KEY POINTS:
Charm doesn't travel. Like spontaneous wit, it tends to need the full sensurround of being there. And sexual allure seems even more problematic.
Especially when the photographic evidence seems to reveal a chinless wonder. She was described by a contemporary as having a heavily made-up face covered
with blue-white powder, chic, empty, dissipated, hungry-looking, spoilt and vicious. She had dyed hair and no chin, looking like a pretty chicken, yet Lady Idina Sackville was a certified sex bomb.
Born in 1893, she married five times, had endless lovers, was divorced scandalously and abandoned her three children with barely a backwards glance. She was, says her biographer, the model for Michael Arlen's The Green Hat and Nancy Mitford's character, The Bolter.
It would be only too easy to caricature her as an upper class slapper, chilly, almost horrible. Perhaps it takes a great-grand- daughter's fond glance back to animate such a strange woman. Frances Osborne grew up knowing nothing of her ancestor. She was deleted from the family conversation.
Idina (surely her name hopped on to Patsy and Adina with a gasp of recognition?) was a woman of scandal, careless, almost grotesque with her sexual appetites. At least this is how she was seen in her own time.
A nymphomaniac, said one of her ex-husbands (who ought to have known). But in these kinder times, she could better be seen as Samantha in Sex and the City. She knew what she wanted and she was not ashamed of it. But the times she lived in made Idina an outcast. She went to live in Kenya. But even there, scandal pursued her when her ex-husband, the 22nd Earl of Atholl, was shot by a jealous husband.
Idina was the essence of Happy Valley, all morphine, sexual activity and hauteur. Airplanes were so useful in dropping off lovers at the farmhouse. Frances Osborne paints a skilful portrait, creating sympathy for Idina.
When she walked out on her first husband, she was forced to say goodbye to her two sons. She did not see her elder son for the next 15 years. When they met, he had to ask a mutual friend what her name was. He wore a red carnation so she could recognise him There was loss attached to such a free life. Her daughter by another marriage was parked with a sister, so she too exited from Idina's life.
Yet through it all, Idina kept up her brittle Cowardesque life of cocktails and laughter. She always dressed beautifully; Osborne suggests that because her name was so tarnished, she worked hard on presenting a seamless, uncreased physicality. I asked myself as I read this book why the English upper classes always make such fascinating reading material. Is it that their lives are so very different and that the normal restrictions don't seem to apply?
And then the news came on the radio that the first P babies had arrived at schools and were creating difficulties. I didn't need an answer really. This book is equivalent to a ride on the old liner, the Queen Mary.
The liaisons, at times, get so intricate you feel lost in a slightly double-barrelled maze. But there is a pleasure in experiencing, at a safe degree, what it might have been like to go to hell in a handbasket, first class.
The Bolter
By Frances Osborne (Virago $37.99)
* Peter Wells is a Hawkes Bay writer.
