Too Close to the Sun (30 page)

SIX DAYS A WEEK,
Tania held a clinic on the farm between nine and ten, and if she could not treat a patient she drove him to the hospital run for Africans. Later in the morning, people would arrive to ask her to arbitrate in a dispute, or to appeal on their behalf in a government office. She had a more sophisticated understanding of tribal thinking than many immigrants—of how the concept of justice was fundamentally different in Africa, for instance—and she respected the habits and traditions of her staff and squatters. Her own life was subsumed within the workings of the farm, and of all the days of the week she liked Saturday afternoons best, as there was no mail until Monday, and therefore no bad news. All 132 oxen had Sunday off (they were inspanned before dawn on the other six days), so on Saturday evening Tania sat on the fence of their paddock smoking a cigarette and watching a tired little
toto
leading them in. All her people, she said, were “never reliable, but in a grand manner sincere,” a description that might be applied to
Out of Africa.

The fine-featured Somali Farah Aden, of the Habr Yunis tribe, was Tania’s closest companion. Farah spoke English and French, the latter learned as a cabin boy on a French man-of-war, though on the whole he preferred to remain silent. A devout Muslim, he wore a turban, a white tunic, and a gold ring, and served Tania as butler, chauffeur, and financial controller. When he married in 1918, she had a house built for him and his bride (his second, and more were to follow). The wives brought their sisters to live on the farm. These unmarried women were friendly to Denys, but they were not permitted to talk to Billea: when he appeared, they vanished. Denys was crushed to be considered so harmless. Tania went to sit in Farah’s house at the end of the day and talk with the women. Farah was her translator until she learned to speak Swahili—the lingua franca of the farm, injected with Kikuyu words and phrases.
^*33
He was proprietorial, and spoke of “our house” and “our horses.” Tania went on to write about the relationship, describing their partnership as a unity, like a hook and eye; the romantic notion of the noble servant appealed to her.

When Paramount Chief Kinanjui arrived with his entourage, all work ceased. The Kikuyu Kinanjui ruled over one hundred thousand of his tribe. A tall man with a bony face and a slanting forehead, he wore a skullcap made of sheep’s stomach and lived on the reserve nine miles from the farm, attended by forty-three wives ranging from gummy hags to gazelle-like beauties with limbs wound around with copper wire. It was, in fact, the British who had given Kinanjui the title “Paramount Chief ” when they secured his allegiance—a reliable tactic, and one they often used. When white grandees drove out to the farm, Tania dressed up her servants as if they were cabaret turns and made them parade through the drawing room offering cigarettes from slim gold cases. When one tripped and the cigarettes rocketed around the room, settling on the Persian rugs like miniature torpedoes, the guests sniggered and drove back to Nairobi to tell everyone that Tania was ludicrously affected. But she had genuine friends, among them Sir Northrup McMillan and his thin wife, Lucie.

The enormous Northrup had a special chair, which was placed on the veranda when he arrived; according to one servant, he was “so fat he had to spit sideways.” In 1925, when he was fifty-two, he died of heart disease in Nice and was brought home to Ol Donyo Sabuk for a summit burial. A hearse was mounted on skis and a tractor drew it up the mountain. But the clutch plate burned out halfway up, so he was buried where the tractor stopped.

The most popular guest on the farm was the red-haired Berkeley Cole, who roared in from Mount Kenya in a car loaded with turkey eggs, wine, and oranges. He was lonely at Naro Moru, his remote ranch farm, and he, too, had financial problems. He helped Tania out, sending her a cat for Christmas one year to dispatch the proliferating rats. Berkeley walked as silently as a cat himself. When they sat talking in front of the fire, he seemed so slight that Tania thought he might at any moment fly up the chimney. He slept late, then walked into the forest at eleven to drink a bottle of champagne. Berkeley could speak the Maasai language well, and during his visits the old chiefs came over to discuss their troubles. When his jokes made them laugh, Tania said, “It was as if a hard stone had laughed.” His heart remained weak, and Jama, his Somali servant, had learned to administer injections to assist his circulation. Berkeley told Tania that it would be unwise for him to have children, on account of his ill health. But he was an outcast at heart, like Denys. By keeping a mistress, he bought a solution to the problems of loneliness that are intrinsic to rootlessness.

