Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  By now Andrew had got his breath back, and with remarkable presence of mind had dashed into Gavin’s room, grabbed the manuscript of Raven Seek Thy Brother and carried it out to safety. Outside the front door they briefly conferred. The otters had to be rescued first; after that they would salvage what they could from the house. But which otter should they rescue first? It seemed Teko would be in gravest danger, for his little shed was right next to the main wall of the house, and a light south-westerly wind was blowing the flames in his direction and away from Edal’s. As they rushed round to Teko’s stockaded quarters they were astonished to see that the whole of the roof was on fire and tongues of flame were leaping out between the cracking slates; and as they stood there, transfixed by the sight of this galloping conflagration, a mass of burning debris came crashing down the stairs and sealed off the main entrance to the house.

  Through all the smoke and bedlam Teko had been sleeping peacefully. Andrew reached in, snatched the startled otter from his blanket-covered lorry tyre, slung him over his shoulder, rushed across the muddy field to Raef’s cottage and threw him in through the door. Teko was safe, but what of Edal? Gavin ran round to the wooden annexe at the other end of the house. Because there was no light other than the guttering flicker of the fire in the main building it was hard to tell whether Edal was still in her quarters or not, but the hatch to her outside paddock was open, so it seemed reasonable to assume she was in no danger.

  Gavin returned to the front of the house to find Andrew, who had displayed great courage and foresight throughout this catastrophe, wrestling with the gun case that was bolted to the wall opposite the main entrance. Tug and twist as he might, Andrew could not move the case, so he smashed the glass with his elbow and began to pass the guns out one by one, severely gashing his hand as he did so. Before he had got all the guns out Gavin shouted: ‘Andrew, for God’s sake come out of there now! Look, the ammunition –!’

  Over five hundred rounds of ammunition, from small calibre .22 to heavy calibre .350 magnum, had tumbled out of the gun case into the red-hot debris at the foot of the stairs. Andrew took one look and dashed out of the door, leaving behind two barrels, a Winchester rifle and Gavin’s Colt pistol from SOE days. Almost immediately the ammunition began to explode, and all around the burning house the sound of gunfire rattled away, as if the place were a hotly fought ambuscade in some remote frontier war. The building was by now far gone. The roof was falling in and flames roaring out of the upstairs windows. The living room was an inferno and the air howled as it rushed in through the door and broken windows to feed the hungry flames.

  Andrew cried out to Gavin: ‘The long room is on fire!’

  ‘And Edal?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

  Andrew had climbed in through a window, but the room was black with thick, tarry smoke and he couldn’t even open his eyes. He tried another window, next to Edal’s compartment, but it was too hot to touch.

  The fire had burst through the side door and set the annexe alight. The roof-felt was melting and the tar was running down like black treacle to fill the room with thick, poisonous smoke. If Edal was still in that room it was hardly possible she could be alive. Even if she had been alive, she could not have survived the next phase of the remorseless destruction of the house, for suddenly the gas ignited, the long room blew up, the walls fell down and the roof caved in. Sweeping on into the workshop, the flames ignited the paint tins, petrol cans and Calor-gas cylinders stored inside, which detonated like cannon fire as the roof and the upper floor of the house collapsed into the cauldron below. A bright glare momentarily lit up the trees along the burn and on the slopes above the dying house, and two muffled explosions echoed between the islands and the hills like a salute of guns.

  It was all over. The house had gone. Its contents, including virtually everything Gavin possessed in the world, had been destroyed. Edal was nowhere to be found. In the bitter cold of the winter night Gavin sat shocked and shivering inside the Polar Star on its cradle overlooking the bay. Up on the hill Andrew, shoeless and half-clad, was racing towards Tormor to raise the alarm. The dawn was a long time coming, and by then Camusfeàrna was far beyond help or redemption.

