Free The Bolter by Frances Osborne Page B

the done thing to play the possessive wife—indeed, it would have been humiliating to do so.
    On Friday, 17 May, Euan and Avie boarded the early-evening sleeper to Scotland. They reached Dunkeld at seven-fifteen the next morning and were met at the station by Dickie and Barbie in the car. On reaching the house they changed and walked over to the stables. By mid-morning the four of them, and another man, Ralph Burton, who was also staying, were riding out with a picnic lunch. For three days they lived the old, prewar life. They went for “glorious rides over the hills,” fished and swam in the River Tay, played furious tennis on grass and hard courts, booby-trapped one another’s bedrooms, and took the gramophone outside after dinner, danced until the early hours, and bonded themselves in a group that Euan tells us they named the BlackGang. On Euan’s last day, Monday, the Black Gang spent several hours lounging in the shade as they posed for photos to commemorate the weekend. “The best 3 days I have had for many months,” he wrote.
    There were more “best days” to come. One week later, back in Cambridge, Euan “got a long wire from Dunkeld, suggesting Maidenhead on Sunday.” He immediately wired Dickie to accept.

Chapter 8
    I dina and Avie were both asleep upstairs at Connaught Place when, on Saturday, i June, Euan arrived shortly after eleven at night. One of the servants let him in but, before his footsteps had passed the first floor, the doorbell rang again. It was the Black Gang: Dickie and Barbie, together with two more of its members, Dickie’s brother Eric Ednam and a friend of theirs called Lionel Gibbs. The four of them swarmed up to the drawing room, chuckling and whooping, and lifted the lid of the piano. Euan dashed upstairs. It was six weeks since he had last seen Idina but he came back down with Avie, leaving his wife undisturbed. This Saturday night the “usual party” 1 was at his house. But, aware that Idina was trying to sleep upstairs, he pushed them out after half an hour.
    The next morning Euan picked up Dickie at ten-thirty and drove her to Paddington. By eleven, Euan, Dickie, Avie, and an admirer of Avie’s called Mike were on the Maidenhead train. Shortly after noon, having signed in at the Boat Club and selected a punt, Euan was punting them upriver: “We lay under the trees and ate strawberries for a bit.”
    This time Idina followed her husband and her sister’s friends. In the six weeks since she had last seen Euan she had recovered considerably and was now clearly determined to join in his social life. She dressed and picked up the telephone. Shortly afterward, she piled into a car with Barbie, Dickie’s brother Eric, and a couple of others and arrived at Maidenhead Boat Club in time for lunch. Euan’s punt came back tomeet them. They ate in the packed dining room. “Saw lots of people at the Club,” wrote Euan, “quite like old days.”
    After lunch they all went out in a flotilla of punts. They drifted in and out of the shade, closed their eyes, dangled their hands in the cool water, and listened to the quacks and whistles of the birds floating by. Then they bumped into another gang, “the Grenfell party,” and the calm was shattered. The men pushed the punts to the banks, the two sexes disappeared behind their own bushes and emerged, the women in bloomers and camisoles, the men in underpants if anything at all, and “had a good bathe.” Idina, having been regularly tossed into the English Channel from her mother’s mixed-sex bathing beach in Bexhill since the age of three, and keen to prove that she was on her way to being as fit and well as any of the other girls, plunged in.
    The Black Gang decided to stay and dine at the club, leaving Euan to go back to London ahead of them in order to reach Cambridge that night. He had agreed to travel there with Idina’s brother, Buck. It was Buck’s eighteenth birthday. Buck had, in anticipation of the date, long planned to