Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Richard left to go shopping for a few comforts for the patient. When he returned he found Gavin sitting up in bed, looking drawn and pale and impassive. Gavin asked him to pour out a couple of drinks. He had turned to brandy now after a lifetime of Scotch – the cancer had affected his tastebuds. Seeing that Richard was ill at ease, Gavin told him: ‘Please don’t let my situation embarrass you … I promise not to afflict you with unnecessary sentiment. Displayed emotion has always been considered bad taste in my family as I expect it has in yours. We don’t cry easily or make a fuss over the inevitable.’

  The doctors had told him that in six months he would be living on borrowed time, he said. He had a primary cancer in the lung and a secondary one in the femur, which accounted for the tremendous pain he had felt in his thigh. Radiation treatment might cure the femur, but there was nothing that could be done about the lung – the general condition, which had probably started with the first scare on his return from Tangier in 1967, was too far gone. Why previous X-rays had not revealed such an established and extensive cancer was a mystery, as were the headache and the thromboses.

  ‘That’s probably another death sentence,’ Gavin said to Richard, ‘to run concurrently with the first.’ He fell silent and stared blankly in front of him. Richard detected a small hint of fear in his eyes. It would take a little while for a full comprehension of his situation to sink in. ‘I hated to think what his thoughts would be on waking,’ Richard was to write later.

  During the next two days, while Gavin languished in his hospital bed, Richard was busy making contact with Gavin’s family and friends to give them the grim news. The news became even grimmer when the specialist, urged by Gavin to give a completely full and frank prognosis of his condition, spelled out blow by dreadful blow the likely course the disease would take in the ensuing months – how the cancer would run rampant round the rest of his body, how eventually he would die either from total exhaustion or from massive internal haemorrhaging.

  Gavin listened impassively to this catalogue of horrors. ‘Charming!’ he remarked when the doctor had finished. This sang-froid belied his inner feelings. In reality he was, as Richard noted in his diary, ‘very sick at heart and afraid’.

  Not long after the diagnosis Gavin asked if he could go home, just for a week, to tidy up his affairs. The doctors agreed readily enough – there was not much the hospital could do for him in his advanced state of disintegration anyway – and on 21 August he was out of bed and back in his Mercedes with Richard at the wheel, bound for his island home on the other side of Scotland.

  It was, not surprisingly, an agonising homecoming. Sitting upright in the car made Gavin’s neck and chest hurt abominably, and he felt every turn and bump in the road. They drove along Loch Ness, through glorious Highland landscapes now tinged with the rust and golds of early autumn, to Cluanie and Glenshiel. By this time Gavin was in great discomfort and fidgeting abominably. He felt ‘bloody awful’, he told Richard, and asked if he could take over the wheel for a bit – a little light activity might do him some good, he reckoned, if Richard’s nerves could stand it. It was his last chance to indulge in one of his greatest pleasures – never again would he be able to drive a car very fast among his beloved hills. In spite of his suffering he drove the big green Mercedes as fast and as skilfully as ever, overtaking a few tourist cars with all his usual squealing of tyres. But at the end of the glen he was pale and shaking and told Richard he’d had enough. Richard took the car on to the Dulverton house at Eilanreach, and they continued to the island next morning.

  Jimmy Watt was there and helped him through his last, brief sojourn on the island for which he had had so many plans and dreams. No guests came to stay, and Gavin used the respite to try and clear his thoughts about his all too finite future. Sitting at Wordsworth’s desk he toyed as best he could with his last professional task as a writer – a review of Alan Moorehead’s Darwin and the Beagle for the New York Times. To various close friends he wrote announcing or confirming his terminal condition. One of the letters he received in reply was from a favourite cousin, Wendy Campbell-Purdy. It gave him much delight, for she had written simply: ‘Hard cheese, Gavin.’

  Though his headaches made prolonged concentration difficult, and he was obliged to sit for long periods without moving or even speaking, he wrote with great dignity and clarity of mind. To Lisa van Gruisen he wrote a letter (which she did not see until after his death) on 21 August:

  Dearest Lisa,

  This is the most difficult letter I’ve ever had to write … Since I last wrote I have been in hospital. The diagnosis and prognosis are blunt and unequivocal – I have an inoperable cancer, and a matter of months rather than years to live. I don’t know where I shall be during the time that remains, but probably not much at Kyle Akin … Please don’t feel bound to see me – I shall understand completely if you’d rather not.

