‘Well, to begin with he stank of the most frightful perfume,’ said Margo, ‘and that put me off straight away.’
‘We went in the cheapest seats, so close to the screen that I got a headache,’ said Mother, ‘and simply crammed together like sardines. It was so oppressive I couldn’t breathe. And then, to crown it all, I got a flea. It was nothing to laugh at, Larry; really I didn’t know what to do. The blessed thing got inside my corsets and I could feel it running about. I couldn’t very well scratch, it would have looked so peculiar. I had to keep pressing myself against the seat. I think he noticed, though… he kept giving me funny looks from the corner of his eye. Then in the interval he went out and came back with some of that horrible, sickly Turkish Delight, and before long we were all covered with white sugar, and I had a dreadful thirst. In the second interval he went out and came back with flowers. I ask you, dear, flowers in the middle of the cinema. That’s Margo’s bouquet, on the table.’
Mother pointed to a massive bunch of spring flowers, tied up in a tangle of coloured ribbons. She delved into her bag and produced a minute bunch of violets that looked as though they had been trodden on by an exceptionally hefty horse.
‘This,’ she said, ‘was for me.’
‘But the worst part was coming home,’ said Margo.
‘A dreadful journey!’ Mother agreed. ‘When we came out of the cinema I thought we were going to get a car, but no, he hustled us into a cab, and a very smelly one at that. Really, I think he must be mental to try and come all that way in a cab. Anyway, it took us hours and hours, because the poor horse was tired, and I was sitting there trying to be polite, dying to scratch myself, and longing for a drink. All the fool could do was to sit there grinning at Margo and singing Turkish love songs. I could have cheerfully hit him. I thought we were never going to get back. We couldn’t even get rid of him at the bottom of the hill. He insisted on coming up with us, armed with a huge stick, because he said the forests were full of serpents at this time of the year. I was so glad to see the back of him. I’m afraid you’ll just have to choose your boy friends more carefully in future, Margo. I can’t go through that sort of thing again. I was terrified he’d come right up to the door and we’d have to ask him in. I thought we’d never get away.’
‘You obviously didn’t make yourself fearful enough,’ said Larry.
For Leslie the coming of spring meant the soft pipe of wings as the turtle-doves and wood-pigeons arrived, and the sudden flash and scuttle of a hare among the myrtles. So, after visiting numerous gun shops and after much technical argument, he returned to the villa one day proudly carrying a double-barrelled shotgun. His first action was to take it to his room, strip it down, and clean it, while I stood and watched, fascinated by the gleaming barrels and stock, sniffing rapturously at the rich heavy scent of the gun oil.
‘Isn’t she a beauty?’ he crooned, more to himself than to me, his vivid blue eyes shining. ‘Isn’t she a honey?’
Tenderly he ran his hands over the silken shape of the weapon. Then he whipped it suddenly to his shoulder and followed an imaginary flock of birds across the ceiling of the room.
‘Pow!… pow!’ he intoned, jerking the gun against his shoulder. ‘A left and a right, and down they come.’
He gave the gun a final rub with the oily rag and set it carefully in the corner of the room by his bed.
‘We’ll have a try for some turtle-doves tomorrow, shall we?’ he continued, splitting open a packet and spilling the scarlet shells onto the bed. ‘They start coming over about six. That little hill across the valley is a good place.’
So at dawn he and I hurried through the hunched and misty olive groves, up the valley where the myrtles were wet and squeaky with dew, and on to the top of the little hill. We stood waist-deep among the vines, waiting for the light to strengthen and for the birds to start flighting. Suddenly the pale morning sky was flecked with dark specks, moving as swiftly as arrows, and we could hear the quick wheep of wings. Leslie waited, standing stockily with legs apart, gun-stock resting on his hip, his eyes, intense and gleaming, following the birds. Nearer and nearer they flew, until it seemed that they must fly past us and be lost in the silvery, trembling olive tops behind. At the very last moment the gun leaped smoothly to his shoulder, the beetle-shiny barrels lifted their mouths to the sky, the gun jerked as the report echoed briefly, like the crack of a great branch in a still forest. The turtle-dove, one minute so swift and intent in its flight, now fell languidly to earth, followed by a swirl of soft, cinnamon-coloured feathers. When five doves hung from his belt, limp, bloodstained, with demurely closed eyes, he lit a cigarette, pulled his hat-brim down over his eyes and cuddled the gun under his arm.
