Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  One more thing and then I will have done lecturing you. You seem to think that, because I said that your not loving me as I love you was unimportant, that I meant that love was unimportant. No way. I love you deeply and I know this will sustain and help our relationship. I hope that by working, living and laughing together that your feelings for me might deepen, not into love as the women’s magazines depict it, but as a secure and happy friendship combined with a genuine fondness. This is the real love in my opinion and when you have achieved it you will know it and want no other. You said two things in your last letter which I think are of great importance since they have a bearing on the matter. You said ‘the certainty of the future with you, the man I adore’. Darling, if you really feel this you are a long way along the road to the state I have been describing. I hope you mean it. It is of great importance to me. In ending your letter you say: ‘No matter what happens, I want you to know that I love and respect you and deeply wish you feel the same about me.’ Do you realise that you have never before used the words ‘adore’ and ‘love’ to me, either in speech or in writing? They did much to restore my morale and to salve my hurts. So I can say that I adore, respect and love you to distraction and I hope you now have sufficient proof of it.

  There! I have finished this peroration of self pity, nearly as long as the Bible but not half so well written. The thing is over as far as I am concerned, but remember my dear that adoration, love, respect and trust are all very fragile bubbles and you came within a hair’s breadth of bursting them all. So I leave you with this quote from no less a cynical source than Nietzsche: ‘It is not lack of love but lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.’

  You are my dearest love and my friend. While you are these I shall want nothing in life for I shall have everything. I miss you.

  Love Gerry.

  At last, after many absences and separations, and not a few serious ups and downs, the two lovers stood transparent and unguarded before one another. Lee, having vigorously laid claim to her right to her personal autonomy, had firmly declared her affection and respect for Gerald. Gerald, having swallowed his ego and battened down his male pride, had loudly proclaimed his adoration, respect and love for Lee. It was the end of an affair and the beginning of a commitment. The prelude was over. The finale was about to begin.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Love Story: Finale

  1978–1979

  Gerald found it difficult to settle back into a solitary life at the flat at the zoo. Zoo and Trust matters distracted him during the day, but when his colleagues and staff went home and the spring night drew in over this enclave of animal salvation, in which he was almost the only representative of the human species, his mind turned to the only living thing that really mattered to him at that time – his wife-to-be in the faraway American South. Then the only solace for his state of yearning and incompleteness was to make a phone call or write a letter. From this point Gerald’s flow of love letters and other missives to Lee doubled and then redoubled. They did not end till she was by his side on a permanent basis, and then he never wrote to her again, for she was rarely more than a room away from him.

  Back in Durham, North Carolina, meanwhile, Lee had been doing her bit. The first casualty was her relationship with her former beloved, Lincoln, which was now decisively terminated.

  The previous summer Gerald had finally got Larry to agree to sell him the Mazet, which had been standing empty for the last three years or so, and he had moved his belongings into it and taken possession, though the sale had still to be finalised. In April 1978 Gerald set off for Languedoc with his personal assistant, John Hartley, to finish his latest work in progress – a collection of anecdotes entitled The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium.

  The Mas – proper name Mas Michel, more commonly known by the diminutive form of the word, mazet – was a white-plastered, stone- and mud-walled farmhouse, set in garrigue-covered hills in a large wild plot of its own that smelled of sage, thyme and wild lavender. Reached by a rough motorable track, a flight of stone steps led up to a flagstone terrace, with the unpretentious old dwelling on the left. Before Gerald redeveloped it some years later, the Mazet consisted of a tiny, low living-room with an open fireplace, a bedroom to the left and a small dining-room on the right, leading to a commodious kitchen at the other end. At the back were three other small rooms – and that was that. It was here that Larry had written some of the best of his Alexandrian Quartet, and Gerald and Jacquie had spent several summers there, with Gerald working on his books and television scripts away from the distractions of life at the zoo.

