Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Gavin was sick with horror and anger at the cruel deaths of these fine animals. The youth who had allowed the Pyrenean dog to die at Sandaig was summarily sacked. The monthly allowance which Gavin had been sending to Ahmed’s family for several years past was abruptly terminated, and in spite of the young Moroccan’s pleas and imprecations Gavin refused to have any more to do with him ever again. Gavin was systematically cutting his links with the past and with what he called his ‘lost causes’ abroad. Even his twenty-five-year-old Sicilian friend and collaborator Giuseppe, whose progress from barefoot, impoverished street urchin to medical graduate had been almost entirely encouraged and funded by Gavin, felt the icy chill of his padrino’s aloof indifference.

  ‘Gavin is a truly remarkable man,’ he had written to a mutual friend, Penelope Biggs, ‘and though his spirit is like a sea in a storm, his heart and mind are those of a great man; to me he is like a father, and there is nothing in the world that would be sufficient to repay him for even a fraction of the kindness and generosity he has bestowed on me.’ But soon Giuseppe was fearful that something had changed: ‘I have a feeling that I have lost Gavin – per sempre, for ever.’ This saddened him profoundly, for Gavin had always represented for him a reality that encompassed a grand and life-enhancing vision. Penelope Biggs, who had taken over the funding of the young man’s medical training now that Gavin could no longer afford it, implored Gavin not to desert him now.

  ‘I know you must have many problems on hand, and can guess at much mental anguish and spiritual weariness behind it,’ she wrote. ‘But please Gavin, for your own deepest sake as well as his, don’t destroy this relationship. Material help, as you very well know, is only a fraction of what you have given him. He has rested in his faith in you, and what he believed you expected of him has given him the vision and the strength to tackle all that he has achieved. Don’t snatch it away from him now that he needs it most. So much of his future depends on you. Do you still believe that the Kingdom of God is within – that we each have a little drop of God in us – that love in the abstract is what every human mammal hungers for? Please Gavin, write to him.’

  There was only silence. In vain Gavin’s former protégé wrote and cabled his distant godfather, signalling wildly from the Mafia island on which he seemed marooned. He had passed his exams. He was sending some wine from his mother’s garden, hoping that ‘in drinking it you will taste Sicily and the thought of me will be closer to you’. He was hoping to stay with Penelope Biggs in London at Christmas. He hoped Gavin was managing to live in some way or another. ‘I feel your life is bitter,’ he wrote. ‘Life is hard, I know, but have courage.’

  Gavin needed more than courage; it seemed that nothing less than divine intervention could save him now.

  * Only Gavin’s article – a thoughtful piece about education – got into the first issue, along with contributions by Henry Moore, David Hockney, the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Le Carré and Vanessa Redgrave.

  THIRTY-THREE

  The curse

  I find no hint throughout the universe

  Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse;

  I find alone Necessity Supreme.

  JAMES THOMSON, ‘The City of Dreadful Night’

  There was no respite for Gavin from his long succession of afflictions. ‘It seemed that fortune could never come my way again,’ he was to write; ‘every piece of news from day to day was of delay, disaster, or death.’ In the company of his friends he would put a brave face on it, wryly and facetiously misquoting Isaiah to describe his present situation: ‘A man of sorrows, and not unacquainted with grief.’ What had he done to deserve all this, he wondered; what was the cause? A few days later he received an explanation of a kind from a most unexpected quarter.

  In the last week of July 1966 Gavin went to stay with his brother Aymer, who now lived almost permanently at his house in Katounia on the island of Euboea. Looking down on the pantile roof of Aymer’s house was the house of his nearest neighbour, a Cambridge historian, theologian and translator of modern Greek poetry by the name of Philip Sherrard. As it happened, Sherrard was one of the oldest and closest friends of Kathleen Raine, and by a fateful coincidence Kathleen arrived as a guest at this house the day before Gavin arrived at Aymer’s.

  Kathleen had met Gavin only once since their final quarrel at Sandaig six years before, and that was fleetingly – ‘for the duration of a heart-beat’ – outside a chemist’s shop near Paultons Square a few months after his marriage. That brief encounter was for her like a fragment from a world which no longer existed. Gavin’s departure from her life had been more final than anything she had ever experienced. She hoped for nothing more, wanted nothing. Her fate, she felt, had run its course.

