Too Close to the Sun (44 page)

Denys and Beryl rode together and picnicked in the hills, sang duets, and went to parties. If he was preparing for a safari, she went with him in the Hudson to collect supplies. When he took her flying they landed at Melela, where Clutt was training. (Markham, Beryl’s husband, was in England.) With Beryl, Denys had his freedom back. Unlike her husbands, he did not try to control her, and when he turned his slow rakish smile on her he expected nothing in return. Above all, he opened up a whole new cultural world. He read to her and introduced her to the poetry of Walt Whitman. “He half taught me how to live,” she said much later. A close friend thought he was Beryl’s first great love, and the only man who competed with her father. She admired him hugely, and to a certain extent she had the measure of him. Someone, she wrote in her autobiography, will say that Denys was a great man who never achieved greatness. She was right; they did say that. “This will not only be trite,” she continued, “but wrong; he was a great man who never achieved arrogance.” He gave out, Beryl said, “a force that bore inspiration, spread confidence in the dignity of life, and even gave sometimes a presence to silence.” And while he was a scholar “of almost classical profundity, he was less pedantic than an untutored boy. There were occasions when Denys, like all men whose minds have encompassed among other things the foibles of their species, experienced misanthropic moments; he could despair of men, but find poetry in a field of rock. As for charm, I suspect Denys invented it…it was a charm of intellect and strength, of quick intuition and Voltairian humour.”
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Interviewed in 1986, Beryl noted that Denys was “a lovely man, very upright.” Then there was a pause. “What makes me so depressed,” she continued, “is that I’ve had so many lovely men who’ve been very good to me. I don’t mean to sound as if I’m bragging. Of course, I was good to them too. Now look at all this!” She swept her arm out to indicate the shabby room and the metal-framed bed propped up on sawn-off tree trunks. This was the price she had paid for her choices: a lonely, impoverished old age, reliant on alcohol and living off her memories as a hibernating animal lives off its fat.

IN FEBRUARY OF 1931,
Denys departed on safari with the Sofer Whitburns, an English couple in their fifties. (Like all his clients, they returned to England a little in love with him.) He had been thinking about flying the Moth home shortly after the safari ended, but as the month advanced decided he was too busy. He was planning a solo photographic expedition in June, and before that was flying to the coast, first to work on his house and then to try scouting for elephants from the air around Voi. He knew that he had to visit Tania before he went down to Takaungu, to hold out a faithless arm. She was to leave Kenya for good on June 9, and her family were so anxious about her emotional state that Thomas cabled to say that he would sail out to bring her home. (She cabled back telling him not to bother.) The furniture sale had not been concluded, and she was still busy receiving viewers and packing crates. But the animals had gone. Someone in Nairobi adopted Dinah, Dusk’s grandchild, and Tania had ridden her horse, Rouge, into town and seen him loaded, protesting, into the horse van of the Naivasha train. When Denys arrived, she asked if he would take her with him to Takaungu. First he said yes, then he changed his mind on the grounds that the journey onward to Voi would be turbulent and he might have to sleep in the bush; besides which he had to take one of his servants, and the plane seated only two. But she reminded him that he said he had brought the Moth out to fly her over Africa. Yes, he said, he had; if he found elephants around Voi, there would still be time to take her down there when he knew where to find suitable landing strips. Tania said later, to make a story out of it, that it was the only time she ever asked him to take her up that he refused. She wrote of “an unconditional truthfulness which outside of him [Denys] I have only met in idiots.” But he was not being honest. He did not want to take her. They quarreled in the end, and he asked for his ring back—the soft gold one he had brought her from Abyssinia. He was afraid (she said later) that she might give it away to Pooran Singh, her bearded Indian blacksmith; Denys complained that whenever he bought her anything she gave it away to her Africans. He put the ring on his own finger and said he would keep it till Pooran Singh had gone.

Denys left the farm on Wednesday, May 6, telling her to look out for him the following Thursday, when he would be back in time to have luncheon with her. He turned for the drive, then went indoors again to collect a volume of poems. It was the book Iris had published. At the end, he stood with one foot on the running board of the Hudson and one on the gravel, and with a finger in the book below a poem they had been discussing. “Here are your grey geese,” he said, and read a few of the lines Iris had written for him.

I saw grey geese straining over the flat lands,

Wild geese vibrant in the high air,

Saw them as I feel them, symbols,

Felt my soul stiffened out in their throats…

And the grey whiteness of them ribboning the enormous skies,

And the spokes of the sun over the crumpled hills.

Then he swung into the car and drove away. Tania said later that the first servant he asked to go to Takaungu with him refused; she concluded that “The shadow of destiny, which Denys himself had felt during the last days at Ngong, was seen more strongly now, by the native.” But this was when she was able to create a piece of theater from the misery. At the time, she went to a friend’s house and, according to Thomas, tried to cut her wrists but bungled the attempt. The suicide note she left has vanished from her papers.

On the seventh, Denys dined with his friends Jack Melhuish and Joan Waddington at their house in Nairobi. Joan worked in the telegram office at Government House, and Jack was a dentist and an amateur photographer. He had a darkroom that Denys often used. Nairobi was chilly after the start of the long rains, and Denys appeared that night in a dinner jacket and black tie, with his camel-hair dressing gown on top. During the meal, he asked Joan if she wanted to fly down to Takaungu with him. “Good God, Denys!” she spluttered. “Do you want me to commit suicide?” He had known she would not go. His offer was not serious, because he had already asked Beryl to go to Takaungu and Voi with him. She had agreed immediately. On the morning of the eighth, the day they were due to leave, she was at the airfield with her flying instructor, Tom Campbell Black.

