As his wife I am a shield in the sense that his marriage is a front for the outside world (‘I am a normal man with a normal wife, even if we are both a bit screwy’) but inside our world, our tiny private world, I am to take last place – the corner to which he can retreat and expect comfort when he wants it – but out of which I must not come to intrude upon his life, his emotions … Gavin has said on one or two occasions how much he wished he was more normal in his woman-relationships, but au fond he believes that it will never be so. But he has said many things which are complete opposites, and I never know where the truth lies …
He spent years freeing himself from his mother (on the surface, that is), and ten years in freeing himself from Kathleen Raine – and if I am placed into that category in his mind, I haven’t a hope in hell, and our relationship is doomed – and I want to believe more than anything that Gavin wants our marriage to work as much as I do.
I know that I love him, and no less than I ever have over the years I have known him … If I lose him, I think I shall lose myself for ever. But he must never know how desperately frightened I am by the precariousness of all this for me – I feel it would be an intolerable burden which he is not capable of carrying …
I do realise and appreciate what an exceptionally fine, warm-hearted and kind human being he is; it would not only break my heart but be a real tragedy if we fail together.
Lavinia found a niche in the Sandaig ecology, and some solace from her anxieties about her marriage, by assuming responsibility for the welfare of Mossy and Monday, and attempting to hand-rear them. ‘Perhaps,’ she noted hopefully, ‘it will help me to tame my wild-Gavin-animal.’ She felt a particular affinity with these shy, semi-wild little creatures, for they had arrived at Sandaig at about the same time as she had, and were thus as junior as she was in the Sandaig hierarchy. It was Lavinia who transported Edal’s glass-sided water-tank from the garden of Paultons Square to Mossy and Monday’s fenced-off compound in front of the sitting-room window at Sandaig; and it was she who, during Gavin’s absence in London, observed the young otters’ all-important first efforts at learning to swim.
Monday was the first to take to the water. Standing on the rim of the tank, she dipped her nose in, then her head, and then, losing her balance but clinging desperately with one hand to the side, the whole of her body. Within a few minutes she was totally at home in the water, and hurled herself time and again into the depths of the tank. ‘It was the most wonderful spectacle of underwater joie-de-vivre I have ever seen,’ Lavinia wrote. ‘After that initial plunge she appeared to have every movement, every trick of swimming, at her fingertips; she was grace and speed and beauty – a water ballerina.’
Not so the dim and backward Mossy. It took him two whole days to master the art – two days in which he clung for dear life to the side with his back toes while the rest of him fell head-first into the water, but would not let himself go, somersaulting over the cross-bars, kicking with his hind legs and thrashing with his tail. Monday mocked and teased him mercilessly, nipped at his tail and his toes, and finally gave him a great shove – and suddenly he discovered that he could swim. ‘They began to evolve endless and intricate games together,’ Lavinia wrote, ‘water ballets, which started in slow motion and worked up gradually to a long crescendo of movement, until the tank seemed a boiling cauldron and the two gyrating animals appeared to be twenty.’
From the moment the two learned to adapt to their true element they became much more integrated into the Sandaig family; they ceased to be mainly nocturnal and fugitive creatures, and before long were bold enough to feed from Lavinia’s hand and even sit on her lap as they did so. But gratifying though this was to Lavinia, and to Gavin too when he returned to Sandaig, it was never far from their thoughts that on the other side of Mossy and Monday’s fence lay the sound and scent and lure of the rushing stream and the broad expanse of the sea, and that one day the young cubs might feel impelled to claim these native wilds as their own.
On 12 August Gavin drove north from London and arrived dog-tired at Monreith that evening after a long day’s drive. The next day he motored over to his old childhood home at Elrig. By coincidence the house was occupied at that moment by an old friend of Lavinia’s – the daughter-in-law of the house’s new owners – who greeted Gavin warmly and offered him her sympathy for his recent illness. This infuriated Gavin. Someone, he reckoned, had been talking about him behind his back – a cardinal sin in his canon – and he quickly convinced himself that it must have been Lavinia (though it was more likely to have been his brother Aymer). He returned to Monreith in a rage, downed a few whiskies which only served to enrage him still more, then picked up the telephone.
