Too Close to the Sun (36 page)

They spent the week quietly together. On the last day of the year a friend came to borrow a rifle, but after he had left with it Denys remembered that he had not explained an idiosyncrasy of the weapon, which meant that the hair trigger could be inadvertently demobilized. As the friend had already left on safari, Denys and Tania determined to set out before sunrise and catch up with him. They took Denys’s Kikuyu driver, Kanuthia, and drove along the new Narok road, hoping to meet the safari caravan, which had taken the old road, at Narok itself. But neither Denys nor Tania knew if the new road had been completed. The stars were still out as cold air flowed over their faces, sharp with the scent of olive bushes, burned grass, and what Tania called “a sudden quelling smell of decay,” and silhouettes of slim gazelles and lumpy eland loomed in the yellowing mist. About fifteen miles from the farm, Kanuthia pointed to a dark bulk on their right. It was a lion feeding on a giraffe corpse. The Maasai thereabouts had recently complained to Tania about a cattle-eating lion, but she had not been able to find it. Denys jumped out of the car and fired two shots at 250 yards. There was no time for skinning, so they covered the lion with branches and hurried on. But the road ran out after six miles, so they turned back, facing the eastern sky as the sun tilted over the plains and the hills. (The friend, it turned out, never used the faulty rifle.) When they reached the giraffe again on their way back, another lion was on it, a magnificent one with a black mane intermittently lifted by the wind. Behind him, the sky was crimson as a wound. Denys shot and the lion flew into the air, coming down with his legs gathered under him. Kanuthia got four bottles of fat from the skinning. Then they sat on the grass, shadows of vultures at their feet, and drank a bottle of claret with bread, cheese, raisins, and almonds that Tania had brought to celebrate the New Year. Was it an auspicious beginning? She thought so, and wrote to her mother to say that if 1928 continued to be so exciting there was much to look forward to. In
Out of Africa,
she transformed the lion hunt into a love scene. She made the first lion a female, shot at the closer distance of “twelve or fifteen yards,” and killed the second lion herself. Her bullet, she wrote, “was a declaration of love.”

Four months after the Narok road incident, Tania’s manager, W. H. Dickens, refused to shoot a marauding lion on the grounds that as a married man with a small daughter he was unwilling to risk his life. After Tania and Denys had done the job themselves, she took up the theme in a long letter to her aunt Bess. Dickens, she claimed, was right: one had to choose between “the lions or family life,” and she ended with what seemed like a gracious acknowledgment that Dickens’s wife “gets just as much out of, sees ‘the highest and greatest’ in her baby daughter Anne’s first tooth and evening bath” as Tania herself did from the lion hunt. This was nicely put, but one can have the first tooth and the lion. Or can one, really, without each being compromised? The Dickenses regularly functioned as ciphers for the undesirability of the married state. “Who can judge,” Tania asked the bemused old aunt in Zeeland, “whether Dickens is actually happier than Finch Hatton, or Mrs Dickens happier than I?” Who indeed? Tania herself, apparently. “I myself think that I am much happier and get far more out of life than Mrs Dickens, who is always pretty sulky.” Denys had compelled her to embrace the unorthodox, but it did not come naturally to her as it did to him, and the effort created tension which emerged most forcibly in her relationship with her family. She told her younger sister that she did not regard illness, poverty, loneliness, or “being let down” as misfortunes at all. These were bourgeois trifles. Instead, her greatest burdens had been imposed on her by people with so-called good intentions. Furthermore, her failure to find conventional domestic contentment encouraged her to indulge in the myth that the artist, in order to achieve greatness, is obliged to renounce convention. The writer, in other words, must be isolated from real life in order to develop her talent—this is the price she must pay. But what can “real life” possibly be? The washing-up, perhaps, and who wants to do that? The pram in the hall had not yet been established as an enemy of promise, but a long line of artistic figures before Tania had conveniently decided that their destiny excluded them from the tedious minutiae of daily life, and that responsibility for the latter fell to smaller people. “Oh yes,” wrote Amandine-Aurore Lucile Dudevant after she had abandoned her husband, son, and daughter in Nohant to take a nineteen-year-old lover, change her name to George Sand, and embrace the literary world of Paris, “
vive la vie d’artiste.
Our motto is freedom.”