“I’m going down to Voi with Denys,” Beryl told Tom. “He wants to see how efficiently elephants can be spotted from the air, and if it would be possible to keep a hunting party more or less in touch with a moving herd.”

Tom leaned against a workbench in the newly built Wilson Airways hangar, jotting figures on a scrap of paper. The open hangar looked out on the airfield, on the plains, and on a square of sky lonely for clouds. “It was a flyer’s day,” Beryl recalled. Tom stuffed the piece of paper in the pocket of his leather jacket.

“Sounds practical enough,” he said, “up to a point. You’d find a lot more elephant than places to land after you’d found them.”

“I suppose so,” Beryl conceded. “But it seems worth trying—Denys’s ideas always are. Anyway, we’re just going to fly out from Voi and back again. No rough landings. If it works out, there should be a good living in it. When you think of all the people who come out here for elephant, and all the time that’s spent, and…”

“I know,” said Tom. “It’s an excellent idea.” He moved away from the bench and went out the hangar door and looked at the field. He stood there without moving. Then he came back.

“Make it tomorrow, Beryl,” he said.

“Weather?”

“No, the weather’s all right. Just make it tomorrow—will you?”

“I suppose I will, if you ask me to, but I don’t see why.”

“Neither do I,” said Tom, “but there it is.”

There it was. Beryl let Denys take off without her.
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In his haste to find another passenger he went to fetch his cook, the old ruffian Hamisi, and told him they were leaving promptly for the coast. Hamisi began flapping, complaining that he didn’t have time to go home to collect spare clothes or to give his wife her share of his wages. But Denys was in a hurry and said he would give him fresh clothes when they arrived at Takaungu. Kanuthia drove them both to the airstrip.

They took off in radiant good weather. Around Takaungu, the fields rippled with high spiky leaves that looked like the tops of giant pineapples. The sisal had just poled, and a tall, sticklike growth shot up from the heart of each plant. From the air, the neat rows ran across the land like green corduroy. Denys had cleared an airstrip north of the creek, within walking distance of his house, and installed a wind sock. He spent three quiet days on the coast with Hamisi, but when they took off again a wheel dug into soft ground and chipped one of the wooden propeller blades in two places on a block of coral. They landed at Voi and Denys wired Tom Campbell Black from the station asking him to send a new blade down by train. He was sure he could replace it himself, but Tom dispatched an African mechanic with it, just in case. With the fresh blade fitted, Denys and Hamisi took off again on Wednesday, May 13, heading for the hills around Voi. Hamisi was airsick, so they landed twelve miles south of Maktau and remained on the ground for two hours. Then they flew on, spotting a large herd of elephants browsing along the Voi River. Denys was elated at the success of his scheme, which he was convinced would cut out weeks of scouting on foot. Now he planned to spend one night in the district before returning to Nairobi. He knew the area well and often landed on an airstrip at the foot of Mbolo Hill in order to stay with District Commissioner Vernon Cole and his wife, Hilda, or with Stanley and Margaret Layzell, who lived adjacent to a large sisal plantation that Stanley managed for a British company. It was an isolated region—according to Beryl, “Voi presumed to be a town then, but was hardly more than a word under a tin roof ”—and social visits were keenly anticipated.

That night the Coles hosted a small party. Guests included J.A., who was starting on safari the next day with an American client named Lee Hudson. Stanley and Margaret Layzell were also present, along with their two elder daughters, Katharine and Anne, aged seven and nine, who adored Denys. Hudson and J.A. left the party early to prepare for a dawn start the next day, and Denys went onto the porch to say good night. As he was standing in the doorway, Hilda came up behind him and gave him an armful of oranges to take back to Nairobi. Kenyan oranges are the color of spring grass, and as Denys stood on the threshold of the bungalow, waving to his friend with his free hand, the electric light reflected amber green on the dimpled skin of the fruit.

THURSDAY MORNING CAME
bright and cloudless. Margaret Layzell arrived at seven to drive Denys to the airstrip. She brought Katharine and Anne, who had clamored to see their hero again. It was toward the end of the rains, and the sky was a tender blue. There was no wind. The sisal had been cut and the fields smelled sulfurous, as water was fermenting in the irrigation furrows.

The Coles arrived to see Denys off, bringing their small son, John. Hilda was in the early stages of a second pregnancy.
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After refueling, Denys turned to Margaret and invited her up for a spin. She accepted, but Katharine grabbed her hand and begged her not to go. Keen to fly, Margaret tried to calm her daughter, but the girl became irrationally frightened and would not be placated. Margaret reluctantly told Denys the spin would have to be postponed.

Denys buttoned his flying helmet and wrapped his greatcoat around him. Hamisi took the chocks away and swung the propeller. The engine spluttered, and Denys pushed gently on the throttle. Hamisi jumped into the front. Iris’s poetry book was stuffed down the side of Denys’s seat. As the Moth banked to gain altitude, the wind played tunes on the struts. The plane circled twice and turned in the direction of Nairobi. As it was still gaining height, the engine faltered. The Moth plummeted out of sight of the spectators and crashed a mile away, close to Mwakangale Hill. On impact, it burst into flames. When all the fuel was burned up and the fire began to go cold, three black oranges rolled out of the fuselage.