  Gerald loved the place. To him, as to Larry, it was like living in Greece – Larry thought it was more like Attica than Languedoc – except that it was easier to get to and the native cuisine was a good deal better. Jacquie had never cared that much for the place, perhaps because she and Larry had never really got on, but Gerald had high hopes that Lee would not only fall in love with the house but, through it, with him. He wrote to her:

  The Mas, poor little thing, had been badly neglected by the people who had it after me. It was like an orphan child that no-one had loved. So John and I and Arlette [the part-time housekeeper who lived nearby] set to work and with the aid of polish, brushes and mops, great blazing fires of pine logs in the living room and kitchen, managed to bring something of a glow to its cheeks and a hopeful sparkle to its eyes. However, as I told you, it needs new clothes, so to speak, so I am having our bathroom and bedroom, the tiny living room, the room I am going to make the larder and the kitchen all repainted. Then I am having the vine support redone so we have a nice place to sit (in summer we live and eat out there) and they are going to repaint and fix up the pool. I say ‘pool’ very grandly but it’s really only a giant’s paddling pool, but big enough to dive in, swim a few strokes and cool off from the sun.

  This is the first day of my diet, by the way, and it is now twelve o’clock and all I have had is one glass of orange juice and two cups of coffee. Oh, I shall be so slim!

  So I leave you. I love you. I want you. I miss you. I need you. The only pleasure in being here is to know that I am preparing everything for you.

  Keep safe. G.

  In Nîmes, the nearest town of substance, Gerald had been busy ordering furniture and other necessities, including a double bed. He duly reported the news of this crucial acquisition, enclosing a brochure:

  Empty Bed Mazet, Route Chilly, Hopeful

  Lit D’amour

  27 April 1978

  Darling McGeorge,

  In haste I send you coloured photographs of what we can do in our new bed. Mon Dieu! The mind boggles. Please read the instructions carefully. I don’t want you pleading ignorance at the last moment. If the bed breaks within a year (so the shop informed me without a smile) we can claim a new one.

  I am lonely and I wish you and the bloody bed were here and I wish you were in it and I wish I was crossing the room and sliding between the sheets and then …

  I love you, both in and out of bed. G.

  With a wedding bed ordered and paid for, Gerald’s mind began to turn to a wedding to go with it. He had already been in communication with Lee’s parents, Hal and Harriet McGeorge, and had recently received a letter from her mother in which she went so far as to say they were looking forward to receiving him in Memphis in due course. The time was getting near, he began to feel, when Lee’s folks ought to be given a chance to meet (and, he hoped, approve) their prospective fifty-three-year-old son-in-law. He could, he told Lee, visit the States around the middle of May. She welcomed the idea, writing from Duke University at the end of April:

  I hope the weather is nice when you come to Durham, so that we can sit on the porch and have drinks while the sun sets and the birds warble their evensong. It’s such a restful place. And we’ll need rest at that point because I am seriously thinking of organising a small party for later that night.

  Love, Lee.

  Gerald wrote back on 2 May:

  H
ere, Wish I were there, With you, Always.

  Beloved McGeorge,

  Today, after two days pissing with rain, the sun came out, the sky was blue and all was right with the world except that you were not here. Went down early to the market. I am most impatient to show you this: it is really splendid, and I really believe it is so beautiful and so filled with exotic food stuff and you can put on a couple of pounds just by walking through it. Did you know that France had five hundred cheeses? And to think I have only tasted about thirty five. Oh, McGeorge, I am going to stuff you like a Strasbourg Goose, except I won’t nail your feet to the floor. Maybe I’ll just nail you to the bed. Or nail us both to the bed. Or just fill the bed with you and me and a couple of cheeses for strength and then nail up the bedroom door. I hope by now you have had the instructions about the bed. IMPORTANT NOTE: DO NOT PRACTISE THEM WITH ANYONE ELSE BUT ME. I don’t mind if you’re a bit rusty.

