Too Close to the Sun (37 page)

Tania was one of the few people who supported Beryl through years of flaky behavior and did not judge her. Beryl was a man’s woman (actually, she liked men and horses equally) with few close female friends, and she grasped the hand Tania held out to her. In April of 1923, she moved to the farm for several weeks, bringing her horse, and told Tania that she and Jock were estranged. She no longer cared for her husband, she said, but he refused to give her either a divorce or an allowance, “so she is pretty stranded, but full of life and energy, so I expect she will manage,” Tania concluded. They went out riding together, socialized with a pair of young Norwegian men, and skidded into Nairobi in the rain for parties. (Denys was away at the time.) Tania welcomed the prospect that they might one day be neighbors: “Beryl and I could always have some fun together,” she told her mother. Beryl went back to Purves briefly before leaving him for good and taking refuge with Delamere at Soysambu, where she seduced his son in the hayloft. This was also the Christmas she was intimate with Denys at Galbraith’s house party after he had been out shooting duck. She fitted in an affair with “Boy” Long, the Stetson-wearing glamour boy who was at that time Delamere’s manager. Purves found out about Tom and Boy (but not about Denys) and dealt with both problems by beating up Lord Delamere outside the Nakuru hotel. As far as he was concerned, Delamere was guilty by association, having fathered Tom and employed Boy. Beryl’s promiscuity was legendary. There was no doubt that she liked sex, but she also attracted gossip; one of her biographers observed that if all the stories were true “Beryl would never have risen from a reclining position between the ages of fourteen to eighty-four.” But Beryl was no mere femme fatale. She was brilliant at doing things: she turned herself into a hugely successful horse trainer, a world-record-breaking pilot, and a bestselling author. Even her critics admired her skills. “She was always up at dawn to be with the horses as usual, no matter what the night had brought,” said an otherwise censorious fellow trainer.

When Beryl went back to England for the first time, in January 1924, it was Tania who saw her off at the station. Beryl was wearing a saggy hand-knitted suit. “I was so sorry for the poor child,” Tania wrote. “She is so boundlessly naïve and confused, and has more or less fallen out with all her friends…. A year ago she was the most fêted person out here, now she is travelling home second class and when she gets to England she will have only £20 in her pocket.” But Beryl found a wealthy lover and came back to Kenya in July “dressed like Solomon in all his glory.” She began training horses again, winning the St. Leger in 1926. Purves agreed to a divorce, and the following year Beryl became engaged to Bob Watson, who was to inherit the Sunlight soap empire, but she broke it off and five months later agreed to marry Mansfield Markham, the mustachioed heir to a colliery fortune. In London’s
Daily Express,
the two betrothal announcements were telescoped together and looked as if they had appeared three days apart—speedy even by Beryl’s standards. But she did marry Markham. Delamere gave her away; Hoey, Denys’s partner on the Nzoia farm, was best man; and Tania provided a bouquet. The newlyweds stayed at the farm and gave Tania a large bed before returning to England, where Beryl was kitted out in full designer trousseau and presented to the king and queen. The Markhams returned to Kenya in March 1928, bringing bloodstock, and immediately drove out to Ngong in Mansfield’s yellow Rolls. They asked Tania to mind their dogs while they went house hunting, and eventually settled on a farm called Melela, at Elburgon near Njoro, close to Beryl’s childhood home. From April to June, Beryl triumphed at the racecourse, but at Melela the going was far from good: Markham wasn’t interested in horses, and Beryl refused to play bridge. But soon she was pregnant.

EARLY IN 1928, DENYS
learned that he had been selected to take the Prince of Wales on safari during his forthcoming tour. It was the most prestigious assignment: Tania had already noted that people were talking of nothing but the royal visit, and one settler wrote to the
Standard
describing it as “the most momentous occasion in our history.” A complex network of subcommittees had sprung up, its representatives stooped under the mantle of their responsibilities. Denys had in fact been second choice for the job: J. A. Hunter was asked first, but he was booked to take out a party of American clients and could not break his contract. It was an honor just to be second. But Denys hated protocol and, according to Tania, he was in “absolute despair” over his duties.

Denys had just begun to take his photography seriously. “It is true that some sort of a Kodak was always taken with a large quantity of film and the best intentions; but if my companion had a camera as well I generally found that my own completed the trip unopened, like the arrowroot,” he wrote of his pre-Patterson safaris. Now he found cameras more absorbing than guns. He went out specially to get pictures of buffalo, spending four days following a herd and positioning his concertina-snouted camera until he got the shots he wanted. In July he sent a selection of pictures to Toby, asking him to see if he could get them into
Country Life
to accompany a chunk of inspirational text that he would write later on the importance of protecting the ageless abundance of Africa. When Toby dutifully took in the prints, an editor bought them as a royal safari tie-in. But there was no time to wait for Denys’s copy. The photographs duly appeared, captioned with text that was not so much staff of life as staff of
Country Life.
At the same time, Denys had photographs displayed at the Kenya game department’s first exhibition in Nairobi and his buffalo shots were praised by the
Standard
critic.

