Too Close to the Sun by Sara Wheeler

Author:Sara Wheeler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588365996
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

FROM ABYSSINIA, DENYS returned to England to report to the syndicate board. Sailing from Asmara, he and Billea reached Marseille on June 15, 1921, and there entrained for Paris and London. Denys was still gaunt from the dysentery, but it was a hot month, and London looked fine. As usual, Toby had been on tenterhooks awaiting his appearance, and the night after his arrival Denys dined with him and Margaretta at their grand house in Manchester Square. Billea, who otherwise padded behind Denys at a respectful distance of five feet, stood silently in the corner of the dining room impassively resisting the sidelong glances of the parlor maids. Geoffrey Buxton was in London, and he, Denys, and Toby went to the City to see if they could raise cash for fresh East African business ventures. Kermit, too, was in town with his wife, Belle, and Denys took them to dine at Manchester Square before they all went off to Lady Cunard’s dance. Toby’s grueling social life had not slowed up with the years. The Queen and Princess Mary dropped in for tea, and the Dudley Wards for dinner, and while Denys was in London the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York attended a Manchester Square soirée. Toby had worked himself into a frenzy about the entertainment arrangements and only at the last minute hired the Douglas Sisters to sing. But he need not have worried. The royals lapped up Denys’s stories of the East African sporting life and stayed till half past four in the morning. The next day, Denys drove Toby to Eton in a 1919 Cadillac that he had bought for £450. Motoring was a national obsession in the twenties. Toby was fanatically interested in the Cadillac, and spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about his own car; he was about to purchase the first of a string of Rolls-Royces. But at his old school Toby was appalled at “all the ghastly lozenges on the walls of cloisters” that had been stuck up to commemorate fallen Etonians. “Place ruined,” he concluded glumly.

Unleashed, Denys toured the nightclubs of the capital and marveled at the transformation of the British woman. She had worked in the police force, in the munitions factories, and on the land while the men were fighting, and in the twenties she changed into a boy, cutting her hair into a bob, flattening her bosom and hips, and lounging unchaperoned in cocktail bars. She took to higher hems, glass beads, and plucked eyebrows, went hatless in summer, and threw parties that featured jazz on the gramophone and nonstop dancing. Dancing, like motoring, had become an obsession. Exotic varieties, such as the shimmy and the Charleston, flourished in the hothouse of London clubs, and even Claridge’s had succumbed to live jazz. Denys drank deeply (but not for him the co-respondent shoes). He saw a lot of Rose and went up to Norfolk to stay with her at Dunston. The following year, she visited her brother Geoffrey in Kenya and met Algy Cartwright, the settler who had introduced Denys and Tania.

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