The Corfu Trilogy (the corfu trilogy) Page 2

  ‘Why doesn’t somebody do something?’ asked Larry, raising his voice above the uproar. ‘This is like a scene from Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’

  ‘Why don’t you do something; instead of criticizing?’ snapped Leslie, who was locked in combat with Roger.

  Larry promptly rose to his feet, snatched the whip from our astonished driver’s hand, made a wild swipe at the herd of dogs, missed them, and caught Leslie across the back of the neck.

  ‘What the hell d’you think you’re playing at?’ Leslie snarled, twisting a scarlet and angry face towards Larry.

  ‘Accident,’ explained Larry airily. ‘I’m out of practice… it’s so long since I used a horse whip.’

  ‘Well, watch what you’re bloody well doing,’ said Leslie loudly and belligerently.

  ‘Now, now, dear, it was an accident,’ said Mother.

  Larry took another swipe at the dogs and knocked off Mother’s hat.

  ‘You’re more trouble than the dogs,’ said Margo.

  ‘Do be careful, dear,’ said Mother, clutching her hat; ‘you might hurt someone. I should put the whip down.’

  At that moment the cab shambled to a halt outside a doorway over which hung a board with ‘Pension Suisse’ inscribed on it. The dogs, feeling that they were at last going to get to grips with this effeminate black canine who rode in cabs, surrounded us in a solid, panting wedge. The door of the hotel opened and an ancient bewhiskered porter appeared and stood staring glassily at the turmoil in the street. The difficulties of getting Roger out of the cab and into the hotel were considerable, for he was a heavy dog and it took the combined efforts of the family to lift, carry, and restrain him. Larry had by now forgotten his majestic pose and was rather enjoying himself. He leaped down and danced about the pavement with the whip, cleaving a path through the dogs, along which Leslie, Margo, Mother, and I hurried, bearing the struggling, snarling Roger. We staggered into the hall, and the porter slammed the front door and leaned against it, his moustache quivering. The manager came forward, eyeing us with a mixture of apprehension and curiosity. Mother faced him, hat on one side of her head, clutching in one hand my jam jar of caterpillars.

  ‘Ah!’ she said, smiling sweetly, as though our arrival had been the most normal thing in the world. ‘Our name’s Durrell. I believe you’ve got some rooms booked for us?’

  ‘Yes, madame,’ said the manager, edging round the still grumbling Roger; ‘they are on the first floor… four rooms and a balcony.’

  ‘How nice,’ beamed Mother; ‘then I think we’ll go straight up and have a little rest before lunch.’

  And with considerable majestic graciousness she led her family upstairs.

  Later we descended to lunch in a large and gloomy room full of dusty potted palms and contorted statuary. We were served by the bewhiskered porter, who had become the head waiter simply by donning tails and a celluloid dicky that creaked like a convention of crickets. The meal, however, was ample and well cooked, and we ate hungrily. As coffee was served, Larry sat back in his chair with a sigh.

  ‘That was a passable meal,’ he said generously. ‘What do you think of this place, Mother?’

  ‘Well, the food’s all right, dear,’ said Mother, refusing to commit herself.

  ‘They seem a helpful crowd,’ Larry went on. ‘The manager himself shifted my bed nearer the window.’

  ‘He wasn’t very helpful when I asked for paper,’ said Leslie.

  ‘Paper?’ asked Mother. ‘What did you want paper for?’

  ‘For the lavatory…there wasn’t any in there,’ explained Leslie.

  ‘Shhh! Not at the table,’ whispered Mother.

  ‘You obviously don’t look,’ said Margo in a clear and penetrating voice; ‘they’ve got a little box full by the pan.’

  ‘Margo, dear!’ exclaimed Mother, horrified.

  ‘What’s the matter? Didn’t you see the little box?’

  Larry gave a snort of laughter.

  ‘Owing to the somewhat eccentric plumbing system of the town,’ he explained to Margo kindly, ‘that little box is provided for the… er… debris, as it were, when you have finished communing with nature.’

  Margo’s face turned scarlet with a mixture of embarrassment and disgust.

  ‘You mean… you mean… that was… My God! I might have caught some foul disease,’ she wailed, and, bursting into tears, fled from the dining-room.

