Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  The worst was still to come. The handling of the intestinal mass during surgery had brought about a paralysis of the digestive system, a condition known as ileus. Gavin’s gut had ceased to function and as a result gases began to form in his belly without any means of escape, as happens in a corpse. Gavin lay on his bed like a stranded whale while his belly swelled and swelled till it resembled an inflated set of bagpipes from which the drainage tubes stuck out like the drones and the chanter. The condition was often fatal, and Gavin’s surgeon could not disguise his concern. Several drugs were used to try and relieve this grotesquely bloated condition, but without success. Then one night there came sudden relief, as dramatic as any coup de théâtre, when Gavin was woken by the most stupendous and prolonged fart he had ever heard and felt his belly deflating like a barrage balloon. They had found the right drug at last.

  Gavin made a restless, rebellious patient, all the more so in that he was in the hands of nuns, who to him represented the impersonal authority of organised religion, against which – remembering the numbing constrictions of the Irvingite Church of his boyhood and the iron rule by which the Catholic priests governed the Sicilian poor – he instinctively bridled. Some of the nuns, however, he found saintly and warm-hearted, and one in particular – a strikingly beautiful sixteen-year-old Irish girl who was working in the nursing home as a probationer while she waited to join the Order – he felt particularly drawn to. The orphaned daughter of a fishing family in Connemara, she had worked on her father’s small fishing boat since she was ten, and had been rescued by this nursing order of nuns so that she might become a nun herself, renounce all earthly things and forget her past life.

  ‘Forget the sea and the salt wind and the sunshine and the great open sky,’ Gavin thought; ‘forget the feeling of wet sea sand and weed beneath bare feet, forget the pitching of a boat in the waves; the crying of gulls; the rasp of frayed and ripping rope on childish palms …’ Such suppression of the joys of human life filled him with a blind anger.

  Gavin’s conversations with the girl echoed his inner dialogues with himself. While still convalescent in hospital he had resumed work on his autobiography of childhood, and quickly realised that his current state of helplessness and dependence provided him with a unique insight into those boyhood years of long ago, not by remembering them but by actually reliving them, so that the past was recreated as a kind of present, complete with long-lost scenes, conversations, feelings and states of mind.

  After four weeks Gavin was discharged from hospital. His brother Aymer came to fetch him, and drove him down to the family home at Monreith, in Wigtownshire – a sad house now, with half its rooms closed and the garden overgrown. There he was to spend the remaining period of his convalescence under the eye of the family’s local general practitioner, Dr Gavin Brown, a good friend of many years’ standing.

  Though the flow of blood to Gavin’s left foot had been restored, he still could not walk properly without suffering cramp, and as the surgical wound in his belly had not yet healed he had to carry a drainage tube in it, which felt like a spiked golf ball that bounced at every step he took. When Dr Brown came to dress Gavin’s wound the first morning, he told him: ‘Well, you’ve got an awful mess of a belly, Gavin. One thing’s certain – that’ll never be a hairline scar, and unless you want a cosmetic operation you’ll never have a flat stomach again.’ A three-inch section of the nine-inch incision still gaped an inch wide, and it was expected to take another six weeks for the wound to close.

  But Gavin was not altogether unhappy. Convalescence at Monreith was a kind of escape from the real world and all its worries. After a week Dr Brown tried to persuade him to walk down the half-mile drive to the lodge gate to meet him. But though Gavin stayed on for several weeks at Monreith he never did manage to reach the gates, and when he finally returned to Sandaig late in February 1964 he could not yet walk properly, and was still more or less helpless.

  Early in March Gavin wrote to Constance McNab: ‘Life has been a series of crises of one sort or another since I came back here ten days ago – as it always is. Another shipwreck (I was ashore) and the loss of the boat for an indefinite period – that would be enough by itself. Jimmy is excellent as always and manages everything practical. I received a very beautiful gift last night – a parcel from a priest containing the vessels of Communion, chalice, cruet and plate – in return, he wrote, for what my books had done for him. An exchange of symbols.’