  Enclosed with the letter was a small envelope full of dried herbs inscribed: ‘This is what our hillside behind the house smells like in the sun’. Under separate cover he sent a ten-page illustrated letter about life and nature at the Mazet, decorated with multi-coloured drawings in the manner of an illuminated manuscript concocted by a medieval Walt Disney. In this lovingly and painstakingly composed letter he beguiled Lee with cameos about the nature of the place, starting with the suicide bees:

  The patio – on which we live and eat in summer – is shaded by a vine which lies upon a sort of bamboo raft. These hollow bamboos are a great attraction to one of the more stupid but attractive insects in the area: the carpenter bees. They are now buzzing around, testing the bamboos for size, mating in mid-air (which is quite disgusting) and generally getting themselves ready for the great moment when they start building their nests in the bamboo. Song:

  The carpenter bee is buzzing and blue

  As a piece of the Mediterranean sea,

  But I fear that his eyesight is not very true

  For he’s swimming around in my tea

  And then, I assure you, just yesterday eve,

  I was watching the sunset at nine,

  And without as much as a quick ‘by your leave’

  He was floating around in my wine.

  He fell in my soup, he fell in my beer,

  He fell – with a splash – in my cafe au lait:

  But his awful myopia just fills me with fear,

  So I’m buying him a life-belt today.

  The first hoopoes have arrived and inspected the wall on the hill at the back of the Mazet where they nest. The cuckoos have arrived too, and they are cucking all over the valley in the most seductive fashion. It’s funny how all the other birds fall silent when they hear the cuckoo. She even gives the nightingale pause for thought, and if you knew the nightingales here you would realise that all they seem bent on doing is to spend all day and night singing like a bloody pop group. However, I must admit that the other night was very romantic. We had such a fierce full moon that you could read a book anywhere in the valley. And there were no less than four nightingales in full song around the house …

  Darling McGeorge I must end this, for it is almost as long as the Book of Kells. You have found it silly? Infantile? Stupid? Then I am all of these things. Soon I will be in America and you will no longer be just a voice on the end of the phone. So, until I arrive, dying of jet lag and love, I leave you with this thought: if you don’t think up a good answer to my protestations of love, I shall go nuts.

  In the second week of May Gerald returned to Jersey. A telegram was waiting for him: ‘HELLO WELCOME HOME BY JOVE I WILL SAY IT FOR REAL IN TEN DAYS YOUR CHIPMUNK’. A week or two later he flew to the States, met up with Lee in Durham and travelled to Memphis with her to meet her parents. Mr and Mrs McGeorge had been fully briefed by their daughter about her unusual choice of fiance. They had studied his photo; they had even read his books. Apart from that, all they knew was that he was closer to their age than hers.

  When Gerald arrived, he was at his most charming and charismatic – shy, deferential, polite, attentive, cuddly. With his English accent, Irish charm, Greek manners and cosmopolitan ways, he was not only likeable, he was irresistible. The age gap didn’t worry him, he reassured them, though the culture gap might. But he loved their daughter dearly, and to prove it (rummaging in his pocket) he wanted to present her with this garnet-and-pearl engagement ring, which he had had specially made in India. Lee put the ring on her finger. Now she was engaged. It was time to talk about the wedding. Were they thinking about a large wedding and a small reception, Lee’s mother wondered, or a large reception and a small wedding? The first would be cheaper, as they could have the reception at home. The second would be more expensive, but easier for all. The ball was rolling. They parted in an atmosphere of great mutual affection and regard.

  Lee and Gerald planned to spend a few weeks of the summer at the Mazet, and early in June she arrived in Jersey on the first stage of the journey. She was just in time to play her first official role as the Honorary Director’s right-hand lady, at the formal opening of the Trust’s veterinary centre by the American Ambassador to Britain, Kingman Brewster. Gerald gave her parents a glowing report of how she coped with this daunting initiating ceremonial.

