Too Close to the Sun (33 page)

TANIA RETURNED TO
the farm on February 1, 1926, listless and depressed. She had wondered, at peaceful Rungstedlund, whether to go back to Africa at all. Denys was on safari when she arrived. She had not seen him for eleven months. On March 5, he came to stay for more than two weeks. She was suddenly so happy, she said, that she had “nothing more to ask of life.” She told Thomas that Denys was the only person who meant anything to her, and that her whole existence revolved around their relationship. But Denys had just received news from home that his father was veryill. He was about to dash back to England again.

Tania was plunged into despair. In moments of clarity, she could see that living only for her lover’s visits came perilously close to living through him and submerging her own ideals. This was what she most feared. When he was with her, she said that perfect bliss and perfect despair fought for her attention, the despair fueled by the knowledge that she might never see him again. She compared his presence to lying in a perfumed bath, and his absence to a session on the rack. One of her staff remembered that she used to sit at her desk, put her head on her arms, and weep, asking the puzzled servant why Bwana Bedar had stayed away so long. Few women could tolerate such a precarious emotional life, and Tania was beginning to understand that she was not one of those fortunate few. “I will not and cannot go on living in this way, with this single element in my life,” she told Thomas in an anguished letter. “It is an intolerable situation and I find it impossible to allow my immediate future to take the form of six months of utter desolation, emptiness and darkness, with the hope of seeing him again in the autumn, and being lifted up to the same unqualified happiness, only to be cast back into desolation and darkness—and so on and so on for infinity.” By August, however, she was perfectly happy again. “One has freedom and peace out here,” she told a bemused Thomas. “The really great passion in my life has been my love for my black brother…and my devotion to Denys fills my whole life with indescribable sweetness, in spite of constantly missing him.” But a month later she was thrashing around again in the vortex of her conflict. She tried to convince herself that she did not actually want commitment, arguing that she could have married Geoffrey Buxton if she wanted a safe anchorage. (History does not record whether
he
wanted
her.
) “The reason for my giving up my life to loving the independence-seeking Denys and the black race so boundlessly,” she decided, “must be because this is necessary for me; I cannot be possessed and I have no desire to possess. It can be cold and empty, God knows, but it is not cramped or stifling.” Tania was vulnerable to violent swings of mood, ricocheting from suicidal despair to elation within twenty-four hours. The serene wisdom of
Out of Africa
was an ideal she never actually achieved for long, just as life on the farm was rarely the pastoral idyll that has enchanted millions. But what is the point of being a writer, if not to change grubby reality into something meaningful?

IN ADDITION TO THE
news of Henry’s illness, Denys learned that a buyer had been found for Haverholme; he was to lose his childhood home. He was disturbed, and conveyed his tense mood to Tania in a letter written in Mombasa just before boarding his ship. It concerned his Hudson, which he left with her on the farm. “Don’t drive fast when the car is cold,” he ordered her. “The red should be up to the lower edge of the white circle in the thermometer. Don’t force your gears if you miss them: start again.” The gears were evidently especially vulnerable. “They are so important,” he continued, “if you want the car to run nicely.” There was more: “Always let your clutch in smoothly otherwise you strain all its transmission.” He hated the journey, was nursing an atrocious cold, and arrived in a chilly, showery London on the first day of the first general strike in British history. The coal miners had come out a few days earlier, their leader warning that the strike would be to the death, and the Trades Union Congress had voted to back them. CLASS WAR SPLITS BRITAIN, shrieked the headlines, and workers at the
Daily Mail
refused to print a leader denouncing TUC plans. A formal state of emergency was declared, troops were deployed, and the prime minister asked John Reith, the head of the BBC, to broadcast a message urging listeners to “Keep Steady!” The Establishment stiffened in its efforts to ensure that the strike cause the least possible disruption. Toby’s colleagues in the City started driving trains, barristers were sworn in as special constables, and the Marylebone Cricket Club announced that there would be no interruption in the cricket. Strikers had little support outside the working classes. As the historian A.J.P. Taylor noted, “The elderly Liberal leaders forgot their liberalism when threatened by (imaginary) social revolution.” It was not imaginary, but it quickly lost any reality. On May 12, 1926, the TUC called off the general strike. The miners fought on until November, when, half-starved, they returned to the pits, worse off than they had been before. The strike was indeed to the death. It was the miners who died.

There were still virtually no buses running when Denys got to the capital, but the streets were thronged with black box-body cars. Car ownership had rocketed even before the strike, especially with the introduction of cheaper models, and Londoners had recently enjoyed their first taste of the traffic jam. Since Denys’s last visit, white lines had been painted onto roads to separate motor streams, traffic lights had been installed in Piccadilly, and a one-way scheme had been introduced around Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park Corner. Now, during the strike, the petrol engine moved stealthily toward its inexorable victory over coal-burning trains. Toby, still a fanatic motorist, drove Denys and Margaretta to Haverholme in the latest Rolls. It rained hard for most of the three-and-a-half-hour journey. Their father had that week suffered an attack of what the doctor called apoplexy. It had partially paralyzed his right hand, but they found him better than they had feared. His hand was coming back to life and his spirits were reasonable, though he was demoralized, as they all were, by the prospect of packing up the contents of the vast house that had been their family home for so many decades. As Henry did not appear to want any help, after two days Toby, Margaretta, and Denys returned to London. But another specter was waiting. On May 21, Denys received a telegram at the Conservative Club from Tania telling him that she was pregnant again.

