The Corfu Trilogy (the corfu trilogy)

by Gerald Durrell

  ‘You see,’ said Mother accusingly to Larry, ‘this is what comes of letting people you don’t know send people you don’t know to stay. The man’s insufferable!’

  ‘Well… he’s not so bad,’ said Larry feebly trying to argue against an attitude that he agreed with. ‘I thought some of his comments were valid.’

  ‘Which?’ asked Mother ominously.

  ‘Yes, which?’ asked Margo, quivering.

  ‘Well,’ said Larry vaguely, ‘I thought that soufflé was a bit on the rich side, and Margo is beginning to look a bit circular.’

  ‘Beast!’ said Margo, and burst into tears.

  ‘Now, that’s quite enough, Larry,’ said Mother. ‘How we’re going to endure this… this… scented lounge-lizard of yours for another week I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got to put up with him too, don’t forget,’ said Larry, irritated.

  ‘Well, he’s your friend… I mean, your friend’s friend… I mean, well, whatever he is, he’s yours,’ said Mother, ‘and it’s up to you to keep him out of the way as much as possible.’

  ‘Or I’ll pepper his arse for him,’ said Leslie, ‘the smelly little…’

  ‘Leslie,’ said Mother, ‘that’s quite enough.’

  ‘Well, he is,’ said Leslie doggedly.

  ‘I know he is, dear, but you shouldn’t say so,’ Mother explained.

  ‘Well, I’ll try,’ said Larry, ‘but don’t blame me if he comes down to the kitchen to give you a cookery lesson.’

  ‘I’m warning you,’ said Mother mutinously, ‘if that man sets foot in my kitchen, I shall walk out… I shall go… I shall go and…’

  ‘Be a hermit?’ suggested Larry.

  ‘No, I shall go and stay in an hotel until he’s gone,’ said Mother, uttering her favourite threat. ‘And this time I really mean it.’

  To give Larry his due, he did strive manfully with Count Rossignol for the next few days. He took him to the library and museum in town, he showed him the Kaiser’s summer palace with all its repulsive statuary, he even took him to the top of the highest point in Corfu, Mount Pantocrator, and showed him the view. The Count compared the library unfavourably with the Bibliothèque Nationale, said that the museum was not a patch on the Louvre, noted the Kaiser’s palace was inferior in size, design, and furnishings to the cottage he had for his head gardener, and finally observed that the view from Pantocrator was not to be mentioned in the same breath as any view to be seen from any high spot in France.

  ‘The man’s intolerable,’ said Larry, refreshing himself with brandy in Mother’s bedroom, where we had all repaired to escape the Count’s company. ‘He’s got an obsession with France; I can’t think why he ever left the place. He even thinks their telephone service is the best in the world! And he’s so humourless about everything, one would think he were a Swede.’

  ‘Never mind, dear,’ said Mother. ‘It’s not for long now.’

  ‘I’m not sure I shall last the course,’ said Larry. ‘So far about the only thing he hasn’t claimed for France is God.’

  ‘Ah, but they probably believe in him better in France,’ Leslie pointed out.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could do something really nasty to him?’ said Margo wistfully. ‘Something really horrible.’

  ‘No, Margo,’ said Mother firmly, ‘we’ve never done anything nasty to anyone that’s stayed with us – I mean, except as a joke or by accident – and we’re not going to start. We’ll just have to put up with him; after all, it’s only for a few more days. It’ll soon pass.’

  ‘Dear God!’ said Larry suddenly. ‘I’ve just remembered. It’s the bloody christening on Monday!’

  ‘I do wish you wouldn’t swear so much,’ said Mother. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Can you imagine taking him to a christening?’ asked Larry. ‘No, he’ll just have to go off somewhere on his own.’

  ‘I don’t think we ought to let him go wandering off on his own,’ said Mother, as if she were talking about a dangerous animal. ‘I mean he might meet one of our friends.’

  We all sat and thought about the problem.

  ‘Why doesn’t Gerry take him somewhere?’ said Leslie suddenly. ‘After all, he doesn’t want to come to a boring christening.’

  ‘That’s a brainwave,’ said Mother delightedly. ‘The very thing!’

  Immediately all my instincts for self-preservation came to the fore. I said that I did want to go to the christening, I had been looking forward to it, it was the only chance I would ever have of seeing Larry being a godfather, and he might drop the baby or something and I would miss it; and anyway, the Count didn’t like snakes and tortoises and birds and things, so what could I do with him? There was silence while the family, like a jury, examined the strength of my case.