  I wonder if this was some component of the urgency we both felt at Kyle Akin?

  My love and blessings.

  Gavin

  To Kathleen Raine he wrote: ‘I am asking you to accompany me in spirit.’ He received in return not just a letter of sympathy but a moving expression of a love that had never died.

  My dearest Gavin,

  I will not say ‘the doctors may be wrong’ – though they may be – for death must come, however long delayed, and the marvel is that we are able to forget that time is so short at best. Suddenly all the truisms are truths – this world is only a moment, and home is elsewhere. But you and I, here, have seen the beauty of eternity, such beauty and such glimpses of joy …

  I have never been able to say how much I love you – but surely you know. And at any time, anywhere, you have only to send a telegram and I will come. And at any time, anywhere, you have only to think of me, and you will find me with you in thought and love.

  Dear Gavin, I have tried for many years to put you from my mind, because you did not want me in your life; but I shall do so no longer – I will always be beside you, and you must never feel alone. Of course, it is only in the arms of God that we ever really are; but the people we love are the faces and disguises of God. So you have been for me always – whether for sorrow or for joy. And in the end, these things are not measured by pleasure or pain but by something else. Love, I suppose. There really is no other word …

  I don’t think it was ever as a ‘lover’ I desired your love. Something else – a more than brother. Anyway, I am here now for whatever you may ask of me or need.

  Kathleen

  Gavin’s last letter to Kathleen gave vent to some of the bitterness he inwardly felt at the fate that had befallen him and the imminence of his premature extinction. He asked for some of her poems from past days, and perhaps some charm or talisman that might allay his fate or assist his passage through the pain of his remaining life. As well as sending him the poems she had already written, Kathleen wrote a new one – ‘In Answer to a Letter Asking me for Volumes of my Early Poems’ – one of the most beautiful and moving of all the poems that Gavin had inspired in her. It began:

  You ask for those poems of Paradise

  I wrote in heart’s blood for your sake,

  Yet this, your ultimate request,

  Is made to me in bitterness.

  If hate were love, if love were hate

  It could not make our tale untold,

  It could not make our blood unshed …

  The poem ended with an image that almost burned on the paper – could stand, indeed, as a permanent memorial to the very spirit, the life-stance of her doomed friend and loved one:

  Where Sandaig burn runs to the shore,

  Where tern and eider nest secure

  On their far island salt and bare

  Beyond our world of guilt and time,

  Yonder I have seen you stand,

  Innocent of all you bear:

  What can I say but ‘you are there

  And I, and all, did we but know,

  Who weep and mourn in exile he
re.’

  ‘I held up a mirror to Gavin through my poetry,’ Kathleen told me. ‘He saw himself in the mirror of my poetry. And that finally is what I have given Gavin, I suppose – immortality. I think “On a Deserted Shore” [the long poetic sequence she was to write after Gavin’s death], to my sorrow, is the only poem I’ve written which I’m absolutely sure has a life of its own, which will endure. So just as he has given joy to others through his own sacrifice, so have I. But look what it came out of – out of Gavin’s death, my bereavement, my guilt, remorse, everything – you see? What was suffering to him has given happiness to others, and what was suffering for me has raised the human spirit for others. It’s such a mystery.’

  As best he was able in his troubled circumstances, Gavin turned his mind to the future of his estate and that of the handful of people he regarded, in the absence of a family of his own, as his dependants. John Lister-Kaye was due to arrive in a few days’ time to take up his duties as the permanent curator of the zoo park, and Gavin hoped that he could still make it a going concern, though he was aware that (as he wrote to a friend) ‘the unfortunate fellow has given up a good job to take on something which now looks a bit precarious’. But Gavin’s main task was to try to make things shipshape before his death – above all to sort out his finances so that he could settle his debts with honour and pass on a worthwhile inheritance to his heir, Jimmy Watt. This would not be easy. Money troubles had returned to haunt him, and there was no prospect of any large literary earnings coming in in the immediate future. His book about the White Island, the sequel to Raven Seek Thy Brother, would obviously never be written now. The real snag was that, as a bestselling author, he was his own capital – ‘one’s death is just the same as burning stocks and shares which yield £10 –15,000 per annum’, he wrote to a friend. What could he do? Where, at this eleventh hour, could he turn?

