‘Do you mean a job here?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes, of course,’ he said.
‘Do you think my boyfriend could come and apply for a job as well?’ I asked.
‘I’m afraid not,’ he replied gravely.
‘Do you mean you want me to live with you?’ I asked.
‘Well, I had a bit more in mind than that,’ he said.
‘Like what?’ I asked.
‘I want to marry you.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said.
‘So what do you think?’
‘I’ll have to think about it,’ I said.
This is generally understood to mean ‘no’, but in Lee’s case it meant what it said. She was still trying to work the man out, and to think through the implications of the offer he had made her. With Gerald’s encouragement she flew off to Paris to talk to the world’s leading lemur expert, Dr Alison Jolly, about various kinds of primates, including Gerry. She then went to Cambridge to meet a fellow graduate student from Duke University by the name of Dan Rubenstein, a brilliant ecologist who later became head of department at Princeton. She talked to him about Gerry too, and his response was encouraging enough for her to go back to Jersey with her mind made up. She recalled:
I had to make some decisions. Marrying Gerry would mean not becoming an academic, not pursuing the career I had always envisaged. This wasn’t difficult, it really wasn’t. I’d messed about with animals all my young life and went into zoology out of a passion I’d formed for conservation. So in marrying Gerry I would be going into the very thing that so impassioned me. Unlike for Jacquie, the zoo and everything that went with it was for me a complete world into which I stepped, a world I really wanted to be in, though not the world I had been heading for. So I had in front of me the prospect of instant fulfilment at the side of a man at the cutting edge. So I went back to Jersey and I went up to Gerry and I said, ‘Yes, I think it’s probably quite a neat idea,’ and he said, ‘Oh good, that’s settled then.’
‘I am a modest man by nature,’ Gerald was to relate later, ‘but I have achieved one irrefutably unique thing in my life, of which I am extraordinarily proud. I am the only man in history who has been married for his zoo.’
‘It was odd, really,’ Lee recalled, ‘considering the twenty-five years that separated us, let alone the entire Atlantic Ocean, that we had so much in common, so many shared interests. The age gap never bothered us. He didn’t have the crusty mind-set of a retired admiral, so to speak. His mind was so wide-ranging, and his interests so broad, he was so stimulating and flexible and fun, so ready to do all sorts of things, that it was as if he never grew any older, had never grown old or grown up at all. Mind you, though he wasn’t set in his ways, he did have some set ways, some opinions about things. The culture gap never bothered us either. Gerry often said that, with all his travels and upbringing, he didn’t think he belonged to any one culture or nationality at all, so it was easy for me to fit in to such a broad spectrum.’
Gerald was due to fly to Calcutta on 27 February for his journey through Assam in quest of the pygmy hog. When Lee turned the trip down because of the demands of her Ph.D dissertation, Gerald invited Alexandra Mayhew, another qualified (and attractive) zoologist, to take her place. There would be no funny business, Gerald assured Lee. Indeed, shortly before their departure Lee and Gerald met Alexandra and her mother for a farewell curry supper in London, Gerald and Alexandra’s mother vying with each other to see who could eat the hottest dish.
Gerald believed passionately that fidelity was an inviolable rule once a commitment had been made, and on the eve of his departure for Assam he composed a declaration in verse, entitled ‘Marriage Vow’, affirming his love and faithfulness to Lee.
Dearest, best beloved Lee,
I send this note from me to thee
Over forests, mountains, ocean
To tell you of my deep devotion
To tell you that my love won’t falter
That I’ll bring you to the altar
After that, as time grows longer
You will find my love grows stronger
No-one else I want to keep
With no-one else I wish to sleep
With no-one else I want to travel
With no-one else would I unravel
Nature’s cunning mysteries
And doing so I hope to please.
