Gerald Durrell

by Douglas Botting

  From the Desk of: Dr Genius Durrell P.H.D. V.D. C.I.A.

  Founder Member and President

  The Foundation of Research into the Sexual habits of the Sciuridae [squirrels and chipmunks]

  My darling,

  I have been home two days and I am sad as Hell. Oh, it was nice enough to get back and see all the new births. But darling it was so empty … I have never realised until then how much I had come to rely not only on you but your beautiful voice. If I was on speaking terms with Dante I would get him to add the best torment of all to his Inferno: to be without McGeorge. It is like being deprived of all your senses except that of pain. To wake in the morning and not see your flower-like face next to me, to not be able to press your body to me strikes me like a physical blow and depression sets in to start the day blackly … I can’t tell you what exquisite pleasure it gave me to be with you in France, to watch you day by day, to watch your pleasure, to pretend to myself that we were really married …

  You are my whole life now and will be until the end of my life; if I lost you now – for whatever reason – my life would have no meaning for me without you. I only tell you all this so that when I behave stupidly you will – because you are so gentle and intelligent – attempt to understand, if not condone. I know I am not an easy man to live with and can be just as big a shit as the next man, so you will have plenty to complain of; however, I hope that my deep love of you combined with other, slightly more material advantages, will outweigh my bad points. I must also warn you that I intend to leave no stone unturned in my efforts to achieve the impossible task of making you love me. So there! …

  Let me tell you about this place. It looks wonderful. The new Pink Pigeon place is very posh and the birds look really lovely in it: they are really beautiful birds when you see them in the sun, but so stupid they don’t deserve to survive. It was super, also to go into the Reptile House and see all the baby Gunthers (and more eggs to hatch yet) and all the baby Telfair skinks … Then we went to look at the bats and that House has really worked, my honey, they look wonderful in it. It was another feeling of triumph to see all the babies – including the newest one – flying round and round, bickering and grooming, just as I saw them in the wild. We now have enough Gunther geckos and Telfair skinks to found colonies elsewhere (hopefully the Bronx) and soon we should have enough bats to do the same, as well as Pink Pigeons. Who said Captive Breeding Won’t Work???? Who Said Durrell Is A Fool????? Who Said He Will Surely Fail?????? Well, to be quite frank with you, they all did. He He He.

  Now for the best news: we are going to embark on our first re-introductions into the wild!!!!!!!!!!! As you know, the Waldrapp [bald ibis] was widely spread in Europe in the Middle Ages and it would be a wonderful thing to put them back into the wild. People always ask us what we have re-introduced into the wild and up until now we have been forced, blushingly, to say ‘nothing’. Now, however, I hope we will be able to point to a triumphant success of the re-introduction of the Waldrapp after some five hundred years.

  Though Gerald’s divorce from Jacquie still seemed no nearer, he was keen to press on with his wedding plans, as he informed Margaret in mid-July.

  The wedding in Memphis is going to be very funny, I think. Jeremy is going to be my best man (he had a little emotional weep when I asked him, dear man) and both John, Simon and Sam and Catha are coming. Mum McGeorge (who is a sweetie with a great intelligence and sense of humour) has purchased a tome on How To Do A Wedding Properly and I am duly being sent a copy. It’s going to cost poor Daddy McGeorge a bomb and it’s not going to be cheap for me, but as I said to McGeorge (which is what I call Lee in moments of sternness) as this is the only time she is going to be allowed to marry in my lifetime I think no expense should be spared. I am, of course, taking the whole thing very seriously because they do take these things seriously in the Deep South and after all Lee is their eldest daughter and so they want to put on a splash. But inside me I shall be one vast grin. You’d think that at my time of life I would know better, but it is such fun and poor McGeorge is torn between trying to take it seriously because she thinks one ought to (this is her strict Episcopalian upbringing) and laughing at a somewhat bawdy and unconventional approach to the whole thing. After the wedding we go to Mauritius and stay at Le Morne (in the old part) and there I want to spend most of the time in the sea, for Lee has never seen a tropical reef and I am looking forward to her wonder and enjoyment of it. Oh, yes, another funny thing: to get married in Tennessee I have to have a certificate to say that I am not suffering from V.D.! How’s that?

  Gerald was now beginning to think more strategically about his marriage. Lee would not just be his life’s partner but his Trust’s co-regent, a role for which, he realised, she was unusually well suited. He aired his thoughts along these lines in a letter to her dated 21 July.

  Darling, I want you to be a real part of this building. Eventually, I want you to know all about its past history, its present progress and I want you to help me to plan the future. I do not want you to think that I am marrying you only to exclude you, see? I want you to be an important part of every part of my life, and I want you to feel that at all times this place and what it does in the future is just as much your place as mine.