  ‘Most insanitary,’ said Mother severely; ‘it really is a disgusting way to do things. Quite apart from the mistakes one can make, I should think there’s a danger of getting typhoid.’

  ‘Mistakes wouldn’t happen if they’d organize things properly,’ Leslie pointed out, returning to his original complaint.

  ‘Yes, dear; but I don’t think we ought to discuss it now. The best thing we can do is to find a house as soon as possible, before we all go down with something.’

  Upstairs Margo was in a state of semi-nudity, splashing disinfectant over herself in quantities, and Mother spent an exhausting afternoon being forced to examine her at intervals for the symptoms of the diseases which Margo felt sure she was hatching. It was unfortunate for Mother’s peace of mind that the Pension Suisse happened to be situated in the road leading to the local cemetery. As we sat on our small balcony overhanging the street an apparently endless succession of funerals passed beneath us. The inhabitants of Corfu obviously believed that the best part of a bereavement was the funeral, for each seemed more ornate than the last. Cabs decorated with yards of purple and black crêpe were drawn by horses so enveloped in plumes and canopies that it was a wonder they could move. Six or seven of these cabs, containing the mourners in full and uninhibited grief, preceded the corpse itself. This came on another cartlike vehicle, and was ensconced in a coffin so large and lush that it looked more like an enormous birthday cake. Some were white, with purple, black-and-scarlet, and deep blue decorations; others were gleaming black with complicated filigrees of gold and silver twining abundantly over them, and glittering brass handles. I had never seen anything so colourful and attractive. This, I decided, was really the way to die, with shrouded horses, acres of flowers, and a horde of most satisfactorily grief-stricken relatives. I hung over the balcony rail watching the coffins pass beneath, absorbed and fascinated.

  As each funeral passed, and the sounds of mourning and the clopping of hooves died away in the distance, Mother became more and more agitated.

  ‘I’m sure it’s an epidemic,’ she exclaimed at last, peering down nervously into the street.

  ‘Nonsense, Mother; don’t fuss,’ said Larry airily.

  ‘But, dear, so many of them… it’s unnatural.’

  ‘There’s nothing unnatural about dying. People do it all the time.’

  ‘Yes, but they don’t die like flies unless there’s something wrong.’

  ‘Perhaps they save ’em up and bury ’em in a bunch,’ suggested Leslie callously.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Mother. ‘I’m sure it’s something to do with the drains. It can’t be healthy for people to have those sort of arrangements.’

  ‘My God!’ said Margo sepulchrally, ‘then I suppose I’ll get it.’

  ‘No, no, dear; it doesn’t follow,’ said Mother vaguely; ‘it might be something that’s not catching.’

  ‘I don’t see how you can have an epidemic unless it’s something catching,’ Leslie remarked logically.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Mother, refusing to be drawn into any medical arguments, ‘I think we ought to find out. Can’t you ring up the health authorities, Larry?’

  ‘There probably aren’t any health authorities here,’ Larry pointed out, ‘and even if there were, I doubt if they’d tell me.’

  ‘Well,’ Mother said with determination, ‘there’s nothing for it. We’ll have to move. We must get out of the town. We must find a house in the country at once.’

  The next morning we started on our house-hunt, accompanied by Mr Beeler, the hotel guide. He was a fat little man with cringing eyes
and sweat-polished jowls. He was quite sprightly when we set off, but then he did not know what was in store for him. No one who has not been house-hunting with my mother can possibly imagine it. We drove around the island in a cloud of dust while Mr Beeler showed us villa after villa in a bewildering selection of sizes, colours, and situations, and Mother shook her head firmly at them all. At last we had contemplated the tenth and final villa on Mr Beeler’s list, and Mother had shaken her head once again. Brokenly Mr Beeler seated himself on the stairs and mopped his face with his handkerchief.

  ‘Madame Durrell,’ he said at last, ‘I have shown you every villa I know, yet you do not want any. Madame, what is it you require? What is the matter with these villas?’

  Mother regarded him with astonishment.

  ‘Didn’t you notice?’ she asked. ‘None of them had a bathroom.’

