Too Close to the Sun (13 page)

Denys quickly lost interest in mining. He could not decide what he wanted to do; he had no vision or goal, no dream-fevered idea of an achievable destiny. Singled out as a star throughout his life, he had no compulsion to prove that he could do anything in particular—not until he was middle-aged, anyway. His comings and goings in Africa in his mid-twenties reflected his equivocating character. It was the approach of a dilettante. Unable to commit to anything, he carried nothing through to conclusion.

His friend Bertie Cranworth commented on his lack of ambition. Ten years Denys’s senior, Cranworth was an impoverished peer who had settled in Kenya in 1907 and striven gamely to make a success of a variety of schemes from transport to newspaper publishing. Like most successful settlers, he had immense physical stamina and a resourceful imagination. Like Denys, he was averse to formality, but as a proud Old Etonian he enjoyed cracking a bottle to celebrate the fourth of June. Over the course of two decades, the pair were to spend many days and nights together—some of them in hostile circumstances—and Cranworth came to look on Denys with admiration and affection. “With his vast talents, he might doubtless have made a success of public life, but it just bored him,” Cranworth wrote much later. “Once I remonstrated with him in later years on his apparent lack of ambition and the more than partial burial of his great talents, but he was quite unrepentant and pointed out that one had but one life and that he reckoned that few people had had more out of it than he had.” Cranworth believed that had Denys lived longer he would “finally have yielded to pressure in this respect.” I wonder. If Denys failed to achieve, it was not because he was ultimately weak. He loved to win—he hated being beaten at chess, for example—but all his talents were subsumed in seeming indifference. It was true that in middle age he told Karen Blixen that he had not lived up to expectations. But he did not mean the professional status of which Cranworth thought him so capable. It was a more ethereal sense of the lack of any spiritual code that would make sense of it all. When at last he did begin to discern a place for himself in the world, there was no time left.

WHATEVER HE WAS GOING
to do, Denys needed a base in Nairobi. In May of 1913, he paid £4,000 for a house in the salubrious Parklands district. The vendor was the three-hundred-pound William Northrup McMillan (he did not use the William), a wealthy American of Canadian parentage who was knighted in 1918 for war services. He had a goatee, and those of his African employees who were able to grow goatees themselves immediately did so. Pixley shared the house, and it served as a staging post for numerous settlers and travelers. At that time, Nairobi was expanding exponentially. Fifty-nine motorcars and a hundred motor bicycles had been registered, a stock exchange was planned, and the first permanent doctor had opened consulting rooms. Roland Burkitt, a son of the vicar from County Wexford, believed that nervous exhaustion caused by the climate was responsible for almost every ailment. He therefore counseled maximum protection. Houses should be kept as shady as possible, people with blue eyes should wear dark glasses, and everything should be lined with red—a color that was believed to act as a barrier against solar rays. The seat of a hardworking settler’s worn-out trousers often revealed its scarlet lining like a traffic light, and this, in Nairobi, was a badge of honor. As a medical practitioner, the doctor’s record was patchy, and he was known as “Kill or Cure” Burkitt. But he and his spectral Goanese assistant, Assumption, were working against stiff odds. Malaria was endemic, plague often erupted in Nairobi, and smallpox, yaws, bilharzia, tick typhus, typhoid, and paratyphoid were all occupational hazards, as were anthrax, tetanus, amoebic and bacillary dysentery, and tropical ulcers. Many of the settlers’ babies died, their lonely little graves choked with blackjack from the shores of Lake Victoria to the ports of the Indian Ocean.

Relations between the settlers and the administration were always poor. Settlers considered that officials sheltered behind a salary and pension prospects and did little to understand the risks faced by the pioneers. They also resented the fact that the only club in town was run by civil servants. The Nairobi Club had a bar and a large billiard room, the walls festooned with the usual array of horns and dented with the imprint of errant balls. It was ramshackle enough, and in what one of his business partners called “an unusual outburst of respectability,” Berkeley Cole, a prominent farmer, announced that he was “sick of being treated like a pig and yearned for a club of a refined nature where you rang a bell and a drink was brought to you on a spotless tray.” A backer came forward, a site was designated three miles from town, and architects, surveyors, and builders were imported. The result was a low, unobtrusive edifice with modest Doric columns at the entrance and a pinkish pebbledash finish, the interior designed around parquet floors, a peristyle that was initially not roofed, and a fleet of sofas with loose chintz covers. The Muthaiga Club was generally considered to be ahead of its time, as well as too far out of Nairobi, and at first membership was low, but a coterie of aristocrats—including Berkeley, Delamere, and Denys—remained enthusiastic. Although only fourteen of them sat down to the inaugural New Year’s Eve dinner at the close of 1913, the event was staged
comme il faut,
with multiple courses prepared by a top chef shipped in from the Bombay Yacht Club and music played by the band of the King’s African Rifles. Muthaiga had the best cellar in Africa, with a range of clarets from Châteaux Pauillac, Lafite, and Latour downward, and a shop selling Charbonnel and Walker chocolates and freshly baked croissants. Delamere was the first president, and over the years he and his cronies nurtured that peculiar sense of deliberate enclavity that marked out the colonial club from Bombay to Calgary. Muthaiga was Denys’s home away from home in East Africa for two decades. Lounging in his characteristic slouchy pose on the terrace with its modern blue screens, surveying the tennis courts and the trailing bougainvillea, he found the companionship he needed after the solitary life of the bush. “The very best of company,” said Cranworth, “he was the life and soul of any convivial gathering at which he was present.”