  One day soon after her arrival she returned to the house to find a note: ‘My dear Kathleen – Today seems a day when Aymer has no particular plans, so if you are free to lunch with me at the taverna? Say meet about 1.15 there? Scribble assent or dissent below. Gavin.’

  ‘Heaven knows I did not seek him out,’ Kathleen wrote later; ‘would have avoided him had he so wished.’ So at the bottom of Gavin’s note she scribbled her apologies: ‘Too hot at lunch-time.’ But when she got to Aymer’s door to return the note she had a change of mind (or heart, perhaps) and crossed out what she had written, substituting: ‘Yes, as always. Love Kathleen.’

  So they met, under the olive trees outside the little taverna beside the mother-of-pearl sea that looked across to Mount Parnassus. ‘He looked as if he too had suffered,’ Kathleen remembered; ‘as if a dark shadow enveloped him.’ They talked all through the heat of noon, and Gavin told her in outline the story of his life during all the years they had been apart, and when at length they rose to leave. Kathleen gave him the manuscript of the autobiography she had come to Euboea to complete – her own version of those times – the story of her heart.

  Many times afterwards she would ask herself why she had thought to do such a thing. The book was not intended for publication – at least not while her parents were still alive. And it was not meant to be a mere chronicle of events but an attempt to understand, to somehow make bearable, her life – a life in which Gavin had played such an overwhelming part. ‘It is one thing to write such a record,’ Kathleen conceded; ‘quite another to read it.’ Gavin, seated in Aymer’s garden overlooking the sea and the mountains, with the sun parching and the cicadas screeching in the fig tree, read it – read it with a mounting sense of anger and dismay. One paragraph in particular leapt from the page – the story of the curse all those years ago.

  ‘She had put her hands upon the trunk of the rowan tree and with all her strength she had cursed me, saying, “Let him suffer here as I am suffering.” Then she left, up over the bleak hillside.

  ‘I put down the manuscript and stared at the coarse dark-green grass of the Greek lawn, thinking how exactly the past years had paralleled her blind desire for destruction.’

  The murder of Mij, the sudden savagery of Edal and Teko and the end of the Camusfeàrna idyll, the failure of his marriage, his injury in the motor accident, the financial catastrophe, the departure of Jimmy Watt and the impending banishment of the otters and closing down of Sandaig … It all made a kind of sense – deep down he had always believed in Kathleen’s strange occult powers. But what were the limits of the curse, where would it end?

  Gavin met Kathleen again in Katounia a few nights later. It was a night of a brilliant moon and they talked for hours. Only then, as Kathleen remembered, was the full and awful bitterness of the truth she had not perceived made known – Gavin’s truth.

  ‘Gavin was entirely to disown and deny any participation in a relationship I had thought mutual,’ she related afterwards; ‘“Outrageous” was the word he used. Canetti had been quite right when he had so solemnly assured me, “Gavin does not love you, Kathleen. Not in any sense of the word love; not at any time.’”

  Gavin was bleakly precise, pitiless and unforgiving, and asked Kathleen to name a s
ingle person close to her whom she had not destroyed. ‘What was your love for me but an infatuation?’ he demanded. ‘You are a destroyer, Kathleen.’

  He had been destroyed, that much he had known before he even set foot on this Greek island. Now he believed he knew how he had been destroyed, and why – and by whom. And as the bright moon rose behind Mount Kantili, he too became a destroyer, and by the end he had left Kathleen nothing from the past to which to cling. Her memories of her love had been like fixed stars in the firmament; but now, she wrote, ‘the stars fell from heaven’.

  ‘Parting,’ Kathleen recalled, ‘the moon cast our shadows on the spent dust; exhausted by hours of torment given and received, we kissed, at last, as long ago we would have kissed at parting, and Gavin said, “write something kind about me.”’

  A day or two later Kathleen pushed a letter through Gavin’s door:

  Dearest Gavin,

  I realise that the most painful thing for you is to be written about at all; and yet you might on reflection find in what I wrote some excuse for other thoughts – to have meant so much to another person is surely some cause for happiness?