  He could think of only one solution to the problem. On 23 August he sent a long telegram, in Richard Frere’s name, to his elder brother Aymer on the Greek island of Euboea, informing him of his illness and begging him to bail him out financially one last time.

  It so happened that Aymer himself was lying at death’s door when he received Gavin’s letter, having suffered a cerebral thrombosis only a few minutes before the letter arrived. The news that his brother, like himself, was gravely ill distressed Aymer enormously. But it was some days before he could be transported from his Aegean island to a hospital in Athens, and some weeks before his doctors would allow him to worry about business matters. In the meantime Aymer’s lawyer, Nassos Tzartzanos, sent an interim telegram: ‘Of course will give all help required. All love and thoughts to Gavin. Doctor says no possibility of travelling in near future.’

  On receipt of the telegram Gavin wrote a lengthy letter to Mr Tzartzanos, again in Richard Frere’s name, outlining in greater detail the kind of financial help he had in mind from Aymer. The sum he was looking for, representing two years’ outgoings, was £20,000 – over £150,000 in today’s money. A precious week passed by before a second telegram arrived from Aymer’s lawyer. The sum Gavin had in mind was impossible, he said, for it would involve the liquidation of all Aymer’s company assets. ‘After having discussed his brother’s problems with me he suffered relapse which forced doctors forbid any business before you hear from me. Please give Sir Aymer’s love to his brother and assurance he will do all he can when he can.’

  There was no magic solution to Gavin’s problems. The best Richard Frere could do was to lie to him about the state of his bank account and give him the impression that he was better off than he really was, for there was next to nothing to bequeath.

  As for his own future movements, these were inevitably shrouded in uncertainty. His neighbours across the water, Colin Mackenzie and his wife, had offered to make the two-roomed wing of their home at Kyle House available to him, with one room for a nurse and the other for him, so that he might spend his dying days in care and comfort. Gavin himself, however, spoke of eventually transferring to the London Clinic ‘for greater ease of communication’. The only certain thing was that he had to return to the hospital in Inverness on 27 August for about ten days for chemotherapy and other treatment.

  Richard Frere again drove him to the hospital. In the week since he had last seen him Gavin’s decline had become so marked that he greatly doubted he would live for anything like six months. Even supported by cushions in the back of the car he experienced intense pain for most of the ride, as Richard could see when he looked in the rear-view mirror. ‘I realised that he knew beyond any doubt,’ Richard wrote afterwards, ‘that this was his last sight of the wild country which he had loved and understood so well.’ There would be no coming back.

  FORTY-ONE

  The tunnel

  Get rags, get rags, all angels, all

  Laws, all principles, all deities,

  Get rags, come down and suffocate

  The orphan in its flaming cradle,

  Snuff the game and the candle, for our state

  – insufferable among mysteries –

  Makes the worms weep. Abate, abate

  Your justice. Execute us with mercies!

  GEORGE BARKER, The True Confession of George Barker (1950)

  Gavin had a room in the small private ward of the hospital. He was able to sit up and usually wore a bright red polo-necked pullover. Propped up in bed, a hawk-like and cadaverous figure, with his black glasses and his raddled lungs he resembled nothing so much as an uncanny incarnation of the hawk that bore his name.

