Fall

by John Preston

  At Betty’s instigation, the two of them took another holiday – to the south of France. Their days soon fell into a pattern. In the evenings they would go to Monte Carlo, where Maxwell would play roulette. ‘Although he did lose sometimes, on the whole he won enormous sums, and we would go back to the hotel around three in the morning, padded with wads of money. We would then order a light dinner accompanied by champagne and make love till we finally fell asleep until lunchtime, the next day!’

  Just to make sure he shouldn’t face any further temptation, Betty insisted that Anne Dove be moved. First, she went to live in New York, where she worked in Maxwell’s office. However, New York appears not to have been far enough away for Betty’s liking. A few months later Dove moved again ‘for health reasons’.

  This time she went to Tibet.

  Throughout the 1950s, Maxwell’s fortunes steadily rose. In 1955, the first international conference on atomic energy was held in Geneva. Maxwell rented a large villa on the shores of Lake Geneva to which he invited every scientist of note attending the conference. His knowledge of atomic energy may have been skimpy – according to one colleague he knew what a mushroom cloud looked like, but that was about it. However, he had a remarkable ability to make a little go a long way. He always made sure he learned the jargon; he was able to absorb information at a phenomenal rate and he gave every impression of knowing what he was talking about. What’s more, Maxwell genuinely enjoyed the company of scientists. He respected them – they were the only people he regularly deferred to – and on the whole they respected him.

  Perhaps most important of all, he had an unerring ability to home in on people’s weakest points. According to another colleague, ‘He was smart because he knew just what to offer to buy a person – fame or money.’ Unused to being made a fuss of, still less lionized, the scientists eagerly rolled over before Maxwell’s flattery. By the end of the conference he had signed up all the key players in the field. In future, their research would be published by Pergamon.

  The next year, Maxwell was in Moscow interviewing leading Soviet scientists. The Russians thought sufficiently highly of him to allow him to talk to the scientists in the Vice-President’s room at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The year after – 1957 – he was back to attend the British Trade Fair, the only British publisher to do so. The same year the Russians launched Sputnik, the first satellite. Caught in a panic that their technology was lagging behind, the American State Department decided they needed to translate as many Russian scientific papers as they could lay their hands on. Maxwell landed the contract – worth around $10,000,000 over the next three years.

  At home Betty moved, almost continually, from one pregnancy to another. ‘Every time Bob looked at me I seemed to become pregnant,’ she would say later. Her role in life, she had decided, was to keep her husband as contented as possible. If Maxwell was happy, she would be too – or so she hoped. But, as she increasingly came to see, this involved sacrificing her own ambitions as well as her own individuality.

  On one of their trips to Moscow she found herself saying to the head of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, ‘Academician Topchiev, I will let you into a secret: Bob gets up at six every day of his life, he works nonstop until nine at night, he travels for Pergamon, he eats Pergamon, he drinks Pergamon, he makes love to Pergamon and the money just pours in! That is the truth.’

  Betty had also begun to suspect that Maxwell might possess even more hidden sides than she’d realized. On the same trip, she was in their hotel room one morning with Babs Whipple, wife of the American astronomer Fred Whipple, when Maxwell burst in carrying a large parcel wrapped in brown paper. The parcel, he told them, contained lists of book titles that he’d obtained for publication in the West. He had to return the parcel before lunch – without fail – but before then he wondered if they could photograph the contents for him.

  Fred Whipple lent them his 16mm movie camera and together Betty and Babbie Whipple began photographing the documents, one shot at a time. As they were doing so, Betty saw that they were not in Russian as Maxwell had claimed. Instead, they were in German, which she happened to have some knowledge of. Nor were they book titles, but lists of ‘German firms whose equipment is to be dismantled and transported to the Soviet Union’.

  ‘I remember feeling cold all over when I realized they were not lists of books,’ Betty recalled. Clearly, Maxwell was still passing on information to his old masters at British Intelligence – some of which he must have picked up at the numerous Soviet conferences on atomic power that he attended during the 1950s.

  Betty wasn’t the only one frustrated by Maxwell’s secrecy. In December 1958, Springer-Verlag decided to sever all contact with him. They’d become increasingly fed up with his lack of transparency, his fondness for keeping people in the dark. None the less, in late 1959 Maxwell was able to write to Sir Charles Hambro giving a breezily upbeat account of his circumstances: ‘My various businesses are flourishing. I have paid all my debts and borrowings, including income tax, and our cash at the bank since the beginning of the year has fluctuated between £70,000 and £100,000. I feel sure you will be pleased to know that the business you helped me start is doing so well.’

  A few months earlier, Maxwell and Betty had gone on another business trip – to Poland. To begin with, he had been in good spirits, but the longer the trip went on, the darker his mood became. ‘I tried, as sensitively as possible, to get inside the black hole of his mind, but he simply refused to let me in, resenting my every initiative in that direction. Everything to do with his past was still an open wound and the slightest intrusion caused him untold pain.’

  Despite this, Maxwell insisted they went to Auschwitz. It turned out they were almost the only visitors. ‘Endless grey clouds seemed to hang over the remaining wooden huts where prisoners were once herded, or over the vestiges of their foundations. It was as if the smoke from all those millions of calcinated corpses still hovered between heaven and earth, refusing to disappear lest the world forgot.

