Straight on Till Morning (16 page)
Read Straight on Till Morning Online
Authors: Mary S. Lovell
Beryl Markham is on record as saying that she doubted whether the love between Denys and Tania was physically consummated.
18
She did not repeat her claim when I interviewed her and the suggestion itself is difficult to accept; for although there can be no actual proof, the couple's closest friends scoff at the suggestion. There are also two separate and well-documented occasions when Tania believed herself pregnant by Denys. In 1922 she appears to have suffered a miscarriage, almost certainly due to her fragile health following the brutality of early treatments for venereal disease.
19
In May 1926, convinced that she was pregnant again, Tania cabled Denys who was in England visiting his family. She used the code-name Daniel in her cable; obviously a name they had used for an imaginary child in discussions, and one which she knew he would recognize and understand.
20
Denys's curt reply â â
STRONGLY URGE YOU CANCEL DANIEL'S VISIT
' â is breathtaking in its casual offensiveness. Tania's cabled response to this is lost, but the subsequent cable to her from England explained, equally coolly: â
RECEIVED YOUR WIRE AND MY REPLY 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
.' Injured pride speaks in every syllable of Tania's final message in this sequence. â
THANKS CABLE I NEVER MEANT TO ASK ASSISTANCE CONSENT ONLY TANIA
.' In the event this pregnancy too, ended in miscarriage, although it is possible she mistook the signs.
21
Certainly after the second occasion she could have been in no doubt at all that her love for Denys would ever culminate in the marriage she craved.
Eventually Tania was unable to contain her desperate urge to possess Denys entirely, even though she clearly recognized that it was destroying the relationship. It was as if she could not help herself. The dissolution started after the first royal safari in 1928 and her anger at Cockie's inclusion among the guests. She was ultra-sensitive to the fact that there were now two Baroness Blixens moving in the tight social circle, and angrily tackled Denys about it. Ingrid Lindstrom thought that the quarrel âleft a reserve of bitterness in both of them, to be tapped later'.
22
In 1929 Tania spent six months at the family home of Rungstedlund, near Copenhagen, where her mother was recovering from a serious illness. Denys too went home, took flying lessons, obtained a pilot's licence and bought a D H Gipsy Moth aeroplane.
23
For him this was a reintroduction to flying, for he had first learned to fly during the First World War.
Whilst in England he met several old Kenya friends including Rose Cartwright and Beryl Markham. Rose was in England working as a social correspondent for the
Daily Express
and recalls being violently airsick when Denys took her flying â though not until after they had landed. Beryl, separated from Mansfield, was in the joyful throes of her âmad little gallop with Prince Henry'.
At the beginning of October Tania visited Denys and his family in England. Earlier that summer Tania had appealed to him for financial assistance to save the farm, which had been visited by the twin afflictions of a July frost and a swarm of locusts. He had complied out of his slender funds but his solicitors, presumably acting on instructions, had written formally to Tania making it clear that there were limits to their client's will to assist, and furthermore that she was to be responsible for the legal fees concerned in the matter which revolved around a debenture on the farm in the amount of £2000. Denys's family did not, at first, take to Tania. They mistrusted her and her motives and were antagonistic. One relative declared, âI don't like that woman. She is trying to take possession of Denys. It won't work.'
24
After the visit Tania returned to Denmark to spend Christmas with her family.
Denys returned to Kenya at the end of 1929 in time for the second royal safari, which the Prince had insisted upon to compensate himself for his earlier, interrupted one. When Tania arrived in Nairobi Denys was already deeply involved in safari preparations. The spectre of Bror's and Cockie's close involvement with this event loomed over everything Denys and Tania did, placing a further strain on their relationship, though they went flying together in the Gipsy Moth,
25
an experience which Tania described as âthe greatest, most transporting pleasure of my life on the farm.'
