Too Close to the Sun (40 page)

DENYS HAD SAILED
to England this time chiefly to requalify as a pilot and to select a plane. He went to as many air shows as he could, inspecting biplanes, triplanes, monoplanes, and any other kind on display. At the beginning of September, he motored to the coast with his nephews and nieces to watch the Schneider Trophy run, an air race over the Solent. An English pilot won in a Supermarine RR 56 flying at 332 miles per hour. Aerial experimentation had made spectacular progress since the painfully unglamorous Wright brothers mounted a small engine onto a gossamer frame and hopped over the sand dunes of North Carolina like fledglings. Over in the equally unglamorous Wolverhampton, it had been enough for a plane to circle the airfield
on the ground
at Arty’s air show. Now long-haul flights were generating unprecedented public interest—Lindbergh’s 1927 Atlantic crossing the most dramatic so far—and chic aviatrixes in flying jackets were ousting film stars from the front pages. In May of 1930, a Hull fish merchant’s daughter, Amy Johnson, flew De Havilland’s twelfth Gypsy Moth to Australia in the record-breaking time of nineteen and a half days. The plane had no lights, brakes, or radio, and Johnson had never been abroad before. People compared her to Joan of Arc. In England it was fashionable for the superrich to own a plane, and many chose the Moth, a milestone aircraft that launched a fabulously successful period of British light-aircraft design and production. In outposts like Kenya, settlers had become obsessed with the potential of flight. As early as 1919 the
Leader
reported eagerly, “Few portions of the British empire have more to gain than BEA from the conquest of the air.” On May 12, 1926, Tania had driven to Dagoretti Junction in Ngong, the car loaded with servants, to see the first planes in the colony arrive from Kisumu. In October that year, John Carberry, an Irish baronet with a bogus American accent, flew a De Havilland 51—an ancestor of the Moth—from Nyeri to Nairobi, a flight the
Standard
described as “epoch-making.”
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In 1927, the Aero Club of Kenya was founded, using the Dagoretti airstrip; the following year, when it changed its name to the Aero Club of East Africa, the government asked its members to select the site for a Nairobi Aerodrome (now Wilson), which was first used on February 19, 1929—though there were no runways until 1933, and game roamed the strip for a long time after that.

Denys booked lessons at an airstrip on the outskirts of Bristol, and put in practice hours at the Hendon airfield in North London. His companion at Hendon was his old girlfriend Rose Cartwright, who was temporarily back in England and working as a social correspondent for the
Daily Express.
They had remained close. Denys sometimes took safari clients to stay at the Cartwrights’ farm at Naivasha. Rose—stable, self-effacing, and the least flamboyant of Denys’s lovers—was able to handle even the most demanding guests. On one occasion, Denys arrived with an American family and, after settling them in, asked for his own dinner to be sent up to his room on a tray, explaining privately to Rose that the clients were “too abominable for words.” Rose’s marriage, however, was troubled. Her husband, Algy, was a regular of the Muthaiga club set, known for his prowess at scaling the Doric columns, but he was a peculiar man and few settlers liked him. He had a butcher’s business, among other interests, and one week was allegedly short of meat and sold a hyena. The Cartwrights had a son in 1924, and in 1928 Rose became pregnant again. When her daughter was born, she asked Denys to stand as godfather. Now, reunited in London, they were able to share their unhappiness. Denys told Rose that he could not tolerate Tania’s emotional demands. “If I don’t move out of the farm, we will lose all that we have been to one another, even our happy memories,” he said. In 1935, Rose left Algy.

When he was not in Bristol, Denys checked in to the Conservative Club. That year, he went to the Russian ballet at Covent Garden every night of its season. In the afternoons, if he was not flying at Hendon, he idled in Hatchard’s on Piccadilly to peruse books in the news for their “obscenity.” The furor surrounding
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
the previous year had risen in a more generalized crescendo of public indignation despite the fact that Lawrence’s novel was available only in Italy; and the
Sporting Times,
Toby’s bible, had described
Ulysses
as “enough to make a Hottentot sick.” Denys thought it amusing, seldom finding himself in sympathy with pious expressions of public morality; and it was not yet closing time in the gardens of the West.