  Mr Beeler stared at Mother with bulging eyes.

  ‘But Madame,’ he wailed in genuine anguish, ‘what for you want a bathroom? Have you not got the sea?’

  We returned in silence to the hotel.

  By the following morning Mother had decided that we would hire a car and go out house-hunting on our own. She was convinced that somewhere on the island there lurked a villa with a bathroom. We did not share Mother’s belief, and so it was a slightly irritable and argumentative group that she herded down to the taxi rank in the main square. The taxi drivers, perceiving our innocent appearance, scrambled from inside their cars and flocked round us like vultures, each trying to out-shout his compatriots. Their voices grew louder and louder, their eyes flashed, they clutched each other’s arms and ground their teeth at one another, and then they laid hold of us as though they would tear us apart. Actually, we were being treated to the mildest of mild altercations, but we were not used to the Greek temperament, and to us it looked as though we were in danger of our lives.

  ‘Can’t you do something, Larry?’ Mother squeaked, disentangling herself with difficulty from the grasp of a large driver.

  ‘Tell them you’ll report them to the British consul,’ suggested Larry, raising his voice above the noise.

  ‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ said Mother breathlessly. ‘Just explain that we don’t understand.’

  Margo, simpering, stepped into the breach.

  ‘We English,’ she yelled at the gesticulating drivers; ‘we no understand Greek.’

  ‘If that man pushes me again I’ll poke him in the eye,’ said Leslie, his face flushed red.

  ‘Now, now, dear,’ panted Mother, still struggling with the driver who was propelling her vigorously towards his car; ‘I don’t think they mean any harm.’

  At that moment everyone was startled into silence by a voice that rumbled out above the uproar, a deep, rich, vibrant voice, the sort of voice you would expect a volcano to have.

  ‘Hoy!’ roared the voice. ‘Whys donts yous have someones who can talks your own language?’

  Turning, we saw an ancient Dodge parked by the curb, and behind the wheel sat a short, barrel-bodied individual, with hamlike hands and a great, leathery, scowling face surmounted by a jauntily tilted peaked cap. He opened the door of the car, surged out onto the pavement, and waddled across to us. Then he stopped, scowling even more ferociously, and surveyed the group of silent cab drivers.

  ‘Thems been worrying yous?’ he asked Mother.

  ‘No, no,’ said Mother untruthfully; ‘it was just that we had difficulty in understanding them.’

  ‘Yous wants someones who can talks your own language,’ repeated the new arrival; ‘thems bastards… if yous will excuses the words… would swindles their own mothers. Excuses me a minute and I’ll fix thems.’

  He turned on the drivers a blast of Greek that almost swept them off their feet. Aggrieved, gesticulating, angry, they were herded back to their cars by this extraordinary man. Having given them a final and, it appeared, derogatory blast of Greek, he turned to us again.

  ‘Wheres yous wants to gos?’ he asked, almost truculently.

  ‘Can you take us to look for a villa?’ asked Larry.

  ‘Sure. I’ll takes yous anywheres. Just yous says.’

  ‘We are looking,’ said Mother firmly, ‘for a villa with a bathroom. Do you know of one?’

  The man brooded like a great, suntanned gargoyle, his black eyebrows twisted into a knot of thoughtfulness.

  ‘Bathrooms?’ he said. ‘Yous wants a bathrooms?’

  ‘None of the ones we have seen so far had them,’ said Mother.

  ‘Oh, I knows a villa with a bathrooms,’ said the man. ‘I was wondering if its was goings to be bigs enough for yous.’

  ‘Will you take us to look at it, please?’ asked Mother.

  ‘Sure, I’ll takes yous. Gets into the cars.’

  We climbed into the spacious car, and our driver hoisted his bulk behind the steering wheel and engaged his gears with a terrifying sound. We shot through the twisted streets on the outskirts of the town, swerving in and out among the loaded donkeys, the carts, the groups of peasant women, and innumerable dogs, our horn honking a deafening warning. During this our driver seized the opportunity to engage us in conversation. Each time he addressed us he would crane his massive head round to see our reactions, and the car would swoop back and forth across the road like a drunken swallow.

