Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  Gavin had received advance warning of a problem at Sandaig before he left London by car with Raef Payne on 16 April. Having finished reading the proofs of Reed in a last desperate late-night scramble, he was packed and ready to leave when he received a worrying phone call from the factor at Eilanreach Estate. There was a rumour going about that an otter had been killed in the vicinity and that Mij was missing. He could not confirm that the dead otter was Mij, because it was said that the otter in question had been so mangy that the man who had killed it had not thought it worth keeping the skin. There was no other information.

  Gavin arrived at Glenelg with Raef the following afternoon. Asking everyone he met in the village and along the shore, he had heard conflicting tales as to what had happened. But he did not believe the stories he was told. He knew in his bones that Mij was dead. He just wanted to know who had killed him and why. In the village he was told that the roadmender had been driving past the church when he had seen an otter by the road and had killed it. The skin was in bad condition, and the man, who in his subsequent account Gavin gave the name of ‘Big Angus’, had thrown it away. His next step was to pay a visit to Big Angus’s house. The man was not at home, but his family stuck to the authorised version. Yes, an otter had been killed, but the skin had been so mangy that it had been thrown away. When Big Angus himself arrived home he confirmed what his family had said. He had seen an otter on the road and had stopped his lorry and gone to the back to fetch a pick-head, with which he smashed the creature’s head in. ‘It was very old and skinny,’ he assured Gavin. ‘I threw the carcase in the river. I don’t remember where.’ He resisted all Gavin’s efforts to persuade him to tell the whole truth and spare Gavin the anguish of waiting in vain day after day at Sandaig for Mij’s return. Later a local informant told him the true story.

  He had seen the body of the otter on the lorry when it stopped in the village – a perfect specimen except the head, which was bashed in. It was obvious it wasn’t a wild otter, and the story Big Angus put about was ‘just a pack of lies’.

  Mij had been with Gavin for a year and a day on the night he had left London. ‘I hope he was killed quickly,’ he wrote later, ‘but I wish he had had one chance to use his teeth on his killer.’

  The fate of Mijbil caused some commotion in Glenelg, and is remembered still. Big Angus is still alive as I write, and he has received much calumny over the years as the killer of Mij. He was portrayed both in Gavin’s book and in the film based on it as a thoroughgoing brute – the quasi-mythological evil-doer of his era. In reality Big Angus was a decent man, and both his family and the community to which he belonged at Glenelg strongly resented what they saw as his character-assassination at Gavin Maxwell’s hands, pointing out that otters were widely considered vermin then and that the death of Mij was simply a case of ‘the wrong otter in the wrong place’.

  * * *

  While Raef took the car on to Tormor, Gavin – much dejected and forlorn – continued on the final sad stage of the journey to Sandaig by boat. Kathleen was waiting on the beach to meet him.

  ‘The day cleared in the afternoon and the wind dropped,’ she recalled; ‘and against the empty horizon I saw at last Gavin’s boat nearing the shore. It slowly grew and grew, like a death-ship in a dream; and at last the dinghy was lowered that brought him to the strand. He already knew; and, bowed with a single grief, we sat side by side beside the dark brown waters of the empty burn, where no animal companion delighted us with his greeting.’ Neither Gavin nor she had yet realised that Mij’s death had ended a world; nor that the very grief they shared was to divide them.

  Kathleen was beside herself with grief and remorse, and wept bitterly. Gavin did his best to comfort her. He was himself partly to blame for what had happened, he told her; he did not blame her, he was not angry, she should not cry, what was done was done and that was an end of it. But she was inconsolable and would allow no one, not even (or especially) Gavin, to relieve her of her burden of guilt. Gavin was a lonely man, she knew, and all his love had been bestowed on Mij. ‘To Gavin and to me, he was more than an animal; a creature of Paradise, a part of ourselves. In him I loved Gavin; in his love, a part of Gavin loved me, and Gavin through him accepted a part of my love.’ And now it was over. Her beloved Sandaig could never again be Eden for her. The gates of Paradise were closed.