‘He has just rung me,’ Lavinia recorded,
in a COLD FURY … From what I can gather over the telephone, Witty sympathised with him over being ill. What has hurt – and made me very angry – is that his next words were: ‘What have YOU said to her?’
This gets down to one of the deep troubles which has hurt me a great deal – this suspicion in him that I am betraying him, the lack of trust. This has GOT to be put right somehow in his mind. I have known for a long time how he inverts things. He takes what someone else has said and makes it come as if from himself; likewise he will transfer to another person some feeling or thought which he doesn’t like. Which is why it is often so difficult to get consistency from him, except on his intellectual level. Unless we can trust and believe in each other, implicitly and without questioning, we will never have the essentials of a marriage – part of the inviolable core in the relationship between husband and wife.
Oh dear – now we have to meet tomorrow with this suspicion in his mind. I shall take a tranquilliser – and I hope he arrives at our rendezvous without a lot of whisky inside him! I want peace with Gavin more than anything but it is desperately hard when the slightest thing sends him scampering back into his burrow – just like a wild animal.
I realised this morning that to be wife to Gavin is a very precarious position indeed.
And so it proved. Life at Sandaig went on as unpredictably as before. Gavin doodled at his desk but could still get nowhere with his book. Lavinia busied herself with the household and the young otter cubs and the continuing stream of visitors. Two blazing rows punctuated the uneasy truce during the ensuing weeks. The first flared up on 27 August, when Gavin suggested that Lavinia’s son Simon should accompany Lavinia and himself on a three-day outing to attend the ceremonial commissioning of the Royal Navy submarine H.M.S. Otter (whose commander was a great fan of Ring of Bright Water), despite the fact that Lavinia had been looking forward to being alone with Gavin for a change. ‘I broke down and lost the truce,’ she recalled. ‘Being as exhausted as I was, I had no reserve left to keep my head. I felt hit by a huge stone of resentment and general despair.’
The second row was the consequence of the exhaustion and claustrophobia engendered by Sandaig life – and by Gavin’s remorseless probing and manipulating of moods and motives.
‘What I find very difficult to deal with in any situation with Gavin,’ Lavinia wrote to Rosamond Bischoff in September, ‘is his eternal interpreting of everything on a psychological basis. I know it fascinates him and that his insight and knowledge of people gives him a sense of wisdom and power. But one cannot live day by day on that level, and molehills are made into mountains when he searches into the slightest change of expression, tone of voice or mood in me or any of us, and finds in it a deep psychological disturbance! So when he is angry he tells me I am destructive, a “killer” bent on destroying people, and that I am jealous and batty and hysterical, a “Jekyll and Hyde” character. It was exactly this sort of thing that led to our second set-to.’
Exhausted after a long, tiring day which had ended with providing supper for nine hungry males, Lavinia was lying on the sofa having a nightcap when Gavin sat down beside her and asked what was bothering her. Nothing, she said, she was just whacked and needed to go to bed. But Gavin went
on and on remorselessly till Lavinia cracked:
In the end I was driven to such a pitch of exasperation that I really blazed and hurled my glass on the floor. Now he may not throw things as I do occasionally when driven to fury – and he says he simply can’t understand what makes me throw things; but he, without raising his voice, can goad one with his words and hate with his eyes and be intensely hurtful; and if he is frightened by the quirks in my personality, I am equally frightened by his passion for playing ‘chess’ with all of us.
