Marrying Off Mother: And Other Stories

by Gerald Durrell

  James looked at his watch.

  ‘Must go now, my dear fellow,’ he shouted. ‘Apologies, but this is an important meeting. You know your room, don’t you? Well, if we make too much row just bang on the floor. I doubt if you’ll hear us, though, with all this racket going on.’

  He rose, apparently perfectly sober, as urbane as any host I had ever stayed with.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ he said, ‘but it’s important, you know, to get things clear.’

  ‘I quite understand,’ I said.

  So as he made his way to the weird room with its multitude of broken mirrors, I made my way upstairs to my room with the gigantic Guyanese hammock hanging down its length. Folded over it was a vicuna wool blanket, soft and light as a spider’s web, warm as a bonfire. I undressed, wrapped myself in it and made my way out cautiously to the head of the stairs and squatted down. The thunder made another attempt to disembowel the house, savaging it with lightning, and then all was silent for a brief while and I heard James Menton’s voice:

  ‘But you must realize I was a public servant, a servant of the crown. I didn’t condemn you, Jenkins, it was the judge and jury . . . why don’t you go and plague them . . . because I killed you? But don’t you see, I was paid to kill you — you were guilty . . . Oh, yes you were, dammit, her body in the boot of your car — knife all covered with your fingerprints — her blood on your clothes . . . circumstantial evidence be damned. No, I didn’t tell anyone you shat yourself just before I dropped you. You don’t say . . .’

  There was another roar of thunder and it lasted so long I missed the rest of the exchange. Then silence returned and I heard the clink of the bottle on the glass. There was no sound of other voices, only that of Menton’s.

  ‘You know perfectly well, Yu Ling, it was an accident — I watched you through the Judas window for half an hour, but you sat all hunched up. I couldn’t see your neck was that slender. Professional hangmen don’t make a habit of tearing off the head, you know. I know it was a disgrace for you . . .’

  More thunder and a splintering crash as lightning hit one of the drain-pipes and it broke loose.

  I sat at the head of the stairs for perhaps two hours listening to Menton arguing with the men he had hanged while thunder shook the house, until it felt as if we were like dice in a cup. At one point I crept downstairs and helped myself to a whisky and retreated to the head of the stairs again to listen to Menton.

  ‘All right! All right!’ he shouted at last. ‘You can have ten minutes to, as you put it, consider your verdict. I will take ten minutes to give myself a drink and consider my verdict.’

  I rose and moved back from the head of the stairs as he came out rapidly, closed the doors and then loped off down the corridor to the veranda. I wondered whether I should join him on the pretext of insomnia, but I heard him pour himself a drink and start pacing up and down, muttering to himself, and I decided against it. For the moment the storm seemed to have retreated; there was only the steady thrash of rain like fine gravel being flung at the fabric of the house, and the odd flicker of golden lightning. Suddenly, he came swiftly back down the hall, holding in one hand the inevitable tumbler of whisky. He burst through the double doors in a blaze of light and then shut them.

  ‘Well, gentlemen, if I may call you that, have you considered your verdict?’

  I leant forward to listen, and the storm that had been lying in wait leapt on the house with a clap of thunder that surpassed all the others. As it died, I heard Menton’s voice.

  ‘So that’s your verdict is it? Well, I’ll tell you what I think of you, you murderous lot. You deserved everything you got. You’ve got the brains of mentally retarded children. You all deserved to die and I’m damn glad to have had the job of topping you all. I’m proud, d’you hear, proud to have cleared the earth of such scum . . .’

  Another clap of thunder drowned his tirade.

  ‘Don’t antagonize them, you idiot,’ I found myself saying, as if his imaginary jury was flesh and blood. The thunder rumbled on and I heard no more of Menton’s voice. Presently, I heard what I took to be a snore and, judging that the whisky had at last done its work and James was now asleep at the table, I went back to my hammock, but I confess I slept fitfully.

  When I awoke, I went straight to James’s room where his huge hammock hung like a long white pod bereft of its seeds. I went downstairs and knocked on the big double doors in the dark hall.

