He settled his accordion more comfortably against his broad chest, arranged his sausage-like fingers carefully on the keys, closed his eyes, and began to play. It was a very complicated and extraordinary tune. Sven was wearing such an expression of rapture upon his ugly face that I was dying to laugh and was having to bite the insides of my cheeks to prevent it. Mother sat there with a face of frozen politeness like a world-famous conductor being forced to listen to somebody giving a recital on a penny whistle. Eventually the tune came to a harsh, discordant end. Sven heaved a sigh of pure delight, opened his eyes, and smiled at Mother.
‘Bach is so beautiful,’ he said.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Mother with well-simulated enthusiasm.
‘I’m glad you like it,’ said Sven. ‘I’ll play you some more.’
So for the next hour Mother and I sat there, trapped, while Sven played piece after piece. Every time Mother made some move to seek an escape, Sven would hold up one of his huge hands, as though arresting a line of imaginary traffic, and say, ‘Just one more,’ archly, and Mother, with a tremulous smile, would sit back in her chair.
It was with considerable relief that we greeted the rest of the family when they arrived back from town. Larry and Sven danced round each other, roaring like a couple of bulls and exchanging passionate embraces, and then Larry dragged Sven off to his room and they were closeted there for hours, the sound of gales of laughter occasionally drifting down to us.
‘What’s he like?’ asked Margo.
‘Well, I don’t really know, dear,’ said Mother. ‘He’s been playing to us ever since he arrived.’
‘Playing?’ said Leslie. ‘Playing what?’
‘His barrel organ, or whatever you call it,’ said Mother.
‘My God,’ said Leslie. ‘I can’t stand those things. I hope he isn’t going to play it all over the house.’
‘No, no, dear. I’m sure he won’t,’ said Mother hastily, but her tone lacked conviction.
Just at that moment Larry appeared on the veranda again.
‘Where’s Sven’s accordion?’ he asked. ‘He wants to play me something.’
‘Oh, God,’ said Leslie. ‘There you are. I told you.’
‘I hope he isn’t going to play that accordion all the time, dear,’ said Mother. ‘We’ve already had an hour of it and it’s given me a splitting headache.’
‘Of course he won’t play it all the time,’ said Larry irritably, picking up the accordion. ‘He just wants to play me one tune. What was he playing to you, anyway?’
‘The most weird music,’ said Mother. ‘By some man – you know the one – something to do with trees.’
The rest of the day was, to say the least, harrying. Sven’s repertoire was apparently inexhaustible and when, during dinner, he insisted on giving us an impression of meal-time in a Scottish fortress by marching round and round the table playing one of the more untuneful Scottish reels, I could see the defences of the family crumbling. Even Larry was beginning to look a little pensive. Roger, who was uninhibited and straightforward in his dealings with human beings, summed up his opinion of Sven’s performance by throwing back his head and howling dismally, a thing he only did normally when he heard the national anthem.
But by the time Sven had been with us three days, we had become more or less inured to his accordion, and Sven himself charmed us all. He exuded a sort of innocent goodness, so that whatever he did one could not be annoyed with him, any more than you can be annoyed with a baby for wetting its nappy. He quickly endeared himself to Mother, for, she discovered, he was an ardent cook himself and carried round an enormous leather-bound notebook in which he jotted down recipes. He and Mother spent hours in the kitchen, teaching each other how to cook their favourite dishes, and the results were meals of such bulk and splendour that all of us began to feel liverish and out of sorts.
It was about a week after his arrival that Sven wandered one morning into the room I proudly called my study. In that massive villa we had such a superfluity of rooms that I had succeeded in getting Mother to give me a special room of my own in which I could keep all my creatures.
