Too Close to the Sun (43 page)

“You were up very high today,” he said. “We could not see you, only hear the aeroplane sing like a bee.” Tania agreed that they had been up high.

“Did you see God?” Ndwetti asked.

“No, Ndwetti,” Tania said. “We did not see God.”

“Aha, then you were not up high enough,” he said. “But now tell me: do you think that you will be able to get up high enough to see him?” Tania said she didn’t know.

“And you, Bedar,” said Ndwetti, turning to Denys. “What do you think? Will you get up high enough in your aeroplane to see God?”

“Really, I do not know,” Denys said.

“Then,” said Ndwetti, “I do not know at all why you two go on flying.”

When they went up in the plane together, Tania sat in front of Denys. Rain and hail stung their faces. They flew down the east flank of Kilimanjaro above the streaky riverbeds that came off it like spokes, and over Lake Chala, the mysterious blue-green sea cupped in a volcanic crater. It was allegedly bottomless, and the lair of monsters various. Alongside the ridged hills east and west of Taveta, the water holes drew game as iron filings to a magnet, dispersed at one end and hurrying into an agglomeration at the other. When the hills flattened out, big-headed dots of wildebeest moved like running water across the yellowing gray plain—you could not see the gallop from the air. They scattered in puffs of dust when the shadow of the aircraft overtook them, and if Denys throttled down and lost height, particles of the dust burned his nostrils. The Serengeti plains, as warm with life as a tropical sea, were webbed with eland paths, and hot vapors pressed the undercarriage of the plane like heat from a fire lifting a flake of ash. As the Moth droned over the Rift, thin Grant’s gazelles showed white against the burned-yellow grass of the valley floor. Lake Natron was garlanded with quivering flamingo pink, and as Denys turned back toward Ngong before day switched abruptly into night a softer shade of pink infused the cloud moving over the ground. “You knew then,” Beryl wrote as she first looked down on ten thousand wild animals rolling like a carpet over Africa, “what you had always been told—that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.”

As Beryl noted when she went up with Denys, “the competence which he applied so casually to everything was as evident in the air as it was on one of his safaris or in the recitations of Walt Whitman he performed during his more sombre or perhaps during his lighter moments.” His aerial experiences reinforced his developing conservation theories: from two hundred feet one could see a whole herd, as opposed to the single beast that loomed through the scope of a rifle. It heightened his awareness of the wealth at risk of depletion. Above all, flying brought Denys freedom and space, ideals of which formed the mainsprings of his character. The plane beat the road to most of Kenya by years. Aviation maps were drawn to a scale of one over two million, meaning that an inch on the map was thirty miles in the air, and many of those inches were labeled
UNSURVEYED
.
What could be more thrilling than reaching the end of the map?
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In the air, more than anywhere on the prosaic earth, Denys experienced a poetic intimacy with the wilderness. It was a physical expression of a spiritual yearning. When, reunited with his shadow, he put the chocks back under the wheels at the airfield or on some lonely patch of bush, he felt a satisfaction that could not be quantified by the number of elephants he had scouted. “Flying suits Denys so perfectly,” Tania wrote home. “I have always felt that he has so much of the element of air in his makeup…and was a kind of Ariel.” She told her family proudly that he said he had brought this machine out here for her sake and that flying with him was the most transporting pleasure of her life on the farm. There was a disconcerting resilience about Tania. It was a mysterious kind of endurance that it is impossible not to respect. But she knew in her heart she had lost him, as one always does when one really has. The sense of freedom he had found in the air had made him feel even more imprisoned with her. She tried to ready her family. Pursuing the theme that Denys had the character of an Ariel, she concluded, “There is a good deal of heartlessness in this temperament.”

IN NOVEMBER, DENYS FLEW
to Lamu with Tania, circling the M’tepe dhows with their matting sails before landing behind the pocked fort. They walked in the sand dunes alongside the village of Shela, admired the plain ashlar beauty of the Arab mansions, and drank coffee served from brass jars by vendors tending tiny charcoal braziers. After three days, Denys dropped Tania at Ngong and departed on safari with Marshall Field, the son of the Chicago department-store magnate. Like the other white hunters, he was always thinking about where he might find fresh terrain for his clients. Between assignments, he had been scouting new areas in the company of the aptly named J. A. Hunter, an ace tracker and shot whom Denys revered. The pipe-smoking J.A., as he was known, was a sensitive Scot who had shot geese as a boy on the Galway Flats. Born the same year as Denys, he came to British East Africa in 1908, began his African career as a guard on the Lunatic Express, and by 1930 was living at Makindu with his wife, Hilda, and their six children. J.A. was solid, flinty and uncompromising, and more uxorious than those hunters who perceived women merely as bipedal quarry. Recently, besides searching for new hunting grounds, he and Denys had been trying to get motion-picture footage of a charging buffalo, a task that was becoming an obsession. On the soda flats of Lake Natron, their backs camouflaged with reeds, they had crawled to within thirty-five yards of the front line of the herd. But they were never able to overcome problems created by the dust kicked up by the disobliging beasts as soon as they heard the click of a shutter. Once it was so thick that a young bull ran straight into their truck, crumpling the bonnet.