ON JANUARY 4, DENYS
left on his safari, but he saw a lot of Tania that month. He turned up unexpectedly and stayed with her for a week while the safari broke; Will Dickerson, his second gun, was with him. Only six days later, the magneto on one of the lorries gave out thirty miles into Tanganyika. Denys drove nonstop to collect a replacement in Nairobi and appeared at the farm for dinner and a few hours’ sleep on the dash back. He got up at one, and Tania went with him as far as the dam in her coat and nightgown, walking home when he went on. In the middle of March he was back, “accompanied, unfortunately,” Tania reported home, “by his slave Dickerson, who is a bit of a bore.” More scintillating guests were made welcome. A week earlier, Tania had run into Joss Hay, high priest of the Happy Valley set, in the bank. His father had just died, making Joss the twenty-second Earl of Erroll and high constable of Scotland. En route to London after the news came through, Hay was lashed with a rhino-hide whip on the platform of the Nairobi station by a cuckolded husband.

Fifteen years younger than Denys, Hay had been similarly fêted at Eton for his charm and good looks before being expelled for fornicating with a maid. He was addicted to speed, and in Kenya was often sighted racing along the rutted roads in Lady Idina’s Hispano-Suiza. When he had his own Buick coupe, a passenger in the backseat once bounced right out of the car. Hay didn’t notice for several miles. Tania invited him to the farm for an afternoon “bottle,” and he asked if he might bring Alice de Janzé, a rich American heiress who lived in Happy Valley but was preparing to leave the country—she was being deported. Alice was frail and gorgeous, with oceanic eyes, a natural pout, and Cleopatra hair. She was in her late twenties and had lingering consumption; a spurned suitor once said she smelled of death. At Muthaiga, where love affairs germinated like valley grass, she had fallen in love with Raymund de Trafford. He was a remittance man from a grand County Limerick family, a former officer in the Coldstream Guards, an asthmatic, a gambler, and a committed drinker. Evelyn Waugh, who stayed with him in Kenya, called him a “fine desperado”; when the de Trafford cook was absent, Waugh had to forage for food and found his host in bed with his finger in a tin of grouse paste. The previous year, de Trafford and Alice had liaised in Paris, where he told her that his Catholic parents would not countenance their marriage. When he left for Calais, she boarded the train with him at the Gare du Nord and entered his compartment. She knelt in front of him, kissed him, then shot him and herself. Both recovered, and they went on to marry, then to divorce. Alice became known as “the fastest gun in the Gare du Nord.” De Trafford continued as before. His elder brother eventually offered him £10,000 to be castrated. De Trafford, always short of cash, reflected for a moment, and said he would have one ball cut off and take £5,000.

When Tania welcomed her to the farm, Alice had just been acquitted of attempted murder, though the Kenyan government had asked her to leave the country anyway, on the grounds that she was an undesirable alien. She had been having an intermittent affair with Hay since 1919. But before the pair arrived, Lucie, Lady McMillan, appeared unexpectedly with two vast American women on leave from their cruise ship. (Cruise operators were just beginning to offer Nairobi stopovers, entraining wealthy passengers up from the coast.) They had gone for a drive in the hope of seeing a lion. But something even more exotic was lying in wait. Sipping tea from Tania’s Royal Copenhagen china while Farah stood impassive in a corner, the dowagers spoke of the scandalous behavior of the Kenyan fast set of which they had read so much lubricious detail. The worst offender, they thought, was their fellow American Alice de Janzé. At that moment, Hay’s Buick screamed up the drive in a typhoon of dust, and a minute later Jezebel herself glided across Tania’s parquet.