My menagerie at this time was pretty extensive. There was Ulysses, the scops owl, who spent all day sitting on the pelmet above the window, imitating a decaying olive stump, and occasionally, with a look of great disdain, regurgitating a pellet onto the newspaper spread below him. The dog contingent had been increased to three by a couple of young mongrels who had been given to me for my birthday by a peasant family and who, because of their completely undisciplined behaviour, had been christened Widdle and Puke. There were rows and rows of jam jars, some containing specimens in methylated spirits, others containing microscopic life. And then there were six aquariums that housed a variety of newts, frogs, snakes, and toads. Piles of glass-topped boxes contained my collections of butterflies, beetles, and dragon-flies. Sven, to my astonishment, displayed a deep and almost reverent interest in my collection. Delighted to have somebody displaying enthusiasm for my cherished menagerie, I took him on a carefully conducted tour and showed him everything, even, after swearing him to secrecy, my family of tiny, chocolate-coloured scorpions that I had smuggled into the house unbeknownst to the family. One of the things that impressed Sven most was the underwater bell of the spider, and he stood quite silently in front of it, his great blue eyes fixed on it intensely, watching the spider as she caught her food and carried it up into the little dome. Seven displayed such enthusiasm that I suggested to him, rather tentatively, that he might like to spend a little time in the olive groves with me, so that I could show him some of these creatures in their natural haunts.
‘But how kind of you,’ he said, his great, ugly face lighting up delightedly. ‘Are you sure I won’t be interfering?’
No, I assured him he would not be interfering.
‘Then I would be delighted,’ said Sven. ‘Absolutely delighted.’
So, for the rest of his stay, we would disappear from the villa after breakfast and spend a couple of hours in the olive groves.
On Sven’s last day – he was leaving on the evening boat – we held a little farewell lunch party for him and invited Theodore. Delighted at having a new audience, Sven immediately gave Theodore a half-hour recital of Bach on his accordion.
‘Um,’ said Theodore, when Sven had finished, ‘do you, you know, er… know any other tunes?’
‘Just name it, Doctor,’ said Sven, spreading out his hands expansively. ‘I will play it for you.’
Theodore rocked thoughtfully for a moment on his toes.
‘You don’t by any chance, I suppose, er… happen to know a song called “There Is a Tavern in the Town”?’ he inquired shyly.
‘Of course!’ said Sven and immediately crashed into the opening bars of the song.
Theodore sang vigorously, his beard bristling, his eyes bright, and when he had come to the end, Sven, without pause, switched into ‘Clementine.’ Emboldened by Theodore’s Philistine attitude towards Bach, Mother asked Sven whether he could play ‘If I Were a Blackbird’ and ‘The Spinning Wheel Song,’ which he promptly executed in a masterly fashion.
Then the cab arrived to take him down to the docks, and he embraced each one of us fondly, his eyes full of tears. He climbed into the back of the cab with his Gladstone bag beside him and his precious accordion on his lap, and he waved to us extravagantly as the cab disappeared down the drive.
‘Such a manly man,’ said Mother with satisfaction, as we went inside. ‘Quite one of the old school.’
‘You should have told him that,’ said Larry, stretching himself out on the sofa and picking up his book. ‘There’s nothing homo’s like better than to be told they are virile and manly.’
‘Whatever do you mean?’ asked Mother, putting on her spectacles and glaring at Larry suspiciously.
Larry lowered his book and looked at her, puzzled.
‘Homosexuals like to be told they are virile and manly,’ he said at length, patiently, and with the air of one explaining a simpl
e problem to a backward child.
Mother continued to glare at him, trying to assess whether or not it was one of Larry’s elaborate leg-pulls.
‘You are not trying to tell me,’ she said at last, ‘that that man is a – is a – is one of those?’
‘Dear God, Mother, of course he is,’ said Larry, irritably. ‘He’s a rampaging old queer –the only reason he’s gone rushing back to Athens is because he’s living with a ravishing seventeen-year-old Cypriot boy and he doesn’t trust him.’
‘Do you mean to say,’ asked Margo, her eyes wide, ‘that they get jealous of each other?’
‘Of course they do,’ said Larry, and dismissing the subject, he returned to his book.
‘How extraordinary,’ said Margo. ‘Did you hear that, Mother? They actually get jealous –’
‘Margo!’ said Mother quellingly. ‘We won’t go into that. What I want to know, Larry, is why you invited him here if you knew he was, er, that way inclined?’
‘Why not?’ Larry inquired.
‘Well, you might at least have thought of Gerry,’ said Mother, bristling.
‘Gerry?’ asked Larry in surprise. ‘Gerry? What’s he got to do with it?’
‘What’s he got to do with it? Really, Larry, you do make me cross. That man could have been a bad influence on the boy if he had had much to do with him.’
Larry sat back on the sofa and looked at Mother. He gave a small exasperated sigh and put his book down.
‘For the last three mornings,’ he said, ‘Gerry’s been giving Sven natural history lessons in the olive groves. It doesn’t appear to have done either of them irretrievable harm.’
‘What?’ squeaked Mother. ‘What?’
I felt it was time to intervene. After all, I liked Sven. I explained how, early in his stay, he had wandered into my room and had become immediately absorbed and fascinated by my collection of creatures. Feeling that one convert was worth half a dozen saints, I had offered to take him into the olive groves and show him all my favourite haunts. So every morning we would set off into the olives and Sven would spend hours lying on his stomach peering at the busy lines of ants carrying their grass seeds or watching the bulbous-bodied female mantis laying her frothy egg case on a stone, or peering down the burrows of trap-door spiders, murmuring, ‘Wonderful! Wonderful!’ to himself, in such an ecstatic tone of voice that it warmed my heart.
‘Well, dear,’ said Mother, ‘I think, in future, if you want to take one of Larry’s friends for walks you should tell me first.’
5
Cuttlefish and Crabs
Each morning when I awoke the bedroom would be tiger-striped by the sun peering through the shutters. As usual, I would find that the dogs had managed to crawl onto the bed without my realizing it and would now be occupying more than their fair share, sleeping deeply and peacefully. Ulysses would be sitting by the window staring at the bars of golden sunlight, his eyes slit into malevolent disapproval. Outside, one could hear the hoarse, jeering crow of a cockerel and the soft murmuring of the hens (a sound soothing as bubbling porridge) as they fed under the orange and lemon trees, the distant clonk of goat bells, sharp chittering of sparrows in the eaves, and the sudden outburst of wheezing, imploring cries that denoted one of the parent swallows had brought a mouthful of food to their brood in the nest beneath my window. I would throw back the sheet and turf the dogs out onto the floor, where they would shake and stretch and yawn, their pink tongues curled like exotic leaves, and then I would go over to the window and throw back the shutters. Leaning out over the sill, the morning sun warm on my naked body, I would scratch thoughtfully at the little pink seals the dogs’ fleas had left on my skin, while I got my eyes adjusted to the light. Then I would peer down over the silver olive tops to the beach and the blue sea which lay half a mile away. It was on this beach that, periodically, the fishermen would pull in their nets, and when they did so this was always a special occasion for me, since the net dragged to shore from the depths of the blue bay would contain a host of fascinating sea life which was otherwise beyond my reach.
If I saw the little fishing boats bobbing on the water I would get dressed hurriedly, and taking my collecting gear I would run through the olive trees down to the road and along it until I reached the beach. I knew most of the fishermen by name, but there was one who was my special friend, a tall, powerful young man with a mop of auburn hair. Inevitably, he was called Spiro after Spiridion, so in order to distinguish him from all the other Spiros I knew, I called him Kokino, or red. Kokino took a great delight in obtaining specimens for me, and although he was not a bit interested in the creatures himself, he got considerable pleasure from my obvious happiness.
One day I went down to the beach and the net was half-way in. The fishermen, brown as walnuts, were hauling on the dripping lines, their toes spreading wide in the sand as they pulled the massive bag of the net nearer and nearer to the shore.
‘Your health, kyrié Gerry,’ Kokino cried to me, waving a large freckled hand in greeting, his mop of hair glinting in the sun like a bonfire. ‘Today we should get some fine animals for you, for we put the net down in a new place.’
