Too Close to the Sun (34 page)

IN LONDON, MEN WERE
wearing Oxford bags and the carefree image of the twenties persisted in the face of the strike and its consequences for working people. Charleston flappers kicked their legs sideways in the ballrooms, Noël Coward and Ben Travers were packing the theaters, and everyone was laughing at the boot-eating scene in Charlie Chaplin’s
The Gold Rush.
Denys did the cultural rounds, stocked up on safari equipment, and toured the country in his recently acquired second Hudson. Unlike the first model, this one had windows and a roof, “to keep this icy climate out.” He visited Pussy and her brood in Stowmarket, Suffolk, and Iris, whose career continued at its usual rackety pace. Her marriage to the painter had disintegrated, and although not yet divorced, during a spell as an actress when she toured America with Diana Cooper she had fallen in love with a fantastically tall impoverished Austrian nobleman. She remained based in the United States, returning occasionally to visit her small son, Ivan, who stayed in England, and Denys caught up with them both. In 1927, a friend arranged for a volume of Iris’s poems to be published in New York to procure desperately needed cash. Called
The Traveller,
the collection included a poem titled “Wild Geese,” which she had written for Denys. Iris was already counting the cost of her youthful abandon, and many of the poems she wrote at this time express regret (“Oh that I had waited fast behind the fret /That loosed me into shimmering illusions”). The weight of her repining grew heavier with the years. “Men are cumbersome,” she wrote to her sister Viola later, after life had really put the boot in. “One has always to treat them like an illness or madness.”

Henry staged yet another recovery. He had taken a house in Park Lane as a London base, and in the long term was to live with Toby and Margaretta somewhere in the home counties. Denys was free to go over to France, where, as he was on both the kitchen and the wine subcommittees of Muthaiga, he wanted to order wine for the club and hire a chef. The raffish and anonymous nightlife of Paris in the twenties appealed to him. He looked in at Lipp’s on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, warmed his hands at the charcoal braziers of the Rotonde, and mingled with the
poules
in the streets, where leaves were already floating from the plane trees to cling around the brightly painted entranceways. Ever since the previous year’s Exposition des Arts Décoratifs, a cultish exhibition that fathered the Art Deco movement, clean combinations of curves and angles and sleek geometric shapes had appeared on the walls of his regular nightclubs and restaurants. Women had become more streamlined, too, and Coco Chanel had made tanned skin fashionable.
Les femmes du monde
were wearing exotic orange, violet, and silver gowns created under the influence of the Russian ballet designer Léon Bakst. The Catholic Church had recently attacked the “scandalous” attire adopted by postwar metropolitan women, as well as their growing involvement in sport, which the Pope found “utterly incompatible” with female dignity. Outrage spilled beyond Rome, and English bishops publicly expressed their alarm at the rise in hemlines, perceiving a parallel descent in morals. Doctors (male) weighed in with the diagnosis that shorter skirts could cause puffiness and chafing of the legs. In Paris, Josephine Baker took little notice, and Denys enjoyed her bare-breasted mating dance in
La Revue Nègre
at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Meanwhile, in the galleries, the patrician portraits of Sargent seemed centuries old next to the canvases of Max Ernst and Joan Miró. But Erik Satie’s pear-shaped piano music was too modern even for Denys.