They had devised a code for such an event: the unborn child would be referred to as Daniel, a Winchilsea name. So the “love relationship” had obviously been normal enough. Denys was horrified. He was not interested in having a child; he was not prepared to have one. His inability to accept long-term commitment was pathological. He sent a cable straight back: “Strongly urge you cancel Daniel’s visit.” It was as if iron had entered the soul. Revulsion and sympathy competed for ascendancy and, later in the day, pacing around the high-ceilinged public rooms, he had misgivings about his heartless telegram. He cabled again: “Reference your cable and my reply please do as you like about Daniel as I should welcome him if I could offer partnership but this is impossible stop you will I know consider your mother’s views. Denys.” She responded with dignity. “Thanks cables never meant to ask assistance/permission—consent only. Tania.” She was, in fact, never certain that she had been pregnant. Before she knew for sure, she began to bleed, and concluded that if she had been expecting a baby she was now having a miscarriage. Later that year, she told Thomas that she no longer wanted a child. But in her childless old age she admitted to her secretary that she had deeply wanted this baby.

A fretful Denys went back up to the Priory, where things had gotten worse. Henry looked awful, and on May 28 Denys reported to Toby that he did not think their father was well. Toby drove up the next day. It had turned even colder, and the red Shorthorns were clustered in the corner of the fields with their heads down. Denys, worried about Tania, felt guilty and confused. It was difficult to be out of communication. He sent her a note, enclosing photographs. “I am rather depressed and could wish myself back at Ngong,” he wrote. “I want your news. What of Daniel? I would have liked it but saw it as being very difficult for you.” He promised to write properly soon. No wonder he was depressed. He had made a frightful mess of things and dwelled miserably over what Yeats called “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”—his heart, padlocked to all, and perhaps even to himself. In July he sent Tania another note, along with a picture, a piece of music, and an Egyptian book. The music, he told her, was for a dance in a Lesbian ballet (presumably Diaghilev’s
Les Biches,
which he had seen at His Majesty’s Theatre). No doubt this lifted her spirits. She did not reply, and he started to worry that he had the wrong box number. He sent her a consignment of bulbs for the garden, along with catalogs marking the ones he had ordered.

Henry again rallied, and in August Denys went shooting in Scotland for three weeks, which cheered him up. When he returned to Haverholme to help his father pack up, he found that the old man was not amenable to assistance. They sat over dinner at the long table, the wind from the North Sea rattling the loose panes and the weak electric light yellowing the old matte silverware. Packing crates lurked in dark corners, and only the discolored oblongs on the flaking walls indicated where ancestral portraits had hung for generations. Henry, white-haired and whiskery, sat with his shoulders stooped. He had been reluctant to sell the Priory, “on sentimental grounds,” and clung to the shreds of his independence, refusing to let his children take over. Denys, as a result, felt useless. “In spite of his being very unwell,” he told Tania, “he insists upon doing everything himself as long as he can stagger around: so that all I can do is stand around like the French clown at a circus.” He stretched his long legs under the table as steam from the poached halibut rose a fraction before evaporating in the cold air. The silence was punctuated only by the clink and scrape of cutlery as Henry worked his knife slowly with his weak right hand.

Denys found the atmosphere depressing, and told Tania that he would be returning to Africa in October. “I shall be glad to see Ngong and your charming self again,” he wrote. “Those sunsets at Ngong have an atmosphere of rest and content about them which I never realise anywhere else. I believe I could die happily enough at sunset at Ngong, looking up the hills, with all their lovely colours fading out above the darkening belt of the near forest. Soon they will be velvet black against the silver fading sky—black as the buffalos which now come pushing softly out of the bush high up under the breasts of the hills to feed with sweet breath unafraid upon the open grass of the night. I am much looking forward to seeing you again Tania: you might have given me something of your news—nothing—no word even of Daniel.” He went on to tell her that he was bringing out a new Hudson, and that he was planning to stay at the coast for a few days, as he had determined to buy a piece of land he had seen and build a small bungalow “so that we can visit the sea from time to time. It is a nice place and will be right away from anyone else. Do not tell of this.” He asked her to write to him in Mombasa, “to say whether you are alive and well, or ill and dying. How is Farah: where is Billea, and has he learned to drive your Hudson yet? Is Kamau still with you, or has he stolen all the tools and
torokaed
[run off ]? I must talk to my father—Goodnight Goodnight.” How could she resist? She wrote him a letter. He was not, after all, to be a father. He replied from the Conservative Club, thanking her for a “charming letter” and agreeing to her request to buy some cosmetics (“I have got your Rubinstein muck”). It looked as if they had made up.