Bruce Chatwin (45 page)

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Authors: Nicholas Shakespeare

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Literary, #Literary Collections, #Letters, #Literary Criticism, #General, #Diaries & Journals, #Personal Memoirs

BOOK: Bruce Chatwin
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He exaggerated his injury to stay at home. He admitted to Elizabeth that her letters from Teheran and Kabul gave him “a slightly guilty complex”. On 24 November, he wrote: “You must realise if I don’t do this thing now it’ll sit here for ever as I have a million other plans as well. I’m very sorry but there it is. I am going on and on until the first draft is available for Tom Maschler and have his opinion. Then I’ll decide. I know the whole thing is very irritating for you especially with your companions – and incidentally Penelope is the last person I want to show me round Delhi and would put me off for ever.” He cancelled one plan to meet her in Bombay for Christmas, another to meet in Delhi. “I don’t know what I can say about coming. I wish I did. I can’t tell you how much I long to get away. But if I break the threads of concentration now, I’m honestly afraid that the whole thing will go down the drain.” He knew himself: “The thing with me is that if I break the continuity it always goes to pot.”
At Holwell, work on the book ground on with remorseless slowness. The house buzzed with legions of flies and a new addition: “long-eared bats that mysteriously secrete themselves into the bedroom and hover around at night after the flies. It’s a curious sensation the noise of fluttering air, more mechanical than animal, and I could even hear the high-pitched screech.”
By December, living with Linda Wroth became impossible. He thought her rude, disliked her boyfriends, “professional snivellers” who devoured his food and drink. “She really is quite awful. I can’t stand her, and she’s been making such a fearful scene because I’m here at all. When I suggested she GO and I STAY, there was no question of it.” He did not know for how long they could endure under the same roof.
But there seemed no easy solution. He had given up Kynance Mews and his money situation was “terrible”. Christie’s had stopped paying him a retainer and by January he was overdrawn by £1,250. “We simply cannot go on asking my parents to fork up, as there will come a limit.” He decided to sell his Greek kouros and Sarah Bernhardt’s Maori sculpture. And he attempted some journalism, earning £200 from
Vogue
for an article on nomads. “Imagine my horror when
Vogue
proofs came back with the title changed to IT’S A NOMAD NOMAD NOMAD WORLD. Jesus, what horrors editors are.” He complained to the magazine. “Either the title is changed or it’s coming out, Thank you.” But he lost the argument. “In spite of my screamings or I suppose because of them the
Vogue
article appeared with title . . . Lesson learned. Never write an article for the fashionable press after a hangover in two hours.”
Hugh Chatwin remembers Bruce’s agony when he came down to Stratford to discuss the article with their mother. All the notes he had made, all his travels, had petered out prematurely in an embarrassing piece of journalism. The book was “very nearly finished”, he reported to Elizabeth, “but is in the most unholy mess. What do I do?” He began to feel ill: “I have caught worms and a terrific resurgence of ringworm, which must be from the cats.” He developed a pain in his right intestine accompanied by a constant urge to pee. “I couldn’t sit at the typewriter because of the agony in my stomach, coupled with really terrible nervous depressions.” He worried if he was being poisoned. “Linda and I both have Holwell Farm stomach ache and we wonder if it could be anything to do with the well.” He was having the water tested. “I am quite decided it isn’t my fertile imaginations. It is quite definitely something biological in the water, local virus etc. God knows! But we really must find out.” And he was fairly persuaded that the house was haunted. “Doors slam for no reason.” He wrote to Elizabeth: “this is the nadir of our fortunes.”
In December, Bruce left Holwell. He cited Linda as the reason. “I am afraid I simply couldn’t stand the atmosphere here one minute longer and one day filled up the car and fled. She infuriates me to the point of no return and has mercifully gone to Bath for the night which is why I have come today. However, she does look after the house well despite everything, though a sinister crack has appeared in the beam in the dining-room due to the jolting of her constant intercourse.”
Bruce fled to Miranda Rothschild, a friend of Peter Levi. A tragic widow, she lived at Yarnton, a Jacobean manor house outside Oxford. Here Bruce and Miranda embarked on “an endless conversation”.