  ‘I know, take him out in your boat,’ suggested Margo brightly.

  ‘Excellent!’ said Larry, ‘I’m sure he’s got a straw hat and a striped blazer among his sartorial effects. Perhaps we can borrow a banjo.’

  ‘It’s a very good idea,’ said Mother. ‘After all, it’s only for a couple of hours, dear. You surely wouldn’t mind that.’

  I stated in no uncertain terms that I would mind it very much indeed.

  ‘I tell you what,’ said Leslie. ‘They’re having a fish drive down at the lake on Monday. If I get the chap who’s in charge to let you go, will you take the Count?’

  I wavered, for I had long wanted to see a fish drive. I knew I was going to have the Count for the afternoon so it was simply a matter of what I could get out of it.

  ‘And then we can see about that new butterfly cabinet you want,’ said Mother.

  ‘And Margo and I will give you some money for books,’ said Larry, generously anticipating Margo’s participation in the bribery.

  ‘And I’ll give you that clasp-knife you wanted,’ said Leslie.

  I agreed. If I had to put up with the Count for an afternoon I was at least being fairly compensated. That evening at dinner, Mother explained the situation and went into such detailed eulogies about the fish drives that you would have thought she had personally invented them.

  ‘Ees eating?’ asked the Count.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Mother. ‘The fish are called kefalias and they’re delicious.’

  ‘No, ees eating on ze lack?’ asked the Count. ‘Ees eating wiz sun?’

  ‘Oh… oh, I see,’ said Mother. ‘Yes, it’s very hot. Be sure to wear a hat.’

  ‘We go in ze enfant’s yacht?’ asked the Count, who liked to get things clear.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mother.

  The Count outfitted himself for the expedition in pale blue linen trousers, elegant chestnut-bright shoes, a white silk shirt with a blue and gold cravat knotted carelessly at the throat, and an elegant yachting cap. While the Bootle-Bumtrinket was ideal for my purposes, I would have been the first to admit that she had none of the refinements of an ocean-going yacht, and this the Count was quick to perceive when I led him down to the canal in the maze of old Venetian salt pans below the house, where I had the boat moored.

  ‘Zis… is yacht?’ he asked in surprise and some alarm.

  I said that indeed this was our craft, stalwart and stable, and, he would note, a flat bottom to make it easier to walk about in. Whether he understood me, I do not know; perhaps he thought the Bootle-Bumtrinket was merely the dinghy in which he was to be rowed out to the yacht, but he climbed in delicately, spread his handkerchief fastidiously over the seat, and sat down gingerly. I leaped aboard and with the aid of a pole started punting the craft down the canal which, at this point, was some twenty feet wide and two feet deep. I congratulated myself on the fact that only the day before I had decided that the Bootle-Bumtrinket was starting to smell almost as pungently as the Count, for over a period a lot of dead shrimps, seaweed, and other debris had collected under her boards. I had sunk her in some two feet of sea water and given her bilges a thorough cleaning so that she was sparkling clean and smelt beautifull
y of sun-hot tar and paint and salt water.

  The old salt pans lay along the edge of the brackish lake, forming a giant chessboard with the cross-hatching of these placid canals, some as narrow as a chair, some thirty feet wide. Most of these waterways were only a couple of feet deep but below the water lay an almost unplumbable depth of fine black silt. The Bootle-Bumtrinket, by virtue of her shape and flat bottom, could be propelled up and down these inland waterways with comparative ease, for one did not have to worry about gusts of wind or a sudden, bouncing cluster of wavelets, two things that always made her a bit alarmed. But the disadvantage of the canals was that they were fringed on each side with tall, rustling bamboo breaks which, while providing shade, shut out the wind, so that the atmosphere was still, dark, hot, and as richly odiferous as a manure heap. For a time the artificial smell of the Count vied with the scents of nature and eventually nature won.

  ‘Ees smell,’ the Count pointed out. ‘In France ze water ees hygiene.’

  I said it would not be long before we left the canal and were out on the lake, where there would be no smell.

  ‘Ees eating,’ was the Count’s next discovery, mopping his face and moustache with a scent-drenched handkerchief. ‘Ees eating much.’

