In short, it was a nice film, and it is not difficult to see why Gavin enjoyed it once he had got used to the portrait of himself and the liberties taken with his text. Virtually his only complaint was that the geese used in the film were not wild geese. The scene in which Mij was killed moved him greatly – ‘far too near the bone’, he said afterwards. As an inveterate film fan he found it rather gratifying to be the real-life model of a motion-picture hero – even if he had to suffer the relative indignity of being metamorphosed into the ingenuous Graham Merril in the process. Once, after it went on general release, Gavin crept into a small Scottish cinema incognito and sat through the film, waiting in trepidation for the loud lamentations of the children in the darkened auditorium as the roadmender’s spade once more smashed into Mijbil’s skull.
Gavin and I had arranged to meet for lunch during his London visit, but I had to return to Scotland for a short lecture tour and we were unable to meet. I lost contact with him after that. In the New Year I moved house and in the late spring set off on an expedition into the Mato Grosso wilderness of central Brazil. For several crucial months I was far removed from news from home and from the dramatic events that now overtook Gavin’s life.
Gavin was back at Kyleakin Island for Christmas. By and large the last few months had been happy ones after the trauma of the fire and its aftermath, and the omens looked good for the coming year. Sadly, the young otter cub Malla did not live to see the New Year, relinquishing her tenuous hold on life despite the love and care that were lavished on her. Irrationally, Gavin blamed Andrew Scot for her death, an unfair charge that marked the beginning of a serious deterioration in their relationship. At about the same time, Gavin’s two gigantic deerhounds, Dirk and Hazel, who had been fostered out shortly before the fire at Sandaig, rejoined Gavin on Kyleakin Island. Sprawled in front of the large fireplace in the long room they gave the place an appropriately baronial air.
January, with its long nights of frosts and stars, passed without incident. Visitors continued to come and go and a start was made on the infrastructure of the zoo park by Andrew Scot and Willie McAskill, a Skye handyman from Kyleakin. At the end of the month, finding the tiny island in midwinter an inclement and claustrophobic place to be, Gavin set off on a round of visiting in the outside world. It had long been his custom to spend a few weeks of each year looking up old friends and relatives on a circuit that included some of the grand houses and castles of Scotland – Inverclune, Brechin, Marchmont, Kier, Shennanton, Enterkine, Inveraray and his own family’s Galloway home at Monreith – moving from one to the other like some Bedouin prince among the desert encampments of his extended tribe. He was always a welcome and popular guest, for he was not only regarded as an old friend, but a famous and entertaining one as well. He was away for the whole of February, returning to Kyleakin on 3 March. Richard Frere met him in Kyleakin village when he got back, and was a little dismayed by Gavin’s appearance. He looked ill and walked hesitantly, breathing heavily. But Gavin was in good spirits. The time away had refreshed him mentally, if nothing else, and he was fired with enthusiasm to get the eider breeding site ready before the nesting season began in May. Richard was sent off to forage for the necessary materials to prepare an eider breeding ground along the lines Gavin had observed in Iceland.
Richard went shopping in Inverness. ‘I went to Woolworth’s and asked for two hundred children’s windmills,’ he wrote, ‘remarking to a cretinous young assistant with a leer that they were to attract the birds. Another shop wonderingly sold me clusters of tiny bells.’ Elsewhere he collected a pile of long thin poles, several hundred canes and quantities of young conifer branches, and Peter Janson-Smith sent 750 yards of gaily-coloured flag bunting from London. ‘The island soon became a visual reproduction of an Icelandic colony,’ Richard continued. ‘The skyline bristled with poles, the air was filled with the tinkle of bells and whirr of tiny windmills, and little green tents of conifer branches appeared all over the charred ground. The coloured bunting was strung between the poles where it flapped gently in the wind, looking for all the world like the washing of a marooned gypsy tribe.’