‘Come on,’ he said; ‘we’ve got enough. Let’s give the poor devils a rest.’
We returned through the sun-striped olive groves where the chaffinches were pinking like a hundred tiny coins among the leaves. Yani, the shepherd, was driving his herd of goats out to graze. His brown face, with its great sweep of nicotine-stained moustache, wrinkled into a smile; a gnarled hand appeared from the heavy folds of his sheepskin cloak and was raised in salute.
‘Chairete,’ he called in his deep voice, the beautiful Greek greeting, ‘ chairete, kyrioi… be happy.’
The goats poured among the olives, uttering stammering cries to each other, the leader’s bell clonking rhythmically. The chaffinches tinkled excitedly. A robin puffed out his chest like a tangerine among the myrtles and gave a trickle of song. The island was drenched with dew, radiant with early morning sun, full of stirring life. Be happy. How could one be anything else in such a season?
Conversation
As soon as we had settled down and started to enjoy the island, Larry, with characteristic generosity, wrote to all his friends and asked them to come out and stay. The fact that the villa was only just big enough to house the family apparently had not occurred to him.
‘I’ve asked a few people out for a week or so,’ he said casually to Mother one morning.
‘That will be nice, dear,’ said Mother unthinkingly.
‘I thought it would do us good to have some intelligent and stimulating company around. We don’t want to stagnate.’
‘I hope they’re not too highbrow, dear,’ said Mother.
‘Good Lord, Mother, of course they’re not; just extremely charming, ordinary people. I don’t know why you’ve got this phobia about people being highbrow.’
‘I don’t like the highbrow ones,’ said Mother plaintively. ‘I’m not highbrow, and I can’t talk about poetry and things. But they always seem to imagine, just because I’m your mother, that I should be able to discuss literature at great length with them. And they always come and ask me silly questions just when I’m in the middle of cooking.’
‘I don’t ask you to discuss art with them,’ said Larry testily, ‘but I think you might try and conceal your revolting taste in literature. Here I fill the house with good books and I find your bedside table simply groaning under the weight of cookery books, gardening books, and the most lurid-looking mystery stories. I can’t think where you get hold of these things.’
‘They’re very good detective stories,’ said Mother defensively. ‘I borrowed them from Theodore.’
Larry gave a short, exasperated sigh and picked up his book again.
‘You’d better let the Pension Suisse know when they’re coming,’ Mother remarked.
‘What for?’ asked Larry, surprised.
‘So they can reserve the rooms,’ said Mother, equally surprised.
‘But I’ve invited them to stay here,’ Larry pointed out.
‘Larry! You haven’t! Really, you are most thoughtless. How can they possibly stay here?’
‘I really don’t see what you’re making a fuss about,’ said Larry coldly.
‘But where are they going to sleep?’ said Mother, distraught. ‘There’s hardly enough room for us, as it is.’
‘Nonsense, Mother, there’s plenty of room
if the place is organized properly. If Margo and Les sleep out on the veranda, that gives you two rooms; you and Gerry could move into the drawing-room, and that would leave those rooms free.’
‘Don’t be silly, dear. We can’t all camp out all over the place like gipsies. Besides, it’s still chilly at night, and I don’t think Margo and Les ought to sleep outside. There simply isn’t room to entertain in this villa. You’ll just have to write to these people and put them off.’
‘I can’t put them off,’ said Larry. ‘They’re on their way.’
‘Really, Larry, you are the most annoying creature. Why on earth didn’t you tell me before? You wait until they’re nearly here, and then you tell me.’
‘I didn’t know you were going to treat the arrival of a few friends as if it was a major catastrophe,’ Larry explained.
‘But, dear, it’s so silly to invite people when you know there’s no room in the villa.’
‘I do wish you’d stop fussing,’ said Larry irritably; ‘there’s quite a simple solution to the whole business.’