I hope within the long hereafter
To hear your voice, your flute-like laughter
To see your lovely flower-like head
There beside me in the bed
With eyes of autumn woodsmoke shade
A face that’s from perfection made
The dusky hair like storm clouds billow …
The fear of losing his beloved, Gerald went on, made his heart ‘writhe in a knot’, for he would be left alone ‘in a world that’s cold … sans perfume, colour, sound’. But he tried to take a sanguine view, trusting that he could ‘truly forge’ a love with Lee.
And since she now means everything
And makes the very stars to ring
So I say ‘God? D’you envy me?
Enjoying thus the fruits of Lee?’
And somewhere dim I hear a voice
‘We cannot but approve the choice.’
Accompanying the poem was a large handwritten note in red ink: ‘HAVE GONE TO ASSAM BACK SOON’. It was decorated with a heart pierced by an arrow and inscribed with the words ‘I love you’.
The Assam expedition did not have a propitious start. After their farewell lunch together in London Gerald and Lee parted and went their separate ways. Soon afterwards, Gerald realised he had left behind in the restaurant his little shoulder bag containing his and Alexandra’s plane tickets, his passport, medical certificates, credit cards, and the cash and travellers’ cheques for financing the entire expedition. By the time he got back to the restaurant the bag was gone, and he was stranded – as was Alexandra, waiting for him with soaring impatience at Heathrow. Their departure was postponed for a week.
Alexandra was not as yet fully aware of the distracted state of her co-expeditionary’s mind. The problem was that Gerald had, to his surprise, fallen head over heels in love with Lee. ‘I’d been married before and was on the point of getting divorced,’ he explained later. ‘After my wife left me, I thought: “Well, OK. Now let’s play the field. To hell with it. I don’t want anything more to do with women except in bed.” I suppose it was rather an arrogant attitude to adopt. But it was the result of being hurt. But then, of course, I met this creature, and made the fatal mistake of falling in love with her. Absolutely fatal. A man of my age, falling in love with a woman who’s young enough to be his great great granddaughter.’
Even as he prepared to leave for Assam Gerald’s thoughts were still focused on Lee rather than on the expedition, as the letter he wrote that evening from his hotel showed.
Dearest and beloved McGeorge,
I just want you to have it in writing that I love you deeply, that I cannot wait for your return, and that you are the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me in a life that has been not uncrowded with wonderful things. I still cannot really believe you are going to share my life. I feel like a man who has succeeded in capturing a rainbow – filled with a sense of awe and delight.
I promise I will not give you any cause for regret. I promise I will devote the rest of my life to making sure you always have a light in your lovely eyes and a smile on your ravishing mouth.
Your devoted servant. G.
Gerald returned to Jersey while the chaos was sorted out. Alone in the flat, with Lee halfway to America and himself all dressed up with nowhere to go, he experienced a solitude akin to vertigo. To ease the burden he sat down and wrote a letter to his love, and so long as they were apart he would never stop writing to her – not only letters but poems and illuminated manuscripts, telegrams and extended narratives, paeans to her beauty, love stories and comic sketches, bawdy limericks and intimate reveries, a vast o
utpouring from heart and mind intended to salve the trauma of separation and cross the barrier of distance. Taken together, the letters must rank as among the most remarkable in the entire history of zoology. While they were at first sporadic and exploratory – though there was no doubting Gerald’s barely hidden agenda – from now on they became prolific and uninhibitedly intimate.
Dear Lady –
I have just returned from the airport to an empty and silent room and I miss you like hell already. There are reminders of your lovely presence everywhere – cigarettes in the ashtray, beautiful black hair in the bathroom, on the bed, in my diary, the faint, delicate smell of your body (like jonquils) lingering on the pillow, the towels, in the air …
We have such an exciting future in front of us and I can’t wait to get started on it. I want nothing but your happiness and contentment. I want each day to be a carnival for you, full of joy and as brightly coloured as a bed of flowers. I want to hear you laugh often, your flute-like bird-like laugh, and I want to warm and protect you with my love. You are now the most important person in my life and the most important single thing in my life. I have been wandering like a blind man and you have restored my sight.