Gavin and Richard spent a spring day searching for old nests, marking them and putting in windmills at appropriate points. Gavin was in high spirits, and by the last week of March the tiny Eider Island was en fête with flags and bunting and Gavin had counted some three hundred eider off the shore. All, it seemed, was going to plan. By then John Lister-Kaye had arrived on the island for a preliminary discussion about the zoo park and various other projects. The twenty-three-year-old Lister-Kaye had already helped set up a wildlife park near Bristol, and had made Gavin’s acquaintance during a short visit to Sandaig a few years back. In February 1969 Gavin had invited him to work with him as the curator of the projected zoo park and co-author of a newly conceived book on British mammals. Jumping at the chance of leaving his job among the belching steelworks of south Wales, Lister-Kaye headed north for Kyleakin Island.
‘Gavin’s enthusiasm was boundless and infectious,’ he recalled. ‘Formidable snags of every shape and description loomed up to limit the extent of the project, but he over-rode each in turn with an exuberant flourish of his hand and the confident assurance “Oh! That’s all right, we can manage that somehow or other,” so that by the end of my stay I was utterly convinced of the project’s potential success and longed to move north and become involved with it.’
But all was not as well as it seemed. By the end of March money was again becoming a source of concern for Gavin and his sorely-tried company. The long-running Beryl Borders affair had come to a head, and Gavin now had to find £2000 to pay her off in return for vacant possession of the house in Glenelg. Early in April, Richard Frere wrote a plea for help to Peter Janson-Smith in a vein that had long become familiar to both of them: ‘I am more than a little worried about my inability to damp down – without being a spoilsport – Gavin’s flights of financial fancy. We have become far more deeply involved in this zoo business than I anticipated … I shall now have to turn my most disapproving gaze on this project … One of Gavin’s more unattractive habits is to involve himself in some financial adventure to the point of no return, and then tell me about it.’
One such adventure was a sculpting party at Marchmont at which Gavin had ordered five bronze heads – three of his god-daughter, Katie McEwen, and two of himself – from the sculptress Fiore de Henriquez, who had been a friend of Gavin and Robin McEwen for years. These did not come cheap. And there were wages and salaries due and old creditors and new bills to be settled. ‘All this amounts to the usual cry for money,’ Richard complained, ‘of which you must be heartily sick.’
To all intents, Gavin was bust again, with little prospect of a fat cheque from a film company to bale him out a second time. But on 2 April, the day the film version of Ring of Bright Water was given its Royal Charity World Première in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh at the Leicester Square Odeon in London, Gavin was served notice that a great deal more than his solvency might be at risk. The première, in aid of the World Wildlife Fund, was a glittering occasion, with fanfares from the Herald Trumpeters of the Life Guards and heftier blasts from the Band of the Scots Guards, Gavin’s old regiment, to play the glitterati in. It should have been Gavin’s day of days – but he was not there. At the last moment, unable to face the kind of event that had always been anathema to him, and knowing that he neither felt nor looked his best, he confided to Richard Frere his intention to duck out of the engagement.
Instead of basking in the publicity and the glory that was his due in London, Gavin set off for the town of Keith to obtain capercaillie and blackcock for his zoo from a local breeder. He drove the Mercedes as far as Inverness, then asked Richard Frere to take over the wheel. He had a terrible headache, he said; it was so severe that he could not drive any further. Richard noticed with alarm that Gavin’s brow was tightly clenched and that his skin bore an unhealthy grey pallor.
Gavin, it seemed, had had ‘a
hell of a headache’ ever since he had come back to Kyleakin Island from his round of visits in early March. ‘Bit of a nuisance,’ he had told Richard, ‘because it makes concentration difficult. Any ideas?’ Richard had already noticed disturbing signs of emotional instability and mental irrationality in his friend’s behaviour in recent days, and he had observed for some little while Gavin’s paranoiac tendencies, his dark mutterings about plots to have him killed, of mysterious sinister forces at large in Kyleakin across the water. Gavin had begun to fall out with Andrew Scot in a bad way, and the increasing tension between the two led first to acrimony, then to quarrels, scuffles, even fisticuffs – especially in the evening after Gavin had had a dram or two. In the midst of this incipient crack-up Gavin’s British publisher, Michael Hoare of Longmans, and his American publisher, Jack Macrae of Duttons, arrived on the island to discuss Gavin’s literary future.