Through the lens of his camera, Denys had seen another Kenya: a pristine and ancient landscape in grave danger from the depredations of immigrants and their toys. He was among the first to recognize that although white men had spent the early years of settlement protecting themselves from game, the time had come to protect the game from the white men. The game department had appointed Denys an honorary warden, one of forty selected to balance the conflicting interests of farmers, hunters, and conservationists, and he was helping the chief warden, Archie Ritchie, gather data for a census that would define migration patterns. Ritchie was a majestic figure often seen in Nairobi behind the wheel of another yellow Rolls—this one distinguished from the first by the rhino horn mounted on the bonnet. Denys was especially concerned to do something about illegal practices proliferating within a parallelogram of land on the Tanganyikan Serengeti plains sixty miles west of the southern tip of Lake Natron. There were few human residents and a wonderland of game unique even in the Africa of the 1920s, but for two years parties of amateur hunters had been motoring across the border to shoot indiscriminately from cars. Americans competed to see how many heads they could bag in a day; one group killed twenty-one lions without getting out of their vehicles. Denys had twice reported the slaughter to the chief game warden of Tanganyika. But nothing was done. Now he began to brood.

In August of 1928, Tania, recovering from flu, drove Denys’s new Hudson to Gilgil, where she stayed in the small hotel run by her friend Lady Colville, a cheery Frenchwoman who was widowed when her husband, a baronet in the Grenadier Guards, was knocked off his bicycle in Bagshot. Tania was preoccupied by the contents of a letter she had just received from Blix informing her that he and Cockie were to marry. Blix had taken up hunting professionally after he was relieved of his responsibilities on her farm; to a man practically born with a gun in his hand, East Africa was paradise. He had worked on elephant control and traveled through Uganda and the Congo’s Ituri Forest, writing copious notes about the Wambouti pygmies he encountered in places where it rains every day for two-thirds of the year. He was there in 1925 when he learned that his mother was ill. He walked 260 miles to the Stanley Falls, caught a steamer down the Congo, and arrived in Sweden before she died. He had one episode of what Tania referred to as his “old illness,” but it was a temporary setback in an otherwise unjustly healthy existence. In 1928, he and Sir Charles Markham motored 2,800 miles from Kano in Nigeria to Algiers—theirs was the first regular car to complete the journey straight across the Sahara. They continued to Paris, where they partied in the Big Bar of the Ritz for three days while the dirty vehicle and its sets of antelope horns caused a stir on the Place Vendôme.

A client had recently asked Blix to develop a five-thousand-acre farm in Babati, Tanganyika, and he and Cockie were to settle there. He and Tania had stayed friends; he was indulgent toward her. When she published her book
Seven Gothic Tales
in 1934, he congratulated her warmly, remarking privately, “We could have done with four gothic tales instead of seven.” But now he and his new wife were sure to turn up in Nairobi, and Tania saw how invidious her position would be with another Baroness Blixen swanning around Muthaiga. She confided her anxieties to Lady Colville. “You will be the Honourable Mrs Denys Finch Hatton,” purred her friend. This she would never be, but it would have solved the problem. It would have solved a number of problems. Was Tania still hopeful? Denys was devoted to her. Ingrid noticed how tender he was when he was with her, and how attentive to her needs. But around the middle of 1928 she also observed that a quarrel was simmering.

IT WAS ANOTHER YEAR
of savage drought. The grass turned to straw and then powder. Tornadoes of dust danced across the plains in a macabre ballet as the hot, dry wind sucked the marrow from the animals’ bones. In September 1928, Denys left to hunt bongo in the Kijabe Forest with a client. After three weeks, the safari party broke before continuing into Uganda, and on the twenty-third Tania returned from the game reserve to find Denys waiting. They had a Schubert evening, and he experienced the monumental lifting of the spirit that comes from communion with a genius like Schubert. But he could stay for only one night. He had to get back to his client before a lightning visit to greet the Prince of Wales, who had a round of official duties before his safari. Everything in the country now seemed to revolve around the royal tour. Roads were under repair, including the one out to Ngong; shops were advertising new frocks; and Grigg, who had once been the prince’s political adviser, refurbished the ballroom at Government House at a cost of £7,000.

Grigg had also summoned Tich Miles, the “third musketeer” who had served in the Scouts with Denys and Berkeley. After the war, Tich had joined the King’s African Rifles in Jubaland, surviving two episodes of the usually fatal blackwater fever before being sent to Mega, in southern Abyssinia, as British consul. Mega was a three-day march from Moyale, the Kenyan frontier post, and there was no road. Tich’s job was to pressure Amharic provincial governors to control their subjects and to open the wells on their side of the border to Kenyan cattle herders, neither of which task they were willing to undertake. Tich sat alongside them at the government palace, sipping
tej
(a drink made from fermented honey and flavored with bitter leaves) and talking with gusto in broken English and Amharic while slaves behind him swatted away flies. A Lawrentian figure who went about with armed bodyguards as the governors did, Tich lived in a kind of palisaded Saxon stronghold with neat beds of dahlias and red-hot pokers in the garden. He loved English flowers and tended his display with devotion; it was an antidote to the wilderness that surrounded him. After more ill health, he at last found an escape when Berkeley suggested that he go to Naro Moru as estate manager. Then Berkeley died, so it was more
tej
and flies in Mega. Tich was often joined by his spinster sister, Olive, known as Dolly, a wiry adventuress with a loud voice and a taste for ghosts and gardening. Both concealed soft hearts beneath their leathery armor. When Grigg engineered a two-year posting for Tich as his aide-de-camp at Government House, the two Mileses returned to a heroes’ welcome.
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