As his father seemed to be stable, Denys began to make arrangements to get back to Africa. He had been thinking of visiting Kermit in America, but felt that he could not be away from his new safari work for so long. He went to Tunis for a week instead, to see more of the northern part of Africa, staying with friends who had a house there. Back in Italy, a country now firmly under the control of the bowler-hatted Mussolini and his pet lion, Denys ended his tour at Rome, a city he loved. On October 25, he set off from Genoa in the German ship
Tanganyika
for what he described as “17 days prison.” He wrote to Tania when he arrived at Mombasa, saying that he didn’t think he would ever go to Europe again by sea. He was glad to be back, and told her, “Homeward bound I feel that I am, for now Ngong has got more of the feeling of Home to me than England.” He said he hoped to stay with her over Christmas, and that he was greatly looking forward to seeing her. But he neither hurried to Ngong nor took out a client. He went to stay with his friend Sheikh Ali bin Salim, the
liwali
(governor) of the coast. The sultan’s representative in Mombasa, bin Salim lived in a palatial residence on the mainland coast, where the red flag of the sultan was hoisted each morning and servants offered cigarettes, figs, and Turkish delight from inlaid brass platters. Installed in one of the whitewashed guesthouses on the grounds, Denys sat in pools of black shade under the mango trees or descended the long flight of stone steps to be rowed to town by the sheikh’s team of Swahili oarsmen. The air on the coast was so damp that the ropes of the boat sweated a salt dew. Denys had shipped the new Hudson out with him, and after a few days proceeded north to see if he could get the land he had been looking for on the ocean. Toward the end of November, having selected his plot, he finally appeared at the farm.

Tania and Denys took up their old pleasures, sitting on the bench picking out their graves or riding into the hills to track a single impala ram running with a harem of eighty females. The plains were heavy with the scent of lilies, and hundreds of plover fed on new grass. In the evenings, Tania told more stories by the fire. She had a paneled French fire screen with pasted-on Oriental figures cut out of an illustrated paper, and the glow of the flames lit an unfolding narrative, the panels crowded with animals like an Elizabethan tapestry. Denys was an attentive listener. At the surprise reappearance of a character, he would chip in, “That man died at the beginning of the story, but never mind.” They played Schubert’s “Frühlingsglaube” (“Faith in Spring”), and when it came to the line
“Es blüht das fernste, tiefste Tal”
(“The farthest, deepest valley is blooming”), they agreed that it was a certain valley they could see from the farm just after the rains.

But
shauries
(problems) continued to plague the farm. Epidemics had immobilized the workers, Tania had been quarreling with Dickens, her manager, and Farah had been sulky. Most serious of all, she had no money and she was fed up with being “poor,” saying that she hated her poverty more than her syphilis or her nose or her loneliness. It was becoming increasingly hard to conceal her neediness from Denys, and when she did reveal it he was only partially capable of an appropriate response, blindly refusing to put her at the center of his life or to engage with her on any profound emotional level. “Denys was a loveable person, but he was also very selfish,” Ben Birkbeck’s second wife, Ginger, recalled. The boundary between selfish and elusive is porous. It was Denys’s elusiveness that attracted Tania (and so many others). Having overtly rejected commitment, he did not see his behavior as selfish. But actions engender commitment as well as words, and he had been living with her for three years, albeit intermittently. He could have raised capital and bought out the Karen Coffee Company shareholders so that he and Tania could own the farm together. They had discussed it, but Denys was never serious about the project. He tried to help in the titanic battle to keep the farm afloat, but as his life was acquiring shape and structure hers was falling apart. He knew that she was desperate. At the very least, he had to co-opt someone to stay on the farm with Tania when he was away. The obvious choice was Ingrid Lindstrom.

Ingrid, a hardworking Swede, had immigrated to British East Africa with her husband, Gilles, in 1918. Another indefatigable pioneer, she saw experiment after experiment fail—she once had a whole flock of turkeys devoured by
siafu
(giant ants)—but she kept going, producing four children while she was about it. Petite and fair, with gap teeth, she was a loyal friend to Tania. “She was difficult, but she was lovely,”
^*36
Ingrid recalled years later. Now Denys devised an elaborate scheme whereby he would wire to let Ingrid know when he was leaving, she would take the train from Njoro to Nairobi the day before his departure, and he would pick her up and drive her to Ngong. Tania would not then be alone. According to Ingrid, Denys was taking precautions because Tania had threatened to kill herself. (“Tanne liked to use suicide,” she remembered.) Death never seemed far off to Tania, and in many of her tales it hovers on the margin of life. She was not afraid of dying. Once, when she was sailing back from Rotterdam, a gale blew up. Ingrid’s sister Ette de Mare was also on board. “I hope we’re not going down,” she said fearfully to Tania. “I wouldn’t mind,” Tania replied. After Denys had actually vanished, however, it seemed to Ingrid that Tania got over the loss almost immediately, tackling life with relish. “She was double,” Ingrid said. “It was hard to get inside someone like that.” Whatever was happening in Tania’s internal world, by the end of 1926 the cracks in her relationship with Denys had opened, and, in the gaps between, crisis was rising.

