The principal reception room, the Long Room, mirrored a formal drawing room, with antique furniture, chaises longues, winged armchairs, gilt mirrors, William Wordsworth’s desk, gilt sconces and oil paintings on the walls, and Persian rugs on the floor. The two huge deer-hounds, Hazel and Dirk, lay sprawled in a Victorian Landseer-esque pose in front of a large open fire of logs and peat. Above the mantel hung a large, dramatic Michael Ayrton wax and bone bas-relief of Icarus falling from the sun, an irony Gavin cannot possibly have missed and which, if it was intentional, would have matched his impending awareness of mortality and sardonic sense of self.
The whole room was refined, elegant and stately, in many ways befitting a world famous author, artifacts from his travels and exploits such as shark harpoons, Berber daggers and carved soapstone ware prominently displayed, but all apparently in determined denial of the source of his fame and recent past – not an otter in sight. Teko, the sole survivor of the fire, was old and grumpy and housed in a fenced compound with a hut and a fibreglass pool. Gavin’s only island helpers were Andrew Scot, the last of the Camusfeàrna otter keepers, and Kenny McInnes, a retired Skye crofter who came across each day to cut peats for the fire and maintain the boats.
I stayed for a week. He revealed the ‘future plans for this island’ that ‘we might possibly co-operate on’ as twofold: he needed a research student to do the legwork for the handbook of British mammals he had been encouraged to write by his publisher, Mark Longman, on the back of the successful seals book, and he wanted someone to live on the island to help him develop and be the ‘curator’ of the private zoo he was planning. Quite honestly, if he’d asked me to clean his shoes and sing sea shanties, I’d have leapt at both. Such was his reputation and the alluring milieu he had created around himself, and so great was the contrast from the toxic-fume-belching blast furnaces of Port Talbot that any hint of caution or uncertainty was strangled at birth. I was up for it, whatever it was, and whatever sacrifices it entailed. As we sat beside the fire drinking whisky and talking long into the night, without ever comprehending it properly at the time, I think we were two dreamers chasing entirely different dreams.
As if those enticements were not enough, in one brief conversational exchange, and perhaps inadvertently, Gavin had loosed off another harpoon that found its willing target. It was late. We had been discussing poetry; there was a lull as I flicked through the pages of a favourite anthology he had given me. After a few minutes he broke the silence. ‘What do you really want to do with your life, John?’
It caught me unawares. I stared into the fire before answering. My mind ricocheted back to the same question my mother had posed a few years before when my father had been so crushingly dismissive. I tried again. ‘I’d really like to be a writer.’
Even as the words left my lips, I winced from the chill slap of folly. Gavin was a world famous author. I was a nobody, thirty-two years his junior. I’d only published a few articles. In front of the man whose writing I revered, my words suddenly seemed fatuous and, horrifyingly, even sycophantic. Remorse instantly overwhelmed me.
‘Why aren’t you, then?’ His curt, penetrative inquisition was almost aggressive, demanding a response. It punched a hole through the smog of embarrassment that had immediately blanked me, not sure I’d heard right. Then, sensing my discomfort, his tone mellowed, ‘You don’t need any capital, you know. All you need is a piece of paper and a pencil.’
I laughed and think I must have muttered something like ‘Perhaps one day.’ The subject died, but not for long. It kept me awake all night. As I lay listening to the lap and swirl of the tide against the rocks and the gulls crying, it seemed to me that everything had changed. Doors I had never dreamed existed had suddenly opened, paths emerged and bright horizons beckoned. And for him? ‘What, what, what, what?’ he would say to himself about nothing in particular, running the ‘whats’ together in quick succession, as though it helped him think things through. I believe he had already begun to formulate a plan.
