A few days later a woman reporter and two photographers from Home magazine arrived looking for a scoop – a peep inside the Camusfeàrna retreat of Ring of Bright Water fame. Gavin and Lavinia presented a united front of domestic harmony and bliss. The reporter’s account of her visit was so riddled with ironies that under normal circumstances it would have left even Gavin and Lavinia speechless with laughter:
Having clanged the ship’s bell to announce my arrival, I bent down to lean my umbrella against the enclosure which housed one of the otters, and immediately a small, perfectly formed black hand darted through a gap in the fence and grabbed my shoes.
The appearance of Gavin Maxwell, tall, slim and kilted, rescued me from the tug of war. Maxwell’s is the austere face of the intellectual who fasts and meditates. It is only when he removes the dark glasses which he wears constantly – a cornea weakened by a desert sandstorm – that one sees his are the aloof, unvanquished eyes of a wild animal …
Mrs Maxwell is a mondaine who has thrown her Paris models away without a backward glance. Her charming narrow face, that of the ladies of the Court of Elizabeth the First, is alight with the joy of living. She cooks, cleans, washes, darns and helps with the otters. She told me that she had lost a stone and a half since living at Camusfeàrna, and remembering the walk across the hills, I was not surprised.
The reporter explored the house, peeped at the otters, then sat down to a lavish luncheon of prosciutto, roast grouse and venison. In spite of the restricted space in the kitchen, she noted, Gavin and his wife did not seem to get in one another’s way. ‘This, I suspected, was a team which could accomplish almost any exploit to which it set its mind.’
Then it was time to go. Halfway up the hillside the reporter paused and looked down. All was quiet and still. ‘In its ring of bright water,’ she concluded with ill-founded optimism, ‘Camusfeàrna was settling down to a long and peaceful night.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
Finale
Selfish? Yes, selfish. The selfishness of a square peg in a round hole.
FR. ROLFE (‘BARON CORVO’)
There now began a piecemeal – though not final – retreat from the conjugal home. As soon as he could arrange it, Gavin left Sandaig for his London house in Paultons Square. At the end of October Lavinia too returned to London and took up residence in her own house in Carmel Court, so that effectively the couple now had not only separate beds, but separate houses as well. When Gavin heard that Lavinia was in London he left Paultons Square for a secret address, scribbling her a hasty note of explanation: ‘I disappeared because I was too tired to be of use to anyone, but you have never been out of my thoughts … At this actual moment what we both need is rest, both of us, and that’s why I haven’t told anyone where I am. But I telephone Rosamond for news of you several times a day … Bless you and get well soon.’
Early in November, Lavinia – lonely, exhausted, but still protesting her love for Gavin, still fighting to preserve their marriage – arranged to enter a private nursing home in Hampstead for a short period of recuperation and care. Before she went she wrote a letter to Rosamond Bischoff, a copy of which she also sent to Gavin. She was patently neither mad nor suicidal, as Gavin claimed, but she was at the lowest ebb of her life. Her fears were not for herself but for her sons and her elderly parents. She had now removed herself from Sandaig for a long period so that Gavin could get to grips with his writing and work out a new modus vivendi. Her affection and regard for him had not diminished. He remained, she wrote, ‘unchanged, unchangeable’, and added: ‘My love for this funny human animal is simply because HE IS WHAT HE IS.’
Lavinia remained in the nursing home under heavy sedation for a few days. Several times a day Gavin would ring the nursing home from his secret address to ask how she was, but he never spoke to Lavinia direct or came to see her, and towards the end of her stay she felt impelled to scribble a furious note of protest to him: ‘From the way you are behaving now, it appears your one object is to break up our marriage – and me. You go into hiding – you do not consider whether a gesture to me of either telephoning or visiting me (with bodyguards if you like) wouldn’t help mend the breach … Why must everything always be what you want? Try to learn about give-and-take – do something sometimes which would make the other person happy – or do you hate your wife so much you want her made more and more miserable and destroyed?’
