The day following the main move, Richard was assigned the tricky task of ferrying one of Gavin’s prize possessions across the Sound of Sleat from Sandaig to the lighthouse cottage. This was the ‘Admiral’s bed’, which took up almost the entire length of Gavin’s boat (a large, seaworthy new dinghy called the Eider), and overlapped the sides by several feet. Though the sea was calm when Richard set out with this precarious cargo, a north-west wind blew up as he approached Skye, and as the boat rolled in the swell the sides of the great bed dipped into the sea and its drawers began to slide out and float away one by one. No sooner had Richard recovered one drawer than another would slip into the water. By the time he reached Isle Ornsay the tide was out and he had to manhaul the contraption all the way to the lighthouse rock and up the slope and into the house. To justify his exertions he decided to spend the night in the bed, only to find (as Lavinia had found before him) that the mattress was as hard and unyielding as a wrestler’s mat.
It soon became plain that Richard Frere was almost as chronically accident-prone as his employer. One day he found the luxuriously appointed sitting room full of sheep; the creatures were lying about all over the carpet ‘like courtesans after an orgy’, amid a litter of wool and droppings. He drove them out of the house with one of Gavin’s shark harpoons, but they trampled and smashed the huge sheet of plate glass that was waiting to be installed in the picture window. When Richard tried to ferry a replacement window across to the lighthouse rock he ran into a brisk sea which twisted the outboard engine off the stern of the dinghy, so that it disappeared ‘with a despairing gurgle and a stream of bubbles’ in thirty fathoms of water. In the years to come such calamities were to seem trivial in comparison with those that succeeded them. Richard was a philosophical man with a keen sense of the absurd, and like his employer he perceived in all mishaps and setbacks at best the obscure workings of Murphy’s Law, and at worst the machinations of blind Fate. Against such unpredictable powers all human planning and organisation were in vain. At least, as Richard noted with relief, ‘With Maxwell spilt milk was spilt.’
The first batch of holiday tenants were due in August. The day before their arrival Gavin and Jimmy Watt made an inventory of the contents of the cottage. The list seemed endless, for Gavin had brought with him a huge quantity of personal possessions – mostly souvenirs from his past life and foreign travels – with which he proceeded to clutter up Joan Frere’s balanced design. Among them were a number of photographs of young Arabs he had taken in the Iraq Marshes. Beautiful though they certainly were, Richard felt that they need not have been so prominently displayed high up on the bathroom walls, and whenever he had a bath he felt embarrassed by all those dark, lustful eyes looking down at him through the geraniums.
It took so long to complete the inventory that Gavin and Jimmy decided to join the Freres for dinner and stay on overnight. After the meal Gavin and Richard lingered on at table with a bottle of whisky. Gavin was cheerful and wide awake, as he usually was in the late evening, and asked Richard to stay up with him for a while.
‘I wonder,’ said Gavin, ‘if you would be happy to sit down in the company of a murderer?’
Richard was taken aback, and hoped that he was joking. Of course, Gavin went on, he was not a murderer. But he was a homosexual. Did that worry him? Richard replied that it did not, and that though he was not so inclined himself he felt some sympathy for Gavin in this matter. This annoyed Gavin, who looked gloomy and hurt. He drained his glass and lit a cigarette.
‘You are much too heterosexual to try and understand us,’ he said.
Richard replied that he found homosexuality unnatural. By now Gavin was in a state of suppressed anger.
‘You are a prig,’ he retorted, ‘and in some ways ignorant. You do not know Morocco, so I shall tell you that there it is a custom, an accepted thing, that young men of position spend some years in the houses of elder men as adopted sons. In return for the love and affection that they give, they receive advancement and worldliness. No harm is ever done to the boy who, as a married man or in later life, looks back upon his sponsor with feelings of affection. What is wrong with that?’
‘Nothing,’ replied Richard, ‘– in Morocco. Isn’t that the point?’