At the end of 1930, after Marshall Field had returned to his father’s shops, J.A. and Denys set out for southern Maasailand, a region they had both been warned off by reports of lack of water. Determined to see for themselves, they started out with a Chevrolet and a team of Africans and headed for the border. On the first day, the grass was so long that they hit an invisible rock and split the Chevy’s sump. Denys patched it up and they carried on to the Mara River, across the cranial protuberances beyond Lake Province, creating their own bush trails. Eventually, they reached the plains of southern Maasailand. “Denys and I could scarcely believe our eyes when we saw the countless beasts ruminating there,” J.A. wrote. “…The abundance of wild life naturally gave each individual creature a sense of security…. Lions, buffalo, rhino and antelope of every conceivable variety continued to graze unconcerned. Every slope as far as the eye could see, even through binoculars, swarmed with game.” The security was often misplaced, as the living was easy for predators large and small. Denys and J.A. explored the plain among packs of gaunt hyenas, bloody jaws deep in entrails, and with the flocks of vultures too heavy to get off the ground. J.A. remembered the trip with nostalgia. “Denys opened up the Maasai with me,” he wrote. “He was fearless and fair…. He was an undaunted hunter whose memory I cherish in my heart.” Elsewhere, he said Denys was one of the bravest hunters he had ever met, which was high praise from one who knew them all. Right at the end of their Maasai tour, a herder asked them to go after a pair of lions that had been molesting his cattle. When they did, the beasts appeared suddenly, yards from Denys, and reared up on their hind legs preparing to dash him to the ground. “But Denys was quicker than the lions,” J.A. wrote. “I saw him stop, shoulder his rifle…two shots rang out with scarcely a fraction of time between them. Both lions fell to the ground immediately, one of them first performing a miniature death dance as he fell.” Most hunters using rifles can hit with the first shot, but few can fire accurately immediately after it with the second, because of the powerful recoil.

“Good effort,” said J.A.

“I’d take any chance with you behind me, J.A.,” Denys replied.

T
HE TRAGEDY OF THE FARM MOVED INTO THE FIFTH ACT. INTEREST HAD
not been paid on the mortgage for two years, and shareholders decided the end had come. In the first months of 1931, the whole estate was sold to a Nairobi property developer; the forced sale did not even cover the cost of liquidation. The developer planned to build luxury houses and a golf and country club, and as a tribute to Tania he was naming his new suburb Karen. The baroness could remain on the farm, he said magnanimously, until work began. She said that she would prefer to live in the middle of the Sahara. But the final harvest belonged to the company, so she did stay until it ripened, leasing her house for a shilling a day. She was giddy with arrangements, pursued around the farm by squatters who ran after her asking, “Why do you want to go away? You mustn’t go, what will become of us?” Determined to secure land for them elsewhere, Tania began negotiating with the government on their behalf—the talk of black brothers had not all been cant. She compiled a list—each man noted with the number of his cattle, then of his goats, then of his women. (She had 157 squatters who owned between them 1,679 head of cattle, 1,506 goats, and 238 women.) She typed and retyped documents on the high-rolled Corona and ricocheted to and fro from Nairobi, trailing around offices, badgering officials, and dealing with unpaid debts: everything had to be settled before fresh land was allocated. Farah put on his brocade waistcoat and scarlet turban and walked behind her along the streets of Nairobi carrying a giraffe-hide whip inlaid with gold. She was deeply grateful. “No friend, brother or lover,” she wrote, “could have done for me what my servant Farah did then.”