Denys and Tania dressed for dinner even if they were alone—he in a brown velvet smoking jacket, she in a gown. When he was away, she spent the evening tapping in the dark study on her tiny Corona typewriter, its ink roll high and proud. The stories she wrote in Africa were little more than early scribblings. Writers have to stand up and live before they sit down to write, and it was what Tania experienced at Ngong, not what she wrote there, that lay the foundations for the literary prose poems that dazzled America twenty years later. If she was too tired to type, she sat reading in one of the red leather armchairs with Minerva, the house owl, perched on her shoulder. (The bird eventually swallowed the end of a window-blind cord, choked to death, and was found swinging in the breeze.) She did not benefit from breaks, as Denys did. Neither the skins he gave her nor the books and records he bought for her in Europe compensated for her drudgery. “It would be reasonable to expect a couple of months’ holiday now,” she complained to Thomas. Not long afterward, she informed him, “No one knows how I slaved.” But the farm was also her purpose in life, and she wanted to be able to stay even more than she wanted to get away. “There have been many times when I have felt absolutely certain that I would not want to go on living if I had to leave this place,” she wrote home. The investors had lost any vestigial threads of confidence—“This time I mean it,” Uncle Aage wrote after the board decided that she was not to receive more money. But nothing seemed to improve, and one has the sense, from her letters, of a Greek tragedy creeping toward its denouement. Chinks of darkness began to appear in the bright light of her vision. “I think we have been too optimistic in believing that a neglected farm like this could be worked up to full capacity in a short time,” she wrote sadly. She even talked of a new life elsewhere. The problem was that she had blind faith in coffee and never contemplated a literal root-and-branch change. After she died, Thomas remarked that she neither knew nor learned much about coffee. She relied instead on intuition, an inadequate business tool if deployed in isolation. It was always Denys who got her out of the trough. But if she lost the farm she would have to leave Africa. That meant losing Denys. It was her deepest dread.

IN THE MIDDLE
of December 1923, at the end of the short rains, Denys drove up to inspect his property on the Nzoia River, north of Eldoret. He had gone into partnership with Arthur Cecil Hoey, an Englishman born in Wimbledon in 1883. In 1904, Hoey had walked a thousand miles across Africa with his brother and then trekked up to the Uasin Gishu Plateau. He was a burly man who held passionate views about the way forward in Kenya, and in his role as delegate on the Game Policy Committee had encouraged the establishment of the first game reserves. The subject had begun to fixate Denys, as he had witnessed a sinister rise in the random slaughter of big game from tourists’ motorcars. He was an innate conservative, like his father, and in the case of animal slaughter saw real damage in change. In the future, he would take a public stand to defend the African landscape. But he did not prolong this December visit with late-night Hoey talk, as he had decided to break the journey home at Kekopey. It would mean missing Christmas with Tania, but the duck-shooting season opened on the twenty-fourth on Lake Naivasha and Galbraith and Nell Cole were hosting a house party. So Denys followed the Rift south to the funnel, where the two escarpments drew close, accompanied as ever by the inscrutable Billea, and arrived at Kekopey without warning on Christmas Eve. The increasingly arthritic Galbraith hobbled out to greet the car hunched over his sticks. His spirit was intact. He had recently followed a wounded lion through thick scrub on his sticks until he was able to shoot. He delighted in the company of his young sons, and that of his brother Berkeley, with whom he had always been close. The farm remained, as it had been during the war, a convivial refuge. Denys was relaxed and happy. At four in the morning on Christmas Day, he took the Hudson out with Dermott Dempster, Galbraith’s manager, and they shot duck all day from Naivasha to Gilgil. On the way back, the car broke down. The Naivasha garage was closed, so they parked in the middle of the road and mended the springs with rawhide. It was dark by the time they reached Galbraith’s farm. Delamere and his son Tom were there, and so was the Stetson-wearing “Boy” Long, one of Delamere’s managers. Twenty-one-year-old Beryl Purves was also a guest.

Beryl was tall and lissome, with arctic-blue eyes, long legs that scissored beneath her like a colt’s when she sat down, and sandy hair bleached by years on horseback. Currently estranged from her husband, she featured regularly at Muthaiga and at the racecourse, where her father had been a leading trainer. There was something of the animal about her. Unlike Tania, who layered on white face powder and kohl eyeliner, Beryl had no interest in makeup. She was a Kenyan Circe, though, as Martha Gellhorn put it when she met her, “not your run-of-the-mill Circe.” To Denys, she embodied the freedom of body and spirit that he identified with Africa. It was said that they ended up sleeping in the same room at Kekopey. Whatever happened, it was a casual, hedonistic encounter. But it was not the last of their romance.
^*34

DENYS RETURNED TO NGONG
in the New Year. It was the time when the purple wood pigeon came to feed on the Cape chestnuts in the forest, and he and Tania went out every morning at five to shoot them. The first spears of sunlight were turning the Ngong Hills copper when the birds came in, fast and thunderous as a cavalry attack. Sometimes Tania’s friends drove out from Nairobi to join the shoot, rounding the corner to the house with their headlamps on. Then, after a week, Denys was off again for a six-week safari in southern Maasailand in a lorry he had acquired. That part of Maasai country, around the Mara River, was known to the early white hunters as the Mara Triangle. (It was later called the Maasai Mara.) Covering well over a thousand square miles and intersected by just two dirt roads south of Narok, the Mara was rarely traveled by Europeans. Apart from the two roads, Denys’s map showed a large blank. The game there, already abundant, was annually augmented between June and September, when hundreds of thousands of animals veered north during the Serengeti migration, one of the greatest sights nature has produced. It was a varied landscape (
mara
means “mosaic”), the rolling hills alternating with savanna, woodland, and thickets. At first, Denys camped with Scottish prospectors panning in what had been touted as a gold rush, but he was unimpressed with what they were getting. He was hoping to find ivory, not gold.