  * * *

  Richard Frere was asleep at home when the telephone woke him at six on the morning of Sunday 21 January. Police Constable Nairne at Glenelg gave him the bleak news. The house at Sandaig had been burned to the ground, he said. Gavin and Andrew were alive but the otter Edal was believed to be dead. Aghast, Richard made a quick check in his office and confirmed the worst. The contents of the house were uninsured – the insurance premiums had not been paid for two years. Grieving and guilt-stricken, Richard set off on the hour-long drive to Sandaig.

  A fire-engine, unable to negotiate the rough track down to Sandaig, stood parked and abandoned at Tormor. Richard drove the Land Rover slowly down the treacherous trail towards the house, and at the last bluff overlooking the bay and the field paused to look down at the grim scene below. Smoke still poured out of the gutted house, filling the air with an acrid blue haze that made his eyes water. The house, still glowing, was almost totally destroyed, with only the outside walls standing. Of the wooden annexe that had housed Edal only charred fragments remained. All around the grass had been scorched yellow by the intense heat of the flames.

  Richard drove down to the field in front of the burnt-out house. Firemen were prodding about amongst the embers looking for clues to the cause of the fire and for anything that could be salvaged. There was very little evidence of either. The destruction was total. The bedrooms, staircase, study, living room and kitchen no longer existed. A few scorched and buckled household appliances like the cooker and refrigerator still stood amid the debris, along with a jumble of water tanks and cylinders that had fallen through from the upper floor, much of it still red-hot. Everything made of wood or paper had vanished utterly, including not only the furniture and the pitch-pine panelling of the walls, but the whole of Gavin’s precious library and that portion of his archives that had been stored in his study, along with the trophies and mementos of a lifetime of travel and adventure.

  Richard found Gavin in the Polar Star, ‘looking,’ he wrote later, ‘like a plant blasted by frost, black and drooping.’ The Glenelg doctor had already given him a heavy sedative, and at first his speech was rambling and incoherent. He asked Richard if he could find it in his heart to bury Edal, and when Richard asked where, Gavin pointed to the rowan tree near the house. ‘Later we shall do her some justice,’ he muttered in a barely audible voice.

  Richard had difficulty finding Edal’s body in the burnt-out ruins of her quarters, where she had been trapped and killed by the flames. Her charred little cadaver had been so shrunk by the fire that Richard could carry her in the cups of his hands. He dug a shallow hole beneath the rowan, laid Edal in it and marked the spot with a stone. Then he remembered that this was the same tree upon which Gavin had once been cursed.

  Gavin had begun to tremble uncontrollably with the cold and shock, and Richard took him to the Land Rover and ran the engine to warm him up with the heater. With Edal buried, Gavin seemed to accept that Camusfeàrna was gone for ever.

  Andrew returned in the dinghy at about this time. His hand was heavily bandaged and he was near to exhaustion, but his thoughts were only for the welfare of Gavin and Teko. Teko was still locked up in Raef’s croft, but his quarters had not been damaged – with hindsight it was clear that it was Edal that should have been rescued first – and Andrew was able to return the surviving otter to his old home.

  Throughout the morning the press straggled down the hill to report the destruction of Camusfeàrna. For the most part they kept a tactful, considerate distance and were content simply to print the short statement prepared by Gavin. The police were less obliging. Constable Nairne had been a model of kindness, but his superior officer felt duty-bound to thoroughly investigate the disaster and eliminate all suspicious circumstances from his enquiries.
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  ‘Mr Maxwell,’ he asked Gavin at the conclusion of a plain-speaking interview, ‘did you set fire to the house yourself?’

  This was too much for Gavin, and too much for Richard too. He took the detective to one side. He was wrong to suspect an insurance swindle, he informed him. The building was not Gavin’s and the contents were not insured.