  ‘James,’ I called, ‘it’s me, Gerry. Can I come in?’ There was no reply. I tried the handle and the door was locked. I leant against it and it seemed flimsy enough. Stepping back I drove my heel at the keyhole. At the second kick the doors flew open and I was momentarily blinded by the blaze from the chandelier which had been left on. I went into the room and looked down its length. Everything was reflected in the huge mirror on the end wall, the expanse of polished wood with the place cards, the chairs and then at the end, where the thirteenth chair should have been, hung the body of James Menton from the beam above. He was not a pretty sight. The big chair he must have occupied lay on its side by the table. It was clear that he had hoisted the chair up on to the table (or somebody had?), fixed the rope on the beam and then kicked the chair away (or had somebody pulled it?). He was very obviously dead, but I felt I ought to cut him down.

  I went to the kitchen quarters and found a sharp knife. With an effort I hoisted the great chair back on to the table. At close quarters, James’s mortal remains were even less attractive than from a distance for, apart from the overpowering stench of excreta, his nose had bled and his beard and moustache were caked in icicles of dried blood. I had to hold him close to me to support his weight as I cut the rope, with the result that we were face to face and the rancid smell of whisky almost made me vomit. As I cut through the rope and took his weight, the chair, on the smooth surface of the table, slid like a stone on ice, and it, the corpse and I crashed to the ground. Unfortunately, I landed on top of James and my weight made him void more excrement with a hideous bubbling sound and, at the same time, the slight loosening of the noose round the neck released an expulsion of fetid breath into my face. I scrambled to my feet, went out into the kitchen and was violently sick.

  I decided the best thing to do was to phone Doctor Larkin. In spite of the fact that it was only just dawn, he answered at the second ring.

  ‘Si, Doctorio Larkin,’ he said, ‘quien habla?’

  ‘It’s me, Gerry Durrell,’ I said.

  ‘What’s James been up to?’ he asked.

  ‘Very bad hallucinations last night, and I found him hanged this morning.’

  ‘You mean he hanged himself?’ said Larkin sharply.

  ‘Er — yes, I suppose so. I cut him down. No doubt he’s dead. The knot was under the right ear so he choked to death, rather than having a clean drop.’

  ‘Wrong ear, eh? So much for his tales about being a hangman.’

  ‘No, he was very drunk, and he was left-handed,’ I explained, but in the back of my mind I kept thinking — ‘I wonder who arranged to have him die in this most painful way?’

  ‘Look,’ said Larkin, ‘you get out of there. Pack your things and get back on the Dolores. She’s going to sail in an hour, so I hear. But don’t hang about or they’ll arrest you.’

  ‘Arrest me for what, for God’s sake?’

  ‘In Paraguay, if you’re a gringo, they’ll arrest you for any reason at all. D’you want to spend the next year in prison while a bunch of dago lawyers argue it out?’

  ‘No,’ I said firmly.

  ‘Well, collect your things and get on that ship. I’ll be round immediately and I’ll report and say I cut him down. All right?’

  ‘All right,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, and Durrell, I suppose there’s none of that Scotch left, is there?’

  ‘Miraculously enough, two bottles.’

  ‘Put them on the veranda table for me, if you would.’

  ‘Is that your fee?’ I enquired.

  ‘No, it’s for
the Chief of Police. Goodbye.’ He slammed down the receiver.

  I packed my few things hastily and went downstairs and to my astonishment found a smiling Indian waiting.

  ‘Capitano . . . ship . . . goodbye,’ he said.

  I handed him my bundle and gestured him to go ahead. There was just one thing I had to check on; something that had caught my eye, but I had not registered properly. I went back into the big room where poor James’s bloated and disfigured body lay and I looked at the table. I realized with a faint shiver that I had not been mistaken. All of the twelve chairs with the name cards had been swivelled round to face the top end of the table, as if the people who were in them had half turned their chairs to get a better view. A better view of what? An execution?

  Miss Booth-Wycherly’s

  Clothes

  I only came to know about Miss Booth-Wycherly’s clothes — and the unsettling effect they had on such a remarkable cross-section of humanity, ranging from the villagers of San Sebastian, to the Little Sisters of Innocence and the croupiers of Monte Carlo — because I happened to know Miss Booth-Wycherly.