On 10 November Lavinia left the nursing home and went to stay at her parents’ home in Kensington Palace. Two days later her parents, alarmed by their daughter’s condition but not yet understanding its cause, arranged to have lunch with Gavin at Paultons Square. This was not a comfortable encounter for Gavin, who hated to deal with more than one person at a time, and was in any case in awe of both his in-laws. As the lunch progressed, he did his best to paint a frank portrait of his marriage as he saw it, and of the problems that his own particular personality brought to it. Lavinia’s parents were dismayed by what they heard during this ‘long Narcissan exegesis’ (as Sir Alan was later to describe it), and advised Gavin it would be better if he never saw their daughter again. When they returned home they told Lavinia what they had said. ‘After they had gone,’ Lavinia recalled, ‘Gavin rang me and asked if he could come round and see me – but alone, with no one else there. So he came round, and he was immensely warm and affectionate, and he told me to get better, and then asked me if I would like to write a chapter about the baby otters for his new book, as a way of keeping myself occupied while he was away, which I did.’
A few days later Gavin went abroad. It was to be two months before he set eyes on his wife again.
One reason for Gavin leaving the country was to take some of the heat out of his fevered marriage by removing himself from the scene. Though it would seem Lavinia was the more wounded of the two, Gavin also bore emotional scars from their encounters, and was, as Lavinia acknowledged, ‘raw and suffering’.
But there was another no less pressing reason for going – the problem of earning a living, which he had signally failed to do for the last two years. During those two years the royalties from the phenomenal success of Ring of Bright Water had continued to pour in – over £25,000 gross in 1961, nearly £30,000 in 1962, a combined total of roughly £650,000 at today’s values. But he had not only gained a fortune in those two fallow years, he had also spent one, on cars, boats, travel, high living, improvements at Sandaig and the great expense of keeping such a remote establishment going, and by late 1962 there was little left of the treasure trove that had slipped through his hands. In October Michael Cuddy, running the Gavin Maxwell Enterprises office in Paultons Square, had advised Jimmy Watt at Sandaig: ‘We are getting some money through in the next couple of days or so. About £2500. But we must still economise where possible as I have over £5000 in unpaid bills now on the company and personal accounts. So could you please keep spending down to a minimum at Sandaig …’ A little later Michael Cuddy confided to Jimmy the ominous news: ‘For your eyes only – at the present moment we have no, repeat no, money in the company account. As of this moment I cannot pay out cash for anything and we have £4200 of unpaid bills on my desk.’ Towards Christmas Gavin’s American publisher, Jack Macrae III, of Dutton’s, warned Mark Longman in London that he had heard Gavin had money problems and might ditch his agent in favour of a high-pressure agent who would force a bigger advance for his next book. At this point Gavin’s debit balance at Longman’s already stood at over £3500.
It was therefore of desperate importance that Gavin should complete his next book, The Rocks Remain, if not by the December deadline, then at least in time for publication in 1963. He had been able to write next to nothing of it during the chaos of the Sandaig summer, and he felt it imperative that he remove himself to some secluded spot abroad where he could write without interruption. He therefore arranged to borrow the house of a friend, Vladimir Daskaloff, who owned a palatial villa on the west coast of Mallorca. Here, in the depths of the Mediterranean winter, he hoped
to find peace and quiet in which to enjoy a break from domestic angst and concentrate exclusively on his much-delayed manuscript.
That was the plan; but it was a plan complicated by a tortuous itinerary that ensured he would spend almost as much time in travelling as in sitting at a desk. He intended to drive all the way from the Channel coast of France to Barcelona in his Mercedes roadster; from there he would ship the car to Mallorca, then fly to Algiers for a week before returning to Mallorca to work on his book.
On 19 November Gavin set off in the company of his former Sicilian researcher and translator, Mark Harwood, hurtling through a France prematurely beset by winter storms and snows and Force 11 hurricane winds. ‘I’ve never driven that distance in such appalling weather conditions,’ Gavin wrote to Lavinia, now back at her Kensington house. ‘From Le Touquet onwards rain, mud, hail, snow, windscreen wipers going night and day.’