  Once they were married, he told her a few days later, he intended to pay her a substantial yearly personal allowance which she was free to spend how she chose. ‘This helps remove one of the awful constraints of wedded bliss,’ he explained, ‘where the poor bloody woman has to ask her husband for every penny, which is not marriage as I see it but a form of ankle chain as used in slavery.’ A lot depended on his income, of course, and this varied from year to year.

  Don’t worry, we are far from broke, but last year I spent my entire (£56,000) income like water, a lot of it stupidly because I was lonely and silly. Also we have to think we may want a child or two, and also consider the chances of my dropping dead suddenly. Now, enough of this sordid commerce. Let me turn to other things.

  You don’t know how much I miss you. The bed has now grown to the size of the Sahara and as cold as the Arctic wastes: I need a telescope to see from one side to the other, but I know there is no sense in looking because you are not there – I would not see your beautiful face, the smoky blue of your eyes, the curve of your ravishing mouth, your wonderful neck, your cloud-like hair, your ears like pink edible mushrooms. That’s above the sheets. Going beneath I would not see your beautiful body, your elegant legs and feet, your super fine-boned hands … So as there is no point in looking for you I roll over in bed and look at your ravishing face in your photographs on the bedside table.

  I love you so much and I am so lonely without your presence. It is not too bad during the day (pretty bad but not too bad) because there are things happening and I really have a lot to do. But when evening comes and I am faced with futile T.V. shows which only make me remember more vividly our times in the Mazet by the fire, watching your sweet face as you played and sang, then it really hurts. Then I switch off the bloody T.V. and play The Only Two records [Pachelbel’s Canon and a soulful Greek air by Hadjidakis] very, very loud (I think the staff think I am mad) and then, when they are over I go to bed. Then I can’t sleep. I get up and take a pill and the bloody thing doesn’t work. I turn on the light and, hell damn it, there you are, looking up at me from the bedside table. So I take another pill and read some idiotic book until it takes. Sometimes, late at night when I can’t sleep, I have black moments (they only last a moment) when I wish I had never met you or, if I had, that I had never fallen in love with you, or if I had, why could I not have only fallen a little in love with you, a tiny crush? Why does it have to be this great multicoloured wave of pleasure and pain that engulfs me. I love you beyond belief.

  Enough of this.

  On 31 July Gerald sent Lee an extraordinary letter. Beginning with a tormented, ruthlessly self-revelatory and self-flagellatory exegesis, it ended with a moving and deeply felt paean to the beauties of the world he loved and
the woman he adored.

  My darling McGeorge,

  You said that things seemed clearer when they were written down. Well, herewith a very boring letter in which I will try and put everything down so that you may read and re-read it in horror at your folly in getting involved with me. Deep breath.

  To begin with I love you with a depth and passion that I have felt for no one else in this life and if it astonishes you it astonishes me as well. Not, I hasten to say, because you are not worth loving. Far from it. It’s just that, first of all, I swore I would not get involved with another woman. Secondly, I have never had such a feeling before and it is almost frightening. Thirdly, I would never have thought it possible that another human being could occupy my waking (and sleeping) thoughts to the exclusion of almost everything else. Fourthly, I never thought that – even if one was in love – one could get so completely besotted with another person, so that a minute away from them felt like a thousand years. Fifthly, I never hoped, aspired, dreamed that one could find everything one wanted in one person. I was not such an idiot as to believe this was possible. Yet in you I have found everything I want: you are beautiful, gay, giving, gentle, idiotically and deliciously feminine, sexy, wonderfully intelligent and wonderfully silly as well. I want nothing else in this life than to be with you, to listen and watch you (your beautiful voice, your beauty), to argue with you, to laugh with you, to show you things and share things with you, to explore your magnificent mind, to explore your wonderful body, to help you, protect you, serve you, and bash you on the head when I think you are wrong … Not to put too fine a point on it I consider that I am the only man outside mythology to have found the crock of gold at the rainbow’s end.

  But – having said all that – let us consider things in detail. Don’t let this become public but … well, I have one or two faults. Minor ones, I hasten to say. For example, I am inclined to be overbearing. I do it for the best possible motives (all tyrants say that) but I do tend (without thinking) to tread people underfoot. You must tell me when I am doing it to you, my sweet, because it can be a very bad thing in a marriage.

  Right. Second blemish. This, actually, is not so much a blemish of character as a blemish of circumstance. Darling I want you to be you in your own right and I will do everything I can to help you in this. But you must take into consideration that I am also me in my own right and that I have a headstart on you … What I am trying to say is that you must not feel offended if you are sometimes treated simply as my wife. Always remember that what you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts. But I am an established ‘creature’ in the world, and so – on occasions – you will have to live in my shadow. Nothing gives me less pleasure than this but it is a fact of life that has to be faced.

