Too Close to the Sun (27 page)

Besides scything the population, the war had smashed the social and moral foundations on which Denys’s world had been built, and since the armistice, unemployment, sour industrial relations, and inflation had set the tone for a generalized disillusion that had seeped over Britain. It was a malaise that led to the collapse of the political middle ground and induced a pervasive sense that only personal values mattered, and that the point of life lay in the experience and understanding of the self. Denys, who had never been concerned either with politics or with conventional achieving or doing, was suddenly in tune with the mood of the era. “Everything I had known before the war seemed to be withering away and falling to pieces,” wrote Siegfried Sassoon, who was born the year before Denys. In addition, it was Denys’s first European winter for almost a decade, and cold, damp weather always precipitated a slump in his spirits. Up in Lincolnshire, he shivered in the familiar corridors as dark feathers of smoke drifted across the park, a bitter wind blew off the fens, and winter shouldered in from the north. The pale October leaves were already falling fast, and early in the morning a sable-blue cold hung over the fields. By December, the herbs in the hedgerows were snowy with rime. The cook made him poached fish in parsley sauce, and he hugged the fire.

Toby had remained with the East Kents until the end of the war. He was mentioned in dispatches and awarded a Distinguished Service Cross. (His batman lived so far behind the lines that Toby, the viscount, had to learn to mend his own socks.) Now almost as bald as Denys and more rotund, he had returned to his career as a discount banker and settled in London with Margaretta and their three children. He remained as close as ever to Denys, despite their different personalities. Popular culture would have been an oxymoron to Toby, whereas Denys had the common touch. Denys was a good organizer, but he was not fastidious, nor was he a worrier. Toby kept an obsessive track of the number of cigars remaining in his store at Benson and Hedges, noted the time of every train he ever took, and fretted about money all his life. In the early twenties, he had something new to worry about: Margaretta was furious about his relationship with another woman in their circle, and a succession of private scenes and late-night arguments were duly documented in Toby’s diary. As for Denys’s romantic life, his most regular companion on this eleven-month visit home was Geoffrey Buxton’s sister Rose, who as a little girl had kept up with the cricket matches at Dunston while her brothers and Denys were down from Eton. Now twenty-one, at first glance the tall, blue-eyed Rose might have seemed an unusual choice for Denys. She was quiet and introverted, with no interest in balls and parties, and she did not talk much in company. She herself questioned why Denys was drawn to her, concluding that he liked the fact that she was “unsociable and shy.” But there was something unusual about Rose, and she was courageous, both characteristics Denys went for in his women. During the war she had driven an ambulance in France, and there was a modest and private determination about everything she did. The intermittent romance between them lasted many years. She was one of his great loves.

In September of 1920, after almost a year in Europe, Denys sailed for Mombasa. As planned, he had secured a position with a London-based Abyssinian trading syndicate—itself a reflection of his reputation as an African expert, and a prelude to his later role as a spokesman for Africa in Britain. He intended to make his first visit soon after reaching Kenya. Denys felt trapped on ships—he often referred to them as prisons—but he was happy to be on his way back. England was enjoying a brief Indian summer that year, and as the SS
Dunvegan Castle
moved out of port the tanned sails of the Hampshire barges were flat in the motionless air and varnished spirits gleamed in the tranquil sunshine. Farther south, war had left its mark. Discarded ordnance littered the brick-red coast of Portugal, wrecks disfigured the ports of the Mediterranean, and dismantled military engines rusted among the earthworks at Kantara, the entrails of a steel monster that had died in the heat. At Aden, where they docked at night, lanterns in the houses climbing the hill glimmered in an amphitheater of tiny lights. In the boats that hurried out to the ship, each with its own flickering lamp, Somalis held up cigarettes and ostrich feathers. On October 2, the palmy outlines of Mombasa appeared ahead, crenellated against a mackerel sky. Soon the ship was engulfed by
totos.
The air was heavy and humid. “Nothing exciting has taken place in Mombasa for the last week,” the local newspaper reported promisingly. But Denys found that the Protectorate had developed a great deal in a year. To begin with, it was no longer a protectorate; it was a colony. The white population had decided to call it Kenya, after the highest mountain. (Equatoria was their second choice.) Victorious colonial powers had snatched bits of Africa from the Germans, and the former German East Africa, now British, had been renamed Tanganyika Territory.
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Ex-soldiers had begun to arrive in Nairobi in large numbers, beneficiaries of the wildly popular land-grant lottery. Kenya, touted as a paradise, was the perfect refuge from the tired European world that had sent them to the trenches in the first place—or so they thought. Roads had opened, and the winner of Kenya’s first motor race had covered the 113 miles between Nairobi and Nakuru at the wheel of a Model T Ford in a touch under four hours, albeit with a jockey astride the bonnet pouring water into the radiator as the car sped along. Denys discovered that settlers had been busily forming fire brigades, football teams, and even a jazz band (“a sort of futuristic idea of harmony,” sniffed the
Leader
). Three years later rugby was introduced, though in the first season a rhino invaded the pitch, had to be shot, and was towed off by a team of oxen. Progress came with its usual chaperone, nostalgia. Regrets were expressed for the good old days, “where erstwhile we were all a happy family….” Meanwhile, the
Leader
struggled to keep its readers abreast of events in the puzzling world beyond East Africa. “What is Bolshevism?” wondered a columnist.