  Looking back on that deathly, now distant event, Kathleen once told me: ‘It all boils down to Mij, doesn’t it, and my losing him. Gavin’s quest was for perfect human love. But really it was Mij that was perfect love; Mij was an angel. Mij would have gone eventually, given his propensity for straying, but it was I who was the instrument – I was the instrument for evil in Gavin’s life. Yet I had meant so intensely to be only the instrument for good. This is something that bewildered and embittered me for many years.’

  From Sandaig Gavin wrote to Mark Longman to tell him the news:

  I’m so very sorry to be once more in the position of letting you down; it seems to be becoming a habit and I feel guilty. The otter’s death has upset the programme for the moment, but I assure you that I will write the book – it’s only that it seems a bit grizzly to sit down and do it straightaway. I know that to mind about an animal so much must seem quite insane to you, but if you remember that I live alone and had this creature with me night and day for a year as, for most of the time, my only companion, you may be able to excuse if not understand.

  There was nothing to keep either Kathleen or Gavin at Sandaig now – indeed, it would have been impossible to stay – and after a day or two they went their separate ways. On 22 April Gavin’s London typist Beryl Borders and her foster-father (and future husband) Jim Borders took Gavin and Raef from Sandaig to Mallaig on a sailing boat they had chartered from Bruce Watt. From Mallaig Gavin went on to Canna to stay with his friends the Campbells, who did their best to comfort him and cheer him up. But there was a vast hollow in his life now, and a deep despair. On 27 April 1957 he left Canna and returned to the south. It was a year before he could bear to return.

  NINETEEN

  Writer at work

  No one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

  SAMUEL JOHNSON

  London was lonely and suffocating and Gavin was desolate. ‘I mourned for my fallen sparrow,’ he was to write. ‘I could not deny to myself how much I had been affected by the death of one wild animal.’

  Mark Longman had now had an opportunity to read the complete text of A Reed Shaken by the Wind and hoped to jolly Gavin up with words of praise. ‘I have read every word of the galleys,’ he wrote on 30 April, ‘and let me say at once that I find the complete work just as impressive as the admirable portions I saw before you left. You have done a splendid job and I congratulate you.’

  Wilfred Thesiger, however, was harder to please. He did not like the way Gavin had portrayed him on their expedition in the marshes, and said so. ‘I can see nothing in these galleys,’ Longman assured Thesiger, ‘which redounds to your discredit – indeed you emerge with flying colours, perhaps a little stern, but that, after all, was your role as leader of the party.’ But Thesiger was not placated. From the retreat where he was writing his classic of Arabian exploration, Arabian Sands, he scribbled a riposte, demanding that certain passages be excised from Gavin’s text, if only because Arab propaganda could make political capital out of them. He added: ‘I think Gavin’s treatment of me remains ungracious and ungenerous … I am fed up with my own book which is bloody. Boring and hopelessly put together.’

  Gavin agreed to the cuts and Thesiger was content. A week later, on 18 May 1957, Gavin left London for Sicily, for one last try to gather material for his faltering work on the tonnaras. Sicily provided a timely distraction from his private grief, even if it did no more than substitute one kind of penance for another. In a letter to Raef Payne on 11 June he described his life in unenviable terms:

  Life here is undiluted hell. I’ve been pretty continuously on the move, as it’s practically impossible to
get a bed anywhere. At the moment I’m staying in a youth hostel about ten miles from Palermo; it is full of fat Germans and northern Italians, none of them under fifty. They wear clackety wooden sabots and play the gramophone day and night. Add to that a sirocco that seems to come out of a furnace, swarms of flies, and a general feeling of malaise, and you have a pretty good recipe for hell. I can’t imagine what I’m doing here, but also can’t imagine what I should be doing in England. The world is still terribly otterless, and in general I feel a greater lack of purpose or direction than I ever remember.

  I find myself very well known in Sicily, and the Palermo bookshops still display rows and rows of the book [God Protect Me from My Friends] in the windows. Hardly a day passes without a local press comment of some sort or a lecture on ‘the Scottish journalist Maxwell’. The atmosphere is usually equivocal and uncomfortable.