  When I go down to my small house in the South of France each year to get some writing done, I always make a detour and spend a few days in Monte Carlo with two friends of mine, Jean and Melanie Schultz. Jean is a retired Swiss banker with a bandit moustache and a roguish blue eye, a man of considerable means, and Melanie is a gorgeous American girl, one of those slender girls with long dark hair and a profile that makes young men gaze with sagging jaws. I loved them both very much and it was only because of this that, when they expressed a desire to go to the Casino one night while I was staying with them, I reluctantly agreed.

  I am no gambling man. I learnt at a very early age that you have to possess a certain kind of karma to gamble successfully. If I back a horse or a dog they instantly develop foot-and-mouth disease or rabies. If I back black on the roulette table red comes up with a positively Maoist malevolence. I had learnt through bitter experience that if I bet someone that the sky was blue it would instantly turn black with storm clouds. I therefore came to the conclusion that I was not designed by Nature to gamble and so i never did. My friends, however, had no such inhibitions and settled themselves down happily to bleed their bank accounts.

  Left to myself, I wandered about watching the people who played, a wonderful assortment of individuals ranging from a tiny hunchback who looked like a gypsy to a svelte blonde who had walked straight out of the pages of Vogue, from a Negro in tails with a face as impassive as an Easter Island statue to an enormously fat man whose purple face and stertorous breathing heralded the fact that he would, in all probability, die at the table. But even amongst this extraordinary crowd Miss Booth-Wycherly stood out and caught my attention.

  She was a small, fragile woman whose skin, at the throat, hung in folds and pleats like a curtain. Her face was a network of fine wrinkles like a relief map of the mouth of some great river. Her nose was prominent and arched like an eagle’s beak. Her eyes were blue, a muzzy, watery blue, like faded periwinkles, and in the left one she wore a monocle tethered by a long piece of watered ribbon. Her clothes were incredible. They had obviously been designed and constructed somewhere in the very early nineteen-twenties. Her full-length dress was in crimson velvet with gold filigree buttons and long sleeves. She wore a large crimson velvet hat which was trimmed with yellow ostrich feathers and the fur of some animal that looked as though it was as yet unknown to science. This same fur was around her collar and the edges of her sleeves and the hem of her dress. Round her tortoise neck hung several long loops of multi-coloured beads and to that part of her dress that presumably concealed her bosom was pinned a large yellow satin rose. Her hands, which looked as if made out of the dead and brittle twigs of some exotic tree, were beautifully shaped and she used them gracefully as she manoeuvred her collection of chips. There was a faint touch of eye-shadow, of rouge on the cheekbones, and lipstick on her mouth, but not enough to turn her into an ancient clown. When she smiled at the croupiers, her false teeth were excellent and white. I judged her to be in her late seventies and was surprised to find later that she was eighty-two. She was, to judge by her atrocious French accent, English.

  She had before her on the table a small notebook in which she carefully wrote down the numbers that came up. She had that dreaded thing called ‘a system’. Most compulsive gamblers (compulsive gambling is a disease, like alcoholism) have a system to which they cling with blind faith. The fact that the system does not work is neither here nor there, it gives them comfort like a rabbit’s foot and is just about as much use. They will lose nineteen out of twenty bets but the one win proves their system infallible. The compulsive gamblers, as opposed to the ordinary ones, could be picked out with ease. Fanatically they watched the tiny ball making its deadly machine-gun rattle as it spun round the wheel, and their faces became intense, predatory, as the ball slowed and clicked and finally sank to rest in a numbered hole. They would let out their breath in a long sigh, like someone at the conclusion of a beautiful piece of music, and if they had won turn triumphant, sparkling eyes and glittering smiles on the other gamblers and the impassive croupiers. If they had lost they busied themselves in writing down the numbers to improve their systems, their lips moving as if in silent prayer.

