Too Close to the Sun (29 page)

DENYS HAD BEEN OUT
of Africa for the whole of 1921, Tania for the whole of 1920. They were reunited at the end of the long rains, when fireflies came to the highland woods and skyscrapers of clouds toppled through the blue. He was still based at the cottage on the grounds of Muthaiga, but in August he stayed on her farm. He had acquired a Hudson, and they motored over to stay with the McMillans at Ol Donyo Sabuk (Buffalo Mountain), sixty miles away on the other side of Nairobi. It was as dry as the desert, but when they returned to Ngong they found that more than two inches of rain had fallen. It was still raining on September 8, when Tania and Denys drove to Lake Elmenteita to have tea with Delamere, who was eager to reveal his latest discoveries with sheep at Laikipia. Wartime illness had turned his hair white, and the locks emerging from his helmet gave him a patriarchal look. Tania took her houseboy’s little daughter Mannehawa with her, as she often did, saying that she considered her an adopted child. Denys, too, had grown fond of the girl, and bought her shoes and scarves. He was becoming increasingly enmeshed in Tania’s life. Late on New Year’s Eve, when Tania was already asleep, he drove out to the bungalow with Lord Francis Scott, a prominent settler. They woke her up and went off for a midnight supper, returning to the farm the next day for lunch before another late night at Muthaiga.

The days and nights with Denys made Tania’s life bearable. She had been ill again, and her hair was falling out. Her financial situation remained critical, and by November she had completely run out of money. She sold her couture gowns to a woman in Nairobi. Denys encouraged her to start painting again as a way of relaxing. (“He has a great talent himself but cannot be bothered to do anything about it,” she wrote.) He offered practical advice, but he had little to give in the way of emotional support. Temperamentally, they were different. She was neurotic; he was phlegmatic. But he was susceptible to the black dog. He held himself, she said, to be an extremely rational person, yet he was “subject to special kinds of moods and forebodings.” He would withdraw into himself for days and barely speak, and when she asked what was the matter he expressed surprise, as if he hadn’t noticed how antisocial he had been. When he emerged from his gloom he was repentant, referring to his withdrawal as “bad temper.” Tania learned to recognize a black period, and he learned to handle her emotional volatility, for the time being at least.

Some time after their reunion, Tania thought that she was pregnant with Denys’s child.
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She was deeply moved. She felt her hopes and needs and her immense store of love coagulate in her belly. Their child would bind them together and give their relationship the form and purpose it lacked. Her heart and her mind filled up with contentment. Then one night she began to bleed. She sent her watchman to Thomas’s house with a lantern, asking him to come over straightaway. She believed she was having a miscarriage.

I
N 1923, KENYA MADE THE FRONT PAGES AT HOME FOR THE FIRST TIME.
Trade figures indicated that the colony had made a promising recovery from the upheavals of war and postwar inflation. The motoring craze had even seeped in, the latest Dodge causing a sensation in Nairobi when the first models chugged onto the Fisher and Simmons forecourt. Improvements included a larger radiator, greater clearance, and, bafflingly, “door handles both inside and out.” But with the Dodges came greed and racial laws that would not have been out of place in early Nazi Germany. On the whole, settlers tolerated Africans not because they were there first but because the replacement of tribal wars with Pax Britannica was part of the imperial mission. Indians, on the other hand, were universally despised. They outnumbered the white population three to one. Most Kenyan Indians were
duka wallahs
who ran the tin-roofed trading stores strung from the coast to Lake Victoria. Settlers did not like the idea that others were profiting from colonial expansion. Indians were “sucking the lifeblood of BEA,” according to the
Leader,
and as early as January 1919, Delamere had made a speech urging the administration to prevent further Indian immigration (“I think the Government ought to give up employing Asiatics”). He and his kind were incensed when Indians lobbied to be included on a common electoral roll. But the most crucial issue, the one with which, according to Tania, every white person in Kenya was obsessed, concerned land ownership. The Indian community had been calling for access to highland territory officially reserved for whites, and the settlers were determined to keep them out. “India for the Indians,” went the rallying cry, “and the British colonies for the British.” In 1922, the citizens of Southern Rhodesia, a British colony, achieved their longed-for self-government status, and Europeans in Kenya had their eye on the same goal, without Indians getting in the way. Worried that Whitehall might yield to Indian demands, Delamere led a deputation to London, where delegates politely threatened armed resistance (if there was a showdown, they already had a plan to kidnap the governor), and newspapers printed maps of Africa so that readers could see where Kenya was. A few observers were beginning to wonder whether the white man had the right to settle on other people’s land at all, let alone elbow the Indians out. Although the war had added a million square miles to the empire, Britons were incubating doubts about the straightforward annexation of colonies. It was no longer universally accepted that the extension of European civilization in Africa was a desirable thing, or that the British race was superior to every other. Some newspaper commentators even branded the settlers fanatical racial bigots and Delamere a robber baron. Groups of freethinkers endorsed U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s ideas, enunciated at Versailles, about the desirability of self-determination for all nations, and a 1923 white paper asserted that “the interests of the African natives must be paramount.” There was as yet no seismic shift of spirit—just a presaging tremor. And anyway, the colonial secretary who issued the white paper, the Duke of Devonshire, failed to note that the horse had already bolted: the most important Crown-land ordinances had already been enacted. One defined the borders of the highlands and forbade ownership to all but white Europeans. In 1923, those demanding ownership rights were Indian. In time, they would be Kikuyu. Their “reserves” abutted the fertile highlands. Even as the duke was delivering his conclusions to Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law, in Nairobi Harry Thuku and a municipal worker called Johnstone—later Jomo—Kenyatta were developing ideas of Kikuyu nationalism and the rejection of colonial rule.
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The winds of change were already beginning to blow, thirty-seven years before Harold Macmillan acknowledged them.

