White Mischief (6 page)

“Tough,” a voice barked in the Muthaiga bar, “but very attractive indeed. Exploited by women, to whom he was irresistible.”

“He was very witty and pleasant to be with, a very good bridge player and a
wonderful
polo player,” said another contemporary, “but he wanted conquests and had innumerable women. Of course, you could live extremely well, put up a tremendous show for £2,000 a year.”

One of the few women who didn’t see him as the epitome of sexual attraction was Dushka Repton, a Russian beauty married to a settler farmer, Guy Repton, who was insanely jealous of his wife and eventually died of drink. Only once did Mrs. Repton consider Josslyn “irresistible,” when he appeared at a fancy dress ball at the Muthaiga Club, dressed in a black evening gown, sequins and pearls. The pearls belonged to Idina. She remembers Joss saying, “Pearls must be
worn.”

At Clouds the parties that Joss and Idina gave were magnificent, and famous for their excesses. Nina Drury, born in 1901, was the young bride of Jack Soames, and in the mid-1920s they often went over to Clouds for dinner. “The dramas that used to take place were unbelievable,” she said. “It must have been the climate, I think.”

The evenings would begin with a certain formality and ritual preparation. In addition to her permanent house party, Idina would summon her neighbours, too, and all her young men, accepting no refusals. She had a Somali chef famous for his cooking and many servants to lay the
separate tables and fill the rooms with fresh flowers. Then, at the appointed hour, ldina would take her bath—which was in the centre of her large bathroom—and like some royal mistress, bathe and dress herself in front of all her guests, talking away, insisting on permanent company, summoning new arrivals.

The excitement of ldina’s presence, of sharing her toilette, was heightened by a steady consumption of cocktails, and by the time dinner was served most of the guests were in a fair state of intoxication. One evening, Nina Drury remembers, a young woman, said in a loud voice that she had been making a list of all her lovers since she had been in Kenya. “Not very nice,” said Josslyn, “when she was my mistress this afternoon.”

A furious argument began between Raymond de Trafford and Frédéric de Janzé. Jack Soames told his young bride. “Now, my baby, there’s going to be trouble and you must go to bed.” Nina was very annoyed at being prevented from watching the drama. “But then,” she said, “various people were led into my room, sobbing and crying and saying that there was going to be a duel and that they were going to kill each other.” At the height of one of these evenings. Raymond de Trafford, maddened with drink, went outside and set fire to several of the African houses. His crime was settled like a gambling debt, and he was forced to pay up.

It seems that Josslyn was quite sober at these moments. His own recklessness was more methodical: he was more dedicated than most to the cause of seduction. But he would never question the right of his friends to act without restraint, whatever the burden on the African staff. Servants, by nature, were there to be inconvenienced. “Hay never paid his servants,” said his former Somali houseboy, “but the Somalis said ‘don’t worry,’ and when he eventually got round to it he gave the wages to the top Somali. Sometimes they waited six months to be paid, but they were fed and clothed and housed.”

Paula Long, a famous beauty of the period, married
to “Boy” Long, a cattle rancher at Elmenteita, remembers Josslyn’s unpleasantness towards the staff: “He was horrible to Africans, and swore at them in Swahili,” she said. “He kept the staff up all night and was quite unscrupulous.”

This cynical, bullying side of Josslyn’s personality could also be seen within his own circle. The roaring jokes and the good company he provided redeemed him only up to a point, and he often antagonised people with his scathing tongue and his sexual arrogance. His innumerable women had one thing in common—they were all married. “To hell with husbands,” he was fond of saying. And to cuckold a man carelessly, while slapping him on the back or borrowing a fiver, added to his pleasure.

Patricia Bowles lived through two marriages in Happy Valley as a close friend and neighbour of Idina, and, at times, a participator in her ceremonies. (She has since retired to Kilifi.) Though fond of Josslyn, she well remembers this vicious element in his nature.

“At the Norfolk Hotel one day he said to some child, ‘Come to Daddy.’ I thought, ‘You bounder!’ It stuck terribly in my mind that he could say something so awful to somebody, indirectly, who was within earshot. That was the sort of thing he’d think funny. And he could be very humiliating and crushing to women. He would say, ‘What a revolting dress. God, how I hate mauve.’” The men’s bar at Muthaiga was the perfect place to display this particular form of wit and to boast of his conquests. In these conversations with his male friends, women would be divided into three categories, “droopers, boopers and superboopers.”

