Marrying Off Mother: And Other Stories

by Gerald Durrell

  Later, when the last mouthful of crisp sheep skin and pink flesh had been eaten, when the last bottle had been emptied and the pulsating heart of each bonfire stamped out, we filed into the faithful Dodge and went home.

  ‘I had such an interesting talk with Professor Andro—, An-dro—, Andro—, oh, I can’t think why the Greeks have such unpronounceable names,’ she said crossly, and then leant forward and touched Spiro’s shoulder. ‘Of course, I don’t mean you, Spiro, you can’t help being called Hak—, Haki—’

  ‘Hakiopolous,’ said Spiro.

  ‘Yes. But this professor’s name goes on and on for ever, like a caterpillar. Still, I suppose it’s better than being called Smith or Jones,’ Mother sighed.

  ‘Was he interesting about cooking, in spite of his name?’ asked Larry.

  ‘Oh, he was fascinating,’ said Mother. ‘I’ve invited him to dinner tomorrow night.’

  ‘Good,’ said Larry. ‘I hope you’ve got a chaperone.’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ asked Mother.

  ‘Well, it’s your first date, you’ve got to do it properly.’

  ‘Larry, don’t be so foolish,’ said Mother with great dignity, and silence reigned in the car until we reached home.

  ‘Do you think he’s the right sort of person to introduce Mother to?’ asked Margo worriedly the next day, while Mother was in the kitchen preparing delicacies for the professor’s visit.

  ‘Why not?’ asked Larry.

  ‘Well, he’s so old for one thing. He must be at least fifty,’ Margo pointed out.

  ‘Prime of life,’ said Larry, airily. ‘Men have been known to sire children in their mid-eighties.’

  ‘I don’t know why you always have to drag sex in,’ Margo complained. ‘And anyway, he’s a Greek. She can’t marry a Greek.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Larry. ‘Greeks marry Greeks all the time.’

  ‘But that’s different,’ said Margo, ‘that’s their affair. But Mother’s British.’

  ‘I agree with Larry,’ said Leslie, unexpectedly. ‘He’s apparently very well off, with two houses in Athens and one in Crete. I don’t see that it matters if he’s a Greek. He can’t help it and anyway, we know some jolly nice Greeks — look at Spiro.’

  ‘She can’t marry Spiro, he’s married,’ said Margo in flustered tones.

  ‘I don’t mean marry Spiro, I just mean he’s a nice Greek.’

  ‘Well, anyway, I don’t agree with mixed marriages,’ said Margo, ‘that’s the way you get doubloons.’

  ‘Quadroons,’ said Larry.

  ‘Well, whatever they’re called,’ said Margo, ‘I don’t want Mother to have one, and I don’t want a step-father whose name nobody can pronounce.’

  ‘We’ll be on Christian name terms by then,’ Larry pointed out.

  ‘What’s his Christian name?’ asked Margo suspiciously.

  ‘Euripides,’ Larry replied. ‘You can call him Rip for short.’

  To say that the professor made a bad impression that evening would be understating the case. As the horse-drawn carachino that brought him clopped and jingled its way up our long twisting drive through the olive groves we could hear him before we could see him. He was singing a very beautiful Greek love song. Unfortunately, no one had ever told him that he was completely tone deaf, or if they had he did not believe them. He sang lustily and so made up for what he lacked in quality by quantity. We all went out on to the veranda to greet him and, as the carachino came to a halt at our front steps, it became immediately apparent that the professor had partaken of the grape in unwise measure. He fell out of the carachino on to the steps, with the unfortunate result that he broke the three bottles of wine and the jar of home-made chutney he had brought for Mother. The front of his elegant pale grey suit was drenched in wine, so that he looked rather like the miraculous survivor of a very nasty car accident.

  ‘He is drunk,’ said the carachino driver, in case this had escaped our notice.

  ‘He’s as pooped as an owl,’ said Leslie.

  ‘Two owls,’ said Larry.

  ‘It’s disgusting,’ said Margo. ‘Mother can’t marry a Greek drunkard. Dad would never have approved.’

  ‘Marry him? What are you talking about?’ asked Mother.

  ‘Just thought he’d bring a bit of romance into your life,’ Larry explained. ‘I told you we needed a step-father.’