  The short grey winter day began to fade. One after the other the reporters, firemen and police began to leave the scene, trudging wearily up the hill. Such was Gavin’s state of shock that at first he refused to make use of Raef Payne’s croft without Raef’s permission, and only consented to do so when Richard managed to contact Raef by telephone and received his whole-hearted assurance that they must ‘use anything, everything’, for as long as it was wanted. Gavin, Richard and Andrew took refuge in the one-roomed croft. None of them was hungry, but they forced down a basic meal and helped themselves to restorative measures of Raef’s Scotch. So long as Sandaig was Teko’s home both Gavin and Andrew felt obliged to struggle on there, for after all that had happened it would have been cruel indeed for one to leave the other in solitary wretchedness. Late in the evening Richard decided to return home. He did not wish to intrude on the private grief of the survivors or endure the gloom that would succeed it. Nor could he look Gavin in the face while he was still consumed by guilt over the insurance fiasco.

  Richard walked over to the smoking ruin in whose ravaged heart the fire still glowed bright. ‘Somewhere away to the north there was a cry like an otter’s. Was it Mossy or Monday, perhaps, crying from some holt of their choosing in the dark river’s bank? I could see the rowan tree in the glow and I walked over to it, found the stone and rested both my hands upon it, staying there a while until the cold and a sense of desolating loneliness sent me back to the Land Rover and the long road home.’

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The White Island

  I met my love in Avalon

  Beside the bay;

  I left my heart in Avalon

  And sailed away.

  AL JOLSON SONG

  The croft was small, dark and rudimentary – a single long room, with a fireplace at one end, two small windows like embrasures in a castle wall, a low door, a few sticks of rudimentary furniture, and an impressive array of sea gear and wet-weather kit hanging from the rafters. In the days when a crofting community had tried to wrest a living from the soil at Sandaig, the croft had been lived in by an old lady, who was driven out by an abnormally high tide. Later it had been the schoolroom, and the initials of those long-dispersed children who had won the dour struggle for literacy in that isolated settlement could still be seen chiselled into the wooden beams and window-surrounds inside. There was no sanitation, no hot water for baths, no privacy, but lots of mice.

  The place was not entirely without its virtues. Situated almost on the beach at the southern end of the little bay, but sheltered from all but the worst of the weather by the wooded cliff in whose lee it crouched, it looked out over a marvellous panorama of dunes, islands, sea and mountains, from the alder-arched ring of the burn to the distant profile of Eigg, a slab along the horizon of the Hebridean Sea. Nor was the croft without a modicum of comforts. For some years the local laird had leased the building to Raef Payne as a holiday home, and over a period of time Raef had restored it from its ruinous condition, installed electricity, and generally made it weatherproof and habitable for short stays. Here Gavin and Andrew, in a state of great austerity and simplicity, and with few personal possessions, settled down to brave the winter. A month after the fire, Gavin wrote a letter of sad reflection to Raef’s mother, an old friend:

  Thank you so very much for writing. What can one say – what can you say – what can anyone say? A dream has died at the age of 20 – a ripe old age for a dream. I think I am still suffering from shock – I didn’t know it could last so long. Perhaps it lasts longer the older one grows and the older the dream was. The charred ruins of the house confront one every time one opens this door. Sometimes they seem negative, sometimes they produce vomiting; one has no warning in advance and the effect doesn’t seem to wear off. Morale, I’m afraid, is low for the moment …

  How long ago everything seems – at the same time how close at hand … the ducks and the flapjacks and all the awful understandings and misunderstandings and drunken Bentleys and hawthorn-torn shirts. And deaths, human and animal. And the idea that one was somehow going to influence the world (I suppose I have, in a way).

  Gavin told me later: ‘It just seemed to me that everything had gone with Sandaig and that I owned literally nothing. Andrew and I started off, I suppose you might say, as beggars. We had escaped from the fire with nothing but a pair of trousers each – we hadn’t got shoes or socks, we hadn’t got shirts, we hadn’t got pullovers. The world seemed a complete dead end. There was nothing more to do – it was over.’