Tania generously offered Alice the farm as a base before she was deported. Contrary to her bravura statements about the inferiority of women, Tania was close to a number of her own sex, notably the gaptoothed Ingrid, whom she told Ingeborg she loved. She liked joining the chaos of the Lindstroms’ farm at Njoro, where barefoot children ran about feeding the chickens, and she enjoyed girlish talks about clothes. Her sartorial style was all her own. At a Muthaiga dance at which the other women wore variations of the clinging hip-waisted, calf-length dresses that were
le dernier cri,
Tania appeared in a hooped gown with panniers sewn with sprays of flowers, introducing a note of fantasy with a white astrakhan fez. But there was always an element of fantasy about Tania, as there is in the lacquered phrases of her prose. She blackened her eyes with kohl before anyone else used eye makeup, and it had an odd effect, as if she put it on just for fun; when she overdid it, she looked like a louche cabaret artiste. Throughout her life she was attracted to glamour, and in her old age, when she visited America as a literary luminary, it was Marilyn Monroe whom she asked to meet. When the audience was granted (with Arthur Miller in tow), Tania was spellbound. But her women friends accepted the posturing. “I knew her very well for many years,” recalled Genessie Long (later Hamilton), who lived in splendor at Nderit, near Lake Nakuru, with her husband, seventy horses, and herds of dappled Shorthorns that grazed miles of parklike meadowland. “Like all my friends, I was devoted to her.” Denys’s old girlfriend Rose Cartwright said Tania was “a wonderful person without pretence. She was courteous, loyal and always most considerate of her servants and other people.” Above all, Tania identified with unconventional women, and this was what drew her to the pantherine Beryl Markham (previously Purves, née Clutterbuck, subsequently Schumacher). But there were things Tania did not know about her friend.

IN 1936, BERYL WAS
to win global fame as an aviatrix when she crossed the Atlantic solo and nonstop from east to west—the hard way, against the winds. She was the first pilot to do so, and the first woman to cross the Atlantic in any direction. She crash-landed her plane, the two-hundred-horsepower
Messenger,
in a bog in Cape Breton, but that didn’t matter. All the press reports—and there were thousands—noted the slacks she wore. Some people said she had whiskey rather than coffee in her thermos. But she did it.

Beryl was born in Leicestershire in 1902. Her father, Charles Clutterbuck, was a failed army officer with a talent for horses. He moved to Kenya in 1904, working, at first, as Delamere’s dairy manager. His wife, Clara, followed him out with their two small children, Richard and the three-year-old Beryl. Clutt, as he was known, bought fifteen hundred acres at Njoro, between the Mau Forest and the Rongai Valley, which in those days was teeming with game. He cut down the ebony, teak, and mahogany, cleared hundreds of miles of creeping plants, and traded salt with the Dorobo, taking in exchange skins of colobus monkeys, which he used as bedspreads. He called the place Ndimu Farm and built flour and timber mills. By 1907, Clutt had more than a thousand Kavirondo and Kikuyu on the payroll. But Clara left him for a colonel and moved back to England, taking their son. Beryl was left to run wild with the Kipsigi, wearing a cowrie shell on a leather thong around her wrist to ward off evil spirits. She ate with her hands, her first language was Swahili, and she could hurl a spear as well as her male
layoni
(pre-circumcision age group) Kipsigi playmates. Clutt had a thoroughbred stud at Njoro, and Beryl practically grew up on horseback; she told a friend that she felt better on a horse than she did on her feet. It was said that even as a young girl there was no horse she could not ride—one of her many African names was a long and complicated one meaning “she who cannot fall off a horse.” She had two and a half years of formal education before she was thrown out of school, and in 1919 she married Alexander “Jock” Purves, a freckled Scottish army captain who played rugby. Beryl was sixteen—though it was said that Clutt could not remember exactly when she was born and aged her as he did the horses, all of which became a year older on the same date. Purves was twice her age. In 1920, Clutt had to sell everything to satisfy his creditors, and Beryl began to train horses herself.