She had made as many enemies as friends in Kenya. Stories of the wild parties at Slains were hotly debated—though the debates often genteelly avoided the racier details. Those outside Idina and Joss’s charmed circle of invitees were split. Some, especially those who had been received more conventionally by Idina, refused to believe that such an elegant and intelligent woman might behave in this way—or that they could have failed to spot the signs of such salacious activity. Others nursed grudges over being left off the invitation list—even if events were a little too fast for their taste.Idina’s neighbors, whom she barely knew, found themselves being quizzed as to the goings-on up at the Hays’. One, Mrs. Case, was so embarrassed at her ignorance that she sent her watu up to Slains to talk to the servants. Tales of confusion over whom the laundry collected from each bedroom should be returned to raced back down the hill and were widely disseminated. These were fueled by Joss’s bragging about his conquests at Muthaiga, dividing the women he had slept with into “droopers, boopers and superboopers.”1 And Kenya’s chattering classes began to worry.Just as the upper classes back in Britain feared the publicity of divorces among their ranks, so the middle-class settler farmers and the more prudish émigré aristocrats feared that the Hays’ misdemeanors undermined the settlers’ cause.