Miranda, whose nickname was “Quail”, was an attractive, faint-voiced rebel with boyish looks and a taste for adventure. The sister of the banker Jacob Rothschild, she had fallen for an Algerian revolutionary. They married, had a daughter, and then in 1964 he was assassinated in Tunis. “I found him in a charnel pit.” She went to live in Athens, where she fell platonically in love with, among others, Peter Levi. She was sitting as usual in Flocca’s tearoom, plunging her cake into a glass of icy water, when she looked up and saw “a beautiful-looking Jesuit, like an icon, thin as hell. We fell platonically head over heels.” Levi could manage no more than “a mad flirtation”, but he wished to help her. Miranda needed nationality papers for her daughter. Levi persuaded her to return to England and introduced her to his best friend, Ian Watson. To facilitate the passport, she and Watson married. They were living together at Yarnton when Bruce turned up.
“I was polishing Tudor glass and living on vodka and lime and baked beans,” says Miranda. “I was jolly bored and Bruce arrives on the scene with Peter Levi. He looked gorgeous, thin, a wheaty, bronzy colour and cold blue eyes. He was every Jewish girl’s dream and I was a plump, exceedingly neurotic widow with a name.” Miranda galvanised Bruce’s competitive streak. “Bruce felt if I had a girl I didn’t want,” says Peter Levi, “so should he.”
Miranda left Watson in Yarnton and invited Bruce to stay at her mother’s house in London. At 27 Blomfield Road, Bruce sat on an ottoman reading aloud his nomad book while she listened from a four-poster. “He read to me constantly, it was his whole burning self-expression. I was starved of it. I was enclosed. I’d always been a nomad. I was married to an Arab and before that I’d lived in a desert in Israel, south of Sodom – appropriately enough.” She became a constructive audience in a period of self-doubt. “The main ingredient of our friendship was an intellectual passion. It was an attraction of opposites who had an idea in common. I’m listening and discussing and we love each other because of the nomad book. I’m part of the book.”
Bruce and Miranda celebrated Christmas in Blomfield Road where they kissed in the woodshed. “It was like a first kiss, a bestowal. It had a mystic edge.” Bruce wrote to tell Elizabeth that he was going to spend four days with Miranda in Paris. He was drawn to her boyish looks. “Miranda has found out she has no female hormones!! and is turning into a man –
imagine
!” In fact, says Ian Watson, she so much resembled a boy that a year later when travelling through Afghanistan, she excited the chief of police in Mazar-i-Sharif into such a state that he machine-gunned the bottom of her house, shouting: “Let him out! Let him out!”
Miranda was well aware of her androgynous attraction for Bruce and of the cachet of her pedigree. She found him an immensely talented but detached person whose emotional luggage had to be honed down to the single perfect accoutrement of a rucksack. “His ambivalence was his impetus. Sexually, Bruce was a polymorphous pervert. Think of the word ‘charming’. Think of the word ‘seduction’. Think of seduction as a driving force to conquer society,
Vogue.
He’s out to seduce everybody, it doesn’t matter if you are male, female, an ocelot or a tea cosy.”
In Paris, Miranda seduced Bruce. “It was my fault. I invited it,” she says. “I was love-lorn and I wanted something. But I didn’t want
that.
He was lust personified. It had nothing to do with anything else.” She describes an act of lovemaking of great speed and savagery, as if he wanted it to be over quickly. “It didn’t leave any taste at all, and I was surprised. I was lacerated as if by a Bengal tiger.” It never happened again. “And then came Akbar.”
In March 1971, in response to an S.O.S. from Elizabeth, Bruce flew to Teheran to drive her back. Meanwhile, Gertrude had also received an urgent request. “It may sound very strange, so be prepared. I have brought with me a Pathan boy from Multan called Ghulam Akbar Khan.” She asked Gertrude to write a letter to the American Consul in Istanbul saying she would vouch for him. “I guarantee he is absolutely honest as the day is long & very kind & thoughtful. He looks rather like a
gaucho
from the Argentine & is very athletic & strong.”
It was a chance encounter with Bruce and Elizabeth that changed Ghulam Akbar’s life. They had met him at the end of their Afghanistan trip with Peter Levi. Akbar had approached on his bicycle. He was 19 years old, from the Pakistan side of the border. His mother was dead.
He corresponded with Elizabeth, who had met him again while driving her van home through Pakistan. Akbar asked to join her. “He has decided to come back to England (or at least Europe) with us & is marvellous company & as nice as can be, but can’t drive and speaks rather quaint English.”
