Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  I have never again sought or desired any relationship of the kind I had with Gavin. That was that. That was my story. Being alone without being lonely has a lot to recommend it. Because the only Beloved, as the Indian teachers know, is God. There is only the one Being, and we seek the divine in the people we fall in love with, in nature, in a thousand things. And that is the great deception – attributing the divine to something or someone else. But I did see in Gavin that which was truly his true spirit – which was very beautiful. He was very beautiful, you know. Everyone is if you see them in that light.

  On Iona a fortnight or so after bidding Gavin farewell, Kathleen wrote a poem, ‘Message for Gavin’, whose concluding lines suggested she would never see him again:

  Since not again can I be with you life with life

  I would be with you as star with distant star,

  As drop of water in the one bright bitter sea.

  On 13 May Fiore de Henriquez arrived on the island bringing her bronze busts of Gavin and his god-daughter, Katie McEwen. Gavin was delighted with Katie’s likeness and sent her a postcard: ‘Fiore’s bust of you is the nicest thing in the whole of this house – it’s almost as beautiful as the subject, though I suppose it’s a poor substitute. Bless you.’ At the beginning Fiore’s visit proved one of the jollier occasions on Kyleakin Island that summer, and as the whisky flowed the long room resounded to the rousing lilt of Italian songs. But Fiore was soon aware that all was not well. ‘Gavin was a very Nordic, delicate, beautiful kind of man, full of bravura. But his eyes were horrendous,’ she recalled. ‘They were red and burning from the inside. Something was very wrong.’ At night Gavin and Andrew would fight in the kitchen, sometimes with kitchen knives, with Gavin wildly drunk and totally out of his mind. ‘I wanted to stay,’ Fiore recalled. ‘I thought I could help. But the situation was hopeless.’ After three days she left.

  It was the visit of another woman that was to cause the greatest and most cataclysmic explosion in the Maxwell household. Lisa van Gruisen arrived on Kyleakin Island from Edinburgh in June. She was delivering a young fox for Gavin’s zoo park, which by now covered much of the island with a complex of aviaries and enclosures and a network of scaffolding containing a growing population of native animals and birds, including herons, magpies, carrion crows, ravens, buzzards, and a golden eagle with one leg that had been caught in a horrible gin-trap. A devoted fan of Gavin’s books, Lisa was in a state of considerable trepidation and excitement at the prospect of meeting such a famous writer, a guru for many of her generation, about whom she had heard many strange rumours – that he was a weird and complex eccentric, a homosexual, a bigamist with up to three wives and a bastard child in Kent, and much else. Such rumours added a zest to the reputation of a man she admired immensely for ‘the power and beauty of his writing’.

  She was not disappointed. Physically she found Gavin unprepossessing, cadaverous and ill-looking. But he had ‘terrific style’ and ‘a tremendous guru-like presence’, and his voice, his words, the brilliance and intensity of his conversation and sense of humour held her in thrall. ‘I had never heard anyone speak as he spoke,’ she was to say later. ‘He spoke as he wrote and he wrote as he spoke – utterly beautifully.’ Gavin, for his part, was enchanted with Lisa. He gave her a signed copy of every one of his books. He whisked her around Skye in his powerful Mercedes. He took her into his confidence and asked her to do the same for him. Before she knew where she was the eighteen-year-old girl had, to all intents and purposes, fallen in love with her fifty-four-year-old host.

  All might have been well had not Lisa missed the train from Kyle the following evening and been obliged to put up in the hotel in Kyleakin for the night. Next morning Andrew Scot, wearing a home-made sealskin waistcoat, came to fetch her, but instead of taking her back to the island he took her for a morning’s drive-about, first to Isle Ornsay and then to Sandaig. There, in the legendary Camusfeàrna, he declared that he had fallen in love with her. This was confusing enough for Lisa, for though she was not unaware of Andrew’s ‘rugged and romantic appearance’ (as she put it in her diary), it was not of him but of Gavin that her mind was full that morning. Greater confusion was to follow. When they returned to Kyleakin Island in the early afternoon they found Gavin in a towering huff – brooding, jealous, angry and a little the worse for whisky. A terrible, oppressive atmosphere enveloped the house. Gavin was abominably rude. Before they knew it they were all screaming and raging at each other. Many of the details of what was said are lost to memory, but Lisa was later to recall that Gavin accused her of ruining his life by taking Andrew, his lifeline, off with her, then suggested she should become Andrew’s mistress, and capped this by proposing that he (Gavin) should marry her himself. Lisa did not know what to do or where to turn. Andrew wanted to leave with her, she wanted to stay with Gavin, Gavin wanted first one thing and then another. She felt pulled in all directions.