They went on talking for hours, until the bottle was empty and the paraffin lamp had gone out and a grey dawn was peeping through the fog of cigarette smoke. Richard finally rose from the table, leaving Gavin to sit it out alone in the lightening dawn, and later he heard Gavin go outside. ‘When he did not immediately return I went to the door to see if all was well with him,’ Richard was to write. ‘He was standing quite still on a rock above the sea, his eyes apparently fixed on the red dawn flaring over Camusfeàrna.’
Richard Frere had got to know Gavin moderately well during the months he had been working on Isle Ornsay, and had begun to respect him as a brilliantly talented and larger than life man who was always capable of surprises. Gradually he formed a picture of the contradictoriness of Gavin’s character and the opposites of which it was composed. Gavin, he perceived, was endowed with a keen intelligence, sharp wit and a powerful memory, yet in practical matters he was a dunce. He quickly lost his temper with the day-to-day irritations of life and the minor foibles of human behaviour, yet displayed almost Christ-like forgiveness when laid low by major catastrophe and colossal human error. He could be full of fun and humour one moment and overwhelmingly black and gloomy the next; generous or mean, compassionate or vindictive, stoic or neurotic, brave or timid. In spite of his apparent self-confidence and urbanity he was essentially a shy person; and in spite of his touching faith in the perfectibility of human nature among the young, he viewed all adults as potentially dangerous and treacherous, and used his power to flatter and charm them quite cynically, even resorting to bribery to buy their loyalty or friendship. Essentially, Richard decided, Gavin was a man of extremes, and uncompromising in all things – especially when he had had a few whiskies.
For all Gavin’s flaws, Richard had come to quite like him. But he did not expect to be involved in his affairs again, for he judged that Gavin’s finances were in a state of such terminal decline that he would be unable to afford any ambitious new projects in the future. In this he misjudged Gavin’s resilience, his imperviousness to the very idea of retrenchment. Early in September Gavin completed his childhood autobiography. ‘The MS has, thank God, been very well received,’ he wrote to a friend; ‘publishers say it’s the best thing I’ve done, which is a boast, because I find any stationary position (not moving forward) intolerable.’ Shortly afterwards he collected the balance of the advance due on delivery, which restored his financial equilibrium, if only momentarily, for Gavin had promised his family that the book would not be published during the lifetime of his mother, now an ailing old lady in her late eighties. In the brief interval of illusory solvency that followed he again approached the Freres. Would they, he asked them, consider converting his Kyleakin lighthouse cottages? This time he offered to pay for their services, but the figure he mentioned was so derisory that Joan declined to be involved, leaving Richard to do the conversion alone – this time to Gavin’s own design. Richard looked forward to the work. He had already experienced a nostalgic yearning for the solitary island life and the yelp and slap of the sea; besides, he loved a challenge.
The layout of the cottages on Kyleakin Island was much the same as that at Isle Ornsay, but their condition was far worse. The moist salt air had wreaked far greater havoc, some of the wooden floors had rotted away, and rubble and dust lay everywhere. ‘It was by far the most depressing place in which I have ever expected to live,’ Richard noted. ‘It was like going back several stages in evolution.’ Unlike Isle Ornsay, Eilean Ban was a true island, exposed to every vagary of wind and sea in the middle of a deep, exposed shipping channel through which the wild ocean tide rushed like a mill race. Coming and going with building materials and supplies in a small, open boat was not something that could be undertaken lightly, and one fals
e step could easily lead to disaster – especially now that winter, with its violent storms and hurricane winds, was fast approaching.
Fortunately Richard was not alone this time, for Terry Nutkins had arrived to lend a hand for a month or two, bringing with him his dog and two wildcats – a male and a female hand-reared from kittenhood by himself and his friend Wendy Stewart. Terry had brought about a reconciliation with Gavin following the fracas of two years before, and though he was no longer part of the Sandaig establishment he was happy to work on Eilean Ban for as long as he was needed. Richard was grateful for the young man’s help and company, for he found Terry a tough, amiable and hard-working companion, as well as a handy cook and a first-rate seaman. Not long afterward they were joined by another of Gavin’s ex-employees, Philip Alpin, who had left Sandaig and enrolled on an adventure course a short while before and who now sought an opportunity to put the character-forming benefits of this experience to practical effect. As the Atlantic wind roared in and the first snows settled on the encircling mountain peaks, the three men settled down like a marooned polar party to battle with the winter and transform Gavin’s dream into reality.
