Gavin Maxwell

by Botting, Douglas;

  This unfortunate confrontation seems to have induced a crisis of conscience in Gavin’s mind, for next day Richard Frere, who was at Sandaig on one of his regular business visits, noticed that he was steadily sinking into a mood of depression. He had been drinking most of the day, which didn’t help. At length Gavin got up, turned to Richard and said: ‘I need some exercise. I shall go for a short walk.’ He took his duffel coat from the coat rack in the porch, opened the front door and strode out.

  It was a wild day. A Force 9 was roaring in from the south-west and the gulls drifted and banked on the wet wind; the sky was almost black and the crests of the waves in the sound were short, white and vicious. Gavin turned towards the burn, crossed the bridge and began to climb the old foot-track that led steeply up over the hill and the moor. At a flat patch where the track bent sharply left he stopped to get his breath back, and turned to stare the way he had come, over the house to the bay and the scatter of islands beyond. A small school of whales nosed down the Sound of Sleat, and a fishing boat butted the chop of the sea in a cloud of white foam. On Skye the first snows on the hills stood out bleakly white against the dark grey scurry of the lowering clouds. He recognised the scene as from long ago, but now it held for him nothing that he wanted to remember.

  ‘I was looking down upon Camusfeàrna, and I believed I was saying goodbye to it after eighteen years,’ he was to write. ‘Suddenly there came a sharp flurry of hail, and I pulled up the hood of my duffel coat, and crouched back into the steep hillside. It gave no shelter; there was no shelter from any wind, and I knew it suddenly and completely.’

  As he stood there he tried to remember the place as he had first seen it – ‘a weather-worn cottage within a stone’s throw of the sea, standing unfenced upon a grass green field, only the low marram-grown dunes between it and the breaking waves. Untenanted, deserted, waiting …’

  Much had changed since those heady, joyous days. His nearest neighbours, the MacLeods, had gone now, like everything and everyone else, and their little house of green corrugated iron up at Tormor stood empty, so that there was no human habitation within five miles of where Gavin lived. The very hills had changed too, and the rough windswept moorland of rock and peat-bog and heather was now covered in a low, dark, dripping forest of young sitkas and larch. As for the house, its simple charm was a thing of the past – the wrecked Jeeps, the ugly prefabricated extensions, the posts and wires and palisades, the Polar Star high and dry on its massive steel cradle, had destroyed it for ever. ‘Now, as I sat huddled in my duffel coat, I was surveying what I had done to Camusfeàrna – what I had done to the animals and what I had done to myself.’

  The recent rains and snows had turned the burn into a racing torrent and the flood water lay in broad pools all over the flat grass around the house. One of these pools was in Teko’s enclosure, and it was a curious shape – a perfect figure of eight, marking the pattern of Teko’s daily walk, a zoo pattern of behaviour, the consequence of boredom and frustration.

  The sun had set now behind the jagged peaks of Skye and the Isle Ornsay light flashed its intermittent gleam across the darkening sound. Gavin stirred himself and began to pick his way back down the steep track towards the house. A full gale drove the rain in from the sea and it slashed at his face as he stumbled downwards; from the bay he could hear the roar and hiss of the breakers as they pounded the shore on the incoming tide. The wild tumult of the approaching night echoed and reinforced the tormented struggle within his own mind. ‘The otters were going,’ he reminded himself, ‘Camusfeàrna would be closed; somewhere I would find a new life … It was, after all, the end of an era, and that comes with greater or lesser shock to every human being who ever lived.’

  But was it right, he asked himself? Was it right to betray the animals who had put their trust in him and made his home their own, who had been the basis of his own fame and one-time fortune? Was it right to betray that great army of the reading public, the fans of Ring of Bright Water, who wrote to him now to share his grief at his impending departure from Camusfeàrna and to protest at his decision to put the otters in a zoo?

  Gavin recrossed the rushing burn, skirted the rowan tree and halted outside Teko’s enclosure, which adjoined the landward end of the house. For some minutes he stood there in the driving rain. He wanted, obsessively, to say goodbye to Teko one last time. Teko’s sleeping quarters were in the little slate-roofed lean-to built on to the end of the house. Gavin opened the door, switched on the light and stooped inside. Teko wasn’t there. It was hardly surprising. The little shed was uninhabitable. A gale had dislodged one of the roof-slates and the floor was under an inch of water, the infra-red lamp had fused and Teko’s blankets were soaking.