He was fifty-four and, although he made no direct mention of it, he was worried about his deteriorating health – he was smoking continuously and downing most of a bottle of whisky a day – and his dwindling income, which, unknown to me, had been a gradually darkening storm cloud for several years, was rapidly engulfing him. The heady years of Ring, when he openly confessed – boasted even – that he had never given money a thought, were long over. His extravagant taste for fast cars, and the large, powerful sea-going launch Polar Star, his hugely generous entertaining and largesse, and his habitual foreign travels essential for his writing, combined with an almost child-like unworldliness in all financial affairs, had consumed it all. Although he probably wasn’t fully aware of its extent at the time, he was heavily in debt and, as had been a life-long trait, was still living well above his income. It would eventually become clear that he had wildly overspent on converting and furnishing the island house. Several years later one of his oldest friends, Eton housemaster Raef Payne, observed wistfully, ‘Gavin was always either extremely well off or completely broke.’
There is a telling line in House of Elrig, where he writes of his family background, ‘a timeless feeling of money not actively spent but just disregarded’. The give-away is ‘disregarded’. If such things can be hereditary, such was unquestionably Gavin’s approach to money, only in his case it was clearly and all too evidently ‘actively spent’. This was certainly worsened by his habitual reliance on professionals, some of whom would later prove to have been incompetent or even exploitative. Their ineptitude and the saga of maladministration of his affairs over many years that would eventually be revealed to his stalwart friend and financial business manager, Richard Frere, raised many uncomfortable questions.
Many are the younger sons of landed families who have stepped onto the slippery slope of financial indifference in the belief that some well-heeled family member will bail them out. Gavin had inherited meaningful wealth three or four times, most notably from his mother, but, failing to acknowledge the difference between capital and income, he had immediately spent it, needing to be bailed out by his Percy relations and his eldest brother, Sir Aymer Maxwell, who had inherited the Monreith estates, on several occasions prior to the success of Ring. Yet disregard for his own long-term financial stability had remained a Gordian knot of his own devising, a character flaw he would never vanquish.
He had no investments or savings, no pension, no assets of any real value other than the island house. ‘I am my own capital,’ he insisted with highly persuasive confidence, which was true as long as he could keep writing and selling books, but what he omitted to comprehend – or chose not to – was that his literary capital was heavily mortgaged to Longman, his long-suffering publishers, always drawing heavily on the next book before writing it. By the time I knew him he was virtually penniless. After a whole sequence of expensive mishaps, he was desperately casting about trying to shore up his future in the only way his restlessly creative brain could work – by dreaming up new ventures.
And as for me? I had no real idea what I was letting myself in for – no game plan, no sense of direction or career, or even a future. I can now see clearly that I was escaping, clutching at straws to find a way of breaking free from what I had come to view as sordid industry, from overbearing family expectations, from outmoded convention, from a shackled existence I had come to despise. I was also worried.
* * *
My mother was ill again. Very ill. In truth she was worse than she had been back in 1953. Once again, without immediate heart surgery she would die. Her aortic valve, the one that feeds the body’s principal artery with oxygenated blood, had finally collapsed, barely opening and closing at all. Her weary old heart was pumping like a steam engine and getting nowhere. Blood gurgled fruitlessly backwards and forwards within the chambers, starving her whole body of oxygen. She was blue and breathless; my father had to carry her upstairs. It was a decline we had all seen but had refused to acknowledge as the ext
remis it had become. Only one hope remained – back to the Brompton Hospital. But Paul Wood was dead. With an irony that now seems perverse, in 1962 he had died of heart failure, in his prime, aged just fifty-four. Russell Brock was sixty-five, now Lord Brock of Wimbledon, the grand old visionary of British cardiology, travelling and lecturing but no longer wielding a scalpel. Instead, at Brock’s behest, Stuart Lennox, a very highly regarded young surgeon on the Brompton cardiac staff, was prepared to take my mother on.
On 11 August that year she underwent an aortic replacement with a pig valve, her second open-heart surgery and, including Paul Wood’s catheterisation in 1957, her third experimental cardiac procedure. Had she not suffered a stroke in the recovery room, it would have been an outstanding success. It was a cruel twist. Her circulatory system was now working better than it had for years, but a clot had slipped away to her lungs and starved her brain of blood. It crippled her. She lost her speech, her handwriting and her mobility – her left arm and leg simply refused to work. Many months of rehabilitation and physiotherapy would follow. I have her letters scrawled in a tortured, childishly uncontrolled hand.