  The drama was reaching its crisis when Lisa abruptly left to catch her train. Richard Frere came to ferry her back across to Kyle and with a sense of profound relief put her on the train to Inverness. As she climbed on board, she turned and said: ‘They’re very peculiar people, aren’t they?’ Then she was gone. ‘Her complex impact upon the occupants of Eilean Ban,’ Richard noted, ‘innocently set the final seal of dissolution upon that small society.’

  What happened in the wake of Lisa’s departure was summed up by Gavin in a single word in his diary for Friday, 13 June: ‘Débâcle’. When she got home Lisa wrote to Gavin: ‘I can only say I have paid very dearly for what were three of the most beautiful and happy days I can remember. I think I will always be grateful to you for them and am only sorry that their effect was so drastic and so miserable. I have forgiven you – please forgive me.’

  In reply Gavin wrote an account of his version of events in a letter sealed with wax stamped with the Maxwell family crest. After Lisa had left, he wrote, Andrew had been inconsolable and had reproached Gavin long and bitterly for trying to keep them apart:

  Well, that awful night, when you left, well … He told me he would kill me before morning. Perhaps wrongly, I took this seriously and telephoned the police, saying that I was alone on the island with someone whom I believed to be insane. (He had a knife.) They wanted details, and I referred them to the doctor, who said he couldn’t discuss a patient on the telephone and referred them back to me. I said I couldn’t give a name, and the next day I told them that it had been a stranger who had now left, so it was no longer of any importance. (There were some rather awful and unseemly struggles during that time – well, you can imagine it.)

  I think you’ve been most sweet and kind to everyone, and I should like to count you among my friends if I may.

  Richard Frere was largely dismissive of these and other allegations made by Gavin against Andrew. In Richard’s view, Gavin’s letter was intended to deter Lisa from renewed contact with Andrew – and given that a real or imagined grudge existed in Gavin’s mind, there was no limit, he felt, to his powers of invention.

  Some days later, after receiving Gavin’s letter, Lisa wrote to him again: ‘I have the strangest and most disturbing feeling that I must say something desperately urgent to you – like one of those terrible dreams when all the forces within you are driving you in desperate pursuit of you know not what …’

  On 9 July, the day Andrew Scot finally left Gavin’s employ and went out into the wide world (as a deckhand, it was said, on an ocean-going fishing trawler out of Grimsby), Gavin wrote again to Lisa, who was now in Paris doing a summer course at the Sorbonne and the Louvre and working as a part-time chauffeuse for Gavin’s old and eccentric cousin, the Duke of Argyll, who had an apartment in the city: ‘Yes, I too had that curious feeling of urgency, and I think I know exactly the feeling you describe, but I’m not sure I understand the cause. I don’t think it’s basically sexual (though perhaps partly) but more the sudden touching of two lives that seem to have something to do with each other in some way, even if one does
n’t know what. When you arrived I felt “this isn’t just an attractive girl bringing a fox – something is happening,” and like you I didn’t know whether it had to do with Andrew or you or me or what … Well, Lisa, I do very actively look forward to seeing you again. Bless you.’

  Before leaving the island Lisa had written the date on which she intended to return in Gavin’s appointments diary – 14 September. When she began to doubt whether she could afford the fare for the journey from Paris to the West Highlands, Gavin wrote a five-page letter to reassure her and urge her to come back to see him:

  I don’t think you should let money stand in the way of your paying a visit here and perhaps laying a few ghosts – unless, that is, you are too proud to accept the fare from me. So? Don’t get wrong ideas – I’m not asking for bed, and am not even sure I want it, but I know I do want to see you again without classifying the relationship.