At Barcelona docks Gavin delivered the Mercedes in time to be loaded on to the night ferry to Mallorca, and next morning flew to the island to reclaim the car at Palma docks. Entering the outskirts of Palma in the airport coach, however, he was surprised to see his car being driven away from the docks in the opposite direction. Convinced that it had been stolen, he called at the headquarters of the Guardia Civil, where he was informed: ‘Your car has had an accident. It is kaput – it is not possible to repair it in any way – ever.’ This proved to be all too true. While being driven at high speed the car had collided with a concrete pillar in the small village of Campastilla in the east of the island. The force of the impact had bent the chassis into a semi-circle, with the form of the pillar driven into the side of the car to create a gaping space in which two men could stand. Miraculously the driver had escaped without serious injury and after treatment for bruises at a first-aid post he had made his getaway through a toilet window, but was soon recaptured.
The Mercedes roadster had been Gavin’s pride and joy, and he was heartbroken at its destruction. But he was also intrigued by the motives and personality of the thief, a nineteen-year-old apprentice third officer from a German cargo ship recently arrived at Palma. Seeing him sitting terrified in handcuffs between his captors in a Spanish police post, Gavin felt a sympathetic rapport with the young man and declined to press charges against him. (‘He’s a curious chap,’ he wrote to Lavinia. ‘Aristocratic background, originally East German, father killed in 1944, mother died of cancer when he was fourteen, smokes marijuana, boxes to championship standards, student of Freud and Jung, widely read and knows reams of poetry.’) Besides, the incident would provide dramatic material for a chapter in his current book – a chapter in which Gavin’s methodical investigation into the cause of the crash was to prove worthy of Hercule Poirot himself.
A few days later Gavin flew to Algiers, now capital of a newly independent nation. ‘Margaret Pope was on the tarmac with the Chef de Protocol,’ Gavin wrote to Lavinia. ‘No customs, no passport formalities, and whisked away in the latter’s car. M.P. lives in an extraordinary flat which someone had started to build at the beginning of the troubles and then lost heart – the various household offices are scattered quite at random, the shower being in the middle of the kitchen, the wash basin and bidet in the hall, and the loo having only a bead curtain between it and the sitting room. The furniture of the whole house wouldn’t raise £5. Taken to the very first session of the new provisional cabinet and sat in the CD gallery between the new Chinese and Yugoslav Ambassadors.’
By early December Gavin was back in Mallorca and installed in Vladimir Daskaloff’s villa on the west coast of the island. ‘I’m trying to start work again,’ he reported, ‘and am determined to deliver the book by mid-February, when I have vague plans for driving the Land Rover from Casablanca to Cairo.’
Gavin had decided that instead of returning home to spend Christmas with his wife and stepchildren he would have Jimmy Watt over from Scotland for Christmas Day, and his young Sicilian collaborator and protégé Giuseppe for New Year’s Eve. Mallorca was not the warm winter refuge he had hoped for, however. The icy weather that had gripped France and frozen the burn and the otter pools at Sandaig had reached the Mediterranean too.
The one great joy was Giuseppe’s news. With Gavin’s support and encouragement he had become an outstanding medical student and a highly able disciple and lieutenant of Danilo Dolci, the so-called ‘Gandhi of Sicily’. ‘Giuseppe’s full story is much more fantastic than we ever knew,’ Gavin reported back to Lavinia. ‘God what a struggle and what a fantastic victory.’ In two years’ time his Sicilian friend would be a qualified doctor and mayor of his town. ‘He will become a greater and more significant figure than Dolci in the history of Sicily,’ Gavin believed, ‘partly because he’s a Sicilian and Dolci isn’t, but partly because where Dolci has patient wisdom like Gandhi, Giuseppe has a sort of firebrand dedication in which recklessness is tempered with the minimum necessary caution and expediency. Even if he gets himself bumped off now he will have done more for his country than anyone of his age has ever done. But he’s thin and worn and looks at least five years older than his age.’
On 9 January 1963, Gavin returned to London, his book still unfinished, to find an unexpected crisis awaiting him. Terry Nutkins, now a tall, good-looking young man in his seventeenth year, had suddenly run off from Sandaig, eloping with a woman some years older than himself, and setting off a chain-reaction of human explosions.