A
FRICANS IN KENYA WERE NOW MOSTLY CONFINED TO SPECIAL RESERVES
and required to supply labor and taxes; the white community, on the other hand, was enjoying the first good years since the war, what some historians call the Sunbeam Period. Plantation crops, mainly coffee and sisal, were flourishing east of the Rift and Britons had established themselves in the western sector, which until then had been dominated by South Africans. Gilgil and Nakuru had developed into livestock centers, the administration had extended the railway, and the architect Sir Herbert Baker, Lutyens’s formidable rival, had built schools as well as a neoclassical Government House for Sir Edward “Ned” Grigg, a governor with more than a touch of the matinee idol. It was in this prosperous interlude between the First World War and the Depression that Kenya became fashionable, and in paraded the set who gave life to the Happy Valley soubriquet that dogged Kenya for a generation.

After the languid Etonian Josslyn Hay married the divorcée Lady Idina Gordon in 1923 and set up home on the slopes of the Aberdares, news spread of a sybaritic clique based in the Wanjohi Valley, a hundred miles north of Nairobi. The loose association of idle toffs, remittance men, beauties, and oddballs thrived on champagne, cocaine, morphine, and sex, and when their friends from England returned home gasping with tales of debauchery and servants who cleaned the family silver with Vim, Happy Valley became a synonym for orgies, wife-swapping, and drinking—above all, drinking—and a gossip-column staple in London and New York, especially as the image of wanton abandon merged into a nameless fear of the primal desires lurking below the surface of sunny Africa. “Are you married,” people in England asked, “or do you live in Kenya?” Lady Idina in particular was emblematic of the untamed female. She stalked the polo grounds like a divine but rackety temptress in a shimmering confection of plum-and-emerald silk slung with ropes of pearls (there were always lots of pearls). The daughter of the eighth Earl de la Warr, she went through six husbands and lashings of boyfriends, including Oswald Mosley. (Joss Hay also went on to join the Fascists.) At one of her cuckolded spouses, an industrialist, Lady Idina once raged huskily, “You maker of shirts, how can you understand us, who have been wanton through the ages?” Hay, meanwhile, a suave figure with foxy good looks, pale gold hair, and a glimmering smile, rested on his shooting stick at the racecourse in a white silk suit, polka-dot bow tie, and panama. In London,
Tatler
magazine had featured his romance with the older Idina as its cover story. Hay devoted his life to the pursuit of pleasure. On the ship that transported him and his bride to Mombasa, a woman locked him in a lavatory after she heard her husband returning to their cabin while she was sucking Hay’s penis. In the Men’s Bar at Muthaiga, he divided women into three categories—Droopers, Boopers, and Super-boopers—although in their state of semipermanent inebriation most of his chums fell limply into the first category themselves. Like many of the truly debauched, Hay himself did not smoke or take drugs, and he drank little. He liked to gamble and once air-freighted a pair of fighting cocks and a hen to Wanjohi, a project that ended when his cook inadvertently roasted the birds for dinner.