  ‘Yous English? Thought so… English always wants bathrooms… I gets a bathroom in my house… Spiro’s my name, Spiro Hakiaopulos… they alls calls me Spiro Americano on accounts of I lives in America… Yes, spent eight years in Chicago… That’s where I learnt my goods English… Wents there to makes moneys… Then after eight years I says, “Spiros,” I says, “yous mades enough…” sos I comes backs to Greece… brings this car… best ons the islands… no one else gets a car like this… All the English tourists knows me, theys all asks for me when theys comes here… Theys knows theys wonts be swindled… I likes the English… best kinds of peoples… Honest to Gods, ifs I wasn’t Greek I’d likes to be English.’

  We sped down a white road covered in a thick layer of silky dust that rose in a boiling cloud behind us, a road lined with prickly pears like a fence of green plates each cleverly balanced on another’s edge, and splashed with knobs of scarlet fruit. We passed vineyards where the tiny, stunted vines were laced in green leaves, olive groves where the pitted trunks made a hundred astonished faces at us out of the gloom of their own shadow, and great clumps of zebra-striped cane that fluttered their leaves like a multitude of green flags. At last we roared to the top of a hill, and Spiro crammed on his brakes and brought the car to a dust-misted halt.

  ‘Theres you ares,’ he said, pointing with a great stubby forefinger; ‘thats the villa with the bathrooms, likes yous wanted.’

  Mother, who had kept her eyes firmly shut throughout the drive, now opened them cautiously and looked. Spiro was pointing at a gentle curve of hillside that rose from the glittering sea. The hill and the valleys around it were an eiderdown of olive groves that shone with a fishlike gleam where the breeze touched the leaves. Halfway up the slope, guarded by a group of tall, slim cypress trees, nestled a small strawberry-pink villa, like some exotic fruit lying in the greenery. The cypress trees undulated gently in the breeze, as if they were busily painting the sky a still brighter blue for our arrival.

  2

  The Strawberry-Pink Villa

  The villa was small and square, standing in its tiny garden with an air of pink-faced determination. It shutters had been faded by the sun to a delicate creamy green, cracked and bubbled in places. The garden, surrounded by tall fuchsia hedges, had flower beds worked in complicated geometrical patterns, marked with smooth white stones. The white cobbled paths, scarcely as wide as a rake’s head, wound laboriously round beds hardly larger than a big straw hat, beds in the shape of stars, half-moons, triangles, and circles, all overgrown with a shaggy tangle of flowers run wild. Roses dropped petals that seemed as big and smooth as saucers, flame red, moon white, glossy, and unwrinkled; marigolds like broods of shaggy su
ns stood watching their parents’ progress through the sky. In the low growth the pansies pushed their velvety, innocent faces through the leaves, and the violets drooped sorrowfully under their heart-shaped leaves. The bougainvillæa that sprawled luxuriously over the tiny front balcony was hung, as though for a carnival, with its lantern-shaped magenta flowers. In the darkness of the fuchsia hedge a thousand ballerina-like blooms quivered expectantly. The warm air was thick with the scent of a hundred dying flowers, and full of the gentle, soothing whisper and murmur of insects. As soon as we saw it, we wanted to live there; it was as though the villa had been standing there waiting for our arrival. We felt we had come home.

  Having lumbered so unexpectedly into our lives, Spiro now took over complete control of our affairs. It was better, he explained, for him to do things, as everyone knew him, and he would make sure we were not swindled.

  ‘Donts you worrys yourselfs about anythings, Mrs Durrells,’ he had scowled; ‘leaves everythings to me.’

  So he would take us shopping, and after an hour’s sweating and roaring he would get the price of an article reduced by perhaps two drachmas. This was approximately a penny; it was not the cash, but the principle of the thing, he explained. The fact that he was Greek and adored bargaining was, of course, another reason. It was Spiro who, on discovering that our money had not yet arrived from England, subsidized us, and took it upon himself to go and speak severely to the bank manager about his lack of organization. That it was not the poor manager’s fault did not deter him in the least. It was Spiro who paid our hotel bill, who organized a car to carry our luggage to the villa, and who drove us out there himself, his car piled high with groceries that he had purchased for us.