  During the week following the fire Richard Frere made several visits with a host of essential items. Then extra succour came from an unexpected quarter. Friends and well-wishers all over the world soon learned of Gavin’s plight – I heard the news myself over the BBC World Service while staying on an RAF fighter base in Singapore. Before long they began to send parcels of food, clothing and home comforts, from books, indoor games, a record player and a typewriter to socks, pullovers and balaclavas. The Earl of Dalhousie sent a three-piece Harris tweed suit, Tony Dunlop donated a large pile of blankets, and a five-year-old boy in Cornwall posted a tin of sardines with a note on the lid which read: ‘Thes is for Teko case hees hungry.’ Gavin’s psychiatrist, Dr Ellis Stungo, sent a note: ‘I always had a fear you would set yourself alight and well recall an evening in London when you used your well-filled wastepaper basket as an ashtray. I was so worried that I phoned Robin McEwen and asked him to come round to keep an eye on you.’

  The precise cause of the fire was never discovered, though its epicentre was believed to be in or around the living-room fireplace or the lobby behind it. When I heard the news of the disaster my mind went back to the winter I had spent at Sandaig and to the smoke I used to see seeping out from the pitch-pine panelling on the adjacent wall whenever there was a good fire burning in the range. Where smoke could find a way, I had warned Gavin, so could sparks and even fire, but nothing had been done. Beryl Borders had voiced a similar suspicion when the police investigated the case. ‘I told them the wiring was bad in the annexes,’ she wrote to Gavin afterwards, ‘and the chimney was weak in the living room and I never had a big fire.’ Once a fire had started there could be no stopping it, for the varnished wooden walls and ceilings were like a tinder box waiting to be ignited.

  It was not until a week or two after the fire that Gavin discovered none of his possessions had been insured. He heard the news when he telephoned the insurance company to ask about the position, and afterwards he rang Richard Frere to pass on the information. He expressed no anger at Richard’s oversight, and attached no blame to him; he was just grateful, he said, for Richard’s help in relieving him of the burden of life’s practical problems so that he could get on with his work. ‘At first I could speak no word in answer,’ Richard wrote later. ‘Guilt which stemmed from my carelessness was added to shame that I had not understood him to be so big a man. Never again did I doubt his presence among the immortals.’

  For the rest of the winter the Sandaig refugees hung on in the croft, huddling in front of the driftwood fire through the weeks of frost and howling gales from the sea; then through the spring, with its primroses and nesting gulls and skeins of migrating geese, and into the long, blue days of high summer. For six months Gavin did little work and received few visitors. He played chess now and then, listened to his favourite comedians (Peter Sellers and Tony Hancock) on the record player, and read some of the books that had been donated by well-wishers. He walked the high-tide line with the irrepressible Teko, talked to Owl, the six-month-old tawny owl he had acquired from Sir Henry Douglas-Home, the brother of the former British Prime Minister Lord Home, w
atched the sunsets flaring behind Isle Ornsay, and thought and dreamed.

  He had, he knew, come to the end of an era in his life. Yet he continued to cling to his last foothold at the edge of Sandaig Bay. It was as though he was unable to come to terms with the cataclysmic change in his situation, with his imminent exile from the ring that had made him and his otters famous around the world. ‘It has indeed been a difficult disaster to take in one’s stride,’ he wrote to the headmaster of Stowe, ‘because what has gone was one’s stride, and in one’s fifty-fourth year it is difficult to get into a new one.’

  It was Teko that jolted him into action. Teko’s original owner, who worked in West Africa, had heard about the fire on the radio and telegraphed to ask whether the otter was alive or dead. This reminded Gavin that no matter what had happened he still had responsibilities, and that somehow he had to provide for the remaining otter. There was now no question of Teko being sent to another owner. ‘Now he will never let Teko go,’ Richard Frere warned Gavin’s accountant. At that time it was not clear whether Andrew Scot would want to stay on. He had originally been engaged only on a temporary basis, and after this disaster Gavin thought that he would go. The fact that he wanted to stay on was another factor in Gavin’s decision as to where he would live.