I squatted on the sand and waited patiently while the fishermen, chattering and joking, hauled away steadily. Presently the top of the net was visible in the shallow waters, and as it broke surface you could see the glitter and wink of the trapped fish inside it. Hauled out onto the sand, it seemed as though the net were alive, pulsating with the fish inside it, and there was the steady, staccato purring noise of their tails, flapping futilely against each other. The baskets were fetched and the fish were picked out of the net and cast into them. Red fish, white fish, fish with wine-coloured stripes, scorpion fish like flamboyant tapestries. Sometimes there would be an octopus or a cuttlefish leering up from inside the net with a look of alarm in its human-looking eyes. Once all the edible contents of the net had been safely stowed away in the baskets, it was my turn.
In the bottom of the net would be a great heap of stones and seaweed and it was among these that I found my trophies: once a round flat stone from which grew a perfect coralline tree, pure white. It looked like a young beech tree in winter, its branches bare of leaves and covered with a layer of snow. Sometimes there would be cushion starfish, almost as thick as a sponge-cake and almost as large, the edges not forming pointed arms as with normal starfish, but rounded scallops. These starfish would be of a pale fawn colour, with a bright pattern of scarlet blotches. Once I got two incredible crabs, whose pincers and legs when pulled in tight fitted with immaculate precision the sides of their oval shells. These crabs were white with a rusty-red pattern on the back that looked not unlike an Oriental face. It was hardly what I would call protective colouration, and I imagine they must have had few enemies to be able to move about the sea-bed wearing such a conspicuous livery.
On this particular morning I was picking over a great pile of weed, and Kokino, having stowed away the last of the fish in the baskets, came over to help me. There was the usual assortment of tiny squids, the size of a match-box, pipe-fish, spider-crabs, and a variety of tiny fish which, in spite of their small size, had been unable to escape through the mesh of the net. Suddenly Kokino gave a little grunt, half surprise and half amusement, and picked something out of a tangled skein of seaweed and held it out to me on the calloused palm of his hand. I could hardly believe my eyes, for it was a sea-horse. Browny-green, carefully jointed, looking like some weird chess-man, it lay on Kokino’s hand, its strange protruded mouth gasping and its tail coiling and uncoiling frantically. Hurriedly I snatched it from him and plunged it into a jar full of sea-water, uttering a mental prayer to St Spiridion that I was in time to save it. To my delight it righted itself, then hung suspended in the jar, the tiny fins on each side of its horse’s head fluttering themselves into a blur. Pausing only to make sure that it really was all right, I scrabbled through the rest of the weed with the fervour of a gold prospector panning a river-bed where he had found a nugget. My dil
igence was rewarded, for in a few minutes I had six sea-horses of various sizes hanging suspended in the jar. Enraptured by my good luck, I bid Kokino and the other fishermen a hasty farewell and raced back to the villa.
Here I unceremoniously foreclosed on fourteen slowworms and usurped their aquarium to house my new catches. I knew that the oxygen in the jar in which the sea-horses were imprisoned would not last for long and if I wanted to keep them alive I would have to move quickly. Carrying the aquarium, I raced down to the sea again, washed it out carefully, filled the bottom with sand and dashed back to the villa with it; then I had to run down to the sea again three times with buckets to fill it up with the required amount of water. By the time I had poured the last bucket into it, I was so hot and sweaty I began to wonder whether the sea-horses were worth it. But as soon as I tipped them into the aquarium I knew that they were. I had placed a small, twiggy, dead olive branch in the aquarium, which I had anchored to the sand, and as the sea-horses plopped out of the jar they righted themselves and then, like ponies freshly released in a field, they sped round and round the aquarium, their fins moving so fast that you could not see them and each one gave the appearance of being driven by some small internal motor. Having, as it were, galloped round their new territory, they all made for the olive branch, entwined their tails round it lovingly, and stood there gravely at attention.
The sea-horses were an instant success. They were about the only animal that I had introduced to the villa that earned the family’s unanimous approval. Even Larry used to pay furtive visits to my study in order to watch them zooming and bobbing to and fro in their tank. They took up a considerable amount of my time, for I found that the sea-water soon grew rancid, and in order to keep it clear and fresh I had to go down to the sea with buckets four or five times a day. This was an exhausting process, but I was glad that I kept it up, for otherwise I would not have witnessed a very extraordinary sight.
My Family and Other Animals Page 39