  ‘We walked from one crematorium to another, then followed overgrown tracks leading to a marshy woodland pond. A dilapidated metal structure still stood there, above the level of the water. A rusty wheelbarrow had long since tipped its last cargo of ash into the murky depths. We kneeled beside the dull grey waters and Bob plunged his hands into the mire, pulling out handfuls of greyish mud full of calcified, pulverised bones. He took a white handkerchief from his pocket, carefully placed those macabre relics in it, then burst into tears. I could not say a word. Only silence was appropriate in the face of such anguish.’

  Soon after their return, Maxwell decided the family should move into a new house – a house more befitting their new circumstances. Headington Hill Hall was an Italianate mansion set on top of a hill overlooking the eastern fringes of Oxford. But it had been unoccupied for the last fifteen years and was in state of advanced decay. In some rooms the ceilings had collapsed, in others the floors had gone. The house was owned by Oxford City Council, who had neither the funds nor the will to do it up. When Maxwell offered to pay for the repairs in return for being allowed to rent it, the council was so delighted they practically threw the keys at him.

  Why didn’t Maxwell buy a house of his own? Clearly, he could have afforded one, yet for the rest of his life he was happy to remain a tenant in what he always liked to describe as ‘the best council house in the country’. Possibly it was because possessions never meant much to him. But maybe he instinctively shied away from putting down any permanent roots in case these too might be torn up.

  In February 1960, while Maxwell was away, Betty moved into Headington Hill Hall’s only habitable bedroom. Woken in the middle of the night by a mysterious creaking noise, she went to investigate, and found that it was coming from an ancient weather vane on the roof. On her way back to her bedroom, she had another shock. ‘As I walked upstairs, something attracted my attention to a door on the landing . . . I distinctly saw the door handle move up and down. I staye
d glued to the top of the stairs, scared out of my wits . . . I was absolutely certain I was alone in the Hall, and this time I knew for certain that I had a ghost for a companion.’

  Although no one else ever saw the ghost, Betty remained convinced that Headington Hill Hall was haunted. Meanwhile Maxwell was fleeing his own demons in the only way he knew how: more work, more hobnobbing, more travelling . . . The first words his son Philip ever spoke were, ‘Goodbye, Daddy.’ But however hard Maxwell worked, or how far he travelled, tragedy was never far behind.

  When she came to write her memoir, Betty was hardly able to describe what happened next. She prefaced it with a quote from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘Manuscript Found in a Bottle’: ‘We are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool – and amid a roaring and bellowing, and shrieking of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering – Oh God! – and going down.’

  6.

  Down on the Bottom

  On 28 December 1961, three days after Betty Maxwell gave birth to their ninth child, a daughter, Ghislaine, her oldest son, Michael, then aged fifteen, was being driven back to Oxford from a party a few miles away in Thame. The car he was travelling in smashed into the back of an unlit lorry, full of onions, that had broken down by the side of the road.

  Although the chauffeur, Samuel Swadling, was not badly hurt, Michael sustained serious head injuries. The next day, another of Maxwell’s chauffeurs, Brian Moss, was sent to look at the car: ‘It was a Rover three-litre, a big machine, and the roof was completely ripped off. I remember seeing that the driver’s mirror had also been torn off and was lying on the floor behind the back seat.’

  Betty, who had given birth in her sister’s maternity clinic in France, rushed back to England. She found Michael in a coma. The prognosis was bleak. The doctors couldn’t tell if Michael would ever emerge from his coma, and even if he did there was a strong possibility he would be brain-damaged. ‘I cried so much then that I seemed to have exhausted the source of tears within me and have not been really able to cry since.’ Meanwhile, Maxwell was ‘shaken to the very core of his being; he could not believe that fate had dealt him such a cruel blow after all he had already endured’.

  The effect on the rest of the Maxwell family was equally devastating. Philip, the second son, ‘worshipped his brother, suffered deeply, and began a prolonged struggle to accept his loss’. It was to be a struggle from which he never fully recovered. His sister Anne, aged thirteen, ‘lost her natural companion and a brother she adored. It would take her years to come to terms with her grief.’

  The twins, Isabel and Christine, ‘clung to each other and allowed no one to penetrate their world’. Ian – then five – filled notebooks with blood-spattered drawings and played endlessly with toy ambulances and model figures in white coats. Meanwhile Ghislaine, ‘who should have been the centre of our love and attention, was hardly given a glance and became anorexic while still a toddler’.

  To begin with, the family clung to what few shreds of hope there were. Betty spent every spare moment by Michael’s bed. ‘I would do anything to stay beside him. I did the work of a hospital orderly, talked to other patients and their parents. I saw people with horrific injuries, parents driven mad by their heart-rending sorrow.’

  Then, at the beginning of December 1962, twelve months after the crash, they received a letter from the Consultant Neurosurgeon at the John Radcliffe Hospital: ‘It is now five months since my last report on this boy in which I said I could see no prospect of any recovery from his state of total disability . . . I examined him again on the 29th of November . . . I should say at the outset that I could see no sign of significant improvement . . . this means that his condition has been static for approximately eight months now.