The British government eventually rejected Indian claims to the highlands and to political equality, but the opposition that had been expressed revealed that the settlers would soon be out of step with the Zeitgeist. Delamere and his supporters, battling still for a chain of linked white colonies across Africa, were marooned in the past. By the end of the twenties, the settler community in Kenya had become an anachronism, its members left to reflect on the transience of the paradise to which they had fled. Back at home, the most farsighted took the argument of self-determination to its logical conclusion and looked to a period of imperial tutelage that would lead to black self-governance.

AT THE END
of January, Tania’s coffee factory burned down. Thomas finally left for Denmark, “worn-down and frustrated,” and his embattled sister immediately began writing anguished letters begging him to support schemes for further loans. “I would be so heartbroken if we gave it up now, so close to harbour,” she pleaded. The problems—Tania used the Swahili word
shauri—
were entering an acute phase. She woke dreading each fresh encounter with creditors and fell ill with a variety of symptoms, including mysterious lightning-like pains.
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In July of 1923, she was admitted to the hospital, though doctors were unable to reach a diagnosis, and the crisis passed. Through all her troubles, sick but indestructible, her optimism held. When a quarter of an inch of rain fell, she wrote to Denmark describing buds all over the farm that were “ready to burst when the next shower comes.” But her lunches at Muthaiga with Denys were her real pools of joy. She told her mother that he was the kind of person who would improve with the years (whatever that meant), and compared him to d’Artagnan. That summer, he moved in with her.

The farm included two thousand acres of grassland on which
totos
herded their fathers’ cows, and Kikuyu squatters occupied an additional thousand acres, living on small plots called
shambas.
In return for use of the land, they worked on the farm. Many had been born there, like their fathers before them; as Tania wrote, they very likely regarded
her
as a squatter on
their
land. They were obliged nonetheless to pay a hut tax to the government, and when Tania collected it the squatters complained that they did not want the roads, police, and street lighting their taxes were meant to finance. To the west, the estate sloped down to the Mbagathi, the river that formed the boundary between Tania’s land and the Maasai reserve. The Ngong Forest lay to the east, the trees bearded with fungus, and at the beginning of the long rains jacaranda flowered purple in the undergrowth. On the farm, it was almost always hot during the day (she said you felt you had got “near to the sun”), but the nights were cold enough for
totos
to keep fires burning in the house. The furniture Tania had shipped from Rungsted included her father’s painted grandfather clock, which her Somali butler wound on a Friday, the Muslim holy day. There was another clock in the dining room, an old German boxy one with doors that opened on the hour, allowing a cuckoo to emerge. The
totos
who grazed goats on the lawn crept in silently and stood in front of it, waiting for the bird to sing.