“He used to hold forth in the men’s bar, telling dirty stories. He was a terrific gossip,” said Patricia Bowles, “until he saw a pretty face through the hatch, when he would go and accost the stranger. He thought of nothing but women, liked them rich and broke up many marriages.”

One of the first marriages to be threatened by Josslyn was that of Frédéric and Alice de Janzé.

*
Daphne Fielding,
Mercury Presides
(Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1954).

*
Duckworth. 1928.

*
Duckworth, 1931.

3

THE FASTEST GUN IN THE GARE DU NORD

Alice fell in love with Joss the moment she saw him, on her first trip to Kenya with her husband in 1925. She was twenty-five. They had been married for three years and had two small daughters. Patricia Bowles, who became her closest friend, says of her affair with Joss, “It was on and off, on and off, I think on many and various occasions. It was never a sort of acknowledged affair. But I think she was always in love with him.”

Alice was probably the most dangerous of his mistresses, perhaps the most fascinating and certainly, when she was in her twenties, before the excesses of Wanjohi got the better of her, the most exquisite-looking. Her face was pale and delicate, with high cheekbones and wide, calm eyes of deep violet colour. She had a lovely, slightly frail figure and short black hair bound tightly in the nape of her neck. She would invariably dress in corduroy trousers and bright, loose flannel shirts.

Alice was the only child of William Silverthorne of Chicago, a rich felt manufacturer of Scots descent, and through her mother she was an heiress to the Armour meatpacking fortune. She possessed all the attributes that Josslyn found irresistible: she was mysterious, she was married, and she was rich.

The danger came from Alice’s waywardness and instability,
heightened by the madness of the 1920s, with which she was fatally touched. She had been a wild teenager, the shock element at Chicago deb parties, and there was a disorder somewhere in her psyche, a lasting melancholy. Her mother had died of consumption when she was five years old and Alice herself was consumptive from birth. She was brought up mostly by a German governess, in large houses in New York. After a traumatic and unexplained incident involving her father, who was a drunk, she was made a ward of her uncle. But her father had often taken her to Europe, dressing her in lace and taking her to nightclubs while she was still in her early teens. Alice developed a liking for cocktails and a mania for animals and would be seen conspicuously walking her black panther, in its white collar, up and down the Promenade des Anglais in Nice.

She met the sensitive, literary Comte de Janzé, who came from an ancient Breton family, in a Paris antique shop when she was twenty-one. They were married in Chicago in 1922 and spent most of their short marriage, between the births of their two daughters, on a succession of safaris in Kenya.

The virtual absence of children in Happy Valley is something of a phenomenon. They would certainly have obstructed the grown-ups’ leisurely programme, and it is a tribute to the residents of the Wanjohi that they managed to keep even accidental children from crossing the border. Joss and Idina did have a baby, called Diana, whom Nina Drury once saw asleep in the garage, dumped like the shopping on the back seat of their Hispano-Suiza. Alice’s solution was simply to leave her two children behind, and later to dismiss them from her life altogether. They were brought up by Frédéric’s sister at the family chateau in Normandy, and in Paris. “Alice knew that she would be a hopeless mother,” said Patricia Bowles. “I admired her for her honesty.”

Alice saw her children only occasionally on her rare
visits to Paris, when she would stay at the Hotel de Bourgogne. One of her daughters, Nolwen, who is married to Lord Clark, recalls, remarkably, feeling no trace of resentment or
angoisse
at these meetings. Instead, she says, she was dazzled by the glamour of this mystery mother who lived in Africa. “I was very much in awe of her,” she says, “and later, as I grew up, I appreciated her great virtues of courage and fortitude … However, it was the quality of her beauty, which was so delicate and transparent and her delicious grace and elegance—
that
was what made my heart turn over when I looked at her. And her hats, scarves, shoes had one enthralled. She dressed beyond perfection, with an instinctive and mysterious subtlety.”