  Love, of whatever kind.

  Gavin

  ‘In retrospect,’ Lisa felt, ‘I don’t think either of us knew what we were doing. We just wanted to lay the ghost – the love or obsession or whatever it was, the extraordinary sense of urgency about wanting to get to know each other, that had made our first meeting so terribly urgent and meaningful. His proposal to marry me may have been a chess move in a game to outmanoeuvre Andrew, and I may just have been a catalyst in a chemical reaction, but at the same time it is clear there was something else. I don’t know what other word you can use but “love”. Reading the letters it looks as though we were heading flat out for a disastrous affair. Remarkable really, considering how much older he was than me, and how ill. Even at the end he was still questing.’

  FORTY

  No coming back

  ‘But man is not made for defeat,’ he said. ‘A man can be destroyed, but not defeated.’

  ERNEST HEMINGWAY, The Old Man and the Sea

  Whatever hopes Gavin may have had for the future, the storm clouds were gathering now, thick and black. A temporary replacement for Andrew Scot, David Wright from Peterhead, had already taken over, and an assistant curator for the zoo park, Donald Mitchell, arrived the day Andrew left. But with Andrew’s departure from the island Gavin had become like a castaway, marooned, abandoned, rootless. In a thank-you note to his London housekeeper, Mrs Lamm, who had sent him a card for his fifty-fifth birthday on 14 July, he wrote: ‘I don’t feel myself to belong anywhere special, things change so quickly, don’t they?’

  But there were still a few moments of peace and happiness to be snatched in Gavin’s embattled life. Towards the end of May he had made a nostalgic return to the land of his boyhood in Galloway in the company of Richard Frere, partly to introduce a showing of the film of Ring of Bright Water in Newton Stewart and make a collection for the Edal Fund, partly to obtain fox cubs and wild birds for the zoo park, and partly to look into the possibility of acquiring from his brother Sir Aymer, who lived abroad, the decaying family mansion at Monreith and thereby re-rooting himself in the country of his birth – a forlorn dream. Richard remembered those few carefree sunlit days picnicking and birdnesting around Elrig, Monreith and Wigtown Bay as the happiest he had ever spent in Gavin’s company. But the interlude was soon over; and when Gavin returned to Kyleakin Island the storm clouds were still there, but darker and closer than before.

  During June Gavin’s health had declined steeply. The headaches returned – ‘a plateau of discomfort,’ as Richard put it, ‘interrupted by peaks of more severe pain.’ Gavin bore this unremitting assault without complaint; only the tight furrow across his brow gave any hint of the torment within. So it continued for a week or two, until one morning early in July Gavin’s undiagnosed affliction made another, more terrifying leap, attacking a completely different part of his ailing frame without a moment’s warning. Richard recalled: ‘He was speaking to me on the telephone at some length when he suddenly halted in the midst of a sentence and cried “Oh, my God!” with a sharp intake of breath. I said urgently: “What is it, Gavin?” He could not answer, being speechless with pain.’ Jimmy Watt was visiting Gavin at the time, and saw him turn deathly white as he half-turned in his chair, clutching his left thigh with both hands. Deep in his thigh he had suddenly felt a pain of a totally new order of ferocity – ‘as though a six-inch nail had been hammered into the bone’ – and though it subsided he still could not walk properly next day.

  Thenceforth his thigh bone ached continuously, like his head, and he began to cough at nights, a deep, dry, hacking cough, and to suffer repeated thromboses. He went to the hospital in Broadford on Skye for more tests and X-rays, but again the doctors could find nothing wrong with him. This was no comfort to Gavin, who felt so desperately ill that he sought solace from any source that came his way. From a faith healer in Nairn he bought a herbal cure called Exultation of Flowers that was supposed to cure anything from colds to cancer; and when the Skye vet, Donald MacLennan, came to the island, Gavin asked him: ‘If I went down on all fours and you examined me, do you think you could find out what is wrong with me?’

  Gavin faced his illness with immense courage and dignity. He rarely if ever complained to anyone. He continued to oversee the work on the zoo park, write his book reviews for the Observer, entertain his friends and colleagues and fulfil his engagements. In the middle of July he travelled south to open Stuart Johnstone’s new wildlife park at Mole Hall in Essex, stopping over in his London flat in the Boltons. Next morning, when Mrs Lamm came to tidy, she was shocked by his appearance.