‘What?’ asked Mother suspiciously.
‘Well, since the villa isn’t big enough, let’s move to one that is.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Whoever heard of moving into a larger house because you’ve invited some friends to stay?’
‘What’s the matter with the idea? It seems a perfectly sensible solution to me; after all, if you say there’s no room here, the obvious thing to do is to move.’
‘The obvious thing to do is not to invite people,’ said Mother severely.
‘I don’t think it’s good for us to live like hermits,’ said Larry. ‘I only really invited them for you. They’re a charming crowd. I thought you’d like to have them. Liven things up a bit for you.’
‘I’m quite lively enough, thank you,’ said Mother with dignity.
‘Well, I don’t know what we’re going to do.’
‘I really don’t see why they can’t stay in the Pension Suisse, dear.’
‘You can’t ask people out to stay with you and then make them live in a third-rate hotel.’
‘How many have you invited?’ asked Mother.
‘Oh, just a few… two or three… They won’t all be coming at once. I expect they’ll turn up in batches.’
‘I think at least you might be able to tell me how many you’ve invited,’ said Mother.
‘Well, I can’t remember now. Some of them didn’t reply, but that doesn’t mean anything… they’re probably on their way and thought it was hardly worth letting us know. Anyway, if you budget for seven or eight people I should think that would cover it.’
‘You mean, including ourselves?’
‘No, no, I mean seven or eight people as well as the family.’
‘But it’s absurd, Larry; we can’t possibly fit thirteen people into this villa, with all the good will in the world.’
‘Well, let’s move, then. I’ve offered you a perfectly sensible solution. I don’t know what you’re arguing about.’
‘But don’t be ridiculous, dear. Even if we did move into a villa large enough to house thirteen people, what are we going to do with the extra space when they’ve gone?’
‘Invite some more people,’ said Larry, astonished that Mother should not have thought of this simple answer for herself.
Mother glared at him, her spectacles askew.
‘Really, Larry, you do make me cross,’ she said at last.
‘I think it’s rather unfair that you should blame me because your organization breaks down with the arrival of a few guests,’ said Larry austerely.
‘A few guests!’ squeaked Mother. ‘I’m glad you think eight people are a few guests.’
‘I think you’re adopting a most unreasonable attitude.’
‘I suppose there’s nothing unreasonable in inviting people and not letting me know?’
Larry gave her an injured look, and picked up his book.
‘Well, I’ve done all I can,’ he said; ‘I can’t do any more.’
There was a long silence, during which Larry placidly read his book and Mother piled bunches of roses into vases and placed them haphazardly round the room, muttering to herself.
‘I wish you wouldn’t just lie there,’ she said at last. ‘After all, they’re your friends. It’s up to you to do something.’
Larry, with a long-suffering air, put down his book.
‘I really don’t know what you expect me to do,’ he said. ‘Every suggestion I’ve made you’ve disagreed with.’
‘If you made sensible suggestions I wouldn’t disagree.’
‘I don’t see anything ludicrous in anything I suggested.’
‘But, Larry dear, do be reasonable. We can’t just rush to a new villa because some people are coming. I doubt whether we’d find one in time, anyway. And there’s Gerry’s lessons.’
‘All that could easily be sorted out if you put your mind to it.’
‘We are not moving to another villa,’ said Mother firmly; ‘I’ve made up my mind about that.’
She straightened her spectacles, gave Larry a defiant glare, and strutted off towards the kitchen, registering determination in every inch.
Part Two
Be not forgetful to entertain strangers:
for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
– HEBREWS xiii, 2
7
The Daffodil-Yellow Villa
The new villa was enormous, a tall, square Venetian mansion, with faded daffodil-yellow walls, green shutters, and a fox-red roof. It stood on a hill overlooking the sea, surrounded by unkempt olive groves and silent orchards of lemon and orange trees. The whole place had an atmosphere of ancient melancholy about it: the house with its cracked and peeling walls, its tremendous echoing rooms, its verandas piled high with drifts of last year’s leaves and so overgrown with creepers and vines that the lower rooms were in a perpetual green twilight; the little walled and sunken garden that ran along one side of the house, its wrought-iron gