Marrying Off Mother: And Other Stories

by Gerald Durrell

  It was at breakfast that we read our mail, if any, which arrived once a week. I never got any letters, but used to make up for it by receiving the Animal and Zoo Magazine, together with other erudite literature containing The Adventures of Black Beauty, Rin-tin-tin and similar zoological heroes. As we ate and read, each one of us would read out titbits from letters or magazines for the rest of the family who would remain totally oblivious.

  ‘Murdoch is publishing his life story,’ Larry would snort. ‘How young do we have to be before inflicting autobiographies on an unsuspecting public? He can’t be more than twenty-four. Can I have some more tea?’

  ‘There’s a rhinoceros been born at a zoo in Switzerland,’ I would inform my family jubilantly.

  ‘Really, dear? How nice for them,’ my mother would say, busy with her seed catalogue.

  ‘They say organdie is coming back into fashion and puffed sleeves,’ Margo would vouchsafe, ‘and about time too, in my opinion.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ Mother would say. ‘I’m sure that zinnias would do here. In that bed behind the beehives. It gets a lot of warmth.’

  ‘I bet my collection of flintlocks would fetch a fortune in England. They’re selling awful-looking ones at fantastic prices,’ Leslie would inform an unlistening audience, browsing through his gun catalogue. ‘That one I got for twenty drachs the other day, I expect in London it would fetch pounds.’

  However, although apparently uncaringly sunk each in our own mail, strangely the family’s antennae would be out and quivering, discarding most of what was said but transforming us into an indignant mob should someone vouchsafe something displeasing. On this particular morning Larry started the whole thing, or to be more honest he lit the fuse that led to the keg of powder.

  ‘Oh, splendid,’ he said, ‘I’m so glad, Antoine de Vere is coming to stay.’

  Mother peered at him over her glasses.

  ‘Now, look here, Larry,’ she said, ‘we’ve just got rid of one lot of your friends. I’m not having another lot. It’s too much. It’s too exhausting, what with preparing the food and Lugaretzia’s legs and everything.’

  Larry gave her a pained look.

  ‘I’m not asking you to cook Lugaretzia’s legs for Antoine,’ he said. ‘I am sure they would be most unsavoury if what she tells me about them is to be believed.’

  ‘Larry, don’t be so disgusting,’ said Margo primly.

  ‘I didn’t say anything about cooking Lugaretzia’s legs,’ said Mother, flustered. ‘Apart from anything else, she’s got varicose veins.’

  ‘I’m sure in New Guinea they would be considered a delicacy. They probably eat them like spaghetti,’ said Larry. ‘But Antoine has a very cultured palate, and I don’t think he’d care for them, even disguised in breadcrumbs.’

  ‘I’m not talking about Lugaretzia’s veins,’ said my mother indignantly.

  ‘Well, you were the one who brought them up,’ said Larry. ‘I merely suggested a disguise of breadcrumbs to make them seem more haute cuisine.’

  ‘Larry, you do make me angry sometimes,’ said my mother, ‘and don’t go about telling people about Lugaretzia’s legs as if they were something I kept in the larder.’

  ‘Who is this De Vere whatnot, anyway?’ asked Leslie. ‘Another one of those wet pansies, I suppose?’

  ‘Don’t you know who he is?’ asked Margo, wide-eyed. ‘Why, he’s a great film actor. He’s made films in Hollywood. He almost made a film with Jean Harlow. He’s making one in England now. He’s dark — and — and — and he’s dark and he’s . . .’

  ‘Dark?’ suggested Leslie.

  ‘Handsome,’ said Margo. ‘At least, some people might call him handsome. I don’t think he is. I think he’s too old, if you ask me. He must be thirty. I mean, I wouldn’t be interested in a handsome film star if he was that old, would you?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be interested in him if he was handsome, a film star, old and a male,’ said Leslie with finality.

  ‘When you two have finished this character assassination of my friend . . .’ Larry began.

  ‘Now, don’t quarrel, dears,’ said Mother. ‘Really, you children do quarrel about the stupidest things. Now, the Beer man, whatever he’s called. Can’t you put him off, Larry? It’s been a very hectic summer with so many people coming to stay and it’s very tiring and then there’s the food . . .’

  ‘You mean you’re frightened that Lugaretzia’s legs won’t go round?’ asked Larry.

  Mother gave him her most ferocious glare, a glare that might just possibly have given a moment of unease to a fledgling sparrow.

  ‘Now, don’t go on about Lugaretzia’s veins, Larry, or I will get seriously annoyed,’ she said. It was her favourite threat and we could never work out what the difference was between being annoyed and being seriously annoyed. Mother, presumably, had it fixed in her mind that there were different grades of annoyance, as there were different colours in a rainbow.

  ‘Anyway, I can’t put him off, even if I wanted to,’ said Larry, ‘this letter’s dated the twelfth, so he’s probably halfway here. I should think he will arrive on the Athens boat next week or the week after. So I should pop those veins into a cauldron and get them simmering if I were you. I have no doubt that Gerry can supply some other ingredients like the odd toad. He has something decaying gently in his room at the moment, so my nose tells me.’

  I was dismayed. He had smelt the hedgehog, and I’d only got as far as the lungs in my dissection. This was the disadvantage of having an elder brother occupying the bedroom next to yours.

  ‘Well,’ said Mother, conceding defeat, ‘if there’s only one of him, I suppose we can cope.’

  There was only one of him when we last met,’ said my brother. ‘We shall only know if, by some strange alchemy, he has been transformed into twins when he arrives. I should get Lugaretzia to make up two beds, just in case.’

  ‘Do you know what he eats?’ Mother asked, obviously working out menus in her head.

  ‘Food,’ said Larry, succinctly.

  ‘You do make me cross,’ said Mother. Silence reigned, while everyone concentrated on his or her letter or magazine. Magically, time drifted by as it had a habit of doing in Corfu.

  ‘I wonder whether passion flowers would look nice on that east wall,’ said Mother, looking up from her seed catalogue. They are so pretty. I can imagine the east wall just covered with passion flowers, can’t you?’

  ‘We could do with a bit of passion around here,’ said Larry. ‘Just recently, the place has been as chaste as a nunnery.’

  ‘I don’t see what passion flowers have got to do with nuns,’ said Mother.

  Larry sighed and gathered up his mail.

  ‘Why don’t you get married again?’ he suggested. ‘You’ve been looking awfully wilted lately, rather like an overworked nun.’

  ‘Indeed I haven’t,’ said Mother indignantly.

  ‘You’re looking sort of shrewish and spinsterish,’ said Larry, ‘rather like Lugaretzia on a good day. And all this mooning about passion flowers. It’s very Freudian. Obviously what you want is a dollop of romance in your life. Get married again.’

  ‘What rubbish you talk, Larry,’ said my mother, bridling. ‘Get married again! What nonsense! Your father would never allow it.’

  ‘Dad’s been dead nearly twelve years. I think his objection could be overruled, don’t you? Get married again and make us all legitimate.’

  ‘Larry, stop talking like that in front of Gerry,’ said my mother, getting more and more flustered. ‘You’re being perfectly ridiculous. You’re as legitimate as I am.’

  ‘And you’re being hard-hearted and callous, allowing your selfish feelings to crush the natural instincts of your family,’ Larry said. ‘How can we boys develop a good, healthy Oedipus complex without a father to hate? How can Margo hate you properly if she doesn’t have a father to fall in love with? You’re letting us grow into monsters of depravity. How can we flourish and become like other people if we don’t have a
step-father to loathe and despise? It’s your duty as a mother to marry again. It would be the making of you as a woman. As it is you’re just dwindling away and becoming a sour old faggot. Get romance while you can still hobble about after the opposite sex and bring a little joy into your children’s lives and a bit of passion into your own.’

  ‘Larry, I’m not going to sit here and listen to this nonsense. Marry again, indeed. In any case, who would I marry?’ said Mother, falling into the trap.

  ‘Well, you were saying how good-looking that boy who runs the fish stall at Garitza is, the other day,’ Larry pointed out.

  ‘Are you mad?’ asked Mother. ‘He’s only about eighteen.’

  ‘What does age matter when passion is involved?’ Larry asked. ‘They say Catherine the Great had fifteen-year-old lovers when she was well into her seventies.’

  ‘Larry, don’t be disgusting,’ said Mother, ‘and don’t say things like that in front of Gerry. I’m not going to listen to any more of your twaddle. I’m going to look at Lugaretzia.’