Through Tania’s prodigious efforts, most of the squatters were eventually resettled. In addition, she tried to find alternative employment for her staff. One man wanted to be a chauffeur, so she gave him driving lessons. In April, she began dismembering the house. She made inventories and advertised her furniture in Nairobi, inviting prospective purchasers to drive out to Ngong to inspect the goods and laying out china for viewing on the polished dining-room table where she had so often sat in the shadows with Denys. Many arrived only out of curiosity, eager for a glimpse of failure. Some came to buy. Lucie McMillan purchased furniture for the library she had built as a memorial to Northrup.
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The cuckoo appeared to mark each hour as it always had, until it, too, was sold, and the house fell silent. In her beleaguered desperation Tania said she felt like Napoléon on the retreat from Moscow (no metaphor was too grandiose). She was too anxious to sleep or eat, and sometimes, in the middle of a meeting with a Nairobi official, she forgot what she wanted to say. As usual she was not well, and she had recently been diagnosed with chronic dysentery and severe anemia. “And during this time,” she wrote in
Out of Africa,
“I thought something would happen to change it all back, since the world, after all, was not a regular or calculable place.”

Denys moved out and went to stay with Hugh Martin, the whiskey-swigging head of the Land Office. Martin’s marriage had collapsed, so he was living alone and had become more cynical and even less sober. It was awkward for Denys, abandoning Tania at this juncture. He sent her bottles of claret and books, offered to help with errands, and took her on spins over the Ngong Hills or down to the game reserve. Sometimes he went out to the farm to dine, sitting on one packing case and eating off another. Without any friendly furniture the paneled rooms echoed with every cough and footfall. “He himself looked upon Africa as his home, and he understood me very well and grieved with me then, even if he laughed at my distress at parting with my people,” she wrote of Denys. He encouraged her to make a plan for the next phase of her life and made her promise that she would write to Thomas asking for practical help. He talked of packing up his books, but he had nowhere else to put them: there was no room at Hugh’s. He briefly considered renting a place in Nairobi, but when he went to look for one he was appalled at the vulgar suburban feel of the houses. Tania said that the episode depressed him. “He had been in contact with a kind of existence the idea of which was unbearable to him,” she wrote. He told her he would be perfectly happy in a tent in the Maasai reserve. Even after Denys had settled to a profession he loved and committed himself to goals he judged worthwhile, he rejected the trappings of worldly success. Most of the time he and Tania still talked as if the future did not exist, as they always had; one had to, with Denys.

In
Out of Africa,
Tania implies that Denys was disturbed at this time, citing the brush with middle-class suburbia and lack of a base as the cause. But he was not troubled, and at forty-four still had no desire to settle. His life was busier than ever, and he was full of plans. He was sorry for her and wanted to help, but he knew that the thing that would really help her was the thing he could not give. They were living in different mental worlds, as unhappy lovers do, coexisting like the twin beaters of a rotary whisk, spinning in time but never touching. His notes are clumsy and awkward; in one, he told her how convenient it was to be in Nairobi because he had a telephone there. Tania’s friends concluded that Denys left her, in the end, because he was being suffocated by her possessiveness. But she wasn’t possessive. She loved him and he didn’t love her—not enough, anyway. It was not a surprise that he left her; she was not shocked. Within days of meeting him twelve years earlier, she had made an observation, writing to her mother, “It is interesting to talk to Britishers who have been to war or who are going to war; none of them are afraid, of course, but somehow you get the impression that this is more due to a certain contempt for life than what we usually call courage. There seems to be no loss in the world which they would really lament as there seems to be nothing they really ‘love’: not their mothers, their mistresses, their children—[except] perhaps their dogs!” Before they even began their relationship, she had recognized that Denys did not really love anyone, the implication being that he and his kind never did and never would. In all the years that followed, somewhere in her heart or her mind, or at least swimming in her subconscious like some mysterious deep-sea fish, she knew that he would never be able to give her what she wanted. If only, equipped with such knowledge, one could stop oneself from falling in love.

