Too Close to the Sun (31 page)

The coffee harvest at the farm was a miserable seventy tons that year. “I really do believe that I have deserved to be given the VC for my work here just as much as you did during the war,” Tania informed Thomas. Her life was a performance, and she was the heroine of every scene. But when Denys came back she was convinced that he was “the most wonderful being on earth.” He was planning a three-month shoot in Tanganyika, and had obtained special permission to kill twenty-five elephants, telling Kermit that although the last two years had been a struggle, he felt that he had turned a corner. Then, in the middle of March, he got a wire saying his mother was ill. He left for the coast with one day’s warning. “Goodbye,” he wrote in a last note to Tania, “and thank you for so many pleasant days when I was so bad-tempered.” Her commitment to him never wavered. Later in the year, she told Thomas, “I believe that for all time and eternity I am bound to Denys, to love the ground he walks upon, to be happy beyond words when he is here, and to suffer worse than death many times when he leaves….”

DENYS ARRIVED IN LONDON
on April 7, 1924. Toby drove him straight to Haverholme in the Rolls, complaining the whole way about his overdraft. Denys had not seen his mother for two years. He found her thin and frail and suffering from lung trouble and a weak heart, but no longer critically ill. The brothers went pike fishing, sitting at their childhood places on the bank under the clenched buds of early spring. The heraldic griffons stood proud on the bridge over the Slea, the wood cart rattled past amid wheeling clouds of primrose butterflies, and at six, in the familiar dining room, Albert the butler carried in the crested dark-silver plates. But the immeasurable timelessness of childhood had slipped away. Denys sorted through the boxes he had stored at the Priory. He found photographs he had taken on the Nandi border with Pixley years earlier and sent one to Kermit with a wistful letter. “I’d give most of the Rue de la Paix to be back there at that date with the friends I had then before the war, just starting off for a day’s sport with those Nandi boys,” he wrote. “Your news, friend?” He cheered himself up with a visit to the Buxtons and swanned about in John Astor’s Cadillac before returning to London for business appointments in the City, dusting off his collapsible opera hat for a burst of Puccini before the Savoy Havana Band.

The spring weather was gorgeous, but ominous clouds hovered over the political landscape. That January, the king had appointed Ramsay MacDonald as the country’s first Labour prime minister. In the cabinet, an institution previously the domain of the aristocracy and ruling classes, eleven out of twenty men came from a working-class background. They were faced with grave problems, working class or not; more than 1.2 million were unemployed, and strikes were proliferating among those who were in work. In continental Europe, a different kind of specter had risen. The previous year, Hitler had attempted to mount a coup in Munich, and now he was demanding that his government seek to have the Treaty of Versailles revoked. The German economy had spiraled out of control, and nationalism was burgeoning. At the Conservative Club, Denys read
The Times
over breakfast with sorrow and horror. The world he once knew had shrunk.

His mother seemed to be rallying, so he made plans to return to Africa at the end of May. Then the weather turned bad, and so did he—he went down with severe abdominal pains, and his doctor recommended an immediate appendectomy. Denys booked himself into a convalescent home and on May 7 had the operation at St. George’s Hospital, on Hyde Park Corner. Toby visited every day. A fortnight later, they heard that their mother had had a relapse and was dangerously ill. Struggling to keep up, Toby noted in his diary, “Rammed a thorn in my eye, v. painful indeed.” Denys went back to Haverholme while he was convalescing, joining Margaretta and Topsy, who were already there. In June, Nan suffered a double thrombosis. There was no question of returning to Kenya now. The may trees were in blossom, and on the pond in Evedon Wood the young herons were flapping on their nests. “It is sad to know how much my mother would have enjoyed it,” Denys wrote to Kermit. By June 17, Nan no longer recognized anyone. Three days later, she died. They were all there. Denys wrote the inscription for her plaque in St. Andrew’s: “No effigy would do justice to the beauties of her person nor any epitaph express the beauties of her mind, therefore neither is attempted here. But those to whom she left the world a void live in the humble hope that through the mercy of God it may be given to them when their time of departure comes to be with her where she is. Anne, Countess of Winchilsea and Nottingham, June 20th 1924.”

TOPSY HAD BORROWED
a flat in Kensington from a cousin, and Denys stayed there on his return to the capital. She always spoiled him with a bottle of Château d’Yquem, his favorite not just among Sauternes but of all wines. After they had retired one night, she looked through the glass panel in the spare bedroom door, expecting Denys to be asleep. But he was lying in bed with
Swann’s Way
propped on his chest. One hand supported the book, and between the fingers of the other a cylinder of ash jutted from the end of a Player’s Number Ten. She tapped on the glass. “Tiny, are you asleep?” she asked. “Topsy, you don’t go to sleep when you’re reading Proust,” Denys replied without looking up. Ten-year-old Michael looked forward to his uncle’s visits. “It was always a major event when he arrived from Africa,” he recalled. Denys would sweep in with silver trinkets and large yellow and green bottles of scent for Topsy. “He wore a felt hat like a mushroom,” Michael continued, “and his shoes, made by Peal’s to a design of his own, had gently rounded square toes, making his feet look like boats. He had to have special trees made to fit the shoes.” When the whole family was at Haverholme, Denys climbed the elms to collect rooks’ eggs for Michael. He had a watching brief over his fatherless nephew. “Read the Bible,” he advised him more than once. “It’s a good book.” The end of Denys’s 1924 visit was inevitably muted, for him and for the rest of the family. But in the midst of his grief he forced himself to do the rounds, catching up with Hoskins, visiting Eton, and watching tennis at Wimbledon before trying out rifles and ordering wine for the farm. He and Toby had been investing in port in vintage years, and, as he wrote to Kermit, “I have often found it a pleasant thought out in Africa to remember those silent rows of black virgins steadfastly awaiting me in England, ready or getting ready, preparing in fact to pour out their life’s blood for me and my friends any time after about 1938. I hope that you will crack one or two with me.” By the time the port was drinkable, Kermit was a dying alcoholic.

