Books |
The Bolter
Frances Osborne
By
Published: Feb 11, 2015
Category:
Biography
I don’t watch Downton Abbey because I am a dull, imagination-challenged viewer. That is, I know it wasn’t all that pleasant if you were Downstairs. And if you were Upstairs…it’s well-documented that “English upper class morality” was a joke. This book is the real thing, penned by the great-granddaughter of one of that tribe. Brace yourselves.
She welcomed her guests when she was in the bath and chatted them up as she stepped out and dressed.
At alcohol-fueled parties, she’d hang a sheet, with holes cut in it, put men and women on opposite sides, and then had them choose their partners for the night based on whatever body parts they were exposed in those holes.
She encouraged her friends to have affairs with her husbands — there were five in all — on the theory that they would respect her position and not try and steal the men for themselves.
She knew how to touch the four strategic points on a skirt that would make a pair of stockings slide to the floor.
Ah, the sexual customs of the English upper class!
The first time many Americans got a glimpse of this freak show was when Princess Diana talked about her marriage. Charles had a mistress, she said, who was the wife of one of his best friends. Was his friend jealous? Angry? Lawyer-bound? Not at all — in those exalted circles, it’s considered quite the honor when a royal beds your wife.
Readers who devour books about English nobility understand how a crude, centuries-old expression of royal power has turned into a sophisticated badge of honor. And they can explain that adultery became sanctioned for those who weren’t royals because, until just a few decades ago, British divorce law was so tilted against women that it was simply prudent for the gentry to keep dead marriages on life support. And then they — men and women alike — slept with anyone they pleased.
Morals? Please. Monogamy was for commoners. There was only one rule to English upper-class infidelity: It had to be limited to sex. Falling in love with your lover was absolutely forbidden.
This kind of promiscuity is the story of the first third of “The Bolter,” Frances Osborne’s biography of her great-great grandmother, Lady Idina Sackville (1893-1955). Here we follow the beautiful, personable young woman as she blazes across London society, gets involved in the suffrage movement and seems bound for a life of style and substance. But in her England, marriage was necessary; at 19, she committed herself to rich, handsome Euan Wallace. Two children followed. And so did World War I.
Wallace was an officer, a party boy and a rake. He was true to his class, but not to his wife — so she returned the favor. The easily shocked would say these people rutted like animals; the participants spoke of “Edwardian friendship.”
The marriage hit a wall after the war. I’ll spare you the details of English divorce law in 1918, but it came down to this: If Edina divorced Euan, she’d lose all rights to his money and cost him his military title. The solution was for him to divorce her. For him to keep the kids. And for her to “bolt” — to leave not just the marriage, but the county — and agree never to contact her children.
A terrible bargain. Why did Idina agree to it? Because she had her sights on her next husband, a farm in Kenya and a new chapter of thrills. [To buy “The Bolter” from Amazon, click here. To buy the Kindle edition from Amazon, click here.]
Alas, sanctioned promiscuity is the story of the next section of “The Bolter”. If you’ve read White Mischief, The Murder of Lord Erroll, by James Fox, you know about the anything-goes marriages of Kenya’s “Happy Valley”. The participants kept diaries, and Osborne gives us the scorecard — but there were so many hookups and combinations you simply can’t follow the action. If you threw up your hands and concluded that every Tab A went into every Slot B, you’d probably be close to the truth. Which may be why her third husband was murdered.
It would be pleasant to report that the third section — Idina’s final years — would be rich with wisdom and contentment. But it’s more of the same. Plus a big dollop of personal loss. As Osborne writes, “Whenever she reinvented her life with a new husband she believed that, this time round, she could make it happen. Yet that better life remained frustratingly out of reach.”
The taste “The Bolter” leaves in your mouth — that’s an individual matter. I kept reading this repellent/addictive story because I saw in Idina a woman defeated by her culture. She was a reader, and witty, and she was not without good instincts. She was also rich and — despite her weak chin — pretty, and that combination made her sexually irresistible. Pleasure beckoned. She made the easy choice.
What made Idina so sexually needy, so romantically greedy? When she was very young, her father “bolted.” You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to know what a wound like that can do to a little girl. Read the book from that perspective, and the nymphomaniac morphs into a tragedy.