But not even the presence of his publishers – in a sense the two most important arbiters of his professional destiny – could keep Gavin calm for long. One night Jack Macrae, having been kept awake by the uncomfortable lumpiness of a stack of ‘girlie’ magazines secreted under his mattress, heard a ‘terrible racket’ outside his door – almost certainly another violent nocturnal battle between Gavin and his out-of-favour assistant. Asked at breakfast what had caused the noise, Gavin calmly explained to his incredulous guests that his ex-wife, Lavinia, had conjured up a poltergeist and directed it to fling all his books off their shelves. It was not until the two publishers came to leave the island that Gavin admitted he had been suffering from ‘exquisite headaches’, of a type Michael Hoare thought suggested a brain tumour.
Only a few days later, on 9 April, Gavin engineered an apocalyptic row with Andrew Scot which raged till three in the morning. Richard was an appalled witness of this head-on collision, and for the first time he saw in Gavin a mental turmoil of an altogether different order. The fracas followed a chance remark, and by the end there was little left unsaid. Bitterly Gavin upbraided Andrew for his untidiness, his absences and much else – including again the death of Malla. Many of the charges were clearly fantastical. In vain Richard remonstrated with his incensed employer. ‘Richard,’ Gavin replied, ‘can you not understand? The boy will destroy me.’ By the end Andrew had handed in his notice. He would stay only as long as it took to find a replacement.
After he had gone, Richard rounded on Gavin. ‘Well, there you are,’ he said. ‘That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’
But of course it wasn’t. Without Andrew life on the island would be impossible in any practical sense. Without Andrew Gavin would be totally alone, apart from intermittent visitors. Without Andrew he would be utterly lost – even destroyed, as he had predicted. And it was he who had driven Andrew away. ‘It did not surprise me,’ Richard concluded, ‘to see that he was crying openly.’
Richard was now deeply alarmed about Gavin’s health. After the incident on the road to Keith he began to wonder whether he was suffering from a tumour on the brain, and he was insistent that Gavin should have a thorough medical examination. On 17 April Gavin checked into the Royal Northern Infirmary in Inverness for a week of tests to find the cause of his continuous headaches and underlying malaise. Just as in 1967, no cause was found, and Gavin returned to Kyleakin Island puzzled but greatly relieved at being given a clean bill of health.
April passed in desultory fashion. Gavin’s headaches improved somewhat and he pottered about the island as spring advanced towards summer. A few small animals arrived for the zoo park but the eider colony seemed to have failed for that season, with only a few birds nesting. Andrew Scot still clung on, but Gavin’s quarrels with him raged as violently as ever. On 30 April Richard Frere noted in his diary: ‘Nastiest day I’ve ever spent on Kyleakin. Constant contention between Gavin and Andrew.’ The flow of visitors continued unstaunched. Though Gavin’s public image was that of a recluse and a loner, in reality he could stand only a day or two of his own company before he grew restless and morose; and he had, besides, a practical need to dilute with outside company his stormy and inescapable contiguity with Andrew.
On 2 May 1969 Kathleen Raine returned for a second visit. Her arrival coincided with an escalation of the pain of Gavin’s headaches and a fresh outbreak of hauntings and other inexplicable paranormal phenomena. Simon MacLean, the lighthouse man, twice saw a strange light which moved about outside the house and around the bay and the lighthouse at midnight, and Gavin himself heard doors opening and closing in unoccupied rooms, and footsteps when there was no one there. Rarely, if ever, had such hauntings been observed on the island so late in the year.