  ‘Marry him,’ exclaimed Mother, horrified. ‘I wouldn’t be seen dead with him. What on earth are you children thinking about?’

  ‘There you are,’ said Margo triumphantly, ‘I told you she wouldn’t want a Greek.’

  The professor had taken off his wine-stained Homburg, bowed to Mother and then fallen asleep on the front steps.

  ‘Larry, Leslie, you’re making me seriously annoyed,’ said Mother. ‘Pick up that drunken fool, put him back in the carachino and tell the driver to take him back where he found him, and I never want to see him again.’

  ‘I think you’re being thoroughly unromantic,’ said Larry. ‘How can we get you married again if you adopt this anti-social attitude? The chap’s only had a few drinks.’

  ‘And let’s have less of this stupid talk about my being married again,’ said Mother firmly. ‘I’ll tell you when I want to get married and to whom, if ever.’

  ‘We were only trying to help,’ said Leslie, aggrieved.

  ‘Well you can help me by getting that drunken idiot out of here,’ said Mother, and she strutted back into the villa.

  Dinner that night was — conversationally speaking — chilly, but delicious. The professor did not know what he had missed.

  The next day, we all went for a swim, leaving a now more placid Mother pottering about the garden with her seed catalogue. The sea was bath temperature and you had to swim out and then dive down some five or six feet to find water cool enough to be refreshing. Afterwards we lay in the shade of the olives, letting the salt water dry to a silken crustiness on our bodies.

  ‘You know,’ said Margo, ‘I’ve been thinking.’

  Larry looked at her with disbelief.

  ‘What have you been thinking?’ he enquired.

  ‘Well, I think you made a mistake with the professor. I don’t think he was Mother’s type.’

  ‘Well, I was only fooling,’ said Larry, languidly. ‘I was always against this idea of her remarrying, but she seemed so convinced that she should.’

  ‘You mean it was Mothers idea?’ asked Leslie, baffled.

  ‘Of course,’ said Larry. ‘When you get to her age and start planting passion flowers all over the place, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘But think of the consequences if she’d married the professor,’ Margo exclaimed.

  ‘What consequences?’ Leslie asked, suspiciously.

  ‘Well, she would have gone to live with him in Athens,’ said Margo.

  ‘So, what about it?’

  ‘Well, who would cook for us? Lugaretzia?’

  ‘God forbid!’ Larry said, with vehemence.

  ‘Do you remember her cuttlefish soup?’ asked Leslie.

  ‘Please don’t remind me,’ said Margo. ‘All those accusing eyes floating there, looking up at you — ugh!’

  ‘I suppose we could have gone to Athens and lived with her and Erisipolous, or whatever he’s called,’ said Leslie.

  ‘I don’t think he would have taken kindly to having four children foisted on to him in his declining years,’ observed Larry.

  ‘Well, I think we’ve got to turn Mother’s mind to other things,’ said Margo, ‘not marriage.’

  ‘She seems hell bent on it,’ said Larry.

  ‘Well, we must unbend her,’ said Margo. ‘Try and keep her on the rails, watch out she doesn’t meet too many men. Keep an eye on her.’

  ‘She seems all right,’ Leslie said, doubtfully.

  ‘Planting passion flowers,’ Larry pointed out.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Margo. ‘We must watch her. I tell you, where there’s no smoke, there’s no
fire.’

  So bearing this in mind we all dispersed and went about our various tasks, Larry to write, Margo to work out what to do with seventeen yards of red velvet she had bought at a knock-down price, Leslie to oil his guns and make cartridges and me to try and catch a mate for one of my toads, for the marital affairs of my animals were infinitely more important to me than those of my mother.

  Three days later, hot, sweaty and hungry, after an unsatisfactory hunt for Leopards snakes in the hills, I arrived back at the villa just when Antoine de Vere was decanted by Spiro from the Dodge. He was wearing an enormous sombrero, a black cloak with a scarlet lining and a suit of pale blue corduroy. He stepped out of the car, closed his eyes, raised his arms to the heavens and intoned in a deep, rich voice, ‘Ah! The majesty that is Greece,’ and inhaled deeply. Then he swept off his sombrero and looked at me, dishevelled and surrounded by dogs, all of whom were growling ominously. He smiled, a flash of teeth in his brown face, so perfect they might have been newly constructed. His hair was curly and glistening. His eyes were large and shiny, the colour of a newly emerged horse chestnut, and under them the skin was dark like a plum. He was undeniably handsome, one had to admit, but in what Leslie would have described as a dago-ish sort of way.