  Gavin called Teko’s name in the dark, and the otter, which had hardly known human contact for years, came bounding in from his enclosure, wet, cold and disconsolate. ‘He greeted me as might a castaway on a desert island greet his rescuing ship,’ Gavin wrote. ‘All his language … he employed in welcome, in rebuke, in renewed hope for the future.’ Gavin rushed out, ran to the main house and burst into the kitchen-parlour shouting for dry blankets. To a startled Richard Frere he looked as ‘wild as a scarecrow’.

  ‘That otter is not going to any zoo!’ he raged at the luckless Richard. ‘I don’t care if you are bloody angry with me, Richard. That otter stays here!’

  Gavin went back to Teko’s quarters. He dried Teko with a towel as he used to do when the otter was a cub and lined his lorry tyre with fresh blankets so that he could sleep in comfort – on his back, mouth open, head resting on Gavin’s forearm, snoring lightly. Gavin knew now that he could never send Teko to a zoo, and that somehow the otter should be returned to the sea and the burn. Quite how, he did not know, but it had to happen. ‘If it did not I would be a betrayer, and a betrayer of animal loyalties becomes a betrayer in human situations too.’

  Richard was aghast when he heard Gavin’s decision. He was convinced that only by putting the otters in a zoo and closing down Sandaig would it be possible for Gavin to survive financially. If Ornsay wasn’t sold in the next few weeks, he told Gavin, Sandaig would be uninhabitable – no electricity, no phone, no food, no money. And then who would look after Teko?

  Richard hoped he had played his trump card. But he was wrong. Gavin was looking searchingly at Beryl Borders – and in response Beryl gave him an almost imperceptible nod of the head. Now Richard perceived from what quarter Gavin had received the strength to make his decision. Beryl, he concluded, ‘had condemned herself to a hard and lonely winter, happy in the knowledge that she was wanted’.

  If Teko was to stay on at Sandaig, there was no overriding reason for Edal, the more self-sufficient of the two otters, to be sent to the zoo either, and in the middle of December, having prevaricated for several weeks, Gavin informed the highly disgruntled zoo to this effect.

  Gavin now prepared to leave Sandaig for a six-month stint in North Africa. He had rented a flat in Tangier with the aim of devoting himself exclusively to writing a new book far from the worries and distractions of his beleaguered life at home. This book was to be an account of how his life had come full circle – from the time years ago when he was sitting at Sandaig with one otter and no money and writing Ring of Bright Water, which would make him rich and successful, back to the present when he was sitting at Sandaig with two otters and no money … Longmans considered the plan ‘an absolute winner – if it could be done without libelling everyone that Gavin has met in the last six years, including Longmans’. To keep body and soul together while he wrote it Longmans agreed to pay Gavin an allowance of £1000. The book was his only chance of reducing his debts, for he was now virtually bankrupt – even his indebtedness to his publishers now touched five figures, Prince Alliata libel damages included.

  There was only one other iron left in the dying fire – the sale of the Isle Ornsay lighthouse cottage. The actor Alec Guinness had been tempted, but finally thought better of it. ‘Greatly regret that my wife and
I must decline Isle Ornsay cottage,’ he had cabled a disconsolate Gavin. ‘We feel it would be too great a responsibility to look after from such a distance.’ Now an English lawyer and his wife had expressed an interest in the place, and Gavin pinned his very survival on their decision. He was on the point of boarding the plane to Tangier when Richard Frere gave him the news over the phone. The deal was off. A long, hard, bankrupt winter stretched ahead.

  So, late in December Gavin flew away to warmer climes. Of that moment he was later to write: ‘I was not saying a true farewell as I had planned and prepared. I was returning, come what might, hell and high water. I felt that by now I was acquainted with both.’

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The rearguard action

  We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

  OSCAR WILDE, Lady Windermere’s Fan

  The expatriate road to Tangier was a well-beaten one; a host of international gamblers, Nazi spies and fugitives from justice of one sort or another had frequented this waterside melting pot in times past, and a bevy of Anglo-Saxon writers, most of them American, had hauled their typewriters out to this extreme tip of Africa long before Gavin set out on their trail. Paul Bowles was the current writer in residence, and it was here that Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and William Burroughs had also lived, written and extended the parameters of their being by such means as happened to come to hand at the time.

