THE BOLTER
Frances OsborneVirago, £18.99
IF YOU were to learn that there was a new book coming out, which showed the fascination that the wife of the Shadow Chancellor has for wife swapping and casual sex, you'd wait with b
ated breath for publication. The tale of Idina Sackville, the bed-hopping, sexually voracious great-aunt who inspired such interest in Frances Osborne, certainly deserves such anticipation.
The bullet points alone are enough to grip you. She married five times in an age when divorce was social suicide. Turning her back on her children, her staggeringly wealthy husband and an immense building project that she had started in Scotland, she decamped to British East Africa (with a new husband) and (after collecting yet another husband) soon styled herself the 'High Priestess' of the exceptionally louche Happy Valley set in Kenya, where your bed partner would be decided after feather games.
Her lovers were legion. She was immortalised by Cecil Beaton and William Orpen as well as in novels, plays and film. Nancy Mitford based The Bolter in The Pursuit Of Love on her, and Greta Garbo played a character based on Sackville in the film A Woman Of Affairs. She was the sexual temptress involved in the notorious 'White Mischief' murder of the Earl of Errol (another husband), who used to receive guests as she relaxed in her hand-carved green onyx bath. She even attended the trial of Jock Broughton – accused of Errol's murder – in order to support her husband's lover.
Sackville may have been born into 'trade', and so was sniffed at by high society, but trade meant money – and plenty of it. A life of pleasure and indulgence was hers for the taking. But it would seem that her true work was to be herself. And to bed husbands, though not necessarily her own (although Sackville always claimed that she never stole other women's husbands but "might pick them up if they were left lying around").
It was the fashion of the day that husbands and wives would have affairs. In fact, it was almost expected that a woman's friends would provide a pool of potential lovers for her husband. When Idina was designing her grand family home at Kildonan, she had a special staircase built in so that her lovers could come and go to her bedroom without alerting anyone else in the house.
Idina was what is generously called a 'handsome' woman. She was well aware of it and developed what she did have. She firmly believed in the old adage that the worse a woman behaves, the better she needs to look – and Sackville looked fabulous. She dressed at the forefront of fashion, patronising new designers like Lanvin and Molyneaux. In the same way that Wallis Simpson was rumoured to have learnt her, ahem, 'art' in Chinese brothels, Sackville was believed to be able to lure men with lingerie, reportedly teaching them the four points on a skirt to touch to ensure that a girl's stockings dropped to the floor.
But, lest you just think of Sackville as some kind of wealthy strumpet, Osborne does bring out her finer points. Before her marriage Sackville involved herself in the new movements of women's suffrage and socialism. When she moved to Kenya, she wasn't afraid to get her hands dirty – well, she had that lovely bath to soak in afterwards – and worked on clearing the ground for the farms.
Sackville developed cancer of the womb and died in Kenya in 1955, aged 62. She had never wanted to be an old woman and, as so often previously, she got her way.
Osborne has had, as you would expect of a family member, unprecedented access to Sackville's diaries – and those of most of her husbands. Unfortunately, she seems to be unable to sift the wheat from the chaff. The tale of Idina and Euan (her first husband) meeting in Paris during the war is smothered by minutiae. The story of her breezing into Lanvin and ordering two dresses and a hat while the rest of Paris was suffering the privations of war should be one of glorious excess. Instead we are given mind-numbing details of teas and dinners, shows and galleries.
While it may be thought admirable for Osborne to show us the depth of her knowledge, in this particular case the devil isn't in the detail – it's in the subject.
The full article contains 766 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
