Too Close to the Sun (41 page)

TANIA’S 1929 VISIT TO
Denmark to visit her sick mother had been less than joyful, despite the fact that Ingeborg made a good recovery. Thomas, his own life now crowded with a wife and children, found Tania “weak, self-absorbed, futureless, emptier than I had ever seen her before. I couldn’t imagine what was going to happen.” She had kept in touch with the farm through detailed monthly reports sent by Dickens, her farm manager. The usual relentless roster of problems had presented themselves: mealybugs, frost, oxen poisoned by arsenic, then the locusts. “Locust eggs are hatching and the factory field and other areas are full of tiny hoppers,” the report read ominously. Dickens, whose African name was Murungaru, “straight as a club,” had entrenched ideas about European discipline and scorned the less rigid Kenyan approach. His bête noire was Farah. Farah was not handing over money for vegetables he had sold; Farah was selling paraffin to the farm school at a high price (“I think it is very wrong of Farah to profiteer on the company like this when he trades on the company’s land rent free”); “Farah I am sorry to say is showing no interest in your affairs.” It was a far cry from the idealized depiction of Farah in
Out of Africa.
But Dickens’s overall prognosis was good. In July he told Tania, “The whole of the coffee is looking well on both estates.” At the beginning of September, he reported that “everything is looking very well and indications show prospects of a very heavy flowering in October and November.” As late as October, he was confidently asserting that the coffee was “in tip-top condition.” All through the long sea voyage back to Africa, Tania was preoccupied with the harvest. On a good day, she reckoned they might pick seventy-five tons. When she was in a less robust mood, she thought they would get sixty—this was the minimum figure, the one they were bound to pick.

Tania got back to Mombasa in the middle of January 1930, and Farah met her. In the African way, they did not at first discuss the vital matter of the harvest. But before she went to bed that first night, she had to ask him—how many tons? Stars prickled in millions outside the window, and the boom of an ostrich broke the surface of the night like a fin. “The Somalis,” she wrote, “are generally pleased to announce a disaster. But here, Farah was not happy, he was extremely grave…and he half closed his eyes and laid back his head, swallowing his sorrow, when he said, ‘Forty tons, Memsahib.’ At that I knew I could not carry on. All colour and life faded out of the world around me….” But she did carry on. She focuse don the Kiptiget loan Denys had promised. It had not yet come through; it seemed that terms had not been agreed on, after all, and negotiations dragged on. Tania made special trips to Nairobi in search of news, as the loan was now the only way out. She and Denys were briefly reunited at the end of January. He told her that he was going to bring a plane out to fly her over Africa, and they chose a place for a landing strip on the flattest part of her farm (now Ndege Road in Karen). They went through the motions, but their relationship had taken on the dreariness of all irresolvable love affairs. He could not give her the commitment she wanted, however minimal. His sense of self was so entrenched that he could not betray it; he looked to a further geography than stories around the fire screen. After he left to prepare for the second royal safari, Tania learned that the crucial loan had fallen through. She took the blame, she wrote to Uncle Aage, “for having raised and maintained a false hope and for having such unreliable friends.”

IN THE SECOND WEEK
of February, the Prince of Wales returned to Mombasa and proceeded immediately to Government House for breakfast. He was received in the dining room by the Griggs, Denys—and Blix. Denys had again hired him, in open defiance of Tania. Actions are so often more powerful than words, and this was as forceful as a right to the jaw. Flourishing as usual, Blix had recently formed a safari company with Hemingway’s idol Philip Percival. He was still exploring on his own account as well. He had recently trawled the area from Makindu to the Yatta Plateau for a month with Dick Cooper and eighty staff. Proceeding down to Malindi, following the Athi to the sea, they stopped after one particularly arduous morning to enjoy a gin and lime before lunch. Bearers set up chairs and bottles. As the hunters took their first sip, a rhino charged. He put one foot through the case of soft drinks, skewered Blix’s hastily vacated chair on his horn, and continued his tanklike trajectory through the bush. Silence returned to the camp and the men picked up their drinks, brushed themselves down, and took a second sip.

Denys had planned an ambitious two-month safari for the Prince of Wales through Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, Congo, and the Sudan. “I am longing to get away to Africa and the sun more than ever,” HRH had added to his letter approving the arrangements. “Especially as I haven’t any horses and golf is a damn rotten substitute for hunting.” He brought a small group of aides (though not Lascelles, who had finally resigned in disgust), but refused to take a doctor into the bush, so Governor Grigg, terrified lest the heir should fall sick on his turf, sent one along disguised as a chauffeur. This time the prince had brought his own motion-picture camera, a device he referred to enthusiastically as “my new hobby.” But heads and ivory had not yet lost their appeal. The highlight of the first month was a seventy-mile trek in pursuit of an elephant reported to be heading toward the Pare Mountains. Denys, Blix, and the prince followed the spoor across remorselessly shadeless plains, camping light and eating cold bully beef and tinned beans. By the third day, dried out and foot-foundered, each man privately feared that he would not be able to get his boots on. But at four o’clock on the fourth day, with just a few inches of water remaining in the canteens, Denys sensed that the elephant was near. He crept forward and saw the animal in a clearing, tugging grass with its trunk and mowing with its toenails, the forefoot swinging like a scythe. Denys reckoned each tusk weighed out at 125 pounds. He signaled to the prince to creep forward and take a shot. But HRH stepped on a twig, the wing ears flared, a brief scream of alarm broke the stillness, and after a violent crashing of branches there was nothing in the clearing but hot, still air. “We sat down where we stood and not much was said, but the words uttered were sincere and vigorous,” Blix said. Then they had to walk thirty miles to the railway.