  His pale face had, as a matter of fact, turned a light shade of heliotrope. I was just about to say that that problem, too, would be overcome once we reached the open lake when, to my alarm, I noticed something wrong with the Bootle-Bumtrinket. She had settled sluggishly in the brown water and hardly moved to my punting. For a moment I could not imagine what was wrong with her; we had not run aground and I knew that there were no sand banks in this canal. Then suddenly I noticed the swirl of water coiling up over the boards in the bottom of the boat. Surely, I thought, she could not have sprung a leak.

  Fascinated, I watched the water rise, to engulf the bottom of the oblivious Count’s shoes. I suddenly realized what must have happened. When I had cleaned out the bilges I had, of course, removed the bung in the Bumtrinket’s bottom to let the fresh sea water in; apparently, I had not replaced it with enough care and now the canal water was pouring into the bilges. My first thought was to pull up the boards, find the bung and replace it, but the Count was now sitting with his feet in about two inches of water and it seemed imperative to turn the Bootle-Bumtrinket towards the bank while I could still manoeuvre a trifle and get my exquisite passenger on shore. I did not mind being deposited in the canal by the Bootle-Bumtrinket – after all I was always in and out of the canals like a water rat in pursuit of water snakes, terrapins, frogs, and other small fry – but I knew that the Count would look askance at gambolling in two feet of water and an undetermined amount of mud. My efforts to turn the leaden waterlogged boat towards the bank were superhuman. Gradually, I felt the dead weight of the boat responding and her bows turning sluggishly towards the shore. Inch by inch, I eased her towards the bamboos and we were within ten feet of the bank when the Count noticed what was happening.

  ‘Mon Dieu!’ he cried shrilly, ‘ve are submerge. My shoe is submerge. Ze boat, she ave sonk.’

  I briefly stopped poling to soothe the Count. I told him that there was no danger; all he had to do was to sit still until I got him to the bank.

  ‘My shoe! Regardez my shoe!’ he cried, pointing at his now dripping and discoloured footwear with such an expression of outrage that it was all I could do not to giggle.

  A moment, I said to him, and I should have him on dry land. Indeed if he had done what I had said, this would have been the case, for I had managed to get the Bootle-Bumtrinket to within six feet of the bamboos. But the Count was too worried about the state of his shoes and this prompted him to do something very silly. In spite of my warning shout, he looked over his shoulder, saw land looming close, got to his feet and leaped onto the Bootle-Bumtrinket’s minute foredeck. His intention was to leap from there to safety when I had manoeuvred the boat a little closer, but he had not reckoned with the Bootle-Bumtrinket’s temperament. A placid boat, she had nevertheless a few quirks, and one thing she did not like was anyone standing on her foredeck; she simply gave an odd sort of bucking twist, rather like a trained horse in a cowboy film, and slid you over her shoulder. She did this to the Count now.

  He fell into the water with a yell, spread-eagled like an ungainly frog, and his proud yachting cap floated towards the bamboo roots while he thrashed about in a porridge of water and mud. I was filled with a mixture of alarm and delight; I was delighted that the Count had fallen in – though I knew my family would never believe that I had not engineered it – but I was alarmed at the way he was thrashing about. To try to stand up is an instinctive reaction when finding one is in shallow water, but in this case the effort only made one sink deeper into the glutinous mud. Once Larry had fallen into one of these canals while out shooting and had got himself so deeply embedded that it had required the united efforts of Margo, Leslie, and myself to extricate him. If the Count got himself wedged in the canal bottom I would not have the strength to extricate him single-handed and by the time I got help the Count might well have disappeared altogether beneath the gleaming mud. I abandoned ship and leaped into the canal to help him. I knew how to walk in mud and, anyway, only weighed a quarter of what the Count weighed so I did not sink in so far. I shouted to him to keep still until I got to him.

  ‘Merde!’ said the Count, proving that he was at least keeping his mouth above water.

  He tried to get up once but, at the terrible, gobbling clutch of the mud, uttered a despairing cry like a bereaved seagull and lay still. Indeed, he was so frightened of the mud that when I reached him and tried to pull him shorewards he screamed and shouted and accused me of trying to push him in deeper. He was so absurdly childlike that I had a fit of the giggles and this of course only made him worse. He had relapsed into French, which he was speaking with the rapidity of a machine gun so, with my tenuous command of the language, I was unable to understand him. Eventually, I got my unmannerly laughter under control, once more seized him under the armpits and started to drag him shorewards. Then it suddenly occurred to me how ludicrous our predicament would seem to an onlooker, a twelve-year-old boy trying to rescue a six-foot man, and I was overcome again and sat down in the mud and laughed till I cried.

