Too Close to the Sun (42 page)

A more alarming disease, however, was incubating elsewhere. Toodles had to rejoin her husband and, against the advice of his equerry, Grigg, and everyone else, the prince insisted on driving her to the railway alone. The heat was appalling. Halfway across the plain, the color drained from his face. “Darling,” he said, “I’ve got to stop for a bit, I feel frightfully seedy.” With that he slumped over the wheel. Toodles had only driven along the boulevards of Beverly Hills. Eyeing a rhino as her lover breathed in sharp gasps and sweat trickled down her back, she thought, rather late in the day, about her “responsibility to the empire.” But before she could take the wheel the prince came around. He was able to drive slowly to the railway, where the “chauffeur” diagnosed malaria and a train carriage was converted into a hospital ward. After a week in Nairobi, the patient was dancing at Muthaiga. Toodles and her husband went home.
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The party then proceeded by train and car to Masindi in Uganda, and from there, through blue gum forests and emerald valleys blazing with alpine flowers—“perhaps the most beautiful 45 miles in Africa or in the universe,” according to the prince—to the escarpment that tumbles two thousand feet to Lake Albert. In the Congo pygmies danced, leeches enjoyed their first taste of royal blood, and a driver misunderstood instructions and lost the baggage. In the sudd, they steamed along torpid creeks lined with hippo landing stages, and the prince, who was experimenting with color film, photographed Nile lechwe, the semi-amphibious antelope that live only in southern Sudan, as well as Shilluk hunters who were hanging flaps of hippo meat over the hide rope slung between the spears fencing their camps. Greater Nile geese and giant shoebills landed on heaving rafts of decomposing vegetation, egrets rose in white cirrus clouds above the papyrus, and the vibrations of the ship’s screw drove everyone slowly mad. The mosquitoes were infernal. On April 12, the party reached Malakal and flew to Khartoum in an RAF plane, following the White Nile north. At Port Said, they all boarded the SS
Rawalpindi—
Denys was returning to England with the royals. He was determined to buy his plane. It had been a tremendous safari, one of the high points of the prince’s touring career. “Finch Hatton was responsible for lions, elephants and rhinoceroses, for Quaker oats, cartridges and candles,” HRH concluded in his diary. “All things were on the head of Finch Hatton, and all things went without a hitch. He never made a mistake. He forgot nothing. He foresaw everything. At last, his charges took off their solar [
sic
] topees to him and said that he was the most efficient man in the world.”

THE LONDON NEWSPAPERS
were full of the Depression, but Denys took a sanguine view. “Everyone says they are more broke than ever this year,” he wrote to Tania, “but there seems to be just as much money being spent on inane amusements as ever: more Rolls-Royces, new fashions, extravagant parties, and everyone who has money placing it abroad in concealed concerns to avoid income tax, supertax, etc.—the rats abandoning the sinking ship.” It was true that the Depression never developed into an industry wide condition, as it did in the United States. It was localized, the coalfields of the Midlands and Wales and the ports and shipyards of the north suffering hard. Little changed in the capital. Unemployment, however, was steadily rising, and that year reached two million (it was two and a half million in Germany). But Denys found something more important to complain about than the plight of workingmen. “The trouble is that the land which cannot escape is taxed to death, and English agriculture is at its last gasp,” he fulminated to Tania. “Australia is bankrupt: Germany full of unemployed: America ruled by gangs of gunmen—France seems to be the one country which is doing well. She kept her head when we were giving away everything; and took everything she could get.” Denys may have had the common touch, but he was at sea in the new democratic order in which land and title did not determine all things. He was so enthusiastic about France that at the beginning of May he went over to Paris to hear
Parsifal.
He liked Wagner, but found the opera too long and sneaked out to have dinner in the second act. He also heard Wagner’s comic opera
Die Meistersinger,
“which is very exhilarating,” and afterward bought the record, writing to Tania, “Shall be quite ready to start back for EA all the same and hear it with you at Ngong.”

By the second week of May 1930, Denys was back from France and staying with Philip Sassoon at Trent Park in New Barnet, thirteen miles north of Trafalgar Square. Since worshipping at Denys’s feet at Eton, Sassoon had conquered London. An MP since 1912, he had risen to a senior position in the Tory administration, which had recently lost office, serving for five years as undersecretary of state for air. Few would have predicted, in those far-off Eton days, that it would be Sassoon, a foreign Jew, who got to the top rather than Denys Finch Hatton. A strange flitting little figure, Sassoon had become famous earlier in his career for snapping up secretaryships to important people (Lloyd George, for example). “Christ has risen,” his friend Diana Cooper informed him by telegram one Easter Day, “and will shortly be needing a secretary.” Sassoon was a lavish host, presiding over elaborate house parties in a double-breasted silk-fronted blue smoking jacket and zebra-hide slippers. Within the previous month alone, guests at the thousand-acre Trent Park had included the Prince of Wales, Prince Albert (later George VI), Lord Londonderry, Euan Charteris, Hugh Cecil, Diana Westmorland, and Freda Dudley Ward. Sporting facilities included a nine-hole golf course with professionals on hand, tennis courts, a boating lake, a swimming pool, and a furrowed landing strip surrounded by tall trees. Sassoon had been fascinated by all aspects of aviation since the war. He was one of the most forceful advocates for a strong air force, sat as chairman of the Royal Aero Club, and had a Moth of his own.
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Gardens that smothered the landscape in their opulent embrace featured crowds of statuary, a pair of king penguins, and the bent figures of eighteen gardeners. The house itself was more English than the other Sassoon residences and had recently been refaced in eighteenth-century rose brick and stone bought from Devonshire House in Piccadilly when the latter was demolished; more grand houses were coming down than going up, and Sassoon was moving in on territory vacated by the landed classes of an older England. His good taste extended well into the ruinously decadent. He gilded the drainpipes, bound the telephone directory in white buckram, and in the guest rooms, where cocktails were delivered to the dressing table before dinner, cut flowers were dyed to match the curtains. There was a story that he had the Union Jack hauled down one day as the colors clashed with the sunset, though at least he did not dye his doves pastel shades like his friend Lord Berners. At Sassoon’s death in 1939 it was said that his baroque was worse than his bite.