When they got back to camp, Denys found a letter and a telegram from Tania. The farm was now barely able to stagger from day to day and she was practically begging for money. Denys had already offered to put up a further £2,000 on behalf of Kiptiget to buy the first mortgage back from the bank. Tania now revealed that she needed another £500, to keep the place going for three more months until the time was favorable for sale. Denys tore a page from an exercise book and sat on a canvas chair outside his tent to compose a reply. Tania obviously thought—and she was mistaken—that purchasing the mortgage would put him in an advantageous position as a potential purchaser. “If I wanted to buy the house and grounds, I should have to come in for it at the sale as any other would-be buyer, and should be in no better position by holding the first mortgage,” he explained. He repeated his willingness to put up £2,000 of company money, “as I cannot see that Kiptiget will stand to lose anything when the sale comes even if they have to buy in to get their money. But I am unwilling to put up the further five hundred for manning the place another three months. Surely the [Karen Coffee] Company will do that in their own interests if they have reduced the bank debt at one fell swoop by some £12,000!” So Denys was not aware that his £10,000 loan had not in the end been ratified. It was a pity: had he known, there was a ghost of a chance that he could have done something, as he would certainly have made an offer of another kind. As it was, what more could he give her? He was still willing to bail her out of minor financial embarrassments. Shortly after this exchange of letters, he paid off a debt of eight thousand shillings that she had incurred five years earlier with a Nairobi lawyer. “I am sorry that I cannot do more to help,” he wrote. “I have not the money myself, and must consider Kiptiget shareholders’ interests primarily. I am very sorry to hear you are so seedy. In haste for the post, Denys.” Squashed up vertically along one margin, he added, “I will do anything I can to prevent your house and grounds going to the enemy. Denys.” Desperately seeking to show concern, he found a tiny space to squeeze in a final thought: “You are having a bad time poor thing. I wish I could help more—will not your brother find the £500 wanted?” He sent the letter by runner and rail (it was thirty-five miles to the station), along with a note to his Nairobi solicitor repeating his offer to buy the mortgage.

When the safari party entrained to the capital, the prince was joined by his current sweetheart, Thelma, Lady Furness, the twenty-six-year-old daughter of an American consul whose identical twin sister, Gloria, married Reginald Vanderbilt. Toodles, as the prince called her, had ostensibly come to Kenya on safari with her second husband, the hard-living Marmaduke, Lord Furness (“Duke”), but he wisely stayed out of the way. She was a sleek, lean creature with bobbed hair, plucked eyebrows, and dark lips, and she was deeply in love with the prince. He got off his train early and went to meet Thelma in Nairobi by road; members of the welcoming reception at the Nairobi station were puzzled when only sheepish aides emerged from his carriage. The whole party stayed at Government House for a week, as they had in 1928. But this time Cockie was there, so it was impossible for Tania to join in. She was even excluded from balls and receptions, and had to rely on newspaper reports that included fulsome references to Baroness Blixen’s gowns. Joanie Grigg was embarrassed, and so was Denys. Tania wrote to Uncle Aage expressing her unhappiness, ending the letter, “But I thought that the only dignified attitude under the circumstances was to stay away from it all and pretend to be completely cheerful.” When Denys went to the farm, however, her dignity departed, and she made what she called “a scene of the first water.” The histrionic side of her repelled him. The next day, back at Government House, he sent her a note. “Your talk disturbed me very much last night,” he wrote. “Do not think that I do not see your point of view: I do absolutely. But I feel that just now you are looking on the very darkest side of things. I would like to see you before I go off and shall try to get out later. I am sending Kamau to collect a box of papers and a Jaeger dressing gown.” There is something inexpressibly bleak about this letter. But he did visit her, and so did the prince, who drove out for tea. But mostly, Tania was left alone with her humiliation.

On the next leg of the safari, in Maasailand, Denys had arranged to be resupplied by plane. He engaged Tom Campbell Black, a pioneering East African aviator who was to become famous for his long-distance exploits. Flying alternately a Gypsy Moth and a Puss, Campbell Black sometimes arrived with Beryl in the passenger seat.
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The safari was progressing well. The prince’s tent was erected at the end of the line, with that of the royal mistress next to it. “This was our Eden,” Toodles wrote of the silky nights by the fire when the others had diplomatically turned in. “Each night I felt more completely possessed by our love, carried ever more swiftly into uncharted seas of feeling….” In the navigable waters of morning, Denys was relieved to see the prince in playful spirits. One morning he bet Denys that he could not stick a photograph of his father on a rhinoceros’s bottom, producing from his pocket two postage stamps printed with the kingly image. Never one to balk at a challenge, at noon Denys went out and found a target dozing within one hundred yards of camp. Stationing the prince to observe from a safe distance, he inched forward until he was able to stick one stamp on each cheek, surely a historical precedent. Less happily, Denys was suffering from an embarrassing infestation. He had been caught in a storm on the way to a convoy of supply lorries stuck in mud and was obliged to accept local hospitality. But the blankets were crawling with bedbugs. “What [the creatures] left of Finch Hatton,” the prince gleefully noted, “returned to camp early next morning.”