NOW THAT SHE
had lost her two great loves, Denys and the farm, Tania compressed her vision of the world into a mythic saga of tragedy and passion. It was a process long established in her imagination, and now it became a survival mechanism. In time, it was to emerge fully fledged in her stories. In the closing months on the farm, she adopted a magnanimous pose in public, talking with dignity of the “world of poetry” that Africa had opened to her and of her gratitude that her house had been a refuge for wayfarers and the sick. But darker forces were swirling around beneath the surface. Those close to her were worried that she might kill herself, as her father had done. Thomas and her mother cabled encouragement, telling her not to feel that her life had been wasted, and Uncle Aage wrote to say that she was not responsible for the failure of the company. “We realise that you have fought a long battle with exceptional ability and endurance,” he said kindly. At Ngong, Ingrid, Rose, and others gathered around. But the “double” in her previously noted by Ingrid was still visible. Tania wrote to Thomas informing him that death was now an attractive option, and that it was preferable to bourgeois life. However, she went on to suggest, her death might in fact be avoided were he prepared to subsidize a new life in Europe—training to be a chef, perhaps, or a journalist (she had started to write a book in English). She stated categorically that a permanent home at Rungstedlund was not on the agenda, and her bald announcement that the alternatives were death or a subsidy was perilously close to blackmail. “I know that I can die happily, and if you are in doubt [about funding a life elsewhere] let me do that,” she concluded the bizarrely cheerful letter. “Let me take Ngong, and everything that belongs to it, in my arms and sink with it…. Will you please reply to this letter by telegram?”

DENYS WAS UNEXPECTEDLY
spending time in his old cottage on the grounds of Muthaiga, the one he had taken jointly with Delamere after the war. It was now rented by Beryl. After the departure of the princes in 1928, Beryl had gone back to England alone to have her baby. The Duke of Gloucester met her ship, as he had promised he would. A son was born in February 1929, and soon after, Beryl again took up with her royal consort, hiding in a cupboard at Buckingham Palace when Queen Mary appeared. The cuckolded Markham had been suspicious of the duke for some time, and after a batch of royal love letters surfaced, any lingering doubt disappeared. When the baby was a few months old his parents separated—the boy was brought up by his paternal grandmother—and there was talk of citing the duke in divorce proceedings. Questions were asked in private about the baby’s paternity. (Tania said everyone in Kenya was counting on their fingers.) A close examination of dates reveals that Beryl’s child could not in fact have been Prince Henry’s. But in 1929, to avoid the scandal of a divorce case, and to keep Markham quiet, a capital sum and an annual income were settled on Beryl, the latter to continue until the end of her life. The monies were drawn from the prince’s own account. Meanwhile, Beryl returned to Kenya depressed and listless. She went to the farm, telling Tania that her husband was a swine and a blackmailer and that she was unhappy to be separated from her infant son. Tania invited her to stay during race week. But Beryl didn’t want to go to the races, as people in Nairobi glared at her. Tania thought she was “the greatest baby I have known, but there is more in her than in most of the people who pretend to be so shocked at her now.” With fine proleptic irony she predicted that Beryl was “so young and light hearted that I am sure, sooner or later, she will find something else to live for.” Then, suddenly, Beryl fled back to England and another summer as royal mistress. By November, she had returned to Kenya and rented Denys’s former cottage.

Now, aged twenty-eight, Beryl was at her most alluring. Nearly six feet tall, slim-hipped and long-fingered, although she was not classically beautiful—she had a strong chin and toothy jaw—she was handsome; her Nordic looks have often been described as Garboesque. She gave the impression that she cared little for anything on two legs, and men found her nonchalance attractive. Beryl was different from Tania in almost every way. Tania was wafty and incorporeal, whereas there was something earthy and physical about Beryl: if her lover disappeared on safari, she would gallop off to someone else’s bed rather than pen a treatise on the morality of marriage. Unlike Tania, she was robust and never ill (she admitted that she was “pathologically” afraid of sickness, hers or anyone else’s). She was calm where Tania was neurotic. Tania found tomfoolery disgraceful, whereas Beryl was always game for rough-and-tumble—she once raced Ingrid in a furniture steeplechase for a rupee note stowed above the Muthaiga clock. (The race ended in a dead heat, and they tore the note in half.) In 1934, when she had qualified as a pilot, she flew for Blix, scouting elephants from the air. Once she dropped him a message from the plane with reports of tusker positions, ending the dispatch, “Work hard, trust in God, and keep your bowels open—Oliver Cromwell.” As her affair with Denys entered the public arena, the bungalow became known as “the way of all flesh.” The fact that Tania was her faithful confidante was of no consequence to Beryl. Characteristically, she played down their friendship later. “She was all right,” she told an interviewer. “I can’t say I thought the world of her. She wasn’t my cup of tea really.” This was rank ingratitude. Like Denys, Beryl was languid, but she had a harder edge. She often abused the kindness of friends; in particular, she was hopelessly irresponsible with money and seldom repaid loans. “She had charm but no warmth,” one hostess said of her. But one detail of Beryl’s recollection of the relationship between Tania and Denys rings true. “Tania,” she recalled, “was always waiting for him to come back.”
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