  ‘Ah!’ he said, pointing a long finger at me. ‘You must be Lawrence’s baby brother.’

  From not particularly liking him at first sight, I had been willing to give him a chance, but now my opinion dropped to zero. I had become used to being described in a variety of derogatory ways by both my family and our friends, and I had adopted a stoical attitude to these unkind, untrue and probably slanderous assaults on my character. But no one had ever had the temerity to call me ‘baby’ before. I was wondering which room he was occupying and whether the insertion of a dead water-snake (which I happened to possess) into his bed would be advantageous, when Larry emerged and whisked Antoine away to the kitchen to meet Mother.

  The next few days were, to say the least of it, interesting. Within twenty-four hours Antoine had succeeded in alienating the whole family with the exception — to our astonishment — of Mother. Larry was obviously bored with him and made only the most desultory attempt at being polite. Leslie’s opinion was that he was a bloody dago and should be shot and Margo thought he was fat, old and greasy. But Mother for some inexplicable reason apparently found him charming. She was constantly asking him to tour the garden with her and suggest where she should plant things, or inviting him to the kitchen to taste the casserole she was making and to suggest what ingredients to add. She even went so far as to have Lugaretzia, moaning like a Roman galley slave, hobble up three flights of stairs carrying an enormous tray loaded down with enough eggs, bacon, toast, marmalade and coffee to feed a regiment. This was a luxury never afforded us unless we were ill and so, not unnaturally, our dislike of Antoine grew. He appeared to be totally oblivious of our ill-concealed feelings and dominated every conversation and made meal-times intolerable. The personal pronoun had obviously been invented for him, and nearly every sentence began with ‘I think’ or ‘I believe’, ‘I know’ or ‘I am of the opinion’. We were counting the days to his departure.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Margo, worriedly. ‘I don’t like the way he hangs around Mother.’

  ‘Or the way she hangs around him,’ said Leslie.

  ‘Nonsense. The man’s a bloody bore. He’s worse than the professor,’ Larry said. ‘Anyway, he’s going soon, thank God.’

  ‘Well, you mark my words, there’s something fishy going on,’ said Margo. ‘There’s many a trick between cup and glass.’ My sister liked proverbs, but invariably gave her own version of them which tended to be confusing.

  ‘I saw them walking on the hillside yesterday,’ observed Leslie, ‘and he was plucking flowers for her.’

  ‘There you are, you see,’ said Margo. ‘Giving flowers to women always means something.’

  ‘I gave a lot of flowers to a woman once and she wasn’t a bit grateful,’ Larry said.

  ‘Why wasn’t she? I thought women liked flowers,’ asked Leslie.

  ‘Not in the form of a wreath,’ explained Larry. ‘As she was dead I suppose one cannot be too harsh in judgement. I’m sure if she’d been alive she would have put them in water.’

  ‘I do wish you’d take things seriously,’ said Margo.

  ‘I take wreaths very seriously,’ Larry said. ‘In America they hang them on doors at Christmas. I suppose to remind you how lucky you are not to be underneath them.’

  To our astonishment, Spiro arrived before breakfast the following morning and Antoine, wearing his sombrero, cloak and blue suit, was whisked away, presumably into town. The mystery was explained to us by Mother when we sat down to breakfast.

  ‘Where’s Antoine gone?’ asked Larry, deftly trepanning a boiled egg. ‘I suppose it’s too much to hope he’s gone for good?’

  ‘No, dear,’ said Mother placidly, ‘he wanted to do some shopping in town and, anyway, he thought it would save embarrassment if he was not here while I talked to you all.’

  Talked to us? Talked to us about what?’ asked Margo in alarm.

  ‘You know some time ago you children were suggesting I got married again,’ Mother began, busily pouring out tea and orange juice. ‘Well, at the time I was very annoyed, because, as you know, I said I would never marry again as no man could measure up to your father.’

  We sat as still as four pebbles.

  ‘I gave the matter considerable thought,’ she continued, ‘and I decided that you, Larry, were right. I think you do need a father to exert discipline and to guide you. Just having me is not enough.’

