Too Close to the Sun (8 page)

IN HARLECH, A DASHING
young man named Ossie Williams hurtled into the Winchilsea orbit. Four years older than Denys, the dark-haired Ossie was tall, with full lips and eyes like blue gas jets. All junior Winchilseas adored him. Their parents were less impressed, as the Williamses were committed Liberals. Their seat, Deudraeth Castle (pronounced
Die-dreth
), occupied a wooded promontory that jutted out into the sands at Penrhyndeudraeth.
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To get to Harlech, nine miles away, it was necessary to cross the estuary on the railway bridge and follow the serpentine road up to the town—except at low tide, when one could walk across the sandy bottom of the Dwyryd. In 1901, Ossie started soldiering, and before he turned nineteen he had served in the South African war, returning to Harlech with a DSO (Distinguished Service Order) to thrill Topsy, Toby, and Denys with stories of bivvying on the veld. The three young men careered between the Plas and Deudraeth, surging with high spirits, shooting, skating, and staying the night wherever they ended up.

Twenty-two-year-old Topsy was not permitted to sleep away from home. (She was allowed to take her shoes off when prawning, but not her stockings.) Taller than the less-favored Toby, she had grown into a fine-featured woman with her mother’s figure and a wistful expression, and she had Denys’s cool temperament. The pair were close; both of Topsy’s children recalled, many years later, the “special bond” that existed between them. As the tragedy of Topsy’s life unfolded, she and Denys became closer still, and the tie drew him back from Africa. By 1903, Topsy’s hair had gone up and her skirts had come down, but she had few companions in Harlech and spent many hours in her room at the top of the house with her dog, a smooth-haired white fox terrier called Billy. Her cousin Essex Gunning felt sorry for her and considered that she had a “rotten social life” in Wales. But in 1906 it emerged that Topsy had not been entirely left out after all, and the consequences precipitated a family crisis: she and Ossie had fallen in love. Henry disapproved of the match on political and social grounds, considering the Williamses to be middle-class Welsh country squires as well as Liberals. It was bad enough that in February the Liberals had swept to victory in the general election. Now they were infiltrating the family. This was agonizing for the shy, sensitive Topsy, but she would not give him up. There was something introspective about the Winchilseas, whereas Ossie and his clan were extrovert, and liberal in both senses of the word. According to Topsy’s son, Michael, this was “a breath of fresh air” to his reserved mother. The year they became engaged, Ossie was obliged to retire from his regiment after a polo accident. He got a job in railway construction and spent several years in Chile and Bolivia. Topsy waited for him. At balls, she would hide under the table rather than dance with anyone else. Denys was her main source of support. When she got engaged, he sent her a book from school inscribed “There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an East wind is to put on your overcoat.”

DURING SCHOOL HOLIDAYS,
Denys voyaged stealthily between Harlech, Haverholme, London, and, in August, the Scottish grouse moors. He liked the abrupt change of landscape and the contrasting rhythms of town and country. His restless spirit never tired of either. In the capital, he spent his time with school friends, among them the hospitable Philip Sassoon. The size of one of the larger department stores, the Sassoon residence at 25 Pall Mall featured cathedral-height ceilings, towering porcelain urns, and bowlegged French furniture topped with cupids. Everything seemed to be encrusted with gilt, and the sheeny surface of ten-foot oil portraits of assorted Sassoons quivered with the reflection of a forest of chandeliers. Besides such urban excitements, there was a constant flow of country-house parties—an essential sideshow in the Edwardian carnival. Denys would arrive to find a card inscribed with his name slotted into a little brass frame on a bedroom door, and before cocktails a water man brought kettles suspended from a wooden yoke balanced across his shoulders. At seven, a duchess “received,” lit up with jewels and attended by liveried footmen in house colors, and later silver grape scissors did the rounds at the conclusion of a ten-course dinner while maids waited in the passages struggling to stay awake.

AT NINETEEN, DENYS
thought that he could get away with anything. In the autumn of 1906, he sat for the Balliol scholarship at Oxford. Candidates were required to write an essay on what they would do if they were given a million pounds. Julian Huxley argued that he would buy up as much of the British coastline as possible for conservation purposes. Denys stated that he would pension off the older Balliol dons. Huxley got a scholarship; Denys didn’t even get a place. It had always been assumed that he would go up to Oxford. His father, Uncle Murray, and the Avunculus Hector had matriculated at Balliol, all the dead earls were Oxford graduates, and Toby was prospering at Magdalen. Balliol was the obvious choice for a boy as brilliant as Denys: public schools still reckoned their status by the number of their Balliol scholars. But an unconventional streak had already emerged. Even at school, Denys wore eccentric clothes as an expression of nonconformism, in his final year favoring trousers made from a material in minuscule dogtooth check commonly used for sponge bags. Alan Parsons, who knew Denys intimately for three decades, reflected in 1931, “Even as a boy Denys was utterly different from other boys of his age. It was not merely a question of unconventional attire…but of unconventional outlook. I always thought that the twentieth century did not suit him.” He was known especially for his headgear, an association that was cemented when he wore a sun hat of coarse beeswaxy straw into class and the master shouted, “Take your hat off, Hatton.” But, however little Denys cared for Balliol, the truth was that Oxford was the nearest thing to Eton on offer. (“To pass from Eton to Oxford in October 1906 was a slight change,” Denys’s friend and contemporary Ronnie Knox wrote.) So, like many agreeable personalities who were lacking in ambition, Denys chose Brasenose, a placid college that topped the university golf table but failed to trouble its academic counterpart.

