Gavin Maxwell by Botting Douglas;

Author:Botting, Douglas; [Douglas Botting]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4822590
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2016-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

Before very long she was hooked. ‘If he had asked me to marry him,’ she told me many years later, ‘I would have felt absolute delight, then fear, then second thoughts. I wouldn’t have been able to resist.’

In the middle of June Constance arrived for the first of two visits to Sandaig that summer. ‘I am afraid you won’t enjoy yourself,’ Gavin had warned her. ‘If you come here you will find it just like living in a cave – and not a clean cave either. Be prepared for SQUALOR.’ Constance was not prepared. She was amazed at how down-at-heel the place was after two months of continuous habitation. There were fish baskets full of dirty clothes and sheets over the fireplace, pots and pans piled up thick with grease, windowsills covered in dead flies. The ambassador’s daughter made herself useful. She took the laundry down to the burn and left it to soak for twenty-four hours weighed down with stones; she took the pans to the stream as well and scoured them with sand and grit. But she felt she was at Sandaig only on sufferance. ‘That is my loo stone,’ Gavin had told her shortly after she arrived, pointing to a prominent stone in the middle of the burn towards its mouth. ‘I don’t know where you are going to go – you’ll have to find your own stone.’ Once Gavin dismissed her for a whole day, telling her: ‘There are days when one has to be alone.’ She found it a strange life. ‘Gavin and Jimmy ate abominably,’ she recalled. ‘They had a huge breakfast, then nothing till late at night.’

One day, when the weekly box of live eels that were the otters’ staple food failed to arrive from a London fishmonger, Constance was sent off with Jimmy Watt and John Donald MacLeod to ‘raid’ the tiny cluster of islands in the vicinity of Sandaig for seabirds’ eggs. They returned with nearly four hundred – a disastrous haul for the gull colonies that nested on them, but Gavin was unrepentant about living off the local ecology in order to survive.

So the summer days passed. Constance passed the time talking and painting and writing poems. One of the poems she wrote at Sandaig was explicitly erotic, in reaction to Kathleen Raine’s Platonic love poetry inspired by Gavin. ‘I showed it to him in the kitchen-parlour. We were sitting by the fire, and when he read it he really sat up and became interested.’

One night Constance had a dream. ‘I dreamt I saw a wood with a path with grass and flowers growing beside it, but it was not sunny, it was overcast, and at the back was a lovely country house, and by the path there was a priapic statue or garden god, and I went up to it and I felt indescribable pity and lust, and I embraced it and put my arm around it and said “It will be all right,” and this white marble face

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