  We sat as though mesmerized. Mother sipped her tea and put down her cup.

  There are not many choices on Corfu as you know, and I was really at my wits’ end. I thought of the Belgian Consul, but he speaks only French and if he proposed I wouldn’t understand him. I thought of Mr Kralefsky but he’s so devoted to his mother and I doubt whether he’d want to get married. I thought of Colonel Velvit, but I think his interests lie in other directions than ladies. Well, I was almost giving up in despair when Antoine arrived.’

  ‘Mother!’ exclaimed Margo in horror.

  ‘Now be quiet, dear, and let me go on. Well, from the word go we were attracted to each other. I don’t suppose you all noticed.’

  ‘Oh, yes we did,’ said Leslie, ‘bloody breakfast in bed, fawning all over the bastard.’

  ‘Leslie, dear, I will not have you use that word about your step-father, or one who I hope will become your step-father in due course.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Larry. ‘I’ve always said women were half-witted, but not as stupid as that. Marrying Antoine would get you the Nobel Prize for idiocy.’

  ‘Larry, dear, there’s no need to be rude. Antoine has many fine qualities. And anyway, I’m the one who’s going to marry him, not you.’

  ‘But you can’t marry him, he’s horrible,’ Margo wailed, on the verge of tears.

  ‘Well, not at once,’ said Mother. ‘He and I have talked it over. We both agree that too many people rush into marriage and then regret a hasty decision.’

  ‘You’d certainly regret this one,’ said Larry.

  ‘Yes, well, as I say, we’ve talked it over and we’ve decided that what would be best is for us to live together in Athens for a while and get to know each other.’

  ‘Live with him in Athens? You mean live in sin?’ asked Margo, horrified. ‘Mother, you can’t. It would be bigamy.’

  ‘Well, it wouldn’t be exactly sin,’ Mother explained, ‘not if we’re planning to get married.’

  ‘I must say that’s the most novel excuse for sin I’ve ever heard,’ said Larry.

  ‘Mother, you can’t do this,’ said Leslie. ‘The man’s awful You might think of us for a change.’

  ‘Yes, Mother, think what people will say,’ said Margo. ‘It’ll be too embarrassing when people ask where you are to say you’re living in sin in Athens with that �
�� that — that —’

  ‘Bastard,’ supplied Leslie.

  ‘And a boring one,’ added Larry.

  ‘Now, look here,’ Mother said. ‘If you go on like this you’ll get me seriously annoyed. All you children could provide by way of a husband for me was a drunken old fool with a name as long as the alphabet. Now I have chosen Antoine and there’s no more to be said. He has all the qualities I admire most in a man.’

  ‘You mean like tediousness, sloth, vanity?’ asked Larry.

  ‘Greasy hair?’ asked Margo.

  ‘A snore like bloody thunder?’ asked Leslie.

  I did not make my contribution for I felt Mother would not be swayed by my comment that anyone who called me ‘baby’ deserved to be strangled at birth.

  ‘It will of course mean a changed way of life for all of us,’ Mother explained, pouring herself another cup of tea. ‘Gerry as the youngest will come to live with me and Antoine so that he can benefit from Antoine’s example. Leslie, you and Margo are quite old enough to stand on your own feet, so I suggest you both go back to England and find yourselves congenial jobs.’

  ‘Mother! You can’t mean it!’ Margo gasped.

  ‘There’s no such thing as a congenial job,’ said Leslie, aghast.

  ‘And what about me?’ Larry asked. ‘What future have you and that barbaric fool planned out for me?’

  ‘Oh, that’s the good thing,’ Mother said, triumphantly. ‘Antoine’s got a friend in Lithuania who owns a newspaper. Apparently it’s got a circulation of several hundred. Antoine is sure he can get you a job as a — a — I think it’s called a composer. Anyway, it’s one of those people who put all those little bits of type together and then it makes a printed page.’

  ‘Me?’ Larry exploded. ‘You want me to become a bloody compositor?’

  ‘Language, dear,’ said Mother, automatically. ‘I don’t see what’s wrong with that. As Antoine knew you wanted to be a writer he thought it would be the perfect job for you. After all, everyone has to start at the bottom.’

  ‘I’d like to start at his bottom and kick it straight up through his bloody skull,’ said Leslie, infuriated. ‘What does he know about congenial jobs?’