Too Close to the Sun (35 page)

Once, because Patterson wanted to photograph lions at night, they staked out a zebra carcass after supper. “We waited for an hour or two, peering through the starlit night at the grey blur which marked the kill,” Patterson recalled. “Then, without warning, came a blood-chilling concert from the dusky bush beyond.” Soon they saw the lions.

“How many are there?” Patterson whispered.

“Three, I think,” Denys whispered back. Then he clutched Patterson’s arm. “No, by George! There are five
—six
!”

When they sat at dinner the next night in the light of glass-globed candle lanterns and a smoky red moon climbed above the brown hills, Patterson asked Denys how he got into the job. Denys smiled amiably and swallowed some more wine. “Oh,” he said, “it just happened, if you know what I mean.”

Photographing big game was a test of nerve, and the hunter’s job was to compensate when the quarry refused to cooperate. Near Njoro, Denys killed a charging rhino six yards from Patterson’s lens. Then, after making sure his client was safely scrubbing up in camp, he had to go out and shoot meat for more than a hundred hungry mouths as flies bit hard on his neck, tracking a kongoni antelope through sansevieria grass with spikes sharp enough to penetrate the sole of a shoe. When he made a kill, his boys carried the limp animal back on a pole, chanting while the tongue dripped blood onto heavy-grained grasses. After six weeks, Denys was ready for a break. He had proposed Patterson as a temporary member of Muthaiga and deposited him there when the safari routed through Nairobi. He himself escaped to Tania.

INGEBORG HAD BEEN
on the farm for a second three-month visit, and after she left Tania was ill. She had two minor abdominal operations and had to stay in bed for three weeks. But by the time Denys stopped off she was better, and when he drove up she was out inspecting the plantation with Charles Taylor, a coffee farmer who was advising her. A founder of the Coffee Board, Taylor was the doyen of Kenyan planters. Later, at Denys’s suggestion, Tania invited him and his wife, Kit, to stay for dinner. “I never knew two people who were on the same wavelength as those two were,” Kit noted at the end of the evening. “I was aware of a very deep harmony between them, but on the surface a kind of delicate detachment.” Tania sat quietly at one end of the table, the scarlet tones of her shawl flashing in the crystal glasses. Denys, deeply bronzed, presided at the other end in his brown velvet smoking jacket. Kit noticed Denys’s “clear steady eyes, with that distant horizons look one often saw in Kenya,” and the way he used his hands without actually gesticulating. He told safari stories in the still darkness. “He began to weave a spell around Charles and me,” Kit recalled, “till we felt we were with him in the strange, beautiful places he had just come from…the dining room was dark and the polished table seemed like a pool with only the glimmer of the candles reflected in it. Tania sat very still and silent as if a sudden move might break the spell. In the shadows her face looked small and white, and her dark eyes huge, like a little woodland witch or something out of legend.”

THE REFITTED PATTERSON
safari journeyed to the banks of the Uaso Nyiro in the Northern Frontier District, an attenuated landscape accurately described by one jaded traveler as “miles of damn-all.” Close to the Lorian Swamp, where Denys had promised elephants, the cars were charged twice by rhinos, adding what Patterson called “zest” to the journey. The Lorian itself consisted of fetid reed beds, olive
mswaki
thickets, thousands of flies, and millions of mosquitoes, and at night Patterson recorded “a pandemonium of trumpetings and crashings all around our camp.” But they got their elephant. The next day, as they crossed a stream in pursuit of another one, an adolescent crocodile silently clamped its jaws around Denys’s right leg. Remembering the drill in a surge of adrenaline and an explosion of water, Denys jabbed at an eye with his index finger. The jaws slackened and Denys floundered to the bank, bleeding into the mud before collapsing. He was lucky: crocodiles usually made off with a limb at the very least. But the episode was a bother. Denys could not hunt with a nasty leg wound. After dispatching a runner to the railway a hundred miles away with a letter summoning a replacement hunter, he sat it out in camp, prevailing upon the faintly irritated Patterson to dress his leg.

By the time the party broke again, in Nairobi, the wound had healed. Denys went about his business. On Government Road the heat solidified like colorless jelly, and the cattle gathered at the far end seemed to walk on stilts. On the wide steps outside the post office, an Indian letter writer crouched over dirty scraps of paper while a Kikuyu stood beside him declaiming his sentences. Denys went in to collect his mail and his cables. When he came out, he walked to the bottom of the steps and stood on the edge of the dusty road. The Kikuyu had finished his letter. Denys opened a cable and learned that his father was dead. Toby was the fourteenth earl. Both he and Topsy were with Henry when he died in his bed at his new Park Lane house. “He looked v. peaceful,” Toby wrote in his diary, “and about 45.” In fact, he was seventy-four. Henry had lasted two months without Haverholme.