As Denys’s visit was drawing to a close, Tania came over from Denmark for a week. He drove her up to Lincolnshire to show her Haverholme, and then down to Buckfield, where they stayed for five days. Topsy was there, and Glyn Philpot, the artist, who was about to paint Margaretta. Neither an Edwardian nor a modernist but a little of both, like the age itself, Philpot was among the most financially successful portrait painters of his generation, and Tania was gratified to be in such illustrious company. She walked the grounds with Philpot talking of North Africa, where he had traveled. But she was too preoccupied to enjoy herself. She was again embroiled in financial negotiations to keep the farm, and this time they involved Denys. He had offered to lend £10,000 to keep the Karen Coffee Company afloat. It would not be a personal loan: the money was to come out of Kiptiget funds (Denys remained a director of the land-development company). He instructed his solicitor to write to Tania at her London hotel to set out terms. The proposed rate of interest was 9 percent, “to be secured by a first debenture upon the undertakings and assets of the Karen Coffee Company,” and the KCC board was to be assured “that money is ready and available so there will be no delay in getting it.” Denys was in a difficult position. He wanted to help, yet he had just received a telegram from his advisers in Nairobi cautioning him against lending, as the prognosis for the 1929–30 harvest was poor. But he did not back out. The terms of the loan were settled by the end of October, when Tania was back at Rungstedlund; but the deal, crucially, was not signed.

Denys passed his test with flying colors, but there was no time left to purchase a plane before returning to business in Kenya. Toby had offered him £100 so that he could take a commercial flight back to Africa instead of sailing and therefore have an extra ten days at home. But suddenly Denys rang from London to say that he had decided to leave by ship from Marseille the next day after all. A distraught Toby hurried up to town to spend the last night with Denys, who, meanwhile, had dashed over to his lawyer’s office to make a will—his preoccupation with flying had not blinded him to its vertiginous casualty rate. He left his guns and hunting equipment to Toby, and made Topsy his residuary legatee. In the event of her predeceasing him, her children were to receive £4,000 each and Toby the rest.
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Tania was not mentioned.

WHILE DENYS WAS
steaming back down the African coast, panic descended on Wall Street, and by the time he reached Mombasa the stock market had crashed. Disaster soon spread to Threadneedle Street. Kenya was already in a state of agricultural crisis: drought had been followed by a locust invasion during which many farmers saw their entire crop destroyed a week before the harvest. Dusk had fallen on the Sunbeam Period, and the high living of the royal tour turned out to be the last spree in Kenya for many years. The colony was wholly dependent on agricultural production, and by 1930 the price of all principal exports was well below production cost; coffee prices were so low that beans were used to stoke Brazilian railway locomotives (imagine the smell). Petrol, on the other hand, became so expensive that farmers used oxen to pull their cars. Historians regularly suggest that the first cracks in the colonial system appeared in the aftermath of the 1929–30 slump. The crash certainly thinned the settlers out; many finally packed their hopes away with the soda siphons and boxes of sparklets and sailed back to the old country. The flow of visitors also dwindled, reducing the influx of capital, and the administration cut back drastically on development programs.

LOSS, LIKE A BANEFUL
predator, was waiting for Denys among the purple shadows of the Rift. On October 6, Galbraith Cole had shot himself at Kekopey at the age of forty-eight. He had had an arthritic crisis and could not face another long period as an invalid. He asked Nell to let him kill himself, and she did; they had often spoken of it. He had spent his last weeks lying on the veranda, looking across the lake with his one good eye at the changing light on the water and the sun setting over the Rift, or listening for the gunfire crack of fighting hartebeest locking horns. When he wanted to inspect a particular flock of sheep, he had it driven past him. The rains had already begun to fall when he shot himself, and the feathered rushes of Elmenteita were swaying again in deep water, shadowing the endless cycle of life and death in the valley. Algy and Dr. Burkitt went to Kekopey to help Nell, and they buried Galbraith overlooking the lake by the light of a hurricane lamp. The wagon carrying his coffin took the top off the gatepost, which would have annoyed him. Nell spoke of “twelve unclouded years of the most perfect companionship that anyone ever had.”