  Third (and very important and nasty) blemish: jealousy. I don’t think you know what jealousy is (thank God) in the real sense of the word. I know that you have felt jealousy over Lincoln’s wife and child, but this is what I call normal jealousy, and this – to my regret – is not what I’ve got. What I have got is a black monster that can pervert my good sense, my good humour and any goodness that I have in my make-up. It is really a Jekyll and Hyde situation … my Hyde is stronger than my good sense and defeats me, hard though I try. As I told you, I have always known that this lurks within me, but I could control it, and my monster slumbered and nothing happened to awake it. Then I met you and I felt my monster stir and become half awake when you told me of Lincoln and others you have known, and with your letter my monster came out of its lair, black, irrational, bigoted, stupid, evil, malevolent. You will never know how terribly corrosive jealousy is; it is a physical pain as though you had swallowed acid or red hot coals. It is the most terrible of feelings. But you can’t help it – at least I can’t, and God knows I’ve tried. I don’t want any ex-boyfriends sitting in church when I marry you. On our wedding day I want nothing but happiness, both for you and me, and I know I won’t be happy if there is a church full of your ex-conquests. When I marry you I will have no past, only a future: I don’t want to drag my past into our future and I don’t want you to do it, either. Remember I am jealous of you because I love you. You are never jealous of something you don’t care about. O.K. enough about jealousy.

  Now let me tell you something …

  There followed a remarkable prose-poem, an aching, wondrous, soaring distillation of the world Gerald had known through all his senses.

  I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises, on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey coloured light, at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multicoloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers.

  I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously.

  I have felt winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and wailing like a lost child; winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath; winds that carried the astringent smell of salt and the death of seaweeds; winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor, the smell of a million flowers. Fierce winds that churned and moved the sea like yeast, or winds that made the waters lap at the shore like a kitten.

  I have known silence: the cold, earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotised and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends.

  I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have heard the Keas calling over grey glaciers that groaned to themselves like old people as they inched their way to the sea. I have heard the hoarse street vendor cries of the mating Fur seals as they sang to their sleek golden wives, the crisp staccato admonishment of the Rattlesnake, the cobweb squeak of the Bat and the belling roar of the Red deer knee-deep in purple heather. I have heard Wolves baying at a winter’s moon, Red howlers making the forest vibrate with their roaring cries. I have heard the squeak, purr and grunt of a hundred multi-coloured reef fishes.

  I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen Spoonbills flying home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen Whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their wings smooth. I have watched Tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry Raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of Dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things … but –

  All this I did without you. This was my loss.

  All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain.

  All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve.

  At about this time Gerald suddenly became tormented by a terrible thought which agonised him over a period of several days. He loved Lee dearly now, but how would he feel if over time she metamorphosed, like something out of Ovid, into someone totally different? She loved food almost as much as he did – and look what it had done to him. Though Lee remained as lissom as the day he met her, inside every thin girl, he feared, was a fat girl trying to get out. That would never do. Gerald busied about, examining the available diets. One of the most rigorous was the Mayo Clinic Diet – all grapefru
it and carrots, boiled lettuce and water, tea without milk, fluid without alcohol. This he sent post-haste to Lee in a bid to head off the dreaded catastrophe of obesity. With it he sent a cautionary verse of his own devising called the ‘Food Song’.

  Lee Wilson McGeorge

  Said: ‘I do like to gorge.

  I’m as round as a ball

  And I’ve no waist at all

  As for my tits

  They’ve both gone to bits:

  The thought of them harrows –

  They both look like marrows;

  While as for my legs

  They look like wine kegs

  And each of my chins

  Proclaims all my sins.

  Well, I may be obese

  As twelve Strasbourg geese –

  But I’ll tell you, as well

  I’m as sexy as Hell.

  This is a grave matter

  For as I get fatter

  There’s one thing I dread:

  There’s no room in the bed.

  Gerald now turned to a more intransigent problem – himself. How should he present himself at the coming nuptials? What should his image be? What should he wear? On a previous visit to the States he had had himself photographed in a studio that promised ‘Your Historic Portrait While You Wait’. The resulting picture showed him in the guise of a Mississippi paddle-boat gambler who’d made good, with bowler hat and cane, tailcoat, fancy waistcoat, wing collar and boating tie. This, he thought, might be a suitable costume in which to parade arm in arm with his wife in Episcopalian Memphis. With a twinkle in his eye, he sent off the photo to Lee’s courteous and patient parents.

  Dear Both,

  So that you don’t feel fearful of the fact that I may let you down in public, I am enclosing here a picture of the outfit I have had made for the wedding. I know it’s the sort of thing that you wear in America because I have seen the films. I am sending you this picture so that you will not be uneasy about my appearance in church. My tailor says that he has never seen me look so stunning; do let me know what you think.