  The summer months passed slowly under the scorching Sicilian sun, and there were times when Gavin’s much-mourned otter companion and even Sandaig itself seemed like the figments of some half-forgotten dream. By the beginning of July he was installed after a fashion in his old haunt at Castellammare, the poor fishing village not far from the tonnara where every summer the tuna fishermen took their seasonal toll in the chambers of death. But the Giuliano affair had begun to catch up with him, darkening the present and threatening the future. On 1 July he reported to Raef Payne:

  Here not all is fun and games; far from it indeed. An atmosphere began to develop when the friends of a certain politician mentioned in my book began to try to persuade him to bring a libel action. Whether or not he will I don’t know, but some unpleasant things have been happening, for these friends are mafiosi. The first symptom was a note in my car, saying: ‘Englischmann go home, you sayed too much someone going to kill you soon.’ To which I replied in a moment of bravado by another note left on the car at the same place – saying, in effect, go ahead. Nothing happened, but after that I was conscious of being followed from time to time. Then, as a result of an article published in L’ora – an interview with me – the police have become actively interested in where I got certain information and assume in fact that it came from the gentleman whose address I’m using here. So they are going to try and make life very difficult for him, because he is already a little non grata in the same quarters as I am. Meanwhile he has warned me to be careful of what I eat(!) and not to accept drinks or coffee from strangers. I eat in the evening at his house, and in the daytime bread and cheese where I am living – part of the castle (but the wrong part) now converted into an as yet unfinished house for the lighthouse keeper. Workmen are still working on it, and any form of privacy is impossible. Also they sing unmelodiously all day.

  All this is a very strange feeling; frankly, I’m scared stiff, and would come home but for (a) leaving a friend in the lurch, and (b) loss of face. As an addition to a repertoire of experienced sensations this is one I could have done without. Paranoia rampant. And Lord how Sicilians can stare! When a street is full of several hundred of them and they all stare it is quite something.

  My ticket home is booked for the 20th, and I should arrive in London that evening (if still alive). My plans beyond that date are uncertain, except in as far as I shall move house within a week of arrival, and then take stock.

  Having failed once again to obtain the material he needed for his tuna-fishing book, Gavin returned to London. Shortly afterwards he moved from Avonmore Road, his London base for almost a decade, to Kathleen Raine’s larger and more up-market house at 9 Paultons Square, Chelsea. It was here, some eight years previously, that he had been brought by Tambimuttu for the first meeting with Kathleen that had, in some measure, led to the start of his literary career. Kathleen’s children were grown up now and she no longer needed the whole of a property that occupied four floors. So she rented the ground floor and basement (and a small bedroom on the first floor) to Gavin, thus providing him with a stylish through-sitting-room, two bedrooms, a dining room and the run of the small garden – more commodious accommodation than he had ever enjoyed anywhere away from his own family home.

  Kathleen kept a small flat at the top of the house, and thus remained in contact with Gavin whenever she was not in Cambridge (she had a Research Fellowship at Girton College). Gradually she came to realise that their relationship was irremediably shattered. It was not the curse on the rowan tree or even the death of Mij that had caused this, she realised, but her pride in not accepting his forgiveness. ‘To see Gavin now was to weep,’ she was to write; ‘not a few tears, but streaming rivers of tears that would not stop, that I could no more control than the waters of a swollen burn. And that no man can bear.’

  One night she was sitting with him in the room that was now his, talking sadly (as she put it) ‘like Adam and Eve after the Fall’, when Gavin asked her to share his bed with him, as once before. ‘And I did not do so. Sadly, slowly, I climbed the stairs to my lonely bed, leaving him to his own. Knowing that I could no longer, now, give him either help or comfort.’

  All might still have been well, or at least bearable, but for a fatal evening they spent in the fashionable buttery of the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge. For some reason – it might have been whisky – Gavin used the occasion to destroy Kathleen once and for all. He catalogued all her faults as he saw them (including her dress and her physical appearance), and every one of her mistakes. ‘His words had come up from the depths,’ she recalled, ‘the fiery pits and deserts which lie far beyond our everyday selves.’ By the time he had finished she was so distraught and wept so bitterly that Gavin was concerned for her safety, and after delivering her to the house of one of her friends he telephoned their mutual guru, Elias Canetti, and warned him, ‘If Kathleen has killed herself, I shall never forgive her.’