You have tremendous views as you get up above the African highlands, surprising combinations and changes of light and colouring, the rainbow on the green sunlit land, the giant upright clouds, and the big wild black storms, all swing around you in a race and a danceâ¦when you have flown over the Rift Valley and the volcanoes of Suswa and Longenot, you have travelled far and have been to the lands on the other side of the moon.
One day Denys and I flew to Lake Natron, ninety miles south-east of the farm and over four thousand feet lowerâ¦The sky was blue, but as we flew from the plains in over the stony and bare lower country, all colour seemed to be scorched out of it. The whole landscape below us looked like a delicately marked tortoise-shell. Suddenly in the midst of it was the lake. The white bottom, shining through the water, gives it, when seen from the air, a striking, an unbelievable azure colour so clear that for a moment you shut your eyes at it; the expanse of water lies in the bleak tawny land like a bright aquamarine. We had been flying high, now we went down, and as we sank our own shade, dark blue, floated under us upon the bright blue lake. Here live thousands of flamingoesâ¦At our approach they spread out in large circles and fans like rays of a setting sun, like an artful Chinese pattern on silk or porcelainâ¦We landed on the white shore, that was white-hot as an oven, and lunched there, taking shelter against the sun under the wing of the aeroplane.
Often they flew around the nearby Ngong Hills close to the farm to see the buffaloes feeding, or to visit the eagles.
Many times we have chased one of these eagles, careening and throwing ourselves onto one wing and then to the other, and I believe the sharp-sighted bird played with us. Once when we were running side by side, Denys stopped his engine in mid-air, and as he did so I heard the eagle screech.
26
But despite these brief periods of happiness, Tania's misery knew no bounds when Bror and Cockie stayed as guests at Government House in February and she was excluded from the civic celebrations surrounding the prince's visit. She quarrelled violently again with Denys, over what she saw as his disloyal acceptance of her isolation, and to try to make amends he arranged for the prince to dine at her farm. Clearly this quarrel precipitated the fracture of their relationship; Tania felt that if only she could call herself âthe Hon. Mrs Finch Hatton' all would be well, but Denys would not indulge her to this degree.
The royal safari ended in the late spring of 1930, and for much of the year Denys was busy taking clients on safari. His visits to Tania were now infrequent and he called at her house more as a casual friend than as her lover. Though he was sympathetic to her problems regarding the farm, which were many, he refused to allow himself to become involved in her despairing attempts to put back the clock. To keep their meetings light and happy, he often misquoted a stanza from Shelley's âInvocation' to her:
You must turn your mournful ditty
To a Merry Measure.
I will never come for pity,
I will come for pleasure.
In its original form it is a poem which Tania herself could have written to describe her feelings at Denys's rejection of her need.
27
At the end of the year Denys left on safari with clients (the Marshall Fields), and this coincided with Beryl's return to Kenya following the end of her liaison with Prince Henry. She could not live with her beloved father because of her antipathy towards her stepmother, and instead she rented the small cottage in the grounds of the Muthaiga Club, where Denys also spent a great deal of his time when he was in Nairobi. When Denys returned from the Marshall-Field safari in the spring of 1931 he removed his belongings from Tania's farm and left them at the house of a friend â Hugh Martin, a government official living in Nairobi. Denys claimed it was more convenient for him to be living in Nairobi, and that he did not like living among the packing cases which now littered Tania's house.
A friend of Tania's, who does not wish to be named, claimed that this occurred only after Tania had flown into a rage because she had heard that Denys had been seeing Beryl since before the time he went on safari, and that the relationship between the two had been anything but platonic. It was during this quarrel that Denys took back the ring of âsoft Abyssinian gold', which he had given her at Christmas 1928, and which she had worn on her wedding-ring finger ever since.
Rose Cartwright, a staunch friend of both Tania and Denys, is on record as stating that Denys confided to her that he had moved out of Tania's farm after much thought. Tania's jealousy and possessiveness were such that it seemed the only solution, and it was done in an attempt to preserve something of the relationship they had shared.