Kathleen’s visit was not only haunted but volcanic. The trouble began when Gavin played her a record of the theme tune from the film of Ring, with lyrics by the pop musician Val Doonican:
Where sun and wind play
On a ring of bright water –
That’s where my heartland will be …
Not unnaturally, Kathleen resented the fact that nowhere was there any mention that she had played any part in the story, or any acknowledgement of her contribution both to the title of the film and the lyrics of the song. ‘I hoped he might have understood,’ she was to write, ‘that his Ring of Bright Water, because it was written in his heart’s blood, was written in my heart’s blood also.’ But he did not, and they quarrelled furiously. At one point she exclaimed: ‘My work will be remembered when yours is forgotten.’ ‘That,’ Gavin replied, ‘may very well be true.’
Inevitably the subject got round to the way Gavin had portrayed her – publicly pilloried her – in his new book. When she first read his version of the curse incident in the manuscript of Raven Seek Thy Brother she was dumbfounded, and her father wanted her to sue Gavin for libel. What Gavin had written, she felt, was a falsified version of part of their story. At first she had even thought that Gavin had described the curse simply because it made a good story, and for no other reason. It seemed a bitter return for all she had tried to do for him. ‘But now,’ she confided to Richard Frere afterwards, ‘I am prepared to believe that he did believe himself under my curse and that that may indeed have influenced his thought and behaviour, giving a reality of a kind to a state of fear or worse, and in that way brought that last illness upon him.’
What Kathleen was really objecting to was the wording of her curse in Gavin’s draft manuscript of the book: ‘Let him, and the house and all that have to do with it suffer here as I am suffering, for as long as he shall live.’ Kathleen claimed this was an elaboration and falsification of what she had really said. According to her own book, The Lion’s Mouth, her actual words had been: ‘Let Gavin suffer, in this place, as I am suffering now.’ At Kathleen’s insistence Gavin amended his version of the curse before publication to ‘Let him suffer here as I am suffering.’
‘I only wanted him to see, to understand, how much he had hurt – could hurt – by asking so much and then dismissing so lightly,’ Kathleen continued:
I would have thought none knew better than Gavin that words spoken in anger are very different from prolonged ill-will. Everyone who knows me knows that I do not ever harbour resentment – sometimes pain but never resentment … Probably the truth is that in his last years he saw many things in an embittered and distorted manner – in part because of his unrecognised illness, in part from the collapse of his life in so many ways. Aymer said to me: ‘Gavin is lucky to have you to blame, isn’t he?’ But perhaps Gavin’s mother – intelligent, charming, upright, and possessive – was the real witch … Gavin and I fell into one of the great human myths, and enacted a part of an archetypal story. You could not kill, or even modify, so basic a myth, by any appeal to mere fact. But that I failed him I cannot deny. And Mij …
So on her last night on the island they quarrelled, as Gavin had quarrelled with many of his friends in recent months. ‘He was surely more ill than he knew or we realised,’ Kathleen wrote to me later. ‘But Gavin I think quarrelled only with those whom he knew were ir
removably his friends, and whom he knew would know that quarrels made no difference to the relationship. The things that meant most to him were the music of the wind and the rain and the heat that came from the heart of friendship.’ At the core of their quarrel and of his anger and tumult in those last months, she felt, was his sense of total inner despair.
He had got himself into some awful tangles – personal, financial. He had tried everything and it hadn’t worked out. Looking back, I think Gavin’s life was a tragedy – but not such a tragedy as the lives of people who have not lived their lives, have not enacted who they are. We are all something, we are all, good or bad, a life which has to flower in this life – and a great many don’t. But Gavin lived his life, he didn’t sleep through it. Coleridge said that every poet is a man of action manqué, and you might say that every man of action is a poet manqué. For Gavin the action was the poetry. I think, for that reason, it was not innately inappropriate that Gavin appeared to choose me as someone he would have in his life – it was very much the same vision, but he lived it and I wrote it.
Gavin Maxwell Page 66