  In spite of the strong sense that time was running out and the place was running down, Sandaig remained the hub of the otter network of the area, and new otters continued to show up there, along with other wild creatures. Anyone with an unwanted otter invariably contacted Gavin, who invariably agreed to care for the waif in question. One of the oddest among the new arrivals was a small, domesticated otter called Tibby that belonged to a crippled bachelor on the isle of Eigg. Anxious to find his pet a permanent home before he became too infirm to look after her, Tibby’s owner brought her to Sandaig, and when he left she was put in Teko’s enclosure, for Teko had never objected to any otter that had shared his quarters with him. But Tibby proved as compulsive and able an escapologist as Mossy and Monday had been. Instead of heading off for the wilds each time she escaped, Tibby would make for one or other of the villages in the area, where with unerring accuracy she would locate the only man who resembled her late master – a cripple on crutches. ‘Perhaps,’ Gavin mused after her last sighting, ‘if I had never had the operation, and had lost my foot, I should have earned Tibby’s allegiance for life.’

  By now Mossy and Monday had taken up residence on one of the Sandaig islands where in past years there had always been an otters’ holt. The two otters had been seen increasingly rarely, but one day in the summer of 1964, when Gavin was writing in his room, he heard an incredibly penetrating whistling, squeaking sound coming from the direction of the waterfall – the sort of sound a young otter makes when it is trying to find its parents. He limped across the field but all he could see was Mossy, looking lost and hopeless on a rock beside the fall. Then he heard the penetrating call again, low down below his line of vision, and raising his head a little he peered down and saw three very small otter cubs near the foot of the fall, and a small sharp face like Monday’s peering round a rock at the top. Monday, it seemed, had climbed the fall, but the three cubs had been unable to follow her, while Mossy, as usual, had been unable to cope with the situation. Gavin hobbled back to the house to fetch his camera, but by the time he got back to the waterfall the young family had gone.

  Monday, with all her knowledge of human ways, was evidently determined that she and her cubs should remain free, and it was some years before Gavin was to see her again, though he was comforted by the fact that otters were again breeding at Camusfeàrna, and that Otter Island once more justified its name.

  But Sandaig was a strange place for Gavin now. Unable to walk, he acquired an almost sedentary, invalid habit of mind, and seldom left the house, except by boat. He sat at his desk in his lonely room and wrote for increasingly long hours every day, working simultaneously on The House of Elrig and the long-overdue Lords of the Atlas, and growing increasingly frustrated and ill-tempered as he did so. It was the beginning of a strange metamorphosis in his role at Sandaig and those of the staff who had been holding the fort during his absence – Jimmy Watt, Mike Cuddy and Philip Alpin.

  ‘Their solicitude and their desire to relieve me of every kind of task and responsibility, other than that of writing,’ he wrote later, ‘worked upon me psychologically to increase my helplessness and dependence; at first I felt myself to be a cypher in my own household, and by degrees that is what I became. They were the young and healthy, really and actually the masters; never had an adolescent rebellion so complete and satisfying a success with so small an expenditure of force.’

  * In fact the correct Gaelic name for Kyleakin Island is not Eilean Ban (White Island) but Eilean na Gillean (Island of Boys). The 1903 ordnance survey confu
sed it with the larger island to the north, properly called Eilean Ban, and the wrong names have stuck to the wrong islands ever since.

  THIRTY

  A pattern of islands

  Be not afear’d; the isle is full of noises,

  Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest

  In July 1964 Gavin celebrated his fiftieth birthday. At almost the same time he was finally divorced from Lavinia – the end of an experiment in living.