  Gavin had closed his life against her. Now he presented merely an external and social mask. And eventually, somehow or other, he took over the rest of the house from her. One day he invited her back to admire his alterations and furniture, but it was all too much and she wept again. ‘I sat alone in a corner of the Blue Cockatoo restaurant,’ she wrote, ‘where there were candles on the tables, and dark shadows, and tried to regain command of myself before returning by a late train to Cambridge. Gavin had rid himself of me.’

  Too late, perhaps, Kathleen had discovered that Gavin was driven by a daemon fuelled by his deep anger about people. At times it seemed he had infringed so many of the norms of human relationships and crossed so many forbidden frontiers in his own inner world that the integrity of his persona had been destroyed.

  Not long after Gavin moved into 9 Paultons Square (for which his mother agreed to pay the rent), he began to enquire about a daily help to clean and tidy and cook his lunch for him. Mrs Lamm, who lived nearby, saw his advertisement on a board outside a tobacconists: ‘Daily help needed one and a half to two hours, for Author and Traveller, away quite a lot.’

  ‘What struck me most of all when I first met him,’ Mrs Lamm recalled, ‘was his friendliness, kindliness and politeness, not forgetting his sense of humour. He was very charming and natural. I felt at ease and very friendly towards him. I wanted to look after him so much. “Can you cook?” he asked.

  ‘“Well, yes,” I said, “I can cook all right to suit my husband and son.”

  ‘“Can you cook sausages?”

  ‘I felt like laughing but I could see that he was serious. I thought to myself, this is going to be easy – I could do that standing on my head. Before I left him he asked me if I liked animals. “Yes,” I said, “I am very fond of animals.” Another thing he said was: “I suppose you want a Hoover.” And that was the beginning of the most exciting, amusing, nerve-racking, alarming and interesting time I have ever experienced.’

  It was not the kind of household Mrs Lamm was used to. Gavin was so preoccupied and absent-minded that sometimes he forgot to pay her wages. But within a fortnight of her starting he had given her a substantial pay rise, and when her husband fell ill he readily volunteer
ed an open-ended loan to tide them over. Then there were the animals. Gavin shared his quarters with a succession of strange and wonderful birds and beasts, not all of which were entirely adjusted to human society.

  Fortunately, perhaps, Mrs Lamm arrived too late on the scene to be exposed to the unsociable habits of the earlier animal occupants of the house. The first was a ring-tailed lemur called Kiko, formerly the pet of the writer and critic, Cyril Connolly. Gavin bought Kiko in Harrods’ pet department for the colossal sum of £75 (more than £1000 today). She was a beautiful creature, a little larger than a cat, with soft blue-grey fur, a foxy black-and-white face, golden eyes, a huge bushy tail with black-and-white rings, and monkey-like hands with needle-like claws. Beautiful Kiko may have been, but her habits were (Gavin wrote) ‘both insanitary and obscene’. Kiko also turned out to be a psychopath. Gavin described the problem: ‘She had some deep-seated psychosis that made her about as suitable a pet as a wild-caught leopard. She was a killer, attacking without warning or casus belli, and always from behind.’ Twice she leapt from a bookcase onto Gavin’s shoulder and tried to tear at his eyes with her sharp claws.

  In a third attack she switched targets and made for his leg. This time she succeeded. Gavin’s tibial artery was slashed, so that it stuck out of his calf like a black cigarette end, spouting blood to a distance of a foot. To his horror, Gavin saw he was standing in a speedily widening puddle of blood. He soaked a handkerchief and tried to apply a tourniquet, but he could not remember where the pressure point was. He looked around wildly for a thread with which to tie off the artery but all the time the blood was pumping out – two pints, he reckoned, had already been lost – and he began to feel faint and shaky. Then suddenly he remembered – the tibial artery surfaced at the groin. He applied the tourniquet, lit a cigarette and contemplated the mess – and Kiko’s future. Since lemurs shared a common ancestor with man, he concluded, they might perhaps have to be chosen as carefully as human friends. Kiko would have to go; and go she did, to Chester Zoo and the company of her own kind.