Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  And not only that. Jimmy was the practical overseer of the place; it was he who kept this complex, vulnerable establishment, with all its buildings and boats and vehicles and human and animal inhabitants, in running order through every crisis. Jimmy was indispensable to Sandaig, and Gavin used every possible means to persuade him to stay. A protracted emotional tug-of-war ensued that paralleled the financial struggle. When Richard met Gavin a week or two later he seemed to have aged ten years. ‘My God, Richard, I’m exhausted,’ he said; ‘Keeping up this front is hell.’

  At the beginning of December Gavin finally delivered the manuscript of Lords of the Atlas to his publishers – six years after he had contracted for it. The reader’s report was not encouraging. Anyone expecting ‘a new Gavin Maxwell’, the reader claimed, would be doomed to disappointment. The book was a long one and the story was complicated and confusing:

  I hardly know what to say about this book. I simply couldn’t grasp it. Gavin only writes well when he is describing what he has seen and experienced. He has seen and experienced none of this book with the exception of a marvellous first chapter when he describes the great unfinished Glaoui castle of Telouet at more than eight thousand feet in the High Atlas. There is, furthermore, one aspect of the whole thing that really worries me. Where on earth did he get all this material from? I can’t imagine him ferreting about in French military archives. My heart sank when I read in the Author’s Foreword that Gavin has borrowed heavily from Morocco That Was by the late Walter Harris (the Times correspondent in Morocco before 1900). In point of fact, he has quoted practically the whole of it! For myself, I can hardly detect the tone of Gavin’s voice except in the first chapter.

  This was one man’s view, and it was wide of the mark. Subliminally, perhaps, Longman’s reader was rueing the fact that Lords of the Atlas was not a kind of sub-Saharan Ring of Bright Water. But there were to be many readers who, judging the poetic lyricism of Ring too rich and cloying for a modern palate, found the leaner, sparer story-telling virtues of the Moroccan book more to their taste, and would even vote it Gavin’s finest work. For Gavin’s baroque, cruel tale of Moorish despotism handled a complex, highly arcane saga in such a measured and masterly way that it was destined to become a classic of its kind, an outstanding account of the Arab world by a Western writer.

  So Christmas approached, and with it a period of still airs and calm seas. The snow fell on the hills and a kind of peace descended on that sad, dejected house within the ring of bright water. At home with his family on New Year’s Eve, Richard Frere waited for the chimes of Big Ben that ushered in 1966, then began to telephone his greetings to absent friends. His good cheer was quickly dashed when he came to call Gavin. ‘Never,’ he was to write, ‘had there been a man to knock the sun out of the sky so quickly.’ Gavin, it seemed, was alone, for Jimmy was out celebrating in the village. Worse, Gavin was now sure Jimmy would leave Sandaig when he himself got back from his next winter foray to North Africa. ‘I should not blame him,’ he said. ‘I suppose he must have a life of his own.’ Perhaps Richard ought to take over the company?

  After he put the phone down Gavin made a call to Beryl Borders, the young woman who had once typed his manuscripts in London and had been on hand to console him after the death of Mij. For personal reasons (she was in the middle of a marital break-up), Beryl was now looking for a temporary asylum for herself and her pets. Gavin told her that in a few days’ time he would be leaving Sandaig and going abroad, and invited her to move in at any time after that, for as long as she liked.

  Late on that same New Year’s Eve, far away in Sicily, Gavin’s friend and collaborator Giuseppe sat writing a desperate letter as he waited for the chimes of midnight in his lonely room in Salvatore Giuliano’s mountain village of Montelepre. Three months ago their mutual friend and colleague Danilo Dolci had openly accused Bernardo Mattarella, Minister for Foreign Trade in the Italian Government, of being a member of the Sicilian Mafia. This was the same Mattarella who had brought criminal libel charges against Gavin after the same accusation had been made in God Protect Me from My Friends. Now Mattarella was bringing Dolci to trial in Palermo on the same charge. As one of Dolci’s closest aides in his crusade against poverty and violence in rural Sicily, Giuseppe knew that now he too was at the mercy of ‘the friends’ of ‘The Friend’, and he desperately needed to have word from his padrino – the one close ally and protector he could trust, who would understand and give him the strength and courage to face his perilous future.