28
There are many small indications however that at the time Denys and Beryl had their short love affair, his feelings for Tania were merely those of concern for an old and cherished friend going through a bad time. Tania's farm was sold by then and though, by agreement, she remained on the farm as manager until the coffee harvest came in, she recognized that her time in Kenya was moving to a close. Denys's notes to Tania at this period, when above all she needed love and understanding, are gentle but cool: âLet me know anytime you would like me to run out, if you have anything to arrange in your own plans in which I could help. I have a book here I want you to read. I will bring it outâ¦' And again: âI feel you are looking at the very darkest side of things. I would like to see you before you go and shall try to get out later.'
29
In the very short space of time between his safaris, Beryl and Denys became lovers. It was a brief, prematurely ended, but infinitely sweet interlude for Beryl. Denys filled the role of lover, brother, mentor, friend.
30
He took her flying, which she loved, though unlike Tania she saw it as an adventure with a practical side to it. Once they flew down to his house at the coast, which he had purchased in the winter of 1926â27. At the end of her life Beryl could only remember that it was a small place near the sea. But in
Out of Africa
the reader is given a full description:
â¦thirty miles north of Mombasa on the creek of Takaunga. Here were the ruins of an old arab settlement, with a very modest minaret and a well â a weathered growth of grey stone on the salted soil, and in the midst of a few old mango treesâ¦The scenery was of a divine, clean barren marine greatness, with the blue Indian Ocean before you, the deep Creek of Takaunga to the South, and the long unbroken coastline of pale grey and yellow coral rock as far as the eye reached. When the tide was out you could walk miles seawards from the house, as on a tremendous, somewhat unevenly paved Piazza, picking up strange long peaked shells and starlish. The Swahili fishermen came wandering along here in a loin cloth and red and blue turbans, like Sinbad the sailor come to life, to offer for sale multi-coloured spiked fish, some of which were very good to eat. The coast below the house had a row of scooped out caves and grottoes where you sat in shade and watched the glittering blue water. When the tide came in, it lifted up the caves to the level of the ground on which the house was built, and in the porous coral-rock the sea sighed and sang in the strangest way, as if the ground under your feet was aliveâ¦The beauty of the radiant still nights was so perfect that the heart bent under it. You slept with the door open to the silver sea; the playing warm breeze in a low whisper swept a little loose sand, on to the stone floor.
31
Denys found Beryl's untutored intelligence a stimulating challenge. He encouraged her to read good books. She had always been an avid reader and now he guided her towards poetry, the classics, the Bible. He habitually read from the Bible and could quote it by the hour, but it was because he saw it as a good story, not because he was a believer â indeed if Beryl had any religious belief at all, Denys put paid to it by intellectual debate.
32
He introduced Beryl to good music, which she loved, and she took a strong and lifelong dislike to Beethoven, simply because Denys expressed his disapproval of him.
33
He particularly liked the poetry of Walt Whitman and read to her constantly, though he was able to quote much of it from memory.
Beryl could never have been the companion to Denys that Tania had been. There was no true meeting of well-educated minds, but Beryl's long-standing âschoolgirl crush' now turned to mature passion. This, twinned with her unconventional nature which was untinged by any hint of jealousy or possessiveness, must have come as a refreshing relief to Denys. She was very different to his previous lovers who had been small, quiet, artistic, refined, well-read women.
34
Beryl, nearly six foot in her tawny magnificence, and with her mind receptive to his tutoring, must have been an intoxicating combination. She was certainly a match for him physically, as athletic as he.
They rode together, picnicked, listened to music and sang together, went to parties and danced, and Beryl was never happier. She still had Melela, the farm bought by Mansfield where her father was living and training. Most of the land they used was leased, but the house and gallops were owned by Beryl and referred to often in her log books as âmy farm'. Sooner or later, she felt, she would return to horses. Denys flew her to Melela several times, landing on the gallops, and they dined in front of huge log fires while Denys read to her.