For Gavin was a great ‘chess-player’ with people, Lavinia observed. ‘He is a mystifier, a spinner of webs, weaver of phantasies, a commander of situations. All part of his very fertile imagination, which makes him the poet, the good raconteur, the humorist, the writer, and many other things besides. It is superb when it is turned outward, to outside people and situations; it can be very tricky and dangerous if it is turned inward to a relationship like ours.’ As Lavinia pointed out to Rosamond Bischoff:
To quote Eric Linklater (who knows and admires and loves him dearly): ‘Gavin is a near-genius … Gavin can twist anyone round his little finger.’ I have all too often seen how he can convince the unsuspecting that black is white! The other day he admitted to me that he does feel himself a God-like power – ‘even though,’ he said with a wry smile, ‘I know very well that I am not.’ Well, everyone knows that genius is a form of madness … But finger-twisting is not a good thing in a husband–wife relationship. Gavin has never been so intimately associated with an adult before, and it shatters his impregnable position of power.
In Lavinia’s view, Gavin’s picture of what their marriage should be was: ‘He is he, Gavin Maxwell, and to be that he must be free to be able to write, paint, come and go when he wants, be a “power” to his dependants and a wise man to his friends, who come to him singly with their problems (women flock to him, as we know, and he hypnotises them and lashes them with his words – isn’t it true that women nearly always fall in love with their psychiatrists?).’
It was when it came to the emotional needs of the two that the problems began. In Lavinia’s view Gavin was torn between making a success of bringing a woman into his life and having to give up his freedom to live as he chose. ‘Gavin is a Gentleman par excellence,’ she wrote. ‘He has a very deep code of honour and behaviour, whilst at the same time he is a complete law unto himself. He is trying to do the right thing by me, and at the same time must do the right thing by himself – and there, I think, is much, if not all, of the rub.’
Lavinia was in no doubt that Gavin needed her as a nanny, mother and friend – but not really as someone to sleep with. Because emotionally Gavin was still an adolescent, Lavinia maintained, he could relate more instinctively to adolescents than to an adult woman, and for this reason was probably closer to his stepsons than he was to their mother.
On 16 September Lavinia returned to London in order to get her sons back to school for the start of the new term. By now she was ill with worry and physically and mentally exhausted; she was edgy and nervous and had lost over a stone in weight in the last few weeks. While she was in London she consulted Rosamond Bischoff about her problems, and on 24 September Gavin wrote a letter to Dr Bischoff in which he outlined Lavinia’s ‘case’ as he saw it. Lavinia reacted with deep, defensive suspicion of Gavin’s interpretation of her predicament and told Rosamond Bischoff so in forthright terms:
I am positive it is fatal for me to become his ‘case’. I am not afraid of qualified, objective judgement and advice, but I am afraid of his because he is clearly the last person who can be objective and constructive. For me the whole situation is worse than a nightmare – it is a very live hell at times, and I am afraid of not only losing Gavin, but of losing myself as well. The baby I need to give birth to is myself – alone – not with Gavin playing the role of doctor, anaesthetist, father and mother with 100% labour pains! … I know you wish I wasn’t going up to Scotland this week – but it is important for me to be at home with Gavin – but I don’t want him to feel that a tottering wife is coming up on the verge of hysteria (as I admittedly have been for the last two days). Please do one thing for me; after I leave to drive north, will you telephone him – and no matter how low you think I am – please tell him that I am fine and in good spirits and very much looking forward to getting HOME – (and I PROMISE that when I arrive at Sandaig I will be all these things).
At Sandaig, meanwhile, the weather was at its wildest, with lashing rain and winds up to Storm Force 10. The water supply was washed away, and the Polar Star lost its moorings out by the islands. Then, on 21 September, a remarkable thing happened – salmon appeared in the Sandaig burn for the first time. They were spotted by Gavin’s local handyman, Alan MacDiarmaid, who was building a new prefabricated wing at the house’s seaward end. Gavin wrote to his stepson Nick: ‘In half an hour he caught three big fish by very unconventional means. First he tickled a sea trout of four pounds. Then he hoicked out a six-pound grilse [young salmon] with his bare hands, and then, with a snare wire over the tail, another of five pounds. Although Alan was born in this house he had only once in his life seen one salmon in the burn. He thinks that if we could get the sporting rights of the burn we could dam it in two places and make two really good salmon pools.’