  His mind was still active and he managed to read a little now and then. On his bedside table he kept two of his favourite books of poetry – both by friends, both with gorgeous jackets of Moroccan gilt-tooled leather. One was the Collected Poems of Roy Campbell, the other The Hollow Hill by Kathleen Raine. As best he could he also continued to fill in his appointments diary. The entries record the major medical incidents and the comings and goings of close friends and relatives and those who had urgent business with him. They reflect his determination, in spite of everything, to fulfil his responsibilities and maintain some sense of order and purpose in his life – not to give up, not to let go. ‘It was very typical of Gavin,’ Peter Janson-Smith was to recall, ‘that he had, in all the years I had known him, become hysterical, childish and totally unreasonable at every minor disaster that had befallen him, but accepted the final doctors’ verdict with total calm and dignity.’ Gavin’s diary also provides a measure of his progressive decline – each day the pressure on the ballpoint pen grows feebler, the marks on the paper fainter, finally becoming no more than pale, spidery traces, after which the pages fall blank.

  On his first day back in hospital, 27 August, Gavin recorded that 3.5 litres of fluid was removed from his right lung. The next day he noted the arrival in Inverness of John Lister-Kaye and spent an hour with him enthusiastically going over the plans for the zoo park, and covering sheets of paper with sketches of the animal enclosures and skilful caricatures of the animals that were to inhabit them. Later his old SOE friend, Hamish Pelham-Burn, arrived, followed by his Stowe chum Anthony Dickins, who was moved to tears by Gavin’s courage and good cheer. When Dickins asked what he thought was the greatest achievement of his life, Gavin replied: ‘Having a new species of otter, Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli, named after me.’ On 29 August Gavin’s infinitely steadfast and resourceful literary agent, Peter Janson-Smith, arrived from London to discuss the literary prognosis and worked out a scheme by which Gavin would, if he had the strength and the time, start work on a final book, the autobiography of a man dying of cancer, to be called The Tunnel – a title based on a waking vision to which he had been subjected in the past few days. If he did not live to complete the task, Richard Frere would finish it to the best of his ability. In the event, the book was never even started; all that can be gleaned about Gavin’s last creative concept is encapsulated in what he was able to impart to Richard about it from his hospital bed. Recently, he said, he had had a
recurring vision. He was walking down a long, dark tunnel with openings here and there in its side. At first he saw shadowy figures in the openings, whom he thought he recognised, but the further he travelled down the tunnel the less real was the world he glimpsed outside, till eventually he barely gave it a glance, but stared ahead into the distance where the tunnel, now oddly secure and comforting for him, seemed to terminate in velvety dark.

  Had Gavin been granted the time to write this book it might, perhaps, have been his finest work, the one his true admirers had been waiting for. Freed from commercial restraints and the need to conform to the expectations of his audience and the conventions of society, and with the experiences of his life intensely heightened by the imminence of his death, he might have written as he had sometimes spoken in the late hours over a dram with his friends – passionately, brilliantly, his intellect and emotion fused in a burning celebration of his interior vision.

  But it was not to be. The ceaseless struggle against devouring death was all. His diary continued the bald record of the progress of the battle. ‘Pain moved to left lung,’ he reported on 30 August; ‘Very bad night.’ On 2 September he recorded his continuing descent into Purgatory: ‘More veins – 1 ltr – unable walk.’

  It was now a matter of great urgency for Gavin to finalise his will. Raef Payne, who was to be his executor and joint literary executor (with Peter Janson-Smith), flew up to see his old friend immediately on his return from a holiday abroad, while John Butters, Gavin’s Edinburgh solicitor, came to the hospital to draw up the document. To Jimmy Watt he bequeathed all his personal possessions (with certain named exceptions) ‘wherever they may be – and with the hope that he may wear my signet ring and the stone I wear as a neck pendant’. Three antique stone and ivory figurines and a rock crystal cross were bequeathed to his much-loved god-daughter Katie McEwen; the Order of the Garter tiepin, which had been given to his uncle, Lord James Percy, by his uncle’s grandparents, went to Kathleen Raine; Richard Frere received the Mercedes saloon; Andrew Scot the 12-bore Cogswell & Harrison shotgun and a Parker fountain pen ‘to remind him that he can write’; Dr Tony Dunlop received a miniature Indian silver Communion set; and Mrs Lamm’s motherly care as Gavin’s London housekeeper was rewarded with a gift of £500. After various other smaller bequests Raef Payne, Gavin’s greatly trusted and respected friend of many years, was given the choice of any objects of personal property not listed elsewhere in the will.