  ‘I can never forget that day,’ she recollected. ‘I knew there was something wrong but I didn’t know what. “Will you be all right?” I asked him, and he replied, “Yes, don’t you worry, I’ll be all right.” Then he said: “Is there anything you’d like to take from here? Take whatever you’d like to take.” Why did he say that, I wondered? “Well, goodbye,” he said, and I began to cry. “Now, now,” he said, “don’t worry, I’ll be all right. I’m going somewhere and I’ll be coming back. I’ll see you tomorrow in the morning.” But he didn’t come back and I never saw him again.’

  By the time Gavin returned to Kyleakin Island he was in dreadful shape. But two weeks later, though he was not in a fit condition to travel anywhere, he bravely insisted on fulfilling an engagement in Clydebank, where he was to introduce the film of Ring of Bright Water at the opening of a new cinema and leisure complex. It was the kind of occasion he would normally have avoided, but it had been agreed that a substantial part of the proceeds should be donated to the Edal Fund, and he was determined to fulfil his engagement even though he was wracked with pain. To the businessmen, city dignitaries and movie starlets among whom he uneasily mingled Gavin must have appeared an improbable, if not shocking apparition. He looked dreadfully weak and ill; and with his black glasses and trimmed, pasha-like beard, his white tie and tails, his gold and enamel Persian charm hanging from his neck on a long gold chain, and a rigid smile fixed on his face as if by plastic surgery, he looked more like an ambassador from some obscure oil-rich enclave in the Persian Gulf than the simple back-to-nature drop-out and otter man of Ring; none guessed the pain and the courage it cost him to be there.

  Richard Frere met him in Kyleakin when he returned on the evening of 1 August, and was shocked at the sight of him. He could hardly walk and the effort to get out of the car made him cough and tremble. His face was grey, his eyes clouded by pain, and his forehead shining with sweat.

  They went into the King’s Arms Hotel and, seated in an inconspicuous corner of the bar, Gavin told Richard that he was now certain he had cancer. He brushed aside his friend’s well-meaning protestations and reassurances. This was a very different matter from his previous cancer scare, he insisted. He was a dying man and he wanted Richard to accept the fact and help him make decisions here and now about the disposal of his property and the future of the island and the zoo park project. Richard, shocked and tearful, suggested nobody could be sure.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, Richard,’ Gavin told him with a look of affection.
‘That remark does your undoubted intelligence less than justice. We are both perfectly sure.’

  * * *

  Even now, Gavin continued to behave to the world at large as if all were normal. His unselfishness and lack of self-pity in these dark days were the hallmarks of a very strong and a brave man. On 4 August his secretary Jacky Hone, who had typed his last three books and answered all his fan mail for him, came for a few days’ holiday on the island. ‘He gave no indication whatsoever of how he must have been feeling,’ she recalled. ‘He was the perfect host and did everything to make me feel welcome. In the evenings he cooked dinner, refused to let me help in any way whatever, and was marvellously entertaining company. I remember Richard Frere came one evening and he was so funny and we all laughed and laughed till we cried. And the whole time he was very kind, considerate and affectionate. It was, for me, a perfectly idyllic few days and it is terrible to think, in retrospect, how ill he must have been, and that I didn’t know.’

  On 11 August Richard drove Gavin slowly and carefully to the hospital in Inverness. The tests were more probing than before, but for the first few days yielded no more information than all the previous examinations. Then, on the seventh day, the doctors finally arrived at a diagnosis. Gavin rang Richard from the public pay-phone in the hospital.

  ‘You’d better come along as soon as you can,’ he said, speaking in a very hoarse voice. ‘The last blood test has confirmed my belief.’

  At the hospital entrance Richard encountered Jimmy Watt, who had called in to ask after Gavin. He was ‘white and shaken and quite broken up’ by the news. They found Gavin in his room looking amazingly unconcerned, all things considered. He had cancer, he said, and didn’t expect to recover. Jimmy had agreed to carry out his plans for the island and would also be his heir.