At half-past six on the morning of 28 September Lavinia left London in her Mini-Cooper and headed north. It was a journey of 625 miles and normally took two days, but the roads were so empty and Lavinia made such good time that by eight in the evening she was at Glenelg and by nine, after more than fourteen hours on the road, she was at Sandaig. Lavinia recalled:
I got the usual affectionate welcome from Gavin, and he said: ‘Come into my room, you deserve a drink.’ So we had a drink – he’d had a few already – and then we had another drink and then I said to him: ‘Gavin, I’m absolutely licked. I must have something to eat, and then I really will have to go to bed.’ But he said: ‘No no no no no. Just one more drink.’ And then he got that tight look over his face, and suddenly, out of the blue, he said: ‘Lavinia, I want a divorce.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ve been thinking – I just can’t go on with this marriage.’
So we started arguing and getting cross and upset, and as I’d had no food inside me all day I was really getting rather sloshed too. Then he handed me this bloody document he’d written and forced me to read it, a kind of profit and loss account of our marriage, with all my pros listed in a short list on one side and all my cons listed in a much longer list on the other, all methodically numbered and marked with a date and time and all serving to prove his marriage was a mistake.
‘Look, Gavin,’ I said, ‘I’ve got to go to bed! We can talk about this in the morning, but right now I’m going to bed!’
So I went wearily up the stairs to the spare room and got into bed. There were two single beds in that room and mine was the far one nearest the window. The other bed by the door had an enormous pile of woollen socks on it – the mending for all the males in the household. I was feeling very upset and nervy, and I lay in bed and thought: ‘Oh my God – what’s going to happen now?’ And then suddenly there was a loud bang like a gun going off in the room below. ‘Oh my God!’ I thought again, fearing the worst. So I quickly put a dressing gown on and went downstairs. Gavin’s room was full of cordite fumes, and there, sitting stark naked on the edge of the bed and clutching a pistol, was Gavin.
‘What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’ I shouted.
‘I saw a rat,’ he said, slurring his words.
‘There’s never been a rat in your room,’ I said. ‘They’re behind the skirting board. So don’t be stupid and scare me like that!’
I went back up the stairs and put out the light and got into bed quickly and pulled the clothes over my head, because I knew what was going to happen next. And sure enough, a few moments later came a PLONK PLONK PLONK as Gavin’s heavy footsteps
came up the stairs, and he threw open the door – BANG! – and he turned on the light and there he was, with a great big Arab djellabah slung round him, standing there like Lawrence of Arabia or the Lord of the Atlas, swaying about with the gun in his hand.
‘Oh Gavin!’ I yelled. ‘Go to bed!’
And at that moment his eyes rolled upwards into the top of his head and he slumped on to the bed with all the socks on it and passed out. So I got up again and went and lifted his legs on to the bed and then I went back to my own bed and lay there absolutely trembling, half asleep and half awake, till eventually there was a tremendous crash and Gavin rolled off the bed on to the floor, with all the socks tumbling down on top of him. And there he lay until the break of day.
This was really the watershed of the marriage; there could be no retracing of steps, only a relentless descent. But there was precious little perception of the fact in the note Gavin scribbled to Nick a day or two later:
Lavinia arrived in one piece and in good form on Friday evening after having done the whole 625 miles from London in one day, at some average speed that doesn’t bear thinking about. Arrived just in time to eat the last of the salmon. Today we’re all in a flap – your grandparents are coming over to lunch, and we are fussing about getting the inside and outside of the house reasonably tidy before they arrive.
Gavin had always felt an honest fear and respect for Lavinia’s father and mother and wished that all should appear to be well at Sandaig while they were there. But as soon as they had gone the in-fighting began all over again.
In October the marriage entered another stage of disintegration. Gavin rang up Dr Beveridge at Glenelg and told her that Lavinia was mentally disturbed, and should be put in an asylum. But when Dr Beveridge arrived Lavinia announced that she was not the slightest bit batty, and had no intention of allowing herself to be put away.
Gavin Maxwell Page 47