I love you, G.
Next day he wrote again, trying another tack. This was, he told Lee, ‘a very difficult letter to write’, but it was best to be honest, even if the truth was brutal. He had met another girl, and they had fallen deeply in love. Her name was Araminta Grubble, a knitting instructress, eighty-four years of age, ‘but slim’. Once they were married they were going to open a polar bear farm in Baffin Land and make a fortune taking photographs of people’s babies on the polar bear skins. ‘If at any time you are passing through Baffin Land,’ he concluded solemnly, ‘please do drop in and have your babies photographed on one of our best bear skins. It would be our pleasure.’
On 3 March 1978 Gerald and Alexandra finally arrived in Calcutta. This was Gerald’s first sight of the land of his birth since he left it nearly fifty years ago, when he was three. ‘We were totally walloped by the culture shock,’ Alexandra recalled, ‘the heat, humidity, smells, squalor, indifference to human life, human suffering. Just the road from the airport to the city centre was enough. The central reservation comprised an entire linear community of the deprived, all living in rag tents, not an inch of space between them.’ The travellers, by contrast, as guests of a tea company, McNeill & Magor Ltd, were treated like royalty, for the whole trip was personally arranged by Richard Magor, the director of the company, who was to prove very generous to the Trust and its pygmy hog work over many years. The Raj-style guest house in Calcutta was sumptuous beyond belief, with air-conditioning, an English garden, white-turbaned, bare-footed servants everywhere anticipating every wish, yet with squalor lapping at the walls of the compound like a seething tide of flotsam. ‘Gerry was very taken aback,’ Alexandra remembered, ‘though he was a bit too preoccupied to notice. For much of our time in Assam he was rather distraught. He felt he should be staying in touch with Lee and not running around after a tiny pig on the other side of the world.’
Throughout his sojourn in India Gerald’s life revolved around finding means of communication with North Carolina. He was desperate to receive word from Lee and to send word back. Above all he needed to know how her announcement of their proposed marriage had gone down in America. In his first letter from Assam on 4 March he wrote:
My darling McGeorge,
I will have you know that I am nearly dead with frustration. I have been trying to telephone you for two solid days. First in Calcutta they said your phone was not answering. We tried all day and up to one o’clock last night – no reward. Then we flew up to Assam today and I started all over again. Now they have just told me your phone is out of order. Suicide seems the only answer – I will go and throw myself under an elephant.
My sweet Lee, I arrived in Calcutta and the first thing I received was your wonderful telegram. Darling, I am delighted about your parents and friends being pleased, but even more delighted that you are pleased – and said so. But then, when you told me to take care and then signed it ‘love Lee’ my head started to swim and I fell down several times. ‘LOVE?’ ‘LOVE?’ Whatever happened to my cold blooded zoo-digger? Whatever happened to flint hearted, wishy washy McGeorge, the girl who kept saying she didn’t love me, eh? Whatever happened to our cold, calculating McGeorge who was only going to marry me for what I could give her, eh? The next thing you know you’ll be writing and telling me you miss me. Get a grip on yourself, McGeorge, for Heavens sake and don’t go around sending telegrams like that.
Unless you mean it …
So I will end as you ended and mean it as much as I hope you did.
Take care, my sweet and lovely creature.
Love Gerry
Gerald and Alexandra travelled round Assam in (or sometimes on) whatever vehicle was appropriate – jeep, plane, elephant, inflatable dinghy. Their first stop was at Gauhati, a cleaner, serener place than the big city. Here they lived in a bungalow perched on a hill above the Brahmaputra river and visited the local zoo. ‘We were shown around in great style,’ Alexandra recorded in her diary, ‘closely followed by a whole army of keepers, directors, vets and this and that – it was like a state visit! And at last I caught my first glimpse of the famous pig. They are absolutely enchanting creatures – about the size of a small dog, hairy, sharp little tusks, move like greased lightning.’