When Evelyn Waugh visited Kenya in 1930, he mixed with the Wanjohi crowd, lolling on their cushions at night picnics and nibbling small hot sausages at the cocktail hour in baronial highland mansions. At the end of it all, he hazarded that these were settlers who “wish to transplant and perpetuate a habit of life traditional to them, which England has ceased to accommodate—the traditional life of the English squirearchy.” They were, he concluded, quixotic “in their attempt to recreate Barsetshire on the equator.” But the few hedonistic aristocrats who inhabited Happy Valley led a very different life from that of the hardworking farmers who struggled for decades to bully the land into productivity. “They were a group as representative of Kenya,” as a contemporary Anglo-Kenyan puts it, “as beefeaters are of London.” They fueled a myth of glamour and hedonism, but all they were doing was seeking escape through sex and stimulants. The story of Tania and Denys, on the other hand, is about transcendence through love; through living out deeply held personal values; and, eventually, through art. And the truth was that the coterie at the heart of Happy Valley, when they were not drunk or bombed out on cocaine, were often suicidally depressed. Unhappy Valley would have been a better name.

DENYS HAD BEEN BACK
in Kenya for less than four months, but he wanted to see his father again before he moved out of Haverholme. A bad bout of dysentery delayed his departure, but Tania nursed him back to health in time to sail on March 5, 1927. When he finally got up to Lincolnshire in April, he was relieved to find the old man fit. The sale of the Priory was nearing completion. A new house had been found near Basingstoke, in Hampshire, and Henry and Toby were to take possession in July. Denys walked through the Haverholme grounds for the last time toward the end of the month. He had just turned forty, and stood on the cusp of middle age looking backward at his youth. A bloom lay over the park, and gusts of cool air from the North Sea rippled the pheasants’ feathers as they scattered from the lawns. Fenland steeples peeped up among the trees along the horizon, and at the end of the day, streams of the retiring sun poured through a broken hedge onto the stile he raced to with Toby when their governess released them from the schoolroom. It was too lugubrious, and Denys hurried back down to the Conservative Club. The staff there adored him. One valet remembered him sixty years later. “I had many a talk with him when I was laying out his clothes or running his bath,” he recalled. “He told me of the safaris he went on and all about the animals. I thought he was a great man, and his tales of Africa kept me enthralled. I have always remembered him because he had time to talk to me.” Denys’s heart and mind had stayed behind among the shadows of the Rift; it was England that seemed foreign. Calling at the Café Royal or at Ciro’s, he noted that young women’s hair, which had been getting shorter and shorter for years, had now vanished completely under brocade skullcaps. He wrote to Tania to tell her that he was longing for Africa, finishing the letter, “I bless you whenever I think of you, which is very often.”

After only two months he left on the SS
Crispi,
for once finding the journey “quite pleasant.” Disembarking at Massawa, an Eritrean Red Sea port, he got hold of a car and motored inland to Asmara: it was “a wonderful road, rising 6500 feet in about 20 miles.” Continuing south on the
Crispi,
he got off again in Mogadishu to spend two days in Italian Somaliland as a guest of his friend Conte Capallo. Much had changed since his first visit. The arrival of the Fascist governor Cesare Maria de Vecchi, later Conte di Val Cismon, in 1923 marked a new phase of colonial “development.” De Vecchi launched large-scale agricultural projects, built extensively, and generally ramped up the economy—greatly, of course, to the benefit of Italy (whereas the British weren’t doing much with their slice of Somaliland to the north). But his regime was vile. Capallo had worked in Somaliland for years, and was attached to the people. He took Denys south to Kismayo, the port, previously in Kenya, that was ceded to Italy along with the rest of Jubaland in 1925. Denys was shocked at what the Italians were dishing out to the Somalis. “They have a madman of a governor there,” he told Kermit, “which is a pity; he is playing the devil with the Somalis: forced labour very badly organised—families split up and sent to work 150 miles from their houses. The inevitable insurrections are suppressed with every brutality: women and children butchered in cold blood after the men have been rounded up and flattened out with machine guns. All decent-thinking Italians are disgusted by this regime.” Capallo knew personally four Somali dissidents who had been tortured for an invented theft. Two died; Denys met the other two. Meanwhile, the governor was building a palace. “If I have ever seen a region in need of the intervention of the League of Nations, it was there,” Denys told Tania later.