Alice made a great impression on Happy Valley, and on Idina herself, and seemed to inspire universal affection among her friends. She was always at the centre of things. She had a keen sense of the comic; she entertained them on her ukelele, singing in a low, broken voice. She was also intensely emotional, angrily bridling when her sense of justice was offended—especially when it came to the treatment of animals. Frédéric warned in
Vertical Land,
“No man will touch her exclusive soul, shadowy with memories, unstable, suicidal.”

There is a telling, beautiful photograph of Alice, sitting in a wicker chair on her veranda, wearing her usual corduroy trousers and a wide felt hat of the period. On her lap is a lion cub, weighing at least forty pounds, evidently too grown-up to be a pet, with paws the size of her own hand, and its tail hanging down almost to her ankle. Alice is staring to one side with a distant look of an icon mother. She was often described as looking like a “wicked madonna,” and the pose is perhaps self-parody. The lion cub, named Samson, was reared by Alice, who had a sizable menagerie on her farm. When it grew to be a lion, it required two zebras a week for its food. Alice couldn’t face that, and sent it away.

The photograph powerfully evokes that period in Kenya, in mid-1926, when Alice was beginning her stormy romance with Raymond de Trafford. Her intermittent affair with Joss, which continued despite her new infatuation, had been conducted in some secrecy and for a time without Frédéric’s knowledge. But with Raymond, who always extracted the maximum drama from any situation, that was impossible.

At first Alice had taken a violent dislike to Raymond, which made Frédéric suspect the beginning of yet another affair. As Alice told the story later, it was Joss who first discovered it. At a large party at Clouds he noticed that she and Raymond had slipped away. He crept into the adjoining bedroom, climbed up the wall partition, lay along the top of it, and heard the couple making plans to elope. “And what about poor Joss?” he interrupted. They did elope that night, but only as far as a cottage on ldina’s estate.

Nina Drury remembers ldina’s complaints the previous day about Joss’s affair with Alice getting out of control. Now she said, “I do wish you’d find Alice for me.”

Nina said, “But Idina, aren’t you upset by her behaviour with Joss?”

Idina replied, “You seem to forget that Alice is my best friend.”

There was a conference the following morning to decide how to get Alice back. Frédéric, the long-suffering husband, agreed to go, and found them in the cottage. Raymond had occupied the bed and Alice was sleeping on a chair. That was thought to be typical of Raymond. “I shall always remember her reception when she returned,” said Nina Drury. “She was received like Royalty. All the men went down on one knee in front of her.”

Frédéric took Alice home to Paris in an effort to save the marriage, but she returned to Kenya almost immediately to be with Raymond, then went back to Paris again to ask Frédéric for a divorce. On March 25th, 1927, Raymond
came from London to Paris to tell Alice that his family, devout Roman Catholics, forbade him to marry her and had threatened to cut him off if he did so. A friend said, “Raymond could have written a letter, but he loved trouble and difficulty.” He got considerably more than he bargained for. Before he left for London, he lunched with Alice in a
cabinet privé
at Lapérouse. Afterwards they went to a sporting equipment shop, where Alice had a small parcel wrapped at the far end of the counter and Raymond looked at the rifles. At the Gare du Nord, Alice climbed into the carriage of the train to see him off. She knelt in front of him, kissed him, pulled out a gun and fired, first at him and then at herself. Both were badly wounded, Raymond near the heart, and Alice in the stomach.

Alice had brought with her a friend’s dog, a German Shepherd, which became hysterical and threatened to attack any of the attendants or policemen who tried to approach the wounded couple. Paula Long, the owner of the dog, said it was typical that Alice’s only concern, as she was carried away bleeding on a stretcher, was to make sure the dog was returned to the right address, which she repeated several times. In the English hospital Alice told Paula with some relish of a nurse who looked into her room, clutching a dead baby in each arm, and who said, “Back in a tick.”

Alice was charged with attempted murder. The scandal received enormous coverage, and she was released on probation from the Correctional Court on a wave of public sympathy. She was seen as the unhappy heroine of a true
crime passionel,
and the judge was seduced.
“Vous êtes une traîtresse, Madame,”
he told her before letting her off. It came out, during the hearing, that Alice had already made four attempts to kill herself. When the question of her having abandoned her children was mentioned, she said, somewhat ingenuously, “My only reply is that my action shows the strength of my love for the man for whose sake I made the sacrifice.”