  ‘Vy you laughing? Vy you laughing?’ screamed the Count, trying to look over his shoulder at me. ‘You no laughing, you pulling, vite, vite!’

  Eventually, swallowing great hiccups of laughter, I started to pull at the Count again and eventually got him fairly close to the shore. Then I left him and climbed out onto the bank. This provoked another bout of hysteria.

  ‘No going avay, no going avay!’ he yelled, panic-stricken. ‘I am sonk. No going avay!’

  I ignored him. Choosing seven of the tallest bamboos in the vicinity, I bent them over one by one until their stems splintered but did not snap; then I twisted them round until they reached the Count and formed a sort of green bridge between him and the shore. Acting on my instructions, he turned on his stomach and pulled himself along until at last he reached dry land. When he eventually got shakily to his feet he looked as though the lower half of his body had been encased in melting chocolate. Knowing that this glutinous mud could dry hard in record time, I offered to scrape some of it off him with a piece of bamboo. He gave me a murderous look.

  ‘Espèce de con!’ he said vehemently.

  My shaky knowledge of the Count’s language did not allow me to translate this but the enthusiasm with which it was uttered led me to suppose that it was worth retaining in my memory. We started to walk home, the Count simmering vitriolically. As I had anticipated, the mud on his legs dried at almost magical speed and within a short time he looked as though he were wearing a pair of trousers made out of a pale brown jigsaw puzzle. From the back, he reminded me so much of the armour-clad rear of an Indian rhinoceros that I almost got the giggles again.

  It was unfortunate, perhaps, that the Count and I should have arrived at the front door of the villa jus
t as the huge Dodge driven by our scowling, barrel-shaped self-appointed guardian angel, Spiro Hakiopoulos, drew up with the family, flushed with wine, in the back of it. The car came to a halt and the family stared at the Count with disbelieving eyes. It was Spiro who recovered first.

  ‘Gollys, Mrs Durrells,’ he said, twisting his massive head round and beaming at Mother, ‘Master Gerrys fixes the bastards.’

  This was obviously the sentiment of the whole family but Mother threw herself into the breach.

  ‘My goodness, Count,’ she said in well-simulated tones of horror, ‘what have you been doing with my son?’

  The Count was so overcome with the audacity of this remark that he could only look at Mother open-mouthed.

  ‘Gerry dear,’ Mother went on, ‘go and change out of those wet things before you catch cold, there’s a good boy.’

  ‘Good boy!’ repeated the Count, shrilly and unbelievingly. ‘C’est un assassin! C’est une espèce de…’

  ‘Now, now, my dear fellow,’ said Larry, throwing his arm round the Count’s muddy shoulders, ‘I’m sure it’s been a mistake. Come and have a brandy and change your things. Yes, yes, rest assured that my brother will smart for this. Of course he will be punished.’

  Larry led the vociferous Count into the house and the rest of the family converged on me.

  ‘What did you do to him?’ asked Mother.

  I said I had not done anything; the Count and the Count alone was responsible for his condition.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ said Margo. ‘You always say that.’

  I protested that had I been responsible I would be proud to confess. The family were impressed by the logic of this.

  ‘It doesn’t matter a damn if Gerry did it or not,’ said Leslie. ‘It’s the end result that counts.’

  ‘Well, go and get changed, dear,’ said Mother, ‘and then come to my room and tell us all about how you did it.’

  But the affair of the Bootle-Bumtrinket did not have the effect that everyone hoped for; the Count stayed on grimly, as if to punish us all, and was twice as offensive as before. However, I had ceased feeling vindictive towards the Count; whenever I thought of him thrashing about in the canal I was overcome with helpless laughter; which was worth any amount of insults. Furthermore, the Count had unwittingly added a fine new phrase to my French vocabularly. I tried it out one day when I made a mistake in my French composition and I found it tripped well off the tongue. The effect on my tutor, Mr Kralefsky, was, however, very different. He had been pacing up and down the room, hands behind him, looking like a humpbacked gnome in a trance. At my expression, he came to a sudden stop, wide-eyed, looking like a gnome who had just had an electric shock from a toadstool.