Too Close to the Sun (38 page)

At the end of September 1928, the SS
Malda
steamed into Kilindini Harbor amid a thronging flotilla of yachts. Edward and his brother Henry, Duke of Gloucester, were standing at the bow rail in military regalia. Later that night, at the ball at Government House in Mombasa, the two princes had to shake five hundred hands. Denys, who had raced across the country from a safari he was leading up the Nile, paid his formal respects before returning to his client.

Slight as a jockey, with fair hair, fair eyelashes, and a shy half smile, the Prince of Wales, known to his family as David, was thirty-four. He had a poor relationship with his father, who did little but bark at him over his shortcomings, of which there were many. He was not cut out for the role of heir. Letters from his foreign tours reveal a preoccupation with “our set” and boundless self-pity over his duties. Life was “merely an existence,” he wrote from one outpost, referring elsewhere to “these foul tours.” On another occasion he wailed, “I’ve got four terrible months ahead of me in India,” and he complained ceaselessly about the official “stunts” he was forced to endure. (“I’ve not had any fun here,” he told a woman friend from South America. “I can’t tell you what these Argentine officials have been like—stunted me to death and B-A is a silly place really.”) There was much talk about him being sunk, by which he meant depressed, without an adequate supply of dances and women. En route from Honolulu to Acapulco at the age of twenty-six, he sulked to the same friend, “I suppose there are some divine new tunes at home now which I shan’t know curse them though!” But at least he found something to like in Kenya. After a week in Nairobi, he wrote to Gwendolyn Butler, née Francis, whom he called Poots. Her second husband was one of his equerries. “Darling Poots, well here we are in this wild place and it sure is wild this race week it’s been a matter of the survival of the fittest…they sure are a wild crowd these settlers and great fun too some of them though. I do miss my friends and wish to god Fredie [Freda Dudley Ward, his mistress] and you were here to enjoy it all and laugh with. It’s exactly what we said before I left about it being a waste to come out to East Africa without the person you love and are keen on. Of course, I’ve not been on safari yet and am d——d glad I haven’t planned a long one as we are a stag party. But the atmosphere and whatever the charm of this country is has got to me all right and I know even now that I’ll want to come back again. Much love, from your very very old friend and spotted doggie.”

The prince’s rackety career was on a cusp when he sailed into Mombasa. In the years after the war he had been popular with the public, both at home and in the dominions, and his tours, while bristling with incident, had sustained the illusion that he took his duties seriously. In the view of his courtiers, 1928 marked the beginning of his decline; seven years later, his public life had been subsumed in its private counterpart. A raft of irreconcilable differences already lay between him and his advisers, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to conceal his failings. At the end of the African tour Joanie, Lady Grigg, confided in her diary that he was “the most unpleasant and uncivil guest I’ve had in my house.”

Joanie had invited Tania to stay at Government House for the first week of the royal visit. The white pillars and cobalt shadows breathed an alpine freshness after the dust of Nairobi, and at luncheon Their Majesties gazed on their sons from gilt frames at either end of the room while velvet-slippered Somali footmen in scarlet and gold drew down the blinds to blot the volcanic glare of noon. Tania was determined to lobby the prince on the subject of the taxes the administration levied on her farmworkers. She had met Poots in England, which helped her cause, and His Royal Highness listened to what she had to say. Naturally, she found him “absolutely charming” (“I am so much in love with him that it hurts,” she told her mother), and she brought off a characteristic coup when she drove him out to the farm for tea. He walked among the
shambas
with Tania and questioned the puzzled residents about the number of goats and cattle they owned, what they earned, and what they paid in taxes, writing down the figures in a notebook and concentrating on the fiscal problem for at least an hour. His brother Prince Henry was occupied with equally pressing matters. A shy, heavy-jowled figure with a whinnying laugh, he was the most Hanoverian of the three royal princes and a model of decorum compared with his eldest brother. But then Beryl appeared, and, after all, Beryl was Circe—albeit a pregnant Circe. “Harry is enjoying himself and has got off with a nice woman,” the Prince of Wales confided to Poots after a week in Kenya. Unlike his dwarfish brother, the duke was tall, and a fine match for the still lean, slim-hipped Beryl, who glided around the paddocks on race days wearing close-fitting slacks and men’s shirts with the top buttons undone. The next weeks unfolded in a series of trysts at which Beryl was smuggled into bungalows and camps, keeping her husband quiet and making sure she didn’t spoil romantic encounters with morning sickness. But her liaison with the Duke of Gloucester was no mere fling. Before he left, he agreed to meet her in London. He said that he would be waiting for her on the wharf.