In the domestic rituals of the farm Denys found the familiar elegance of his youth, or the nearest a Kenyan household ever got to it. Gloved servants, linen napkins, polished silver, and a house blooming with candidum lilies—he had only to ship in some decent wine and he had found a home away from home. All the staff knew him and his ridgeback, Sirius. Among themselves they called him Bedar, “the balding one,” or sometimes Makanyaga, which means “to tread upon,” as they considered that he could tread upon inferior men with his tongue. They addressed him as Mr. Pinja-Hattern. He had shelves built in the study and installed his Proust and Swinburne and seven-volume Anatole France (in French), and he learned to master Poorbox, Tania’s skittish Irish jumper. If news came that leopards had been at the maize or ostriches were eating the vegetables in the
shambas,
he picked up one of his rifles and went to the crime scene. He tried to help Tania in her titanic battle to keep the farm afloat, drafting letters to lawyers or others with whom she was in dispute. She wrote to her family about raising capital with Denys so that they could buy the shareholders out and own the farm together. When she decided that a servant needed to be punished, it was Denys who administered the beating. It seems an awkward role for a hero. At any rate, by August Tania had decided that the English were splendid. But Denys was often away.

He had formed a land-development company, Kiptiget, Ltd., with Tich Miles and four others and began touring the country to assess land for the firm, always tacking on days or weeks to hunt. Sometimes he returned unexpectedly, and Tania would ride back to her house to hear an aria floating through the French windows from the windup Columbia Grafonola that Denys had given her. At other times, he would send a messenger and she would find a naked youth standing on one leg outside her house. “Bedar is on his way back,” he would say. “He will be here in two or three days.” Denys brought marabou feathers and cheetah pelts, which she sent to Paris to be made into coats and hats, or sometimes he appeared with snake skins for belts, bags, and shoes. In Abyssinia, he bought her a ring fashioned from gold so soft that it could be molded to fit any finger. He came back, she said, “starved of talk,” and they would sit smoking for hours at the millstone table outside the dining room. This was the emotional heart of the farm. From there they picked out a far ridge where they wanted to be buried, and sometimes they said, “Let us drive as far as our graves.” When they got to the ridge, Denys would lie in the grass on his back and peel an orange, picking off segments as he watched eagles coasting overhead. Once he said he’d like to stay there forever. But they went home when the sun set and late light leaked from the west to outline the knuckled Ngong silhouette in silver. After dinner they read Shelley aloud, spreading cushions in front of the fire so Denys could sprawl out while she, cross-legged, invented stories infused with philosophical wit. Tania’s accent, and her antiquated syntax and vocabulary, contributed to the exoticism of the tales. As in the versions she wrote down much later, characters supped rather than ate, bid rather than asked, and things happened on the morrow. Like many storytellers, she wove together fantasy and reality. She invested the facts of her own life with myth in the same way; much of
Out of Africa
departs from actuality. Story time developed into a ritual on the farm, and through Denys Tania experienced the liberation of her creative power. After the stories they smoked hashish or opium, he played the guitar, and they listened to records, though they rarely agreed on which. She wanted the old composers, and he, “as if courteously making up to the age for his lack of harmony with it, was as modern as possible in his taste in all arts. He liked to hear the most advanced music.” He said, “I would like Beethoven all right, if he were not vulgar.”

The preeminence of grand passion was notable later in Tania’s published stories. Her characters tend to be personifications of good or evil, just as her moral landscape is painted in black and white. One longs for a touch of gray—the inconsistency that is the hallmark of humanity. But Tania was a storyteller first and a writer second (she once said she was a member of the storytellers’ tribe), and she willingly subordinated characterization to plot. In her life, as in her art, she assigned roles, and again and again in her letters Denys is cast as redeemer. Once, when he had been with her for an entire month without a break, she wrote to Thomas and said she was happier than anyone else on earth. “That such a person as Denys does exist, something I have indeed guessed at before, but hardly dared to believe, and that I have been lucky enough to meet him in this life and been so close to him—even though there have been long periods of missing him in between—compensates for everything else in the world, and other things cease to have any significance.” Many years later, the young writer Thorkild Bjørnvig, who knew her well, even intimately, said he did not think she ever recognized one living person as her equal except Denys Finch Hatton. She ended the letter to Thomas with a request that if she were to die he must
on no account
tell Denys what she had written. She repeated the demand in subsequent letters. It was a reflection of the degree to which Tania concealed her neediness from Denys, casting herself as the independent modern woman. She understood that if he knew that her life revolved around him he would leave. Even in death, she wanted to preserve his affection. It was a heroic effort. Her family saw the histrionic side of her, the side that did not bear witness to her ideals. And, in time, so did Denys. “He was happy on the farm; he came there only when he wanted to come”—a beautiful sentence in style and content, characteristic of the chaste elegance of
Out of Africa.
But what a world lies behind it. It was her triumph that for some years she let him come when he wanted to come, without telling him how very much she needed him to come when
she
wanted. As for Denys, he was taking advantage of the different moral code that prevailed in Kenya. At home, in England, he would not have lived openly with a woman to whom he was not married.