  Dear Both,

  Your daughter is a delight and I am even thinking seriously about keeping her. The opening of the new vet complex in Jersey went off with a flourish. As lady of the manor she looked beautiful and elegant in her yellow dress with a silly white hat we got her, and everyone thought – quite rightly – that she was wonderful. She took over when we got to our lemur collection and gave poor Ambassador Brewster a long discourse on these creatures, telling him, I fear, more than he ever wanted to know about them. He fell asleep several times and had to be woken up by careful pinches from his wife. But the whole day was splendid and was enhanced by your daughter being the hostess. The day ended with a massive dinner, a lot of silly speeches (of which mine was the only one worth listening to) and then – after Amb. Brew. and wife had left – McGeorge and I danced. You did not know that your future son-in-law had such talent, did you? True, I fell down several times, but I did dance.

  In mid-June Gerald and Lee left for the South of France. ‘My brother Gerry is buying the Mazet and is busy knocking it about,’ Larry reported to Henry Miller. ‘He plans to marry a nice American girl and spend the summers there. He is rich and famous as a zoo man now and has very happily shed his last wife.’

  The leisurely journey with Lee through the summer landscape of southern France was a revelation for them both, though in different ways, as Gerald reported in a letter to his sister Margaret.

  Dear Marg,

  We drove down very slowly and the weather was perfect all the way. We stayed at all the really posh old chateaux that are now hotels and I spared no expense regarding food and wine. I wish you could have seen Lee enjoying it, for she has never seen France, nor has she had that sort of treatment from any of her boyfriends before. She is such a treat to be with as she enjoys everything so much, from just looking at flowers and insects in the hedges to savouring new foods and wines (she is a glutton like me) and she makes an adventure of everything. When we got to the Mazet and walked up on to the patio her whole face lit up and she flung her arms round my neck and kissed me. As we walked from room to room, all freshly decorated and beautifully organised with fresh flowers by Arlette, Lee got more and more excited. If anything she now loves the place more than we do, which is wonderful, and keeps saying, ‘now when it is ours let’s do thus and thus, but we must be careful not to spoil the atmosphere,’ and so on. Although it was warm enough to sunbathe on most days it was still cool enough to have fires: she adored this and insisted on lighting them herself. Then we’d drink wine and she’d get the guitar out and she’d play and sing (she has a very true and clear voice) and then we’d drink more wine and fit bawdy words to the songs that she knew and laugh a lot and then go to bed and make love for hours. I wish to Hell I’d met her yea
rs ago, but at least I have her now. As we told you she is not in love with me and has never made any bones about it, but is very fond of me and is most gentle, sweet and considerate. Of late, to my secret joy, she has shown unmistakable signs of developing a crush on me, so I have high hopes of the future. But I am happier than I have been in years and she has given me a new lease of life: I feel eighteen again. We like all the same things, we can sing and laugh together, talk serious scientific talk, we can talk about the future of the Trust and the Zoo – both of which she is mad about (unlike Jacquie who spent all her time nagging me to give it up) – or we can talk nonsense. All the things that for years I have taken for granted have now taken on new colours and charms for me, for I am showing them to her for the first time and her delight and enjoyment doubles my own. Anyway, all this crap is really to tell you that I am as happy as hell: don’t tell a soul but we are even seriously thinking about a child, but we have so much that we want to enjoy with each other first and are agreed that a child is not like a pet that you can leave behind to be fed and watered by the zoo staff like a cat or dog. Anyway, we’ll see, and we may decide against it.

  Though Gerald and Lee were sharing a house all on their own, this did not stop Gerald, an inveterate scribbler, leaving handwritten notes for her around the Mazet, scrawled on any scrap of paper to hand, including kitchen rolls. And everywhere, like giant confetti, in kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, the ubiquitous and sempiternal message ‘I LOVE YOU’.

  The couple stayed at the Mazet for a little over four weeks, and on 12 July Lee flew back to the States. A few days later Gerald reverted to his old habits and wrote another love letter.