  ‘I’ve got used to feeling you very close to me in the last few days,’ Giuseppe wrote, ‘but even though you’ve always been present in spirit, not to have any word from you is a terrible thing for me … I am alone in the house here thinking about you as I never have before. In a few minutes I will drink a glass of wine to you and to destiny …

  ‘I’m going to be here day after day waiting for some word from you, because all the rest, believe me padrino, doesn’t have the slightest importance. Don’t forget – I want to hear from you one way or another as soon as possible. I trust you. Tanti baci. Your godson.’

  To this cry in the dark Giuseppe received no reply from a padrino as embattled, impoverished and benighted as he.

  ‘You are doomed to live alone for ever,’ a Siamese fortune-teller in Marrakesh had once warned Gavin, ‘and like the Wandering Jew to wander and travel until you die.’ This dire prediction, coming soon after the end of his honeymoon with Lavinia, had given him pause for thought at the time. Now it seemed the omen was coming true. For during the next two years Gavin was indeed to live a rootless and footloose existence – a nomadic life that was partly the consequence of circumstance and partly of the hopelessness and emptiness that now began to seize his inner being.

  For some time Gavin had been planning a trip with his friend Raef Payne to Rewalsar, 150 miles north of the Indian hill town of Simla, where a refugee settlement had been established for Tibetans fleeing the Chinese occupation of their country. Gavin hoped that he might be able to collect material for a new book from interviews with the exiled Tibetans, a sociological study of the alienated and deprived rather along the lines of The Ten Pains of Death. When these plans fizzled out – at the end of the year the Tibetans were moved on to another camp further south, and by then Gavin couldn’t afford the trip anyway – he decided to cut his losses and return to Morocco, ostensibly to undertake further research, but in reality to escape from the mess of his collapsing life at home.

  For two months he wandered about the mountains and the desert south of the country with Raef Payne, his Berber linguist friend Ahmed, and a mule-driver from the Sous by the name of Boujamar. Compared with previous visits Gavin was desperately short of funds. ‘Money melts,’ he wrote to Jimmy Watt. ‘How is the Treasury (may Allah fill it!)? As you see, I’m doing my best NOT TO WORRY – but I do rather dread my return and the bankruptcy proceedings … It’s an odd feeling not having anything definite to do, and it’s difficult to get used to. In a quiet way I fuss about eider islands and lighthouses and debts and mortgages and whether this year will be as awful as the last one, but it all seems a long way away – which, as a matter of fact, it is.’

  From time to time Gavin cabled his literary agent, Peter Janson-Smith, for more money. But his friends rallied round, loaned him cash, bought him drinks, laid out a table for him. At a restaurant in Asni in the High Atlas, he wrote, ‘Raef and I had an enormous meal, frogs and all, plus six bloody Marys and wine and coffee and cognac, and when I asked the waiter for the bill he said his instructions were that we were guests of the house … I can’t move a muscle without some Englishman whom I haven’t seen for twenty years coming up and saying “Gavin!” – it’s really very odd. However, Wilfred Thesiger and his fantastic eighty-six-year-old mother arrive at the Hotel Tazi this evening …’

  Thesiger-style, Gavin travelled with a well-stocked chest of medicines which he dispensed to the sick in the remote mountain villages. ‘The drugs in my medicine chest are
nothing short of miraculous,’ he wrote to Jimmy Watt:

  At Telouet the superbly beautiful eleven-year-old daughter of the Mokhazhi [headman] had had a raging fever for fifteen days and seemed to be at the edge of death, but with a course of injections was cured after five days as we proceeded on our philanthropic way. Likewise Ahmed’s father, with one ball the size of a goose egg, and René Bertrand’s wife, shrunk to the size of a monkey. This same Mokhazhi at Telouet has an indescribably beautiful white Arab stallion, trained to a point at which it can be galloped bareback by a stranger, which he wants to sell because he isn’t given enough allowance to feed it as he wants. It used to earn big money hired to film companies and ridden by female film stars who had never been on a horse before. I feel I would pay that money just to look at it. It ought to come to England.

