Too Close to the Sun (28 page)

And yet I really must complain

About the Muthaiga Club champagne.

This most expensive kind of wine

In England is a matter

Of pride or habit when we dine

Presumably the latter.

But on an equatorial stay

You
must
consume it—or you
die
.

And stern indomitable men

Have told me time and time again

The nuisance of the tropics is

The sheer necessity of fizz.

DENYS SPENT CHRISTMAS
at Haverholme, and for the New Year drove to a party at John and Vi Astor’s double-moated Hever Castle in Kent, a ride Toby described as “pretty exciting” on account of the Cadillac’s lack of lights. Astor’s American father’s acquisition of Hever in 1903 was a characteristically emphatic expression of the power of the new order; a decade later, he snapped Cliveden up from the Duke of Westminster. Back at Haverholme, Denys found his father in bed with sciatica. Henry had only recently recovered from pleurisy, and his rheumatism was chronic. Nan was also poorly, and before she recovered properly she broke her leg riding. They had been discussing the possibility of selling Haverholme, the prospect of which lowered everyone’s spirits. In addition, it was freezing, and in the middle of February Denys went down with such a bad cold that he took to his bed—and this despite the recent purchase of a calf-length greatcoat lined with musquash. It was his second winter on the trot in England, and he remembered why he didn’t like it. The mornings at Haverholme were dark and liquid and wild, the afternoons too short, and the park so vaporous that from his bedroom window he could barely see the trees. He wrote to Tania telling her that he’d be home soon.

THE KAREN COFFEE COMPANY
had been performing poorly, and shareholders were reluctant to continue pouring kroner into an African hole. Everyone had lost confidence in the profligate Blix, who had got the farm into appalling credit difficulties. Hostile telegrams had flashed between Europe and Africa, wrangling over the terms of a final loan. Geoffrey Buxton, a solid source of support to Tania, was involved in an abortive rescue package. Tania was faced with the threat of losing her farm. She would have liked to turn to Denys. But he was far away, and could not help her. The pattern of their relationship had been established, and she accepted it. She had to.

Tania had been in Rungstedlund in 1920, staying with her mother and receiving outpatient treatment from her venereologist at the national hospital. She returned to Kenya with her brother Thomas. He had decided, with her encouragement, to see if he, too, could carve out a life in Kenya. He had often thought about her vision of Africa, he said, on night watch in the trenches. He planned to buy a farm of his own, but for now he would stay with Tania; in any event, he had invested in the KCC. On December 30, 1920, they steamed into Mombasa on the
Garth Castle.
Blix and the servant Farah rowed out to meet them. Prices, Blix announced gravely once on solid ground, had gone through the floor. Drought had ruined the coffee, the laborers had not been paid, and there was no maize to eat. The value of flax had dropped to a quarter, and their flax fields at Eldoret had been abandoned. “Tanne sat as if paralysed,” Thomas recalled. Blix took Thomas straight to the bank and relieved him of a large chunk of money to get Tania’s silver out of pawn. Then, when they reached Mbogani, she found that her house had been occupied by persons unknown (though not unknown to Blix) and her china and crystal used as target practice. But again she knuckled down. All through 1921, she and Thomas worked to save the farm. He lived in a house of his own, close to the bungalow. At first he believed in the viability of the enterprise, and rather than buy his own land, as he had planned, he invested his remaining capital in the KCC. During that first year, he designed and built a factory near the coffee fields so they could process their own beans.

Eight years Tania’s junior, Thomas was not neurotic as she was, and he had a lively sense of humor, a commodity she lacked. But they were exceptionally close. “I will never be able to thank you enough for what you have been to me,” she wrote in 1918. He saw Tania as she was, not an idealized version. “It seems likely that from her childhood onwards, throughout her whole life, she had one shining goal—to be world famous,” he wrote in old age. Many years later, she told an acolyte that the important things in life were to ride, to shoot with a bow and arrow, and to tell the truth. (She selected this dictum, in Latin, as the prefatory quotation for
Out of Africa.
) When the acolyte recounted this, Thomas reflected for a moment. Then he said, “She couldn’t do any of those things.” He was of a more genuinely liberal persuasion than Tania (“a Bolshevik,” according to her), and less at ease with the feudal hierarchies she loved. Once, after returning from a safari, he told two English settlers how he had allowed three of his Kikuyu servants to share his tent during a violent thunderstorm. The Englishmen were deeply shocked, as if he had committed an act of treachery against their race. “And they were right really,” Thomas noted. “If 40,000 white men have to maintain their dignity, their whole position over eight million Africans, then the gulf between them
has
to be kept insuperable. But we Scandinavians feel differently.”

The April rains were good, and the fields foamed with flowers. A delighted Tania toured the farm in her wet-weather outfit of long khaki trousers, knee-length shirt, and clogs, accompanied by her dog, Banja, another Scottish deerhound. (She kept only this breed, she said, because they created a feudal atmosphere.) She had cut her hair short, and said she felt like Tolstoy, without the beard. But the struggle to stave off bankruptcy never went away. Time and again, Tania appealed to shareholders for further injections of capital. In the weekly struggle to find the wages, she sent Thomas to Nairobi on his three-wheeled motorbike to get a loan. When he returned empty-handed, she would set out in her old Overland car and wangle till she got the money.