This surprise development had its origins in the previous autumn, when Gavin had been invited for a convivial weekend of good food, conversation and falconry at Spinningdale, the Sutherland home of his friend the actor James Robertson-Justice. Among the other guests were Robertson-Justice’s falconer, Phillip Glasier, Eric Linklater and his wife Marjorie, a thirty-year-old American woman called Wendy Stewart, who kept hawks, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, the President of the World Wildlife Fund, and Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, who Gavin claimed to have taken for a lunatic 90 m.p.h. spin in his Mercedes roadster down the tortuous road to Bonar Bridge – an act of potential regicide, let alone reckless driving.
Not long after the Spinningdale house party, the Duke of Edinburgh sent Gavin an inscribed copy of his recent book, Birds from Britannia, and in return Gavin sent a copy of The Otters’ Tale to Buckingham Palace, inscribed for Prince Philip by Jimmy and Terry as well as himself. Some weeks later, while Gavin was abroad, Wendy Stewart turned up at Sandaig with two falcons and an Indian sparrowhawk; when she left Terry followed her and joined her at her cottage at Spinningdale, just down the road from James Robertson-Justice’s house.
‘It was not so much an affair as a friendship with a woman, a member of the opposite sex, which I saw as a way out of Sandaig,’ Terry commented later. ‘Gavin resented it – very much so. He was very bitter about it. When I moved into Wendy’s house I had Jimmy Justice knocking on the door exclaiming: “What are you going to do about it, boy, eh?” He and Gavin and the others had rows about it for quite a long time.’
From Paultons Square, a short time after he had arrived back from Mallorca, Gavin sent Lavinia a note (in parts a masterpiece of disinformation) to await her return from a skiing holiday in Switzerland:
1. I came back to England to find a SITUATION (not for the first time as you know).
2. Everyone from Spinningdale converged on Paultons Square, and as you can imagine the situation did not lack strain and what-have-you.
3. For some reason everyone looked to me to make a decision.
4. I was in a v. v. difficult situation, being legal guardian of Terry.
5. I said, ‘When we are adult we make a muck of our lives anyway – therefore the youngest person must logically be the most important – and in this case it’s Terry.’
6. So I fixed that Terry goes off with Wendy. Hope and fear. Terry leaves this week, after going back to Sandaig to collect her hawks and his luggage, and is going to spend a holiday(?) for 6 weeks with her before starting work as a Keeper at London Zoo in March. If things get as bad as
I fear, he can come back to find refuge at Sandaig.
7. As a result of all this I feel worn out …
8. Jimmy is alone at Sandaig.
9. I return there this weekend, for so long as it takes me to finish this book, which now seems as if it will never be written – but it’s the only monetary salvation possible, and if it fails …
After a reunion with Lavinia and a conciliatory meeting with her parents, Gavin returned on 26 January to a wintry Sandaig, still frozen hard after more than a month of frost. All but one of the greylag geese had disappeared in the last few weeks, two of them falling prey to half-starved wild cats or foxes; and a gigantic female otter that had recently arrived from Griqualand in south-east Africa as Teko’s mate had been found dead in Teko’s bed by Jimmy Watt. In Gavin’s absence Mossy and Monday had become expert escapologists, and for the first weeks following his return their capture and recapture became a major preoccupation. Monday, in particular, seemed to find the call of the wild irresistible. Confine her outdoors in her stockade and she would shimmy up the sheer five-foot wall of the surrounding palisade or shift stones weighing up to sixty pounds and tunnel her way out through ground frozen as hard as iron; shut her indoors in the bathroom and she would find a way of forcing open the door or gnawing her way through the plasterboard and woodwork. Gavin was to write: ‘Monday could climb like a monkey, balance like a tight-rope walker, dig like a badger, move stones that were heavy to a human, jump like a squirrel, make herself thin as an eel or flat as a flounder; no device nor ingenuity of ours could make her once relent her first avowed intent to be a pilgrim. But most of all it was her brain, the systematic application of her many skills and her single-minded pertinacity, that convinced me of the uselessness of the struggle.’
Gavin Maxwell Page 48