Denys went to his property at Takaungu, on the coast. He had bought the land in 1927, and had the house built the following year on the ruins of an Arab settlement. Situated thirty miles north of Mombasa between two deep tidal creeks, it was an isolated spot reached by a rutted track through a sisal plantation off the Mombasa-Malindi road. (It remains hard to access even now.) The house was a low Moorish-style dwelling built from blocks of porous coral stone that were plastered and whitewashed, and it was dwarfed by a row of swaying palms. At the front, an arched colonnade faced the sea and a low wall ran between the arches, broken by steps that curved down to a sandy beach. A pair of carved doors with worked brass-copper bolts opened from the tiled colonnade into the dark, cool interior, and Denys had designed that part so that when the moon was full it shone right through the house. At those times, Tania wrote after she visited, “the beauty of the radiant, still nights was so perfect that the heart bent under it.” One could always hear the murmur of the breakers at Takaungu, and the low rustle of palms—a ceaseless dirge charged with the unresolved melancholy of all beach houses. Denys slept with the doors open, and the breeze swept sand onto the stone floor. He liked to lie under the mosquito net watching the sun rise over the ocean, or, before the monsoon, the row of high-pooped dhows that ran noiselessly close to the coast, a file of brown shadow-sails against the cyclamen dawn. Many flew the red flag of the sultan of Zanzibar and displayed a cargo of Persian carpets. “The scenery was of a divine, clean, barren marine greatness,” Tania wrote. When the tide was out, they could walk a long way over the beach picking up shells before retreating to one of the caves below the house until the water returned and the caves filled up, “and in the porous coral-rock the sea sang and sighed in the strangest way.” The long waves came running up Takaungu Creek then like a storming army. In the afternoon, Swahili fishermen came in loincloths and turbans selling spiked fish, and out in the ocean waves broke on the reef like a curl of lemon pith bisecting the blue. After a long safari, Denys would walk down the steps and bathe in the bleached silence of midday, or go to look at the ancient stone walls at the south end of the beach, catching sand crabs and brittle stars in the coral pools. In the other direction, the pale gray and yellow rocks of the coastline wriggled up to Mtwapa Creek, where, in a band of gathering green, he could watch the mating dance of the Usambara, a coastal tropical butterfly, in the orange flowers of the
Cordia africana.

Occasionally, Denys had guests at his refuge. Once, when he heard that Bunny Allen, the young hunter who had assisted on the Duke of Gloucester’s safari, was down in Mombasa competing in a boxing competition against a Royal Navy team, he sent a runner with an invitation. Bunny, who wore a gold earring in honor of his Romany forebears, was still in his early twenties, and Denys was already established in his mind as “a great hero.” At that time, Bunny had a Rugby-Durant safari car with wooden wheel spokes and a geyser-like radiator that made excellent tea. He went on to become a leading white hunter himself. He had a courtly manner irresistible to women, a love of parties (“I was always ready to give the drinks the go”), and a tendency to get into scrapes. He once lost a finger in a motor accident, and the digit was returned to him a week later by an Indian trader. Tania was at Takaungu when he arrived. “And what a difference,” he noted, “from the Karen Blixen one met at the Muthaiga Club, at a polo tournament, at a race meeting, or anywhere with a lot of people about. Under those conditions she was so reserved as to be almost cold. You could almost feel the icy blast of a Scandinavian snowstorm—not the wonderful glow of her heart. Denys reacted in complete sympathy to her feelings. Until Takaungu, I had not seen their warm, loving side. It was a complete revelation…. Whenever he left he kissed her. When he returned he kissed her. She did exactly the same. They would go for long walks on the beach, holding hands the while. They would pick up a shell, putting their heads together as they examined it. Constantly he would read to her as she sat at his feet.” It was nonetheless Denys’s house. He was considering turning it into his Kenyan base, and was devising schemes to improve it. This was incompatible with a life shared with Tania, and anyway, as even the awestruck Bunny noticed, she found the heat at Takaungu uncomfortable and merely “put up with it” for Denys’s sake. He carried on with his plans, irrespective of her, or of anyone. He had stepped up his commitment to the area by buying shares in the Kilifi Sisal Plantation. Although it was a laborious crop, sisal grew tolerably well on the waterless coastal plains and was in perennial demand in the foreign markets, as its fiber made the toughest ropes in the world.
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The spiky leaves were so hard that settlers used the points as gramophone needles. In the slump, sisal fell from £40 to £12 per ton, but prices came back and the crop became the country’s second most valuable export, after coffee.