From Gauhati they moved on to the Kaziranga National Park, a refuge for Indian rhino. From the Kaziranga Forest Lodge, a riverside bungalow at Arimara, Gerald wrote to Lee on 6 March, describing the difficulty he had experienced in attempting to send her a telegram from the local post office:
They were very charming, and looked in a big book to see how much it was to send a love telegram to North Carolina. Here they hit a snag of some sort. They all gathered around the book like a flock of ants, gesticulating and arguing. Eventually they brought the Post Master himself into the fray. He had a large turban, chewed betel nut and looked like Orson Welles. Even this magnificent specimen could not solve the problem, so they called me around the counter and into the inner sanctum. There they showed me the magnum opus. In the book was written the baffling phrase ‘NORTH-SOUTH CAROLINA’ and then the rate. Why, they enquired, puzzled, had I only put North on the telegraph when it clearly stated in the Post Office Bible that North-South was the correct way of putting it? I pointed out that there was a North and a South Carolina and the book merely put them with a hyphen to show that the rate was the same. They looked at each other aghast. How could the Post Office Bible be so obtuse and cunning? Impossible! By this time the entire staff of the post office was gathered around me trying to solve the problem of North and South Carolina, while at the other side of the counter a great wedge of humanity who merely wanted to buy stamps or post letters or send telegrams to ordinary places like Calcutta, got more and more restive. Meanwhile the Post Master General arrived. He looked about a hundred and eight with a beard that fifty macaws could have nested in. Everyone shouted at him at once and I thought the sheer noise would make him faint or have a heart attack. Eventually, when they had all explained it to him several times and he had heard my explanation (out of politeness only, since no one believed me) he took out a very dusty pair of glasses, put them on and peered into the Bible. The silence was such that you could have heard a dandelion clock landing. Then he took off his glasses, cleared his throat and proclaimed in a tremulous and dignified voice, that I was right – there was a North and a South Carolina and the rates were the same. The outlet of held breath was like a whirlwind. Then everyone beamed at me, the clever white man. They smiled at me, patted me on the back, shook my hand and brought me a cup of pale white and horribly sweet tea to drink while my telegram was handed round so everyone could read it. Thank God they did not read it aloud. Then they made out a receipt and I was free to go, having refused more tea. The little man who started it all apologised for the delay but, as he pointed out
proudly, they had to get it right. It was, after all, the most expensive telegram that had been sent in the whole history of the Post Office.
Five days later Gerald and Alexandra had reached Pertabghur, en route to a camp on the Subansiri river, where they aimed to look for a rare Indian freshwater crocodile with a long pointed snout called a gharial. Gerald wrote to Lee from there on 11 March:
Darling McGeorge,
I have just arrived at the above estate and got your telegram. My sweet, you should not send telegrams like that unless you mean it – it makes my heart turn over and my mind spin. ‘I love you’ forsooth – do you mean it or are you simply saying it because you think I want that and are feeling guilty? Dear McGeorge, if it is true I cannot say how delighted and flattered I am. But I must say once again – I do not expect it. I asked you to marry me knowing full well the terms and with my eyes wide open, so please don’t feel you have to force yourself to love me against your inclinations. I shall not be OFFENDED.
If, however, by some alchemy, you have really got your feelings involved then my world is made. I will move mountains for you, pluck the moon out of the sky for you to wear behind your ear, plait rainbows into tresses for you and guard you from harm like an elderly tiger. Please write and tell me what is and what is not true …
You’ll be delighted to know that all the women in Assam are quite beautiful and if I can remain faithful to you here I can do it anywhere. We leave tomorrow to an elephant catching camp, then to a place to see cock fighting, then to the place to see pygmy hogs, then back here. After that we go – for Easter – to a place in the hills called Shillong, and thence back to Calcutta when I hope I can phone you and hear your lovely voice …
Gerald Durrell Page 58