AS PATTERSON WAS DUE
to sail from Mombasa in the second week of October, they spent the last leg of the safari moving toward the coast. “Hatton was talking of a return trip to England, but his eyes kept sweeping the horizon,” Patterson noted. “He loved every inch of this country….” They saw sable running, scimitar horns thrown back almost to their tails. Many hunters considered the sable the most beautiful antelope in Africa, and it made a good ending. Finally they reached Mombasa, and Denys shook Patterson’s hand.

“Till we meet again,” he said. “You will come back.”

Patterson turned toward the ship that was to convey him back to what he called “civilisation,” though he spoke the word more ruefully now that he had lived without it for five months. He returned to America extolling the beauty of unspoiled Africa, noting that the tentacles of that “civilisation” were creeping ominously toward the “healthful wonderland” that had so enchanted him. “Every tale I have ever read about African wildlife falls short of the real thing,” he wrote. He had nothing but praise for Denys: “I could not have found a better person for the job. He was a true sportsman, a fine companion and a fair dealer with the natives; a man fearless in the face of danger and most considerate at all times…. Never once did I see Hatton lose his head in a tight corner…. He is popular with everybody…. The great thing is, I think, that he loves Africa: people, country and animals.”

Denys arrived back at the farm to find that Tania had crashed his Hudson into a ditch, thumping her head on the steering wheel and smashing the car. But he had brought records back from his last trip to England, including the Kreutzer Sonata, which he loved (so much for Beethoven being vulgar), and they resumed their postprandial routine of music and stories. During the day, he interrupted her as she sat at the typewriter in her dark mahogany study pounding out missives home. Tania said that she was happier than she had ever believed it possible to be. Although they had not had enough rain and the berries had shriveled on the coffee bushes, she was buoyant, assuring Anders, her youngest brother, that she was not going to let the company go bankrupt, no matter what the board thought. As for Denys, he appreciated fine cuisine, and the house had become famous for its table. The cook, Kamante Gatura, was a favorite of Tania’s. She had noticed him as a boy in 1921, herding goats. His father, a Kikuyu elder, had a
shamba
(small plot) on the farm. After he died, Kamante contracted a leg infection, which Tania tried to treat, dressing the suppurations herself, but the disease had advanced too far, so she sent the patient to the Scottish mission hospital. When Kamante was cured, he came to work as her dog
toto—
the servant in charge of feeding the dogs. He also came back a Christian. Awakened by the howling hounds in the middle of the night, Kamante and Tania had often sat together picking giant ants
—siafu—
off their fur. When the cook was found murdered, Kamante was apprenticed to the kitchen and subsequently became chief cook himself. He was angular and his legs remained skeletal; there was, she said, something of the gargoyle about him. She taught him dishes from a recipe book and sent him to Muthaiga and to friends’ kitchens to learn how to prepare new meals. When guests were expected, she scribbled menu plans in the back of her battered
Mrs Beeton
cookbook:
soufflé aux tomates, jambon froid Richelieu, artichaux à la Milanese.
But Kamante memorized recipes by naming them after events that had taken place on the day they were shown to him—the sauce of the gray horse that died, or the stew of the lightning that struck the tree. The only thing he never mastered was the order in which dishes were to appear, and if Tania did not draw pictograms beforehand the chocolate mousse would appear in advance of the consommé. He himself ate corn on the cob.

DENYS WENT OFF NORTH
on his own account, traveling light with a few boys. He valued his solo safaris; the eye stared more sharply inward when there was no client to worry over. At dusk, he listened for the hoot of the spotted eagle owl and watched the finely barred underparts of the bird’s yard-wide wings lofting toward the outcrops of Somalia. When he looked out beneath the tent flap at dawn and watched life returning to the plain in the strengthening light, like sap rising, or when he stepped beyond his camp to watch night deepen over the river, stillness rose in him, a primitive quietude that conquered despair, and at those moments he knew it was the only victory worth having. The incommunicable content Denys found in the landscapes of Africa nourished his emotional self-sufficiency. Tania projected her inner world onto the exterior environment with such remorseless intensity that there was no liberation from the bondage of self. Then Denys became ill again. By the beginning of December he was laid up at the farm, “horribly thin” and worried that he would not be well enough for a safari he was booked to lead on January 4. A doctor was called. It was his old heart trouble. But he was well enough to drive to the French mission with Tania on Christmas Eve for midnight Mass. They heard the mission bell tolling through the warm air even before they had cleared the wattle plantation. When they drew up outside the small church, the yard was thronged with beaming converts.