  I had to write it now, to try to understand what a life is, to free myself, if you like. You yourself have, after all, been engaged in the same search for one’s lost self in a return to the past. I thought, in The House of Elrig, you had done just that – rediscovered your essential, radical self, and the soul’s radical innocence, in the child you described …

  As to friendship – yes, Gavin, I remember. I said to you, I know, that our relationship was ‘not friendship’, and that love cannot be turned into friendship. Very different in kind. I thought it was mutual Platonic, or spiritual, love, of a kind; it seems that I was altogether mistaken in thinking it in any way mutual …

  If I failed you it was for much deeper reasons; and we must both be judged by the only Judge; who is, as you long ago said to me, Love. Indeed if I were to forget all else you ever said to me I should remember your saying, ‘God is love’.

  But why go on. I think we must both see that for two elderly and eminent writers to go on as we did the other evening has indeed its comic side.

  I hope perhaps to see you before you go –?

  With love, Kathleen.

  It was not until the end of August that Gavin finally returned to Sandaig, after an absence of nearly nine months. He found the place much changed. Only Beryl Borders and her daughter were there now, and Gavin was the only male. The number of dogs had recently been reduced somewhat, following allegations that some of them had been responsible for a series of depredations among the sheep on the neighbouring hirsels; but after a masterly feat of detective work on Gavin’s part the allegations were found to be false, and the dog population at Sandaig was restored to its former level.

  It was a strange life – the oddest period, perhaps, in the entire Camusfeàrna saga. Off and on for four months Gavin lived cheek by jowl with Beryl inside the house, rarely going out and only occasionally leaving Sandaig. Not since his early childhood at Elrig, probably, had he lived for such a long unbroken stretch in the company of another human being. And yet, in a curious way, it worked out. Gavin was not averse to the little comforts of life that living with a kindly and undemanding woman could bring, and in spite of the bedlam caused by the hordes of pets with which he was surrounded he found life less stressful at Sandaig than it had been in the recent past. ‘I found him really very easy to live with,’ Beryl recalled of that period. ‘But he used to have blow-outs. Once a week, perhaps because of sexual frustration, he would go round the house complaining about everything. He didn’t drink when I was there – only if a visitor was coming, when he’d drink half a bottle of whisky to help him face up to it.’ As for Beryl, she was very fond of Gavin, and held him in great respect and affection. She was only too willing to help him in any way she could, for had he not provided her with a port in a storm?

  Meanwhile the menagerie continued to increase. One sunny day in late September Gavin decided to take the Polar Star out for a run to the lighthouse islands off Isle Ornsay and Kyleakin, returning later in the day (minus the starboard propeller) with a hundredweight of mackerel he had caught for the otters, a flightless Fulmar petrel he had rescued from the sea, and a helpless Manx shearwater that had been blown ashore on Sandaig beach in the recent gales. The two birds, housed in the bathroom amid piles of seaweed, added to the general tumult of the Sandaig bestiary, and it began to seem that there were so many creatures in and about the house that it was almost impossible to move. ‘Any open door,’ wrote Gavin, ‘was an automatic invitation to a vast and vocal avalanche of dogs, of all sizes and shapes, but with patently conflicting desires. The fantastic fertility of the household was crystallised for me by the discovery one day, previously unknown to anyone, of a litter of weaned kittens living in the loft above the lobby.’