  In his apartment at 1 Rue Dante, Gavin unpacked his suitcase, set up his typewriter, arranged his paper and ink and began to write for his life. ‘I’ve settled down here,’ he wrote to Jimmy Watt a few weeks after his arrival, ‘and found a few really pleasant and interesting friends, and find writing so much easier than amid all the worries at home. I think I shall probably emigrate once the otter problem is finally solved somehow; I seem to have become rootless with the breakup of Sandaig. I find myself dreading spending the whole summer there.’

  It was a strange existence, holed up amid the street cries and car horns of a strange city on the northernmost fringe of Arab Africa, scribbling away day after day about life with otters in a tiny patch of wilderness on the edge of the Hebridean Sea. During the working day Gavin’s mind was filled with nostalgia for his home in the distant Scottish Highlands; but once the sun had set over the old port another kind of nostalgia took over, a nostalgie de la boue that found release among the dockside dives and drinking holes of Tangier’s seamy nether world. It was here, perhaps, in an oddly academic sort of way, that Gavin experimented with hashish, which was widely prevalent in North Africa (though theoretically illegal in Morocco at the time). He wrote to me:

  I smoked hashish – you know, little hashish pipes – and I got no reaction from it at all except an intense headache. I was mainly interested in my pulse rate. I went up to twenty-five pipes in two and a half hours, which is pretty high, and at the end of this time my pulse rate was 160 and I didn’t feel very well. After a while I reached the conclusion that the reason for the popularity of this drug in North Africa is as a means of raising the pulse rate prior to sexual intercourse so as to produce an intensified orgasm. If you read Masters and Johnson, I think, you will find that orgasm rises to a pulse rate of 160 and if it falls much lower than 140 it’s liable to be unsatisfactory. Personally, I failed to find anything else in it. I also ate the stuff in ‘joint cakes’ and I felt as though I’d had about five double whiskies, though I didn’t feel particularly happy.

  It was possibly under the influence of this unfamiliar substance that Gavin wrote to Jimmy Watt in April regarding the problems of coherent, creative thought in his present surroundings:

  After due and undue cogitations, borborborygmi [sic], farts and regurgitations a couple of ideas emerged in the form of smoke rings which are still hanging around the room somewhere if I could spot them. Though possibly the result of hallucinations, halitosis and hashish, they looked like halos when I last saw them … I’ve got them now; one has taken refuge in the fridge, and the other, slightly rhomboid in shape, was very happy in the dregs of a bottle of Pernod. In fact it didn’t want to come out again. Anyway, I’ve got them both cornered now, in a small bottle marked ‘Not for human consumption’.

  In some respects Gavin’s life in Tangier had regressed to something like his hard-up existence as a painter in post-war London twenty years previously. He was poorer than he had been for years. ‘Life here is hell,’ he wrote to Beryl Borders. ‘I am without money and living like a tramp, which is not a happy situation.’ The outlook looked even blacker when Lords of the Atlas was withdrawn from circulation in the United States because of libel problems. ‘Christ, I just can’t win!’ Gavin lamented. ‘It’s probably penury again for a long time.’

  Wilfred Thesiger, on his way to the Sahara with his formidable mother, was particularly struck by Gavin’s strange behaviour at this time. He recalled:

  Gavin was very odd about money. In Tangier he hadn’t got any – hadn’t got a car or anything – so my mother and I would pick him up and take him out to lunch a few times. Just before we left, Gavin said to me, ‘I do hope you and your mother can come and have lunch with me. I’d like to return your hospitality and I’ve invited the Consul General to join us. You’ll find him interesting – he was a prisoner for a long time in China.’ So we met up at the Rembrandt Hotel for drinks before lunch, and Gavin took me on one side and said, ‘Can I have a word with you? As you know, I’m absolutely broke and I can’t afford to pay for this lunch. Could you pay for it?’ So like a bloody fool I said, ‘Yes, all right Gavin.’ I thought the least he would do when the Consul General came in would be to say, ‘You owe this luncheon to Wilfred – he’s insisted on paying for it.’ But he didn’t. He just said, ‘Well, now, pick yourself a very good lunch.’ So we had a very expensive lunch at a very expensive restaurant, with wine and liqueurs, and at the end the Consul General said, ‘Thank you, Gavin – you’ve just given me one of the best lunches I’ve ever had.’ And then, when no one was looking, Gavin pushed the bill across to me and I said to myself, ‘Well, you’ve had it, Gavin, I don’t really want to see you again.’ And I didn’t.