Akbar was not Elizabeth’s sole passenger. There were in addition: Simon, a chess-playing hippy with no driver’s licence, and three more quail. “They are supposed to sing, but don’t like the travelling and hardly utter.” Akbar, as a present for Bruce, had bought a hawk in a round cage that made the quail fearful. “He has to be supplied with little bits of raw meat all the time. I hope we never get out of reach of a butcher or the quail will be sacrificed.” The hawk subsequently escaped through the van’s sunroof.
Elizabeth had reason to be grateful for Akbar’s presence. Outside a caviar port on the Caspian Sea, there was almost a repetition of the rape incident with Penelope Betjeman, whom she had left behind in India with the others. Elizabeth was walking on the bleak sand flats when an Iranian soldier approached with a bayonet. While Simon screamed hysterically that he had not got his shoes on, Akbar speaking his quaint English talked the soldier out of his purpose. “He did save my bacon.”
On 7 April, the van arrived at the Oxmantowns’ house in Teheran where Elizabeth hoped to find her husband. Having cabled Bruce, she had heard nothing since February. “I hope he’ll be able to come to Teheran, but I suppose his back won’t be well enough. I certainly hope he’s turned the book in by now.”
Bruce had arrived in Teheran a week earlier, on 29 March. This was the occasion when he borrowed an Embassy Land Rover and drove to Shiraz. “Saw the Qashgais on their spring migration, which was thrilling, and for five days filled a British Embassy Land Rover full of sheep, tribesmen, women suckling babies etc.,” he wrote to Welch. He described in
The Songlines
how at Pasagadae the nomads glued their eyes to the way ahead. While Bruce could not help looking at the huge domed tents, designed by the Paris firm of Jansen for the Shah’s celebration of 2,000 years of monarchy in June, the nomads swept past without a glance, their eyes blinkered to the horizon towards which they drove hundred upon hundred of separate herds.
Bruce returned to Teheran to greet Elizabeth. “He waited, impatiently pacing around,” says Alison Oxmantown, “looking out for her with all the signs of one much in love and desperate to see her.” There followed several discussions about Akbar. Bruce was concerned about the responsibility of taking an innocent Muslim to Europe. Alison felt Elizabeth had picked him up as she would any stray and unhappy animal.
Alison had just given birth to a daughter, Alicia. “It was spring and hot and Bruce walked up and down with our baby saying how it proved the point that humans were meant to be on the move and that moving babies don’t cry. Akbar, however, was dismayed that she was not being breastfed. He explained that even when he went to school and returned from the long walk, his mother, now feeding smaller children, would point him to a friendly sheep that he could suckle. We all thought of starting a coffee bar with sheep tied to the counter for a quick pint. When they left I kissed him – he was very good looking – and Bruce said, very sharply, that this would seduce him into the other world, which it did.”
A week later, on 13 April, Bruce, Elizabeth and Akbar left Teheran, dropping Akbar in Corfu to sort out his Italian visa. “Either the quails or Akbar have to go,” Bruce told Elizabeth as they continued on to Rome to meet her parents. On 4 May in Rome, they received a desperate message from Akbar. He had reached Genoa. “But with very truble. I spend three days in Corfu. I next day get visa and reach to port but the ship was gone.” The Italian banks had refused to cash the cheque Elizabeth had given him to cover expenses. He begged her to send money to the Pakistan Embassy in Paris, the sole clue to his whereabouts,
Bruce turned up in a state at Miranda Rothschild’s flat in the rue de Grenelle. “He was having a breakdown,” she says. “He was feeling so guilty. ‘Look Miranda, only you can do this. I know he wanted to get to Paris to meet us. Will you please find him?’ I took it on like an oath, out of love. He told me the last time he saw Akbar he had long black hair and was dressed in native costume. He now had to go back to Cold Comfort Farm.”
Miranda looked up the address of the Pakistan Embassy. “I began to walk up and down the Champs Elysées to see if I could see a long-haired Afghan. I looked for a couple of days, six-and-a-half hours at a time. I like that kind of work. Suddenly I see this apparition, stinking of onions, tall, slim with raggedy-cut hair in a pudding basin. I go straight up: ‘You must be Akbar.’ He’d had to sell his hair to get money for his passage. He hadn’t eaten anything except onions for four days.”
Akbar was living at a Youth Hostel at the Porte d’lvry. Every day he had walked to the Pakistan Embassy hoping to find Bruce and Elizabeth, nine miles each way, carrying his suitcase since on the first day at the hostel someone had stolen his shaving things.

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