Founded in 1509, Brasenose took its name from a brazen (brass or bronze) door knocker in the shape of a nose. Denys was billeted on staircase nine in New Quad, which was still new then—the High Street frontage wasn’t completed until the college’s 1909 quatercentenary. Designed to reflect the asymmetry fashionable in the High Victorian era, the quadrangle, with its angled gate turret, was austere compared with the honey-colored Early Tudor Old Quad and the college gatehouse on Radcliffe Square. Denys’s second-floor room overlooked the spire of St. Mary’s, the university church, and, beyond the dome of the Radcliffe Camera, the dreaming Hawksmoor towers of All Souls. As the staircase was adjacent to the kitchens, in summer odors of cabbage and ham offered proleptic intimations of luncheon.

Denys started off reading law, but in his second year he switched to modern history, reckoning that there was no point in submitting to the tedium of the law reports since he was never going to practice. Nobody seemed to mind what he did. The college’s attitude toward work was reflected in the fact that undergraduates weren’t permitted to enter the library until 1897, the same year that heat and light made an appearance. A contemporary of Denys’s has written of “the roomy, uncrowded years” when an Oxford college was like “a small Utopia”; but it has never been crowded at Brasenose. The college was less a bastion of scholarship than a sporting club in which young men in gray flannels and Harris green coats could loaf at leisure, and most rules could be broken as long as one knew whom to pay. The supremacy of sport was unchallenged, and within weeks of arrival Denys got his first half-blue, traveling up to the Royal Liverpool Golf Club at Hoylake to compete against Cambridge. Between the ages of seventeen and twenty-three, he played golf nearly every day. The counterbalancing demands of strength and intricacy appealed to his imagination, and so did the way the links glowed greenly as his whole body worked in anatomical harmony. He grew addicted to the grandeur that blossoms out of a well-lofted slice, the dizzy instants of whiz, hover, and fall, the clipped satisfaction of a bunker chip slashed in an arc of sand. Open space compelled him, and golf is a sport welded to landscape. At St. David’s, his home course, he was in touch with the altered perspectives of the changing seasons. In spring, he could tell where the plovers’ eggs nestled in the gorse. He knew the deepening rough of June, the patchy greens and thunderstorms of August, the wet October smell of foliage as the links ripened and the lower angle of the sun brought the contours of the fairway into fuller relief. Golf satisfied his restlessness in many ways, from the quiet concentration required to solve a problem alone in the long grass to the shared slow drama of the foursome and the camaraderie at the nineteenth. It was a sport that exploited sharp eyes and finely tuned coordination, the same gifts that later enabled Denys to save clients’ lives on safari, and to kill Germans.

Denys was to play twice more in the Varsity match, and in his final year captained his team. At the Easter meeting of 1909, he also won the President’s Cup at St. David’s. (It was presented to him by the president—his father.) But despite his championship potential, golf, like everything else in his life, was never more than a game to Denys, and his attitude reflected his mysterious antipathy toward achievement. During one university match, a don among the spectators watched him concede a yard putt to his opponent. “Remember,” snorted the don, “you are playing not for yourself but for your university.” “Remember,” flashed the reply, “that you are playing for neither.” Denys was the apotheosis of the amateur. He was competitive only to a point, and too much winning would have been vulgar. At Oxford, he gave up cricket and soccer altogether. “He did not appear to take games seriously,” Alan Parsons recalled. Many years later, Karen Blixen based the character Lincoln Forsner in her short story “The Dreamers” on Denys. “I had myself been fairly keen for competition as a boy,” says Forsner as the dhow in which he is sailing tacks from Lamu to Zanzibar under a monsoon moon. “But even while I had been still at school had lost my sense of it, and…unless a thing was to my taste, I thought it silly to exert myself about it just because it happened to be to the taste of others.” A report of Denys’s football skills in the Eton magazine confirms the point, as well as inadvertently catching his character: “The Hon. Finch Hatton, when not charged, is apt to be careless…. When charged, he rises to the occasion and is very hard to getpast.”

Building on his Eton career as a romantic anarchist, Denys moved out of college toward the end of his first year. He had worked out that it would be easier to circumnavigate the rules governing hours, guests, and entertaining if he did not have to get past the porter in his gatehouse cubbyhole. Inquiries and emollients secured ample lodgings at 117 High Street, a terraced house directly behind Brasenose that was supervised by an unscrupulous landlord by the name of Goodall. Denys filled the bedrooms with friends and, as house scout, installed the aged Feltham, a servant he and Toby had taken over from their father. (Employed as Lord Winchilsea’s butler, Feltham had been sacked after leading a shooting party to the wrong place.) A diligent, if unusual, scout, Feltham was the object of mirth at No. 117, and Philip Sassoon once referred to him with intriguing obscurity as “a tiara of hair and a mixture of Dr Nikola and Sherlock Holmes.” (Dr. Nikola was a popular fictional archvillain.) During all-night gambling sessions, Feltham was on hand with supplies of champagne, caviar, and pâté de foie gras sandwiches, and on Sunday mornings he cleared up the debris while the young men slept it off, oblivious to the bells of St. Mary’s and the dumpy horse omnibuses clattering down the High. Denys’s circle of friends extended far beyond the “gown” sector of Oxford, and the house and its tuneless piano soon became famous for well-oiled gambling sessions. John Langley was a regular guest. A bookmaker and the mayor of the neighboring town of Marlow, Langley was popular with sporting undergraduates, as he allowed them to settle debts with non-cash payments such as fur coats. Denys, who was often short of cash, frequently availed himself of this service. The provenance of the furs remains unknown.