* * *
I told Gavin that while I would love to move north to the island and take on the full-time research for his mammal book, I could not desert my mother. To have moved 600 miles away at that moment could have been too much for her. Her whole determination to recover was built around her love for and dedication to her family. More than at any other time she needed us. Gavin’s disappointment was all too evident. ‘When do you think you could come?’ his voice burdened with despondency. I didn’t know what to say. I was in turmoil. I longed to say ‘in a month, six weeks, two months’, but I couldn’t. I knew from past experience that strokes were glacially slow to repair, if ever.
‘Can I aim for a year?’ I asked tentatively.
He stared past me and out to sea.
I would discover soon enough that he was also very unwell, frustrated and deeply worried. Although the extent of his difficulties, both financial and medical, were yet to be fully diagnosed, I believe he sensed that the noose was fast closing; time was running out and he desperately needed help to shore things up. He was suffering unexplained migraines and an uncharacteristic loss of energy. Kathleen Raine’s curse still played heavily on his mind – ‘Oh Gawd! When’s it all going to end?’ had become a mantra. By making the curse public in Raven Seek Thy Brother, he had engraved it into his own subconscious like a malevolent subtext that refused to go away. He never mentioned any of this to me, but as I bade him farewell and headed back south at the end of that week, I knew he was a profoundly troubled man. A little while later he commented to Richard Frere that for the first time since the Camusfeàrna fire he had glimpsed a chance to build a team that could solve all his problems – the problems I knew virtually nothing about.
Had I known more I think I might have hurried, but I was beginning to enjoy myself. Gavin had handed me a cause and a sense of purpose. At long last I was working in natural history – still unpaid but loving it – and with a goal previously unimagined: that my name would appear alongside his as co-author of a handbook of British mammals. I attended meetings of the Mammal Society and its recently formed scion, the British Deer Society, to forge essential links. I corresponded with many experts in their own fields of mammalogy. Never once did it cross my mind that Gavin might be terminally ill.
In the event it would be nearer eighteen months, although throughout that time we corresponded and telephoned regularly about the mammal book at my end and the island animal collection at his. He was still urging me to come. Finally, in August 1969 I packed up and made the move. I had no real idea what I was going to and certainly no suspicion of what I would find when I arrived. Gavin was dying.
* * *
With all the sails of her lifelong fortitude fully unfurled, my mother was valiantly battling her stroke with the renewed vigour the replaced aortic valve had given her. I travelled to Frimley to see her and break the news that I was heading north. I had handed in my notice to my employers and my landlord. My bags were packed. ‘Follow your dream,’ she whispered. As she hugged me I felt a shiver of acceptance pass through her poor wrecked body like a breeze shimmers through corn.
24
Paradise lost and found
The sale of the Manor Farm, the disposal of the orchards beyond the moorhens’ pond for a housing development and the sale of the Manor House itself were hard to bear. Until my mother’s final surgery and then her death, the only time I ever saw my father evince heavy emotion was on the day of the house sale. Folk travelled from all over the country, antique dealers, local householders, villagers who had never seen inside the house, and nosy parkers on a spree with no intention to buy. The country lanes were jammed; a trail of vans and furniture lorries parked nose to tail all down the hill to the village green.
The auctioneers’ men carried everything out onto the lawns. Huge oak dressers and chests that had been made for the house in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the great dining-room table, the big wing chairs from the drawing room, tea chests full of pots and pans from the scullery, bookcases, grandfather clocks, marble wash stands, wardrobes, Victorian brass beds, scores of pictures and books, and the entire contents of the butler’s pantry all vanished forever under the hammer. In stony-faced silence my father stood and watched it all.