On October 15, Denys took the boat train to Paris accompanied by Margaretta, who was on her way to visit her father at Cap-Ferrat. The leaves on the plane trees along the Seine were showing brown. “I am so sorry he has gone again, and am afraid that he will not be back for some time,” Toby wrote.

WHILE DENYS WAS
in England, Tania tried to write off her losses on the page, typing out fragments of the stories she liked telling, to take her mind off her situation. “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story,” she once said. Indeed. She had also written a monograph on modern marriage. In this excruciating document, published posthumously when anything by Karen Blixen would sell, she argues that marriage has to be reinvented, suggesting that one must love “without the support of habit or outward conditions”—as Denys loved, in other words—and that a “love relationship” must be free of rules. She sent the monograph to Thomas, who retaliated with an article he had written on birth control. Intellectually, Tania recognized that her relationship with Denys was predicated on mutual freedom, which really meant his freedom, though she had convinced herself that it was what she wanted, too. Over the next two years, her lucubrations developed the idea of modern love, “which takes the form of a passionate sympathy…while one is oneself and striving for one’s own distant aim one finds joy in the knowledge of being on parallel courses for all eternity.” It was a protracted exercise in self-justification. She was trying to accept that love can exist, and flourish, without possession; she was willing herself to believe it. A laudable goal, but horribly hard to achieve. Tania genuinely valued sensuality and instinct above a rigid moral code, but sex itself was not important to her. Syphilis, even when no longer infectious, hardly stimulated the libido, and when she was an old woman she admitted to a confidant—albeit gnomically—that during these years “the love relationship could no longer be experienced as normal.” To deal with the problem, she sought to sublimate sexual union to the higher plane (as she saw it) of spiritual union. She told Thomas, “I do not think I am capable of treating a sexual relationship in itself with any great seriousness…. I do not in the least like being caressed.” Her friend the Russian diplomat General Polowtzoff once told her that he had never known anybody so sensual and yet “so little sexual.” She took it as a compliment. The role of sex is often sublimated in her tales. In one story, she portrayed a woman of noble birth who has a disease that is obviously syphilis. The condition has endowed the character with “a mirthful forbearance with and benevolence towards the frailty of humanity”; syphilis, in other words, is presented as something ennobling. Karen Blixen even imbues venereal disease with religious overtones when she reveals that the woman became infected in St. Peter’s Basilíca in Rome when she kissed the foot of the saint’s statue immediately after a mysterious cloaked young man smelling of “sweat and stable” had done the same (the bronze was still warm and “slightly moist”). But she also describes how the disease has shut down the erotic part of her character’s life: “mystically she had become a maiden—an old maid.”

WHEN DENYS RETURNED TO
Kenya, he decided to look for work as a white hunter. It had taken him a long time to identify an occupation that made sense to him, but now, at the age of thirty-seven, he discovered his vocation. In ten years, he had become one of the best hunters in East Africa. He had learned how to kill a reedbuck neatly by feeling for the heart behind the foreleg, and watched his skinner turn the stomach inside out and stitch the liver and kidneys up in it to form a bag in which to carry the delicacies to camp. With a pair of field glasses, he could judge the size of a set of kudu horns to within half an inch. He knew the big tuskers would emerge from the trees immediately after a downpour, because they objected to water dripping on their backs, and he knew how the cut hide of a dead rhino hung down behind the head like a cape, white as freshly sliced coconut. It was useful, as a hunter, to be exceptionally strong, as he was. (His party trick was to tear a pack of playing cards in half.) On one safari, he was driving a Ford back to Nairobi late at night after heavy rain. At Nyeri he tried to drive across a river, as the bridge had disappeared, but the car tipped over, its roof coming to rest on the riverbed. He jumped clear, but his gun bearer could not get out. Denys righted the car and freed him. The only annoyance was that he had lost his bowler, and when they proceeded to the nearest house to summon help he borrowed a hat from the female occupant. He was also mechanically adept and could seal a leaking radiator with an egg, or, if there was no egg, a lump of dung: there was always plenty of that. The rituals of camp had become second nature, from rodding and re-oiling his rifles while Hamisi prepared dinner to setting up the gramophone and listening to Rachmaninoff in C minor belting away in opposition to the night noises of the forest. After a long expedition in Tanganyika, he would return through the low-lying country around Mombasa, a region poor in game and rich in tarantulas, disease-carrying insects, and urinating bats that haunted the trees in the thousands. It suited the mood at the end of a safari, like a dying fall of trumpets.