  ‘Well, take my word for it, looking at Lugaretzia would pale into insignificance if you had the choice between her and the fishmonger at Garitza,’ warned Larry.

  Mother gave him one of her glares and went off to the kitchen.

  There was a pause as we all reflected.

  ‘You know, Larry, I think for once you’re right,’ said Margo. ‘Mother has been looking down in the dumps recently. She’s got a sort of left-on-the-shelf air about her. I think it’s unhealthy. She needs to be taken out of herself.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Leslie. ‘I personally think it’s too much contact with Lugaretzia. These things are catching.’

  ‘You mean varicose veins are catching?’ asked Margo, looking down with alarm at her legs.

  ‘No, no,’ said Leslie, irritably, ‘I mean all this moaning and depression.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Larry, ‘ten minutes with Lugaretzia is like having a night out with Boris Karloff and the Hunchback of Nôtre-Dame. There’s no doubt about it, we must try to think of a way of saving Mother for posterity. After all, under our guidance she was doing so well up until now. I will give my mind to it.’

  With that ominous pronouncement he went off to his room and the rest of us dispersed about our various affairs and forgot about our mother’s sad lack of a soul mate.

  At lunchtime, when we were all sitting on the veranda, wondering if we would melt before Mother and Lugaretzia managed to get food to us, Spiro arrived in his ancient Dodge piled high with multifarious goodies for the larder, ranging from water melons to tomatoes, a vast quantity of bread, whose mouth-watering crusts were peeling off the loaves as cork bark peels from a cork tree. There were also three huge coffin-shaped blocks of ice wrapped in sacking for our ice box, Mother’s pride and joy, designed by her and of enormous proportions.

  Spiro had entered our lives on our arrival in Corfu as a taxi driver and within hours had transformed himself into our guide, mentor and friend. His curious command of the English language — learnt during a sojourn in Chicago — absolved Mother of the insoluble problems of trying to master the Greek tongue. His adoration of her was complete and selfless, as his often repeated phrase ‘Gollys, if I hads a mother like yours I’d go down on my knees and kisses her feets every morning’ bore witness. He was a short, barrel-shaped man with massive dark eyebrows and those black, brooding, unreadable eyes that only Greeks appear to possess, fixed in a brown face like a benevolent gargoyle. Now he lumbered on to the veranda and went through the litany we did not want but which seemed to give him pleasure.

  ‘Good morning, Missy Margo. Good morning, Mr Larry. Good morning, Mr Leslies. Good morning, Master Gerrys,’ he intoned and like a well-trained choir we would all say, ‘Good morning, Spiro,’ in unison. When this ritual was over, Larry took a thoughtful sip of his post-prandial ouzo.

  ‘Spiro, we have a problem,’ he confessed. It was like saying ‘walkies’ to a bull mastiff. Spiro stiffened and his eyes narrowed.

  ‘You tells me, Mr Larrys,’ he said, in a voice which was so deep and rich it sounded like the birth cries of Krakatoa. ‘I’ll fixes it.’

  ‘It may be difficult,’ Larry admitted.

  ‘Don’ts you worrys, I’ll fixes it,’ said Spiro with all the conviction of one who knows everyone on the island and who could make anyone do anything.

  ‘Well,’ said Larry, ‘it’s about my mother.’

  Spiro’s face took on a reddish tinge and he took a step forward.

  ‘What’s the matters with yours mothers?’ he said in alarm, his plurals coming thick and fast.

  ‘Well, she wants to get married again,’ said Larry, calmly lighting a cigarette. We were all breathless. Of all the audacious things Larry had ever perpetrated, this had to be the most formidable and far reaching.

  Spiro stood immobile, staring at my brother.

  ‘Yours mothers wants to gets marrieds again?’ he said hoarsely, in an incredulous voice. ‘Tells me who this man is and I’ll fix him, Mr Larrys. Don’ts you worrys.’

  ‘How would you fix him?’ asked Leslie with interest, who, with his enormous collection of guns and his hunting forays, tended to let his mind travel along lines of death and destruction rather than those of sweetness and humanitarianism.

  ‘Likes they teaches me in Chicago,’ said Spiro, scowling. ‘Cement boots.’