  In a fit of mental aberration – or a gesture of defiance or romantic indulgence – Gavin bought the animal, cabling his long-suffering agent Peter Janson-Smith: ‘Have bought white Arab stallion. Please send £500.’ Gavin couldn’t afford it, he could barely justify it – but, in spite of his desperate financial circumstances, he had to have it, and he formed the idea of breeding a race of wonderful white Arab horses at Sandaig. He could see no other way of saving this beautiful animal from the slow death by cruelty and neglect which awaited any creature that had outlived its usefulness in North Africa. He was no horseman, but the horse captivated him; it could rear and dance at command, it loved human beings for their own sake, and he dearly wished to have it in Britain with him. Above all, perhaps, he identified with the stallion, which was for him a potent symbol – a proud animal in exactly the same predicament as he found himself to be. Now the knight errant had his horse, the White Knight had his white charger – even if he had next to nothing else.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Bitter spring

  To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs:

  To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,

  To spend, to give, to want, to be undone.

  EDMUND SPENSER, ‘Mother Hubbard’s Tale’

  Gavin returned to London and reality in the middle of April 1966. He was not glad to be back. His debts had grown in his absence, and so had the number of creditors. Many of them had run out of patience, and some had resorted to the law. The mortgages on the lighthouse properties, on which he had pinned his hopes of salvation, had failed to materialise, for their island location did not recommend them to mortgagers. Now there seemed no alternative but to send Edal and Teko to a zoo, close down Sandaig, and in extremis sell off one (if not both) of the lighthouses. Two employees who were meant to have prepared Eider Island for the eider duck experiment under the nominal direction of Jimmy Watt quit their jobs, leaving the project high and dry. Then on 21 May the surviving old hands, Jimmy Watt and Michael Cuddy, finally set off into the wide world beyond the confining horizon of Gavin’s domain.

  ‘I left perfectly amicably,’ Jimmy recalled of that decisive moment:

  I didn’t even want to go. But I felt I couldn’t live under his shadow for ever. He had been my guru – my father, if you like – and I owed everything to him, almost. If you needed help there was no finer person to turn to – he gave all his time and energy to what you had to say. He gave a lot of himself – the letters written late at night, the long conversations about everything under the sun, the donations to people and causes in need. He laid himself on the line, took a lot of risks, made himself vulnerable – and some people took advantage of him because of that, made him look a fool. Of course, he wasn’t an easy person and there were times when living at Sandaig was very fraught. Gavin could be better than the best of fathers, worse than the worst of dictators. If he was in one of his moods everyone got very jumpy and it was impossible to relax. It was much easier when he wasn’t there – one got up earlier, got more done. It was his energy that drew people to him, but some people couldn’t cope with a person composed of opposites like Gavin – you never knew which opposite you’d get next.

  Gavin wrote a final envoi to Jimmy, whom he regarded as a son, before the young man turned his back on the house and the burn and the sea for the last time as an employee: ‘It’s 2 a.m., which is the first moment I’ve had to write to you … You’ve kept this place going for a long time, often in very difficult circumstances. I’m very grateful to you for what you’ve done for this place and for me, over a long time. I think you are a superlative person, and will always think so, because it’s true. Bless your heart; and my love to you and my absolute wish for your happiness, no matter what it might be.’ Never spend your capital, he advised the departing twenty-one-year-old; never burn your boats; never hesitate to make use of people to help you on your way; and never forget that mutual dependence is the basis of human existence. ‘All human relationships are built on sand,’ Gavin wearily confided to a friend at this time. Desolate and hurt, he hardened his heart and did his best to forget everything but the bitter struggle to survive.

  Gavin stayed on in London in apocalyptic mood, not improved by the news from Sicily. He had finally written to Giuseppe shortly after his return from Morocco, giving him news of his recent setbacks and warning him that he could no longer afford to fund his young protégé’s medical studies as he had done up to now (£600 in the last year alone).