Gavin himself, meanwhile, was much preoccupied elsewhere. He wrote to Constance McNab: ‘I finished my book (autobiography of my first seventeen years) ahead of schedule, and have now started on a “standpoint” work of philosophy/psychology which I shall continue at the same time as trying to complete the Glaoui over the next year.’ To this ‘standpoint’ work, which was intended as a work of serious and original intellectual research in the field of comparative psychology, Gavin was to give the title The Heritage of Fear – a thesis concerning the roots of human and animal behaviour which he was to claim as ‘my great discovery’ and ‘an entirely new idea’. He was to toy with this theme off and on over the next year or two, but for the moment his attention was drawn to the problems of animal behaviour at a more practical and immediate level.
Earlier in the year he had acquired a Pyrenean mountain dog, a magnificent white-coated creature whose original owner had been unable to cope with the animal’s aggressive nature. Gavin told Constance: ‘It was hubris to take on a dog already classified as dangerous, which is now causing us infinite trouble by menacing humans and killing sheep. In such creatures constant contact is necessary, and even a short absence makes havoc. With infinite regret we are castrating the dog as the only alternative to killing him. I hate the idea of any mutilation, and that one in a glorious male animal revolts me.’ To carry out the operation Gavin called on the services of Donald MacLennan, the vet from Skye.
‘He had some way-out ideas on a lot of things,’ MacLennan recalled,
and nobody could dissuade him until he’d proved that they were wrong himself. He had a notion that if he caught the dog in the act of attacking one of the sheep around Sandaig, and wrapped him in the skin of the dead sheep and practically suffocated him in it, it would stop him. So he tried it, but with no success. He tried everything, and eventually he decided the only thing to do was to castrate him. I was hoping and praying that he wouldn’t go through with this, but lo and behold, he did.
Anyway, when the appointed day arrived and I came walking down through the wood, loaded with all my bits and pieces, I was absolutely dreading it. I went into the house and the first thing I saw was a tumbler of whisky. So I looked at it and said: ‘Is that for me?’ And he said: ‘Yes, it’ll help you tackle the dog.’ And I said: ‘If I drank half that I’d be seeing two dogs and the good Lord knows one’s enough.’ So anyway we started and everything went just like clockwork … Yes, he had a tremendous way with animals.
Gavin was confronted with a new year as bleak and daunting as any he had ever encountered. He had crashed his Mercedes just before Christmas, three boats had been lost in stormy weather at Sandaig, and he was besieged by Moroccans, for Ahmed was at Sandaig to help with the final stages of the Glaoui book, and Si Mohammed el-Khizzioui, the Glaoui’s former secretary, was staying with friends of Gavin’s at Stirling, where he seemed to have developed exaggerated expectations of Gavin’s personal wealth. These were mere aggravations, however. Far worse was to follow. ‘The year 1965 opened with a succession of body-blows so massive,’ Gavin was to write, ‘that I came very near to being knocked clean out of the ring altogether.’
The cause of this débâcle was one Gianfranco Alliata, Prince of Montereale, a former Monarchist member of the Italian Parliament then living in Rome, who on 13 February 1965 brought an action for libel at the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court of Justice in London against Gavin Maxwell and his publishers, Longmans Green & Co.
The basis of the Prince’s complaint lay in certain passages in God Protect Me from My Friends, which had been published in Britain nine years previously. In 1958 an Italian court had found Gavin guilty on a charge of criminal libel brought by Italy’s former Minister of Posts and Telegraphs, Bernardo Mattarella, and Gavin had been sentenced to eight months in prison (which he never served) and fined £3000 (which he paid). Gavin had believed that that was the end of the matter, but in September 1962 the Prince Alliata, a friend of Mattarella, announced that he too intended to bring a libel action against him, this time in an English court, on the grounds that the book was injurious to his character and reputation (such as it was, for he had already been tried for bigamy in both an Italian and a Brazilian court).