  Gavin was now seriously alone. He was also seriously broke. His literary agent cum business manager, Peter Janson-Smith, had warned him: ‘I was alarmed to learn that earnings this year are so far in the region of only £500. A major financial crisis would therefore seem to be in prospect.’ Michael Cuddy, who ran Gavin’s London office, confirmed the worst. ‘Money-wise we are in the most critical condition we have ever been,’ he wrote to Sandaig. ‘We can’t pay any accounts at present. Our bills total £3500 and there will be some pretty hefty legal ones coming. I can’t pay anybody. We must just sit it out until more money comes in and I have no idea when that will be.’ As a desperate measure to raise immediate cash Gavin sold his rare Maserati racing car and put the manuscript of Ring of Bright Water (which he had given to Peter Janson-Smith as a gift but then asked to be returned) up for sale at an auction of valuable autographs and manuscripts at Christie’s, hoping it might reach a reserve price of £1000; but no sale was forthcoming. The future began to look bleak.

  Gavin devoted all his energies to completing the two books which were now due – his childhood autobiography and his Moroccan history. But his restless and frustrated aspirations were directed elsewhere. His two lighthouse properties were for him symbols of the freedom of which he was now so painfully deprived at Sandaig. He had always been attracted to small islands as the ultimate refuges from the cares of the world and the menace of human kind, and he was ambitious to transform the lighthouse cottages on Isle Ornsay and Eilean Ban into stylish residences which he could let out to rich holiday-makers and perhaps retreat to himself one day. ‘Those lighthouses became my chief distraction,’ he was to recall, ‘because they seemed then to represent something emergent and hopeful in the general muddle of my personal situation.’ So the die was cast, and instead of selling them and buying some sensible house with a road to it, he committed himself to spending huge sums which he had not got in pursuit of another romantic dream.

  To achieve that dream Gavin enlisted the help of a couple whose acquaintance he had made at Glenelg the preceding spring. Richard and Joan Frere lived in a beautiful old house overlooking Loch Ness, some sixty miles away to the east. Joan was an interior designer and Richard was a mountaineer, an aspiring writer, and a man of many parts who was destined to play a crucial role in Gavin’s struggle for survival during the ensuing years. Born in 1922, the son of a country squire and great-nephew of a British Ambassador to Spain, from whom he inherited the title (which he did not use) of Marquis de la Union, Vizconde de la Alianza, he had spent his early boyhood on his father’s country estate in Norfolk and the rest of his life in the Scottish Highlands, whose hills, lochs and glens he considered his true home country. Like Gavin, then, he was a Highlander by adoption, and like Gavin too, he was the sworn enemy of the urban and industrial life, and a lifelong devotee of high hills and wild places. Imbued with a dogged determination to remain his own master, he had supported his growing family as best he could by a variety of abortive projects, including mushroom growing, poultry farming and timber extraction; and though these activities had served only to prove that in business terms he possessed what sailors call ‘negative buoyancy’, this had not dented his relish for an independent and unusual way of life.

  Richard had not been impressed by his first brief encounter with the famous author, about whom many wild rumours had been spread in the locality. ‘His manner was abrupt and uneasy,’ he recorded, ‘and consequently touched the edge of rudeness. I felt that here was a man who liked to prepare himself for meetings; chance encounters had no charm for him. Soon he made it clear that he wished to talk no more and stalked away in a kind of outrage, like the offended ghost of Hamlet’s father, to take shelter behind his spectacles in a quiet corner of the bar.’

  Richard never expected to meet this churlish-seeming writer again, and felt no great desire to do so. Even when chance brought him and his wife to Sandaig the following autumn he continued to view Gavin with some diffidence. Though he enjoyed the company of Jimmy Watt and Terry Nutkins, who seemed to hold Gavin in great affection and respect, he had grave reservations about Gavin’s famous otters, Edal and Teko, whom he regarded as rather slimy and untrustworthy.

  It was not until May 1963, when Gavin called at the Freres’ home at Drumnadrochit while en route from London to Sandaig, that Richard’s impressions changed. Gavin was in one of his ebullient moods. ‘How different he seemed from the forbidding character I fleetingly remembered,’ Richard recalled, ‘or from the sinister recluse of many a wild report … so charming, erudite and glittering with sophisticated wit.’ The droll tales he told of his adventures abroad had the couple alternately enthralled and doubled up with laughter.