  It was difficult to get down to any useful writing in such a household, and apart from a few reviews for the Observer and an occasional American newspaper Gavin did not try. On 24 October 1966 Lords of the Atlas, Gavin’s long-gestated history of the rise and fall of the cruel and ambitious House of Glaoua – from obscure mountain faction to power-brokers of the nation and back again – was finally published after six years of intermittent, tortuous and extremely expensive labour. In spite of his publisher’s suspicions to the contrary, the book was largely a work of original research, its sources – unpublished notes, anonymous verbal communications, fragmentary references, long-buried documents from the early days of the French imperium – so scattered that putting them together as a continuous narrative was (as Gavin put it) ‘like collecting and assembling widely dispersed pieces of a jigsaw puzzle’. This was one reason it had taken so long to unravel the full story and had entailed so many visits to Morocco – this and what Gavin called ‘the infinite procrastination of Moors’. The time, effort and travel the book had involved far exceeded the advances and royalties Gavin ever received for it – the payments he had made to one informant, the Glaoui’s former secretary Si Mohammed el-Khizzioui, alone exceeded the publisher’s advance. And delving into such an arcane and secret history in such a closed, medieval and culturally alien society proved even more difficult and time-consuming than primary research does at the best of times. That Gavin achieved his aim is a tribute to his powers of persuasion, his gift for intrigue and arras diplomacy, his stamina and professionalism. The result is a work that is still, a quarter of a century later, required reading for any informed visitor to Morocco.

  Longmans congratulated Gavin on the ‘blazing press’ he received for the book. The reviewers heaped praise on it, making nonsense of the publisher’s preliminary report. ‘In telling the story of El Glaoui,’ Nigel Dennis wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Mr Maxwell has written his best book. It is a waste of time to praise it with superlatives … the year has not produced a better book. Both subject and writer equally deserve our thanks and attention.’ Geoffrey Moorhouse, in his Introduction to a later paperback edition, was no less fulsome. The book, he wrote, ‘combined scholarship with a flair for the imaginatively written word. To call it a travel book is as inadequate as calling a camel a quadruped.’ But it was not, he felt, exactly a pleasant book. The barbarity of the régime it described was horrific by the standards of any age. Pretenders to power, real or imagined, were thrown to the lions or flayed alive, while. T’hami El Glaoui, Pasha of Marrakesh, the most commanding figure in the story, had mounted the severed heads of his enemies outside his gates not long before he attended the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. ‘Repulsive as much of it is,’ wrote Moorhouse, ‘the book is only made readable by Gavin Maxwell’s narrative skill. Now there’s your writer’s writer at work: perfectly balanced, rhythmical, concise, feeling.’

  Fear of a rash of libel suits had precluded publication of the book in France, and even in Britain it was withdrawn from circulation for a while when it was discovered that Gavin had wrongly called an American Professor of Islamic and North A
frican Studies ‘a European Jew’, and inadvertently described the wife of a member of the Glaoui family as the daughter of Edward G. Robinson. In Morocco, not surprisingly, the book was banned as being contrary to the public interest, and not even Si Mohammed el-Khizzioui, who had been Gavin’s go-between in Marrakesh, ever received a copy. But at least the interminable labour was over, and Gavin was free to turn to something new, though exactly what he did not really know. ‘I never want to do another researched book again,’ he confided to me at this time, ‘ – ever!’ At the beginning of November he put a few tentative ideas to Michael Hoare at Longmans – a much more personal book about Morocco (under the title of, say, Moroccan Journeys), or a spell with Gavin Young in Vietnam.

  But it was his animals that were uppermost in Gavin’s mind. The otters’ move to Aberdeen Zoo had been put back several times but was now fixed for the end of November. ‘After which,’ Gavin wrote to Constance McNab, ‘God knows what!’ Inevitably the press got wind of the news. ‘GAVIN MAXWELL SENDING OTTERS TO ZOO’ proclaimed a Daily Telegraph headline. ‘The otters’ home, Sandaig island, near Skye, is becoming too expensive to run. Everything including the otters’ food, has to be brought long distances. The lease of Sandaig, which is owned by Lord Dulverton and rented for £1 a year, has another seven years to run. Mr Maxwell is also selling, for a total of £27,000, two islands off Skye which he bought three years ago.’

  On hearing about Edal’s impending departure, her original foster-parents, Malcolm and Paula Macdonald, who more than eight years ago had handed their young Nigerian otter cub over to Gavin after their chance encounter in Kyle of Lochalsh, arrived at Sandaig to ask for their otter back. They had given Edal to Gavin when they had been in no position to look after her; now the position was reversed, and they were anxious she should not have to spend her last years behind bars. But at an emotional meeting Gavin had turned their request down flat, and after some heated words the couple left the house, with Paula in tears and the old friendship in ruins.