When the safari he was leading up the Nile ended, Denys returned to Nairobi on the night train from Kisumu to be on hand in case the prince, who was staying with Delamere at Soysambu, wanted to go shooting. But HRH was too busy enduring the usual round of stunts—at a reception in Gilgil after a golf tournament, one settler tried to make him shake hands with her dog—and behaving like a rutting stag in between.
^*39
His assistant private secretary, Captain (later Sir) Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, a dark man with a pronounced center part that ran over his crown like a stripe, knew Denys from England. They had been contemporaries at Oxford; Lascelles was close to Alan and Viola and to others within Denys’s circle. Chaperoning HRH through Africa had already reduced him to paroxysms of despair, his attempts to run a smooth schedule thwarted by the prince’s leaping into bed or the nearest bush with any woman who came to hand. The crusty Lascelles was unimpressed by “the farmyard morals” of the settlers, and “the all-pervading eat and drink for tomorrow we die philosophy.” At a dinner in Kitale 100 of the 150 present “were tight before the soup was off the table.” He had been on the prince’s staff for eight years, and was so browned off that he was on the brink of resignation; he looks furious in the official photographs, his brows furrowed and his part gleaming in the sun. Starting off in the job full of optimism, Lascelles had consistently tried to make the prince fit to be king. But it was a hopeless task. He finally resigned in 1929, but returned to royal employment in 1935, working once again for the prince when he became King Edward VIII. “Though I have little doubt that the change is ultimately for the best,” he wrote in November 1936, when he was one of only twelve people in the world who knew that Edward was going to abdicate, “I am inclined to think that as the years went on, the Hyde side would have predominated more and more over the Jekyll—the pity of it all is heart rending.” He continued, “Nothing but his own will could have saved him, and the will was not there.”

Almost as soon as Denys reached the farm, a runner appeared brandishing a cleft stick with a cable from Delamere summoning him to Soysambu. The prince wished to make safari plans. A plane was waiting at the airfield, and Tania drove Denys there as fast as she could. He was allowed no luggage, as the pilot said he was too heavy already. The props were turning when they raced onto the strip. As the plane took off, a clearing sky laid bare the high plateaus that stretch down the spine of eastern Africa, and triumphant shafts of sunlight fell on a herd of elephants moving over them like gray lava. It was Denys’s first flight over the Rift, and as he looked down into the entrails of the Longonot Crater he realized the potential of planes in Africa. One could cut out backbreaking weeks of sweat and delay as cars sank up to their axles in mud and clients looked at their wristwatches, as well as penetrate thousands of miles of virgin hunting ground. One could even scout elephants from the air and keep hunters in touch with a moving herd. Clients would pay well for the service. Denys was awed by the spacious magnificence of floating in a tiny plane, cut free from the earth, in another dimension. He returned to Tania after the trip raving about the view. As with photography, he had found another way of looking at the world.

The prince vanished to Uganda, leaving Denys a clear month to finish his preparations. The royal brothers were to take separate safaris before continuing overland to South Africa for Christmas. From now on, Denys spent every waking hour checking and rechecking supplies among the tiers of sun-dried hides in the Safariland offices, negotiating with headmen, and studying maps unfolded on the millstone table. A week before the start, he and Tania were invited to a private dinner in the dining saloon of the royal train. It was the kind of social event he hated, but Tania was in heaven. Seated next to the host in the dark paneled carriage, she talked innocently about her Africans and their ritual dances, called
ngomas.
As she was leaving, the prince announced that he would dine with her on Friday in order to watch a
ngoma
on her farm. But
ngomas
were scheduled according to sacred law; they could not be whipped up on a whim. The next day Farah was dispatched on a frenzied diplomatic mission to Paramount Chief Kinanjui. He returned to the farm on Wednesday night. “Memsahib,” he told Tania as she emerged from the house anxious for news, “they are coming.”