  In faraway Scotland all was not well. Fighting his desperate rearguard action against Gavin’s increasingly hostile creditors, Richard Frere became as artful as a fox with the hounds on its tail. But even his ingenuity and dedication to his unenviable task could not delay the inevitable for ever, and one by one the most persistent creditors obtained judgements against Gavin Maxwell Enterprises or closed their accounts; the electricity and telephone were in imminent danger of being cut off, which would deprive Sandaig of the means of existence, and before long it was barely possible to pay even for fuel for the Land Rover.

  Beryl Borders was holding the fort at Gavin’s Highland home, but as winter deepened and life at Sandaig grew harder and more rugged still, her mood began to undergo a sea-change. Richard noticed that little by little she was becoming less boisterous and more withdrawn. Life in the wild weather and long dark nights at the northern sea’s edge was unremittingly dour, requiring considerable physical exertion and mental resilience to survive. As well as looking after her own animals Beryl had to care for Gavin’s and keep the place in running order come frost or flood. Every night she toiled over the mile and a half of peat-bog and mountainside to meet the mail van at Tormor; every night she stumbled down again with supplies and Gavin’s mail in a 50-lb rucksack. Apart from her little daughter Fionna, there was no human company, and no diversions, no transport, no chance of getting away, and precious few perks and rewards. She received no remuneration from Gavin, and only a little over £5 a week to defray expenses.

  Until now Beryl’s respect and affection for Gavin had been unbounded; but gradually, in the absence of any warmth and encouragement from him in return, the conviction grew in her that he was simply using her – ‘like a packhorse’ – and disillusionment set in, and with it a mounting list of grievances. She felt Gavin had betrayed her friendship and trust, taken all and given l
ittle in return, demeaned her in front of his friends as ‘a servant of a very low order’ and ‘a beggar under his roof’. Worse, she claimed Gavin’s company had cheated her over a house in Glenelg and misappropriated her £500 down-payment on it. In fact, Gavin had offered to sell her the house – one of the two he had rashly bought in Glenelg at the same time as his two lighthouse cottages – at the valuation price of £2500, but shortly afterwards accepted a higher offer from someone else, which forced Beryl to raise her own offer to match it. In the autumn of 1966 she handed over a second payment of £2000 which instantly vanished into the maw of Gavin’s deeply indebted company – a source of contention that was to grumble on for years. It did not help that one of her beloved Great Danes was caught in the act of savaging some sheep and was promptly shot dead by the outraged shepherd.

  Though Mike Cuddy and Richard Frere and his family were able to take over the burden of running Sandaig from Beryl for a few weeks in late winter, the damage had been done. At the end of March Beryl’s lawyers demanded that Gavin either hand the Glenelg house over to her or give her £2000 deposit back. ‘Gavin, always on the lookout for duplicity in women, stormed in distant Africa,’ Richard Frere recorded of this sad episode. Beryl responded with a score of bitter letters accusing him of ingratitude. Though the immediate quarrel was patched up, Beryl’s underlying resentment was to survive for many months to come.

  In the middle of March Gavin sent the first twenty thousand words of his new book off to his publishers, hoping for some interim reward, for all he had in his pocket was £44 in Moroccan money. He felt cut off from his home country and news from Sandaig was scant. ‘Communication with England seems so uncertain as to be practically non-existent,’ he wrote to Beryl in April. ‘But at least I have got a major part of a book written, which I suppose I couldn’t have done anywhere else.’ Then on 18 April Gavin was startled to receive a telegram from Beryl which jolted his mind back to Sandaig in times long past, and momentarily helped to lighten the mounting tension between them: ‘MONDAY CAME HOME TODAY WITH THE DOGS LET ME KNOW WHAT TO DO.’