The Prince of Wales arrived for a golf lesson, bringing his African photographs to show Denys, but the latter was in a black mood. He had not gone to Trent Park to be social; he had gone to try out Sassoon’s Moth, but the “pestilential” weather had precluded any flying. “This is a cursed country,” he ranted. The others had been golfing in the rain, but Denys was allergic to cold English showers and thought his housemates mad. They had made him play one morning, and the single session was quite enough; he retired to the library. “This afternoon I have
kata’ed
[Swahili for ‘refused’], and am spending a pleasant indoor afternoon by myself,” he told Tania in an uncharacteristically long letter. She had not written to him, and he was anxious for her news. He felt a degree of responsibility toward her and wanted to help; he knew that she was having a difficult time. He urged her to go to his beach house at Takaungu. “I feel it would do you a lot of good to get away from Ngong for a little,” he wrote. But to get there she would have had to take the train to Mombasa and then make a complicated journey north involving two ferries. (Nyali Bridge was not completed until 1931.) How could she do it, with the farm in turmoil? And anyway, Takaungu was too low and too hot for her. What Denys could offer was not enough.

He had been busy looking at planes that spring and was disappointed that the next batch of the new Puss Moth monoplane would not be ready in time for him to buy one before he started back. He test-flew a Bluebird, but didn’t like it nearly as much as the Moth. He also took up a DW2, which needed only twenty yards’ clearance for takeoff—a great advantage in the bush (“One could land it on your lawn!” he told Tania in excitement. “The Ngong side of the house!”), but it was slow, cruising at 60 miles per hour, whereas the Puss cruised at between 100 and 110. In the end, he bought a custard-yellow Gypsy Moth with the registratio
G-ABAK
. A twenty-three-foot two-seater biplane with a thirty-foot wingspan, the Moth flew up to 102 miles per hour with a range of about 320 miles, and Denys immediately whizzed down to Buckfield, landing in a field beyond the lawn to the delight of his nieces and nephew, who squealed as their glamorous uncle unfolded his long limbs and emerged from the plane in his goggles. But later he crashed into a tree and repairs to the Moth delayed his departure.

When Denys finally got back to Kenya, he stayed in Mombasa. His French client Gourgaud and his wife, Eva, had returned for a second safari and they were all to meet up on the coast. Denys cabled Tania inviting her to join them for a week before they went into the bush. She had been taken with the Gourgauds when she met them on their previous safari; they were the right type, as Baron “Napo” was the great-grandson of Napoléon’s aide-de-camp Gaspard Gourgaud. But she could no longer leave the farm: the situation there was more critical than ever. She had had a miserable time in Denys’s absence. In March 1930, she was locked in dispute with Dickens, who was threatening to resign. There had been three attempts to murder Farah, who had long been at loggerheads with another Somali faction. Tania was having nightmares and took an African baby to bed to comfort her. Then locusts arrived in their brassy mass, darkening the sky for twelve-hour stretches and shrieking the way a blizzard shrieks in northern latitudes. They flew in a belt that extended from the ground to the treetops, whirring against faces, sticking in shoes and collars, and settling in such dense abundance that when they landed on the branch of a tree it snapped. Their jaws were not strong enough to chew the coffee leaves, but they left the maize fields a dustheap.
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Tania lost weight, and did not perk up even when Beryl came out to ride with her.

Denys went through the motions when he reappeared, running errands and commissioning an Indian carpenter to make shelves so that he could keep the rest of his books at the farm. Tania even drove to Nairobi to fetch some of them, including his sixteen-volume Voltaire. But they both knew it was over. She could not tell her family, but tried to prepare them. “My black brother here in Africa,” she wrote to her mother, “has become the great passion of my life…. Even Denys, although he makes me tremendously happy, carries no weight in comparison. It is lovely for me that he exists…but he can do just about anything he likes for me and still not greatly affect my feeling of happiness or unhappiness, and in general I find it hard to take anything concerning Denys really seriously. But with my black brother it is something quite different; it is a matter of life and death.” It was hardly a sibling relationship. Her attitude to “her” Africans was feudal: she was their mistress, not their sister. But a fresh anti-English phase was understandably looming. “I am finding it difficult to stand the English,” she wrote. “The mere fact that they are always so skinny shows their uncongeniality.”

MEANWHILE, G-ABAK JOINED
the fragile flock of wings on the Nairobi airfield. The Africans on the farm christened it
Ndege
—“bird” or “plane”—but Denys and Tania called it Nzige, the Swahili word for locust. If he dive-bombed the house she rushed out, hands to her face, while boys and girls from the
shambas
ran around shrieking. Kikuyu elders trailed out to quiz Tania, as they could not understand why Denys didn’t fall out of the plane. Once, after they had both been up, an old man named Ndwetti approached them as they walked back to the house.