The KCC chairman, their uncle, Aage Westenholz, had invested in the farm at the outset. Early in 1921, his patience exhausted, the sixty-two-year-old sailed to Kenya to arrange for loans and advances that would make it possible for Tania to buy the farm herself and relieve him and the board of their responsibilities. But it was impossible to secure the necessary funds. Collision with her family was traumatic for Tania. Her anger, often violently expressed, at what she perceived as their lack of support was unfair but curiously moving. Her faith in the farm—which meant her African life—was childlike in its simplicity, and she risked everything for it, including her dignity. In June 1921, she signed a last-ditch agreement with the board. It stipulated that she could continue running the farm in the position of managing director on condition that Blix had nothing to do with it. What could she do? Ngong, she said, was already engraved on her heart. She had to accept the board’s terms or she would lose the farm. As for Uncle Aage’s suggestion that she should move into a more modest house to economize, she agreed at first, then wriggled out of it once the old man was safely back in Denmark. He had traveled second-class,
pour encourager les autres.
The others were unmoved. Tania had to live in the grand manner. She made her servants wear white gloves at mealtimes, and each plate appeared at the table in an embroidered slipcase that was slid off as the plate was set down. Morning tea was served in Royal Copenhagen china on a silver tray, and each evening the twelve-seat dining table was laid with ranks of crystal glasses, even if there was nothing to pour into them.

In the last months of the year, the rains again failed. Thomas began to doubt the viability of the farm. Every year the coffee bushes bloomed and Tania talked about a harvest of 150 tons, and every year the crop yielded 40 to 50 tons and a profit that barely covered the wages. Too often, a black sky slid away after shedding only a few drops, the earth hardened, and the colors and smells of the bush faded. A bleak wind blew at those times. During Thomas’s second year, he often made up his mind to go home. Although he loved Africa, it had no future for him. But it was hard for him to leave Tania. His departure would seem to her like a failure of her own. And she was alone—by this time Blix had moved out. In 1920, when Tania was in Denmark, he had passed through London, where Geoffrey Buxton invited him to a dinner at the Carlton. At the table he met the brown-eyed Jacqueline Birkbeck, who was married to Buxton’s cousin Ben and known to everyone as Cockie. She was a friend of Iris Tree’s, and of the same hue, though Cockie was less a bohemian than a dedicated partygoer. Cockie and Ben went to Kenya later that year, planning to settle, and Blix took them on safari. Soon he and Cockie were enjoying a clandestine affair under canvas, with love notes stowed in a gun barrel. Cockie was to ditch Mr. Birkbeck to become the next Baroness Blixen.
^*29

Although the family pressured Tania to get rid of Blix formally, she was opposed to a divorce. “There is so much here that binds us together,” she wrote home plaintively, “and it is impossible for me to stop believing in the good in him….” As late as June 1922, when it was clear that they were to be divorced, Tania told Blix’s elder sister that divorce would be for her “the greatest sorrow in the world.” She admitted that she had not been a good wife, “but I do not think that there is anybody in the world who is as fond of him as I am.” Besides the fondness, she had found out about her husband’s affair with Cockie, and was anxious about the implications of two Baroness Blixens knocking around Nairobi—especially as she, Tania, would no longer be the incumbent. When it happened, it was exactly as she had feared, and hostesses dropped her from the guest list. But, divorced or not, she kept a firm grip on the title for decades, to the amusement, in later years, of egalitarian Danes. Early in 1922, she reluctantly agreed to file for divorce, but only because Blix wanted it—he was indeed going to marry Cockie. According to Thomas, Blix “harassed her about it endlessly.” Thomas was more than bitter. “By his vicious lies,” he wrote to Uncle Aage, “he [Blix] has made my position here in this country all but impossible…he does everything he can to ruin Tania’s reputation…at the same time presses Tania for money and assistance.”

When Tania was agitated, she became emotionally manipulative. Early in 1922, her eldest sister, Ea de Neergaard, died after giving birth to a stillborn child. She was thirty-nine, and already had a daughter, little Karen, known as Mitten. The child was being cared for by Ingeborg, her grandmother, who decided she could not visit Kenya that year, as she had planned, because Mitten needed her. “But she [Mitten] does have so many years ahead to look forward to with you,” Tania protested. Mitten was five and had just lost her mother; Tania was thirty-seven. On another occasion, she suggested to her mother that if her father were alive he would see that she, Tania, loved her parents more than their other children did. She identified with her dead father, whom she imagined had been suffocated by his wife’s bourgeois milieu. “Father understood me as I was,” she decided. It was her one great mistake, she wrote to her mother, to have accepted family help, and “I have suffered all the pains of hell for it.” But there would have been no farm had her relatives not stumped up the capital at the outset. In the same letter, she told her mother, “You are the most beautiful and wonderful person in the world.” Like most of us, Tania was a mass of contradictions.