Denys had often spoken of Abyssinia at the bar of the Norfolk with George “Jack Flash” Riddell, one of the first white hunters. The Sandhurst-trained Riddell was a flamboyant individual who wore a wide-brimmed hat and bright-colored cravat, and in race week once rode his horse into the Norfolk dining room and hurdled over tables. Before the war, he had traded Lancashire cotton products for Abyssinian sheep and goats, wheedled his way around the local
ras
(head), and bought horses in the Danakil Desert. Europeans still knew little of Abyssinia, yet its civilization was as old as that of Egypt, and Christianity had flourished in its highlands since the fourth century. Riddell’s stories spoke directly to Denys. At the end of the year, Denys set off himself. Although Abyssinia shared a border with northern Kenya, he traveled by ship up to Aden for the first leg of the journey. In nearby Djibouti he had arranged to meet Philip Zaphiro, a Constantinople-born Greek who rode around the country in the capacity of frontier inspector for British Southern Abyssinia. Denys now offered Zaphiro a stipend to act as local agent and interpreter for the syndicate. Terms were duly agreed.

Now Denys and Billea boarded a train for a three-day journey inland to Addis Ababa. Abyssinia was a disparate land, even by African standards. Besides the Christian Amharic highlanders, the population embraced pagan Shangalla in the west, nomadic Danakil in the east, and Somalis of the Ogaden Desert in the south. A cultivable belt was farmed by Muslim Gallas. Although Ras Tafari had not yet been crowned emperor and turned himself into Haile Selassie, in August 1917 he had been named heir apparent and regent, and was in the process of establishing a system of law courts, abolishing formal slavery, and generally modernizing—an auspicious time, therefore, for foreign investors to establish links. Abyssinia was admitted to the League of Nations in 1923 and accepted as a legitimate trading partner by the European powers. Slavery persisted.

The ride across the plain to Dire Dawa was pleasant, if noisy, but by Afdem the remorseless glare of the sun had beaten European spirits into submission. At night, when the train stopped, first-class passengers slept in fly-blown hotels serviced by Arabs whose mouths were green from long hours spent chewing the narcotic khat leaves. At Hawash, the train began its laborious climb through its own soot-laden steam to Modjo, Akaki, and Addis Ababa itself. The capital was a new town situated eight thousand feet above sea level on a grassy, treeless plain raked by gulleys and surrounded by eucalyptus woods. The royal enclosure, or
ghebbit,
lay on a slight elevation, and a gallows tree stood in front of the cathedral. Most Abyssinians lived in circular grass-roofed
tukuls,
or mud huts, and the unpaved streets smelled of rancid butter, red peppers, and burning cow dung. The omnipresent white dress was relieved by the colored cloaks of aristocrats (who were always shadowed by a noisy mob of retainers) and the brilliant violets of mourning. Denys’s syndicate was interested in the mineral wealth that might be lying inside the Entoto Hills, and these he explored on horseback, watching vultures circle in slow spirals above the cliffs and baboons lope below them among cabbage palms and coppices of yellow hibiscus. Then, after liaising with officials from the government and the legation, he and Billea set off northwest through Amhara, where heavy-bearded overlords rode about in white togalike
shammas
over long shirts and jodhpurs, their stiff curly hair frizzed out in a wide halo. Every fifty miles, the pink hills threw up a sandstone fort and a cluster of conical huts, and at the wells rows of youths chanted as they pulled up giraffe-hide buckets bulging with chalky water. Denys had a bad bout of dysentery as he followed the Blue Nile north, and he and Billea made haste for Khartoum and the facilities of the Grand Hotel, where laundry lists quoted prices for jodhpurs and nannies’ uniforms.