  ‘Finalmente!!!!!!!!!! At last!’ The young Sicilian was overjoyed to hear from his padrino for the first time in a year. He sent news of Dolci, who had begun a week of fasting in Castellammare and wanted Gavin to join him for a few days: ‘Dolci said, “But where is Maxwell? Isn’t he in England?” and I replied, “Maxwell, Maxwell? I’ve heard next to nothing for a year!”’ Dolci was going to call Giuseppe as a witness in his trial, at which he would speak out publicly against the Mafia in their own heartland. ‘I will have to testify,’ Giuseppe advised Gavin, ‘that when you were in Castellammare in 1954 we found a note with a Mafia death threat in your car. Do you remember? This is important to Dolci. Certainly it may be dangerous for me but I consider it a duty to help him against the Minister. I am definitely under surveillance here – everyone knows I’m working for Dolci, but don’t worry, I’m keeping my eyes open.’ To complicate life still further, Giuseppe had important exams to sit at the end of the month, and more in June, before he qualified as a doctor in the autumn. Two weeks later he wrote again with further news. Mattarella was no longer a Minister, and a committee of the Italian Parliament was now investigating him. Many of his Mafiosi friends were in prison and Giuseppe had given the names of other Mafia supporters from his area, so now he would probably be summoned for questioning before the Anti-Mafia Commission:

  Well, padrino, I hope nothing bad happens to me, but I believe in truth and justice and I hope that many will follow my little example – then (who knows?) things may improve in Sicily. Oh how I wish the world knew! I know all this is dangerous, but it is necessary. In the end I learned something from you. I’m afraid of not being strong enough. You are strong, that’s for sure – I’d like to have some of your courage, I’d feel safer. If something happens to me now, now you know everything and I hope I am worthy of everything you have done for me.

  Greetings from my mother, she always asks after you. I am afraid for her. She doesn’t know anything at all, but she is ill and if she knew it would distress her deeply. My fiancée knows and she is very frightened.

  In the event, Danilo Dolci was found guilty of libelling Mattarella and sentenced to a long term of imprisonment. In a peculiarly Italian way, however, the sentence was ‘cancelled’, for it would have been too scandalous for the State to have punished Dolci for saying openly something that everyone knew. Mattarella died four years later.

  There was once a time when the reverberations of these urgent struggles in far-off countries would have preoccupied Gavin intensely. Now he felt unable to respond to their distant echoes, for his energies were confined to the arena of his own personal struggle to survive. In his desperate state of mind he felt the same about the places in his life a
s he did about the people – he wanted to disburden himself of all the sad, dark memories of the past and to walk off over the desert horizon alone.

  Gavin’s friends were saddened by his situation but did not know how they could help him. ‘I have severe financial problems of my own,’ Robin McEwen wrote from Marchmont, his stately home in the Scottish Borders, ‘which does not prevent my appreciating the depths of the tragedy which requires you to sell the Islands and leave Sandaig. I am truly sorry about it all.’ Raef Payne echoed this sentiment: ‘When I think back to the delight you used to take in the birds and the shells and the burn and the sea wrack,’ he wrote to Gavin, ‘– well, the loss seems a tragic one.’ Constance McNab wrote: ‘I do not like to picture you alone in that room. It will be good when you move and make a home again. But never think of yourself alone, do not fear it. As long as I can creep you have only to say and I am there, and my home is yours. I’ll feed you too. In any case we are always alone … I would like you to come to a point where you can sit in an empty room “as in the presence of an honoured guest” as one Zen master puts it. Be still … You are brave to go on speaking, writing. I dare say one has to. But you are brave all the same.’ And a few days later she added: ‘You are feeling your way back. But unless you come to greater understanding, you will break again. Your way back is through new love, through healing the sick, rescuing animals, creating beauty, through not projecting sterile suffering, through accepting yourself. Nothing can be bent out of shape without disaster. There is only metanoia, metamorphosis, new life.’