At the end of the second day, after the last van and pantechnicon had pulled away down the lane, he closed the white gates on his home, his birthright, his own happy childhood and his family’s past. I walked with him across the lane to the graveyard. It was March. Daffodils were bursting everywhere. We picked a dozen stems and placed them among the mass of floral tributes crowding my grandparents’ grave. As rich as plum cake, a burst of pure notes rippled from a cock blackbird’s syrinx. It was perched on the uppermost branch of a yew tree beside the lych-gate. He turned to look at it. ‘Just listen to that. I hope Grandpa can hear it too.’ We walked slowly back up the drive and entered the front door. The hall was hollow and empty. No solemn tick of the Bowler, no laughter from the kitchens. ‘Come on, old boy, let’s go.’
‘What’s happened to the rib?’ I asked gently. I had been through to the old servants’ hall earlier in the day and seen its empty nails.
‘I have sent it to Warwick Museum,’ he answered quietly.
‘Oh,’ I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
When we got into the car, he slumped forward onto the steering wheel and buried his head in his arms. The car trembled. He was silently sobbing. Then he pulled himself together, blew his nose noisily and fired up the engine. ‘It’s been a long time coming,’ he said without looking at me. ‘But, my God, it’s hard when it happens.’
My mother could never have lived at the Manor House. Neither of us knew it that day, but she was rapidly running out of time. It would only be a few years before she needed surgery yet again, but long enough for me to make the move to Scotland, to break free, to start a new life, and to try to reconcile the nagging losses of Nellie and the Manor House, where I still went in my head and my dreams almost every night of my life, and still do all these decades later.
My grandfather had left an estate cottage to Nellie rent-free for life. She was well into her sixties and accepted her retirement with grace and an assertive dignity as though it was promotion to a grander order befitting the erstwhile head of the lord of the manor’s household. Her personality seemed to expand to meet the challenge, becoming the grand old maid of the village, in perpetual denial of the rapidly changing 1960s world around her. She heaped scorn on incomers and anyone who didn’t properly belong to her past. ‘Who does they think they are?’ she would demand defiantly. ‘They don’t know nothin’ about the village in the old days and never will.’
My father had given her his mother’s fine Coalport tea service, which she had always admired. Whenever I called to see her, out it would come. ‘Now, you sits there by the fire while I gets you a nice cup
pa tea.’ Then she would sweep in with a tray, the rosebud plates laden with scones and slices of her rich fruitcake. And when I got up to go her eyes would moisten and her voice quiver with more than a hint of emotional blackmail. ‘When ’ll I see you again, young Jack, cos I shan’t be around forever, y’know?’
She did her best. Nellie West lived on in her cottage beside the village green for a further thirty-four years to the arboreal age of 101. Even long after I was married with a family of my own and both my parents were dead she had refused to concede my adulthood. I remained ‘Young Jack’ for the rest of her days. Then one day a neighbour phoned me. Before I heard the words I knew that it was the end.
As I drove the long road south for the funeral I felt the leaden cloud of a long-awaited grief descending like a bitter winter’s night. A grief not just at the loss of my earliest alter mater, my beloved mother goddess, but also that the last silken thread to my childhood had broken. We buried her next to her parents, only a few yards from my grandparents, her headstone looking straight across the lane to the Manor House. As we lowered her into the land to which she had given so much, I knew that not just I but everyone gathered there that day would never forget Miss Nellie West, and that a small part of us all had departed with her into that grave.
* * *
When I arrived to take up my new job on Kyleakin Island, Gavin wasn’t there. He had gone to hospital in Inverness for further check-ups, still struggling with headaches and what was thought to be another outbreak of the duodenal ulcers he had suffered for years, the cure for which, he had once written, was ‘strong curry washed down with plenty of whisky’. The next day I travelled the eighty miles through the towering, craggy mountains of Glen Shiel to see him in the Royal Infirmary. It was everything you would not expect in a hospital. His small private room was full of cigarette smoke and a tray of drinks topped the locker beside him. He was sitting up in bed with a glass in hand. ‘Come and have a dram. I’m on brandy and dry ginger, but there’s plenty of whisky here.’ He waved at the tray crowded with bottles.
The Dun Cow Rib Page 30