  Miss Booth-Wycherly was a compulsive gambler par excellence. She wrote down copious notes, she arranged her chips in rows like guardsmen ready to attack, and tapped them constantly with her well-manicured nails. She placed her bet with the air of one who knows she’s going to win, and then as the ball set off on its circular, wall-of-death travels, she screwed her monocle ever tighter into her eye and glared at the wheel as if she could hypnotize the ball into the right number. But it was not her evening and, as I watched, her small battalion of chips, her army of guardsmen, were whittled away by bad luck until at last she had none left. I wondered whether it was the lighting or my imagination that made me think that she had grown whiter and whiter with the loss of each chip, so that the rouge now stood out on her cheekbones making her look as if she had a fever.

  She rose from the table with elegance and bowed to the croupier who expressionlessly bowed back. Then she made her way slowly out of the room. I followed her. When she came to the great entrance hall of marble columns she swayed suddenly and put out a hand to cling to one of them. I was luckily close to her and I went forward quickly and took her arm. The flesh, what there was of it, was soft and flabby and I could feel the bone of her arm through it seeming as brittle as a stick of charcoal. A strange smell emanated from her that puzzled me; it was not perfume, but something familiar. I couldn’t put a name to it.

  Too kind,’ she murmured, swaying. Too kind. I fear I must have tripped. So stupid of me.’

  ‘Sit down a moment,’ I said, guiding her to an ornate sofa that stood nearby. She tottered to it and then collapsed like a carelessly dropped puppet. She closed her eyes and then leaned back. The rouge and lipstick and eye-shadow now stood out like neon signs against the milk-white of her wrinkled face. Her monocle had fallen from her eye and lay on her heaving chest. I felt her pulse which, though faint, was steady. I caught a passing waiter.

  ‘Get a brandy for madame, quickly,’ I said.

  The waiter took one look at the wrinkled wreckage in its crimson velvet gown and hat and sped away. He returned commendably quickly with the goblet containing a liberal measure of brandy.

  ‘Drink some of this,’ I said, sitting next to the old lady. ‘It will do you good.’

  She opened her eyes, groped for her monocle and then, after one or two abortive efforts, managed to wedge it into her eye.

  She surveyed the brandy glass and then looked at me.

  ‘Young man,’ she said, drawing herself up indignantly, ‘I never drink.’

  Again, I got a whiff of the strange smell from her. It was on her breath and suddenly I realized what it was. Methylated spirits. The old lady was a lush as well as a gambler.

  ‘Norma
lly, madame, I would not insult you by offering you a strong drink,’ I said, soothingly, ‘but you seemed a trifle faint — the heat no doubt — and I felt that this, taken purely as a medicine, might do you good.’

  She peered at me through her monocle, which had the ludicrous effect of making one eye appear larger than the other, then she examined the goblet of brandy.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘if it’s medicinal of course that’s different. Daddy always used to say that a tot of brandy was better than all Harley Street.’

  ‘I agree,’ I said, warmly.

  She took the glass from my hand and gulped it down, then coughed and produced a tiny scrap of lace and wiped her mouth with it.

  ‘Warming,’ she said, closing her eyes and leaning back. ‘Most warming. Daddy was right.’

  I let her sit quietly for a moment so that the brandy took hold. Presently she opened her eyes.

  ‘Young man,’ she said, her speech faintly slurred, ‘you are absolutely right. It has made me feel worlds better.’

  ‘Will you have another?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I don’t know that I should,’ she said, judiciously, ‘but perhaps a soupgon.’

  I signalled the waiter and he brought another brandy. It disappeared with the miraculous suddenness of the first.

  ‘Madame,’ I said, ‘since you are feeling somewhat fragile, may I have your permission to see you safely home?’

  I was dying to know where this extraordinary relic lived during the daytime.

  She opened her eyes and glared at me.

  ‘Do I know you?’ she enquired.

  ‘Alas, no,’ I said.

  ‘Then it’s a most improper suggestion,’ she said. ‘Most improper!’

  ‘But not if I introduce myself,’ I said, and proceeded to do so.

  She inclined her head regally and held out her fragile hand.

  ‘I am Suzanna Booth-Wycherly,’ she said, in the manner of one announcing that she was Cleopatra.