  In April 1964 Gavin asked the Freres if they would be willing to undertake the renovation of his lighthouse properties, starting with Isle Ornsay. He could offer no immediate remuneration, he warned them, but by the time they began work on the Kyleakin Island house he was confident things would be different. The Freres saw the work as an exciting challenge. Joan welcomed the chance to engage her talents as an interior designer, while Richard regarded making and building as his greatest creative satisfaction, and in any case loved the Isle of Skye. A small private income from a family trust would tide them over the financial shortfall. So the work began.

  Richard first set eyes on the Isle Ornsay property in May. It was not a propitious encounter. The interior smelt of the grave, for the sea-damp was everywhere, the walls black and streaming, the woodwork dotted with a spreading fungus. Simply to paint such saturated walls was a challenge; to turn such a gloomy and rudimentary structure into the luxurious residence Gavin had in mind was a daunting proposition. The problems were not simply those of the builder’s and decorator’s arts. Isle Ornsay was a remote place oh the edge of a wild ocean, and simply to come and go presented a herculean struggle with the elements. At low tide the whole bay was an expanse of sand across which it was possible to walk to the lighthouse rock; but when the tide was flowing a boat was needed to make the crossing, and Richard knew nothing about boats and had no experience of the sea, or any love for it. Gavin arranged for one of the small boats from Sandaig to be left on the Skye shore at Isle Ornsay, but Richard viewed this craft with the greatest suspicion and distaste, and it did not reassure him that it was called a pram and looked better suited to a pond than the margin of one of the world’s great oceans.

  So his seafaring adventures began – and his lonely days and even lonelier nights on the lighthouse rock. ‘The Isle Ornsay lighthouse cottage in the early days was primordial, without a stick of furniture, and no light or fuel. And it was eerie beyond belief,’ Richard wrote; ‘All around me were new sounds, some known and understood, some as odd and mysterious as the dark shadowed island outside … My ears sang for hours with compulsive, nervous listening.’

  Soon Gavin’s – and Joan’s – ambitions for the refurbishment proliferated and soared, and Richard’s period of service was extended to accommodate them. By now he had acquired a modest mastery of the sea and progressed by stages to more ambitious voyages – even across the open sea to Sandaig or the Knoydart shore, or down the Skye coast to Kinloch. Such excursions were not without their hazards, which did not always owe their origin to nature and the elements. One hot, still, early evening in June, after being royally entertained in the customary Scots manner at Sandaig in the morning and at Kinloch in the afternoon, Richard fell asleep at the tiller. When he woke, the sun was several degrees lower in the sky and
the boat was steering a circular course. A great shout of applause reached his ears as he stirred and sat up. A crowd of people had been observing his wayward progress from the distant shore with tremendous glee. Richard waved and the applause redoubled.

  Gavin was not amused when Richard rang him on the newly installed telephone when he finally reached Isle Ornsay. In such moods, Richard noted, Gavin behaved very like his own (Richard’s) mother, creating a mood of pained martyrdom if he felt himself overlooked. Why hadn’t he telephoned earlier, Gavin asked him?

  ‘I couldn’t,’ Richard replied. ‘I was drunk in charge of a pram.’

  By the middle of June the conversion of the Isle Ornsay cottages into a single sumptuous four-bedroomed residence was almost complete. On 17 June a great collection of elegant furnishings was off-loaded on to the lighthouse jetty from the Glenelg ferry, which had been specially chartered for the occasion, and manhandled by a swarm of willing helpers (including Hamish Brown and a fresh party of boys from Braehead School) up the slope and into the cottage. The place now wore an air of opulence and good living. Precious antiques and foreign exotica filled every room, from the Chang Dynasty china bluebirds, Regency settee and 1788 Adam cabinet to the ivory-inlaid Berber musket and powder horn, ancient Sicilian amphora and Tibetan yak horn embossed with stones. Moroccan rugs, antique embroidered Greek waistcoats, a Chinese embroidery peacock, a framed eagle’s wing, nineteenth-century whaling harpoons, and paintings and drawings by John Gould, Gerald Wilde, Michael Ayrton and Gavin himself hung on the walls.