FROM ABYSSINIA, DENYS
returned to England to report to the syndicate board. Sailing from Asmara, he and Billea reached Marseille on June 15, 1921, and there entrained for Paris and London. Denys was still gaunt from the dysentery, but it was a hot month, and London looked fine. As usual, Toby had been on tenterhooks awaiting his appearance, and the night after his arrival Denys dined with him and Margaretta at their grand house in Manchester Square. Billea, who otherwise padded behind Denys at a respectful distance of five feet, stood silently in the corner of the dining room impassively resisting the sidelong glances of the parlor maids. Geoffrey Buxton was in London, and he, Denys, and Toby went to the City to see if they could raise cash for fresh East African business ventures. Kermit, too, was in town with his wife, Belle, and Denys took them to dine at Manchester Square before they all went off to Lady Cunard’s dance. Toby’s grueling social life had not slowed up with the years. The Queen and Princess Mary dropped in for tea, and the Dudley Wards for dinner, and while Denys was in London the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York attended a Manchester Square soirée. Toby had worked himself into a frenzy about the entertainment arrangements and only at the last minute hired the Douglas Sisters to sing. But he need not have worried. The royals lapped up Denys’s stories of the East African sporting life and stayed till half past four in the morning. The next day, Denys drove Toby to Eton in a 1919 Cadillac that he had bought for £450. Motoring was a national obsession in the twenties. Toby was fanatically interested in the Cadillac, and spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about his own car; he was about to purchase the first of a string of Rolls-Royces. But at his old school Toby was appalled at “all the ghastly lozenges on the walls of cloisters” that had been stuck up to commemorate fallen Etonians. “Place ruined,” he concluded glumly.

Unleashed, Denys toured the nightclubs of the capital and marveled at the transformation of the British woman. She had worked in the police force, in the munitions factories, and on the land while the men were fighting, and in the twenties she changed into a boy, cutting her hair into a bob, flattening her bosom and hips, and lounging unchaperoned in cocktail bars. She took to higher hems, glass beads, and plucked eyebrows, went hatless in summer, and threw parties that featured jazz on the gramophone and nonstop dancing. Dancing, like motoring, had become an obsession. Exotic varieties, such as the shimmy and the Charleston, flourished in the hothouse of London clubs, and even Claridge’s had succumbed to live jazz. Denys drank deeply (but not for him the co-respondent shoes). He saw a lot of Rose and went up to Norfolk to stay with her at Dunston. The following year, she visited her brother Geoffrey in Kenya and met Algy Cartwright, the settler who had introduced Denys and Tania. This signaled the end of her romance with Denys; she married Algy in 1923, and moved to Kenya permanently. She and Denys remained close.

Meanwhile, in November Berkeley Cole, who had returned to England for medical treatment, joined Denys, Topsy, and a brace of Finch Hatton cousins for a Haverholme shoot. The hawthorns were crimsoned with haws, and the weak sun circled with a ruff of lavender cloud as beaters drove the pheasants out of Evedon Wood. Berkeley’s heart had been troubling him for years and, back in London, Rose and Denys waited at the Ritz while he visited his cardiologist on Harley Street. The news was bad. Berkeley returned to the Ritz announcing that they must immediately start drinking the best champagne. In fact he had a few more years, but not many. His heart did kill him in the end. As for the champagne, its crucial role was a standing joke with Denys and some of his friends from Africa. He wrote a verse of doggerel about it, cribbed from Belloc.