  ‘He shows no appropriate emotional expression, no signs of recognition of what is going on around him, and he has made no attempt to talk . . . He does not blink in response to a loud noise beside him . . . My previous impression has been confirmed and I see no further prospect of any further improvement here. As I said in my last report, his expectation of life is enormously reduced as a result of this injury, but it is not possible to say how long he is likely to live in this state; it might well be for many more months yet.’

  Christine Maxwell, then aged twelve, remembers going to see Michael in hospital. ‘I went sometimes, but after a while I couldn’t do it any more because it was so upsetting. It was just a nightmare because here was this person who was there, but not there. When you moved around the room, his eyes would follow you, and yet there was absolutely nothing there.’

  Her twin sister, Isabel, found it just as upsetting. ‘I only went to see him three times. I just couldn’t do it any more – I was so traumatized. And then I felt guilty for a long, long time that I hadn’t been. It was an absolute disaster. A disaster which tore the fabric of our family for ever.’

  Betty continued to visit Michael every day. ‘I took it upon myself to be Michael’s only regular visitor, so that everyone else could return to a normal life, knowing that I was watching over him.’ Later, she would tell Joe Haines that Maxwell never once went to see him, that he had effectively shut him out of his life. Yet this turns out not to have been the case. Brian Moss remembers how he would often drive Maxwell back to Headington Hill Hall from London. ‘It would always be late at night, around midnight. We’d get near Oxford and he’s say, “Are you in a hurry, Brian?”

  ‘When I told him I wasn’t, he’d say, “We’ll go to the hospital.” This happened a number of times. We’d sit by Michael’s bed and Maxwell would talk to him. Then, after a bit, he would say, “You try, Brian. You used to take him to school – he might recognize your voice.” So I would try to talk to him, but there was never any response. Despite that, I know Maxwell always thought there was a chance Michael might come through. To begin with, he would talk about sending him to America for treatment. But after a while I think he must have realized that it was pointless. There was nothing anyone could do.’

  Throughout it all, Maxwell never told Betty about these late-night visits. The only plausible explanation for this was that he found it too painful; he couldn’t face her seeing him at his most vulnerable. As Betty had realized when she and Maxwell first began going out together, behind his brash exterior lay a vast lake of insecurities. ‘He was incredibly sensitive . . . Bob’s desperate need to be loved was so great that he tortured himself . . . At first he almost persecuted me to arouse my love, and when I reached the point of being in love with him, he simply would not believe it and carried on with his perpetual doubts.’

  Perhaps Maxwell also found it easier to visit at night, when he would be less exposed, when there were fewer people around to witness his anguish. But it also offers a telling glimpse of how he and Betty were slowly drifting apart – each in their increasingly separate worlds.

  At times, Maxwell would refer to Betty as ‘Mummy’, and expect her to provide the comfort and uncritical devotion his own mother had once given him. But at others he would plunge into extended sulks, blaming her for whatever problems he was going through at the time. However great Maxwell’s desire to be loved may have been, somewhere inside him the suspicion seems to have taken root that his emotional ties to Betty – above all the neediness they prompted – risked distracting him from his chosen course. If left unchecked, they might destroy his dream.

  It wasn’t just Betty who was being pushed away; all emotional ties were kept to a minimum. Maxwell had no real confidants, only glorified acquaintances, and while he continued to see his two sisters, Brana and Sylvia, both of whom were now living in London, they were never particularly close.

  There were other effects of Michael’s accident too. While Maxwell didn’t blame Samuel Swadling for what had happened – he kept him on the payroll for many years afterwards – his attitude towards his children changed. ‘The most obvious thing was that we were effectively confined to barracks,’ his son Ian remembers. ‘He obviously had this horror of something happenin
g to another of us. But then the whole tribe was in a state of shock. I think it must have been especially hard for my sister, Ghislaine, because she was basically ignored.’

  This took such an extreme form that one day when she was just three years old, Ghislaine stood in front of her mother and said simply, ‘Mummy, I exist.’ In an attempt to compensate for the fact that she had been neglected, her parents began showering Ghislaine with attention. Pretty, coquettish and indulged, she soon became her father’s clear favourite. Perhaps Maxwell saw something of his younger self in Ghislaine’s wilfulness, her refusal to compromise and her apparently cast-iron belief in her own allure. The result of all this attention, as Betty noted ruefully, was all too predictable: ‘She became spoiled, the only one of my children I can truly say that about.’

  Isabel Maxwell remembers that for years after Michael’s accident ‘the whole family seemed to drift about in this grey fog. Every time we wanted to go anywhere, my father would ask, “Where are you going? How are you going? Do you have to go in a car?”’ On one occasion, several of the children went out to the local cinema in Headington. Halfway through the film, a notice appeared on screen telling them to come home immediately.

  However isolated an existence they may have led, as they grew older the Maxwell children began to realize they were different – or at least that people saw them as being different. When Isabel was eleven, she and Christine invited some children they’d met at school to come and play in the garden at Headington Hill Hall.