Gavin became anxious as the date of the case drew near. Before the opening hearing he had been given a word of advice by Tony Lincoln, the barrister friend who rented a pied-à-terre in Gavin’s house in Paultons Square. ‘He was terribly wound up the night before the hearing,’ Lincoln recalled. ‘So much so that at one point he interrupted our conversation, went to the window, pulled back the curtain and looked nervously out. “The Mafia are after me,” he said. “They’ve got men outside.” I pleaded with him not to wear his dark glasses in court. The glasses made him look terribly sinister – more like a Sicilian mafioso than a reputable Scottish author – but he chose to ignore my advice.’
Prince Alliata was represented in court by Mr Colin Duncan, Q.C. The defamatory passages in God Protect Me from My Friends, he contended, were based on testimony given by Salvatore Giuliano’s lieutenant, Gaspare Pisciotta, at the trial of Giuliano’s followers at Viterbo in 1951. Pisciotta alleged that Prince Alliata had used his political position and influence to aid and abet Giuliano, and had conspired with him to perpetrate a massacre at a 1947 May Day rally of the Communist Party at Portella della Ginestra, in Sicily, in which at least eight people had been shot dead and thirty-three wounded. ‘Alliata was the power behind Giuliano’s throne,’ Gavin had quoted Pisciotta as saying, ‘without whom Giuliano never moved, and in whom he had absolute trust.’
Gavin and his publishers were represented by David Hirst, who denied that the words were defamatory and claimed qualified privilege. No one seemed to doubt that Gavin would win the case, but the process proved complicated and lasted several days. By the second day it was evident that things were not going well for Gavin. ‘The whole trial was to me a sort of nightmare,’ he wrote afterwards. ‘I found it difficult to believe what was happening … I began to suffer an acute sense of unreality, doubting my ability to add up even a number of years that would fit on to the fingers of one hand; this did not increase my own coherence in the witness box … And so it dragged on day after day. Soon I felt that I was not enjoying the judge’s sympathy and after a while I had lost the jury’s too.’
The fact that he had worked on the disputed book so long ago and was no longer master of all the details it contained contributed in part to his incoherent performance in the witness box; it was not that which lost him the sympathy of the court, however, but his dark glasses. They were not just dark, they were black, and totally opaque; they obscured a large part of his face and invariably induced a negative reaction in any person who did not know him. ‘As I had predicted,’ Anthony Lincoln commented afterwards, ‘the glasses completely lost him the trust of the court
.’
As he sat there, feeling miserable, indignant and maligned, Gavin must have rued the day ten years before when he ignored the advice of his publisher’s libel lawyer to remove the name of Alliata from his manuscript, or overlooked the fact that Alliata’s alleged complicity in the May Day massacre had been investigated and dismissed by an Italian court in 1953. Pisciotta had been proved a liar at his trial, the judge pointed out in his summing up on 22 February, and his allegations against Prince Alliata were known to have been unfounded. ‘To repeat a libel was to publish a fresh libel,’ the judge added. ‘Why repeat it if it was a lie in the first instance?’ Turning to the evidence Gavin had given in court, the judge had this to say: ‘Mr Maxwell went so far as to say to the jury that these statements in God Protect Me from My Friends were put in the friendliest spirit … If that was the act of a friend, the jury might think that Prince Alliata might well say, “God protect me from my friends”!’
The jury retired, and returned a little under two hours later. In court Prince Alliata had stated that he wished the defendants to be ‘severamente puniti’. But though the jury’s verdict was in favour of Alliata, this had not been a criminal case under British law, so there was no question of punishing the guilty parties, only of compensating the plaintiff for his possible loss of reputation in England. As he was not a public figure in that country he was awarded damages of only £400. However, the court decided that Gavin and his publisher were liable for the costs of both sides, which ran into five figures. ‘I walked out of the court,’ Gavin recalled, ‘knowing that it would be years, if ever, before I could pay my share. I hope I shall meet his Lordship in an after life – if we are heading in the same direction.’
Gavin Maxwell Page 53