  ‘Cement boots?’ asked Margo, her attention attracted now that the conversation had apparently turned to fashion. ‘What on earth are those?’

  ‘Well, you get this bastard — if you’ll excuses the words, Missy Margo — and you stick his feet in a couple of buckets of cement. When it gets hard you take him out in a caique and drop him overboard,’ Spiro explained.

  ‘But you couldn’t do that!’ Margo exclaimed. ‘He wouldn’t be able to swim. He’d drown.’

  ‘That’s the idea,’ Larry explained patiently.

  ‘I think you’re all perfectly horrible,’ said Margo. ‘It’s disgusting. It’s murder, that’s what it is, just pure murder. And, anyway, I’m not having my step-father going about in cement gumboots or whatever they are. I mean, if he drowned, we would all be orphans.’

  ‘No, there’s Mother,’ said Leslie.

  Margo’s eyes widened in horror.

  ‘You’re not putting any cement near Mother,’ she said. ‘I warn you, I shall go straight to the police.’

  ‘Oh, Margo, for heaven’s sake, shut up,’ said Larry. ‘Nobody’s saying anything about drowning Mother. In any case, we can’t carry out Spiro’s ingenious little experiment unless we have a candidate, and this is what we lack. You see, Spiro, Mother has merely expressed a wish to — as it were — have another round with romance. She has not yet decided on any particular man.’

  ‘So when she decides, Mr Larrys, you lets me knows and me and Theodorakis, we gives him the cement boots, OK?’

  ‘But I thought we were trying to help Mother to get married again?’ said Margo. ‘I mean, if Spiro goes and puts cement round the legs of every man she looks at, he’ll be a mass murderer, like Rasputin the Ripper, and we’ll never get Mother married off.’

  ‘Yes, Spiro, just keep an eye out, will you? Don’t do anything drastic but keep us informed,’ said Larry, ‘and above all, not a word to Mother. She’s rather sensitive about this subject.’

  ‘My lips are seals,’ said Spiro.

  For several days we forgot our mother’s mateless existence, for there were many things to do. Several local villages had wonderful fiestas which we always attended. Fleets of donkeys were tethered to trees (for the relatives of the villagers had come from far away, some as far as six miles). The smoke drifting through the olive trees was like a heavy perfume of burning charcoal, roasting lamb and the piquancy of garlic. The wine, red as the blood from a dragon’s slaughtering, whispered into the glasses in a purring, conspiratorial way that was so warm and friendly that it nudged you to have some more. The dances were gay, with much leaping in the air and leg-slappin
g. At the first fiesta, Leslie tried to jump over a bonfire that looked like the internal organs of Vesuvius. He failed to make it and before eager hands pulled him out, his nether regions were burnt quite nastily. He had to sit on an inflatable rubber cushion for a day or two.

  It was during one of these fiestas that Larry steered through the merrymaking throng a small man in an immaculate white suit, wearing a cravat of crimson and gold silk and an exquisite panama hat. The shoes on his tiny feet were as burnished as a beetle.

  ‘Mother,’ said Larry. ‘I have brought over somebody most interesting who is dying to meet you. This is Professor Euripides Androtheomatacottopolous.’

  ‘It is so nice to meet you,’ said Mother nervously.

  ‘I am enchanted, Madame Durrell,’ said the professor, pressing the back of her hand into the well-clipped beard and moustache that concealed the bottom part of his face like a snowfall.

  ‘The professor is not only a gourmet of renown, but a ruthless exponent of the culinary arts.’

  ‘Ah, my boy, you exaggerate,’ said the professor. ‘I am sure my humble efforts in the kitchen would pale into insignificance when compared to the positively Roman banquets that your mother presides over, so I am told.’

  Mother always had difficulty in distinguishing between a Roman banquet and a Roman orgy. She had it firmly fixed in her mind that the two were synonymous, implying a great deal of food with half-naked men and women doing things to each other between the soup and the sweet course which were better kept for the privacy of the bedroom.

  ‘Now,’ said the professor, sitting down beside her. ‘I want you to tell me all you know about the local herbs. Is it true they do not use lavender here?’

  This was of course, as Larry well knew, one of Mother’s favourite subjects and, seeing that the professor was keenly interested and knowledgeable, she launched herself into a gastronomic diatribe.