DENYS HAD ABANDONED
almost all professional pursuits except hunting with clients, an occupation that turned out to encompass more than he or anyone else could have imagined. It led him to the serious study of photography, to a campaigning involvement in conservation, and to flying as a bush scout. All three were fed by his love of Africa and, finally, provided appropriate purpose for his energies and talents. From now on his schedule of assignments for Safariland gave his life sense and pattern, and when he got back to Kenya in the first week of June he started on his longest safari to date, a five-month photographic expedition with a single client, the American manufacturing tycoon Frederick B. Patterson. Denys had been offered the job the previous year and wrote to Kermit for advice: “Do you know aught of one ‘Patterson’ whose chief call to fame I believe is that he has made a hideous amount of money out of some patent penny-in-the-slot machine for correctly registering the sale of buns and ginger pop?” The inventive Patterson, a fastidious individual close to Denys’s age, with springy dark hair and sloping shoulders, was a fanatic snapper. Photography was a craze among Americans with money in the twenties, and the possibility of returning from exotic lands with gorgeous black-and-white prints depicting elephants in their own environment or the aluminum backs of hippos in a wallow gripped the imagination of inquisitive travelers like Patterson. He had been negotiating with Safariland for almost a year, and his friend the Duke of York had recommended Denys as his white hunter. Patterson had business in Europe and sailed from New York in March to spend six weeks in London before proceeding to Africa. While he was there he met Hatton, as he called him. He found his future guide “a walking encyclopedia” who could “rattle off all the names of African animals and tell of the quarter-mile where one could find them on the map.” The pair met again at the Voi station at midnight, when Patterson stepped off the Mombasa train. “Hatton,” he recalled, loomed from the sidings to shake hands and “seemed eight feet” tall. Denys had a Dodge and two Chevrolet trucks waiting, and they set off along a hoof path that corkscrewed through the encircling darkness of the Taita Hills. Sitting next to Denys in the Dodge as the trucks dropped behind, Patterson wondered if he would ever see his luggage again.

For their first base camp, Denys had selected Maktau, west of Voi. It had been one of his favorite areas since his soldiering days, and he and Patterson hunted for a month before proceeding southwest across the Serengeti plains to Lake Jipe.
^*37
The party consisted of a hundred Swahili porters who walked barefoot ahead of the cars, two skinners, and two driers (there was to be some trophy-shooting in addition to the photographs), Hamisi and his mess boys, Billea, now an experienced headman, and Kanuthia, a young Kikuyu with watchful eyes who worked for many years as Denys’s driver. Each hunter also had two gun bearers (Patterson said that his pair did not leave his side for five months) and a personal team of Marsi boys. At first, the nocturnal snort of a rhino left Patterson rigid with fear till dawn. His doctor had ordered him to drink only filtered water, and the breakage of his filter precipitated a crisis. He gulped down quinine grains and followed specific medical instruction to take no fewer than one and no more than two glasses of whiskey per evening. He fretted day and night about the dirt that might be scratching his Graflex lens. But he was enchanted with Africa. He and Denys walked all day, following the musky smell of waterbuck to places where yellow-barked fever trees grew like inside-out umbrellas and Fischer’s lovebirds flashed among the branches in mustard streaks. Before dinner, filmed in sweat and dust, they sat at a water hole and pulled ticks off their ankles, the delicate scent of spoor mingling with the dank, earthy smell of hoof-plowed soil. Stentorian troupes of baboons prattled out of sight while an advance guard of old males scouted for leopards; zebras sniffed the air and bared their teeth; and just before the light died velvet-eared giraffes drank warily, tempting prey when their legs were splayed. Then Hamisi baked bread in a tin box and served up ostrich eggs as appetizers.