On Friday night the moon was full. Three thousand of Kinanjui’s people had gathered around a giant oval of fires close to the freshly whitewashed boys’ huts. Flashes of dyed red flesh and narrow waists trussed with beads kaleidoscoped with feathered spears and fur-braided chests as naked young men gyrated around a tumescent central fire, oiled limbs buckling and pumping to the throb of skin drums and chants that rose and fell like a wave. Toward the outer edge of the crowd the elders (
mzees
) stood limp, monkey-skin cloaks drawn close. Later, Tania served dinner in the house for the guests of honor. The prince and two of his aides—Lascelles and Captain the Hon. Piers “Joey” Legh, a Grenadier Guardsman who had introduced the prince to sex in an Amiens brothel—joined Denys, Tania, and two female guests. One was Vivienne de Watteville, a twenty-eight-year-old beauty who had just spent three months photographing elephants near the Tanganyikan border, camping on the southern buttresses of Ol Donyo Orok with a six-foot Nubian gun bearer and a cook who fried the croutons in lion fat. She slept with a .318 next to her camp bed, and spent the evenings in the company of Plato and Plutarch, with a gramophone on which she played Schubert’s Trio in B-flat Major, music that reassured her “that all I felt had been felt before.” The other female present was an “absolutely ravishing” Beryl, whom Tania placed next to Denys. The nine-course menu included what Kamante described as “a very strange fish got from Mombasa, it is the crab one with many legs and arms.” Denys provided the wine and the cigars. Outside, the dancing continued, even when a fight broke out. The royal party were delighted with the spectacle (they didn’t see the fight), and Tania was gratified. The elders were proud. Several weeks later, when she thanked them formally and presented each with a goat or a rug, one old man made a speech in which he said that their hearts had been pleased to see her wearing a special frock, “for we all think that here, every day on the farm, you are terribly badly dressed.”

The safari was preceded by a crescendo of parties. At one event a settler was bundled out of Muthaiga for offering His Royal Highness cocaine. There was no resident club band then, and when the prince got fed up with the gramophone he and a female guest picked up all the records and threw them through the ballroom window. At least he had stamina. He went to bed well after dawn, emerging from the sour air of the Muthaiga bar into the bone-white light of a Nairobi morning, and was saddled up on the racecourse before eight. The other benighted competitors had to force their horses to slow down to let him win the KAR Trophy—and to let the duke come second. Lascelles longed for the safari to begin so that he could hand over responsibility to Denys and relax, or so he thought. “I
fiche
myself completely of all anxiety, for I know nobody in the world who inspires me with more complete and childlike confidence than he [Denys] does,” he wrote home. “He was always a remarkable chap, but he has come on tremendously since the days when I used to know him in England…. He has organised the whole expedition for medown to the last sheet of Bronco.”

ON DEPARTURE DAY
the rains sheeted down, warm and heavy, and the road to the first camp, at Kajiado on the southern fringe of the Kapiti Plains, was impassable. Denys abandoned his plan to go by road and co-opted the assistance of the controller of the Uganda railway, who conjured a train that was part passenger and part freight. The vehicles—spare tires roped to the sides and crates protruding from every aperture—were simply driven onto the train. Denys sent one lorry out to try the road, like Noah’s dove. (It was never seen again, though the driver eventually materialized, asking for money.) At two o’clock, according to the prince’s diary, “practically everyone in Nairobi” came to see them off. Rain continued to flood country so recently paralyzed by drought, and when the royal train drew into the Kajiado station it was met with relief by the district officer, Clarence Buxton, a cousin of Geoffrey’s, who had himself been bogged down all night on the Athi Plain. (This Buxton was famous for trying to get the Maasai to play polo on donkeys. He was later exposed as an adulterer and transferred to Palestine in disgrace.) The next day it was dry, and they were able to continue by road. The convoy consisted of four Albion lorries in the charge of a KAR sergeant; Delamere’s loaned Buick, driven by the prince; Denys’s Hudson, driven by him, with Lascelles in the passenger seat; two Willys-Knight safari box cars driven by Legh and Kanuthia; and, at the rear, a Rolls-Royce provided by the Nairobi reception committee, driven by one Inspector Burt.