The settlers were also suspicious of the administration’s intentions toward Africans. In 1911, the year Denys arrived, a passionate editorial on “the economic conquest of Africa” in the
Leader
(effectively the settlers’ mouthpiece) warned the governor of the perils of handing “natives” too much power. When Galbraith Cole, Berkeley’s younger brother and, like him, a well-known settler, killed an African stock thief, he was acquitted of murder even though he admitted the crime. But outrage in England led to his deportation, and the other settlers didn’t like it at all. It was, according to the
Leader,
“a sop to the negrophile Cerberus” at home. “I believe,” Delamere thundered, “that even an isolated case of local injustice is better than interference by the central government in the liberties of a colony.”

Berkeley Cole, the fourth son of the Earl of Enniskillen, had followed his brother Galbraith to East Africa in 1906 and established a cattle farm at Naro Moru (Black Stone), between Nyeri and Nanyuki on the lower slopes of the twin-nippled Mount Kenya. He was an energetic, forceful man who lived at Naro Moru with his African staff, sheep that roamed the dining room, and a Russian bearhound that ate off his plate. Berkeley was deeply involved in settlers’ affairs and for five years sat as an elected member of the legislative council representing West Kenya. Like Delamere, his brother-in-law (Delamere married a Cole sister), he was a Maasai worshipper, and he also nurtured a profound admiration for the Somali people. He was never seen without his personal Somali servant, Jama, and he kept a Somali mistress in Nairobi. Denys, too, admired the stoic and sensitive Somalis and had acquired a servant of his own, the inscrutable Billea Issa, who accompanied him to war and on visits to England like a medieval retainer. Berkeley was to become Denys’s closest friend in Kenya, and it was through him that Denys met another man who played an important role in his life. Arthur “Tich” Miles was a debonair farmer-settler in his early twenties, and in him Denys recognized his own brand of cheerful nonchalance, humor, and reckless adventuring. Tich’s father had been a captain in the Eighteenth Hussars, but died under chloroform on his sofa while being operated on for piles. Although they were not related, both Tich and Berkeley were slight, with elongated Modigliani faces, Roman noses, and piercing eyes, and each wore a toothbrush mustache. Tich weighed barely seven stone (half Denys’s size), but he was a powerhouse when it came to energy. Enthusiasm and detestation both foamed up in him like geysers. “Nature had endowed him with a physique about ten times too small for the great heart it sheltered,” Cranworth wrote. Sir Edward Grigg, the governor of Kenya in the twenties, commented, “At all times, however bad, he saw life through a haze of knightly romance, and tackled every new physical trial that came his way like a fresh dragon to be met and slain.” Tich and Denys once sang the whole of
Carmen
as toreadors, with a third man as the bull.

IN 1913, DENYS RETURNED
to England for almost four months. His parents had sold the Harlech estate: the Plas, shops, cottages, farms—in all, 347 acres had come under the auctioneer’s hammer. Like many landowners, the Winchilseas had reduced their holdings partly out of economic necessity and partly as a response to the long assault on “landlordism” most forcefully expressed and enacted by the Liberal chancellor of the exchequer David Lloyd George. (The Harlech area happened to be his home turf.) Many English proprietors got out of Wales both before and after the war, or at least pared down their estates. But in England Henry had clung to his eight thousand acres around Haverholme, for the time being at least, and now that he and Nan had moved back there Denys was able to shoot pigeons again in Evedon Wood and row down the unruffled Slea to fish for pike. Snails still stuck to the locks of the water buttercups; the red willows near the brickworks still flexed their long limbs over the pond; and late-blooming roses continued to rear from the pitted brick of the kitchen garden wall. The park came alive with the scents and colors of an English summer, and early in the morning mist hung like radiant gauzy fabric over the fens, draping the woods in diaphanous folds. Denys’s earliest memories were imprinted on that flat landscape, and it embodied something deeply loved. But he had begun to see how small it was.

On the other side of the park, Aunt Edith was still ruling all she surveyed at the Cedars. For years, she had been obese. Then she met Dr. Valentine Knaggs, an advocate of a vegetarian diet that also eschewed sugar and salt. Edith threw herself into the regimen and was swiftly transformed, keeping the faith, and the diet, even after she discovered Knaggs gnawing mutton chops in the summerhouse. Now she drank stewed peas in tomato juice and took meals on the veranda even when it snowed. She kept up with the Season and was a fixture in the court and social columns of
The Times
as she powered around the country attending weddings, balls, and funerals. Toby and Margaretta, meanwhile, had rented a house near Byfleet, in Surrey, and on July 12 that year their daughter Daphne was born there. Denys found Toby fretting about money, as usual. The stock market was performing poorly, in response to the uncertain political climate. “Things very flat,” Toby noted in his diary. “Russia being rather rude to Austria.” But he had seen Nijinsky dance, and was so moved that he judged it “very good.” Byfleet was conveniently close to Brooklands airfield, and while Denys was staying they all went to watch the French pilot Adolphe Pégoud loop the loop (or “fly upside down,” as Toby put it—“wonderful”) above a herd of butter-yellow Guernseys. That summer, Denys took to the air himself. He went up with Victor Barrington-Kennett, a huge athlete and joker from a military family and a friend from both Eton and Oxford. Over the years, Denys had enjoyed many days with Victor and his three brothers at the Barrington-Kennett London home in South Kensington. Victor had recently joined the Royal Flying Corps Special Reserves and learned to fly, and in August 1913 he took Denys to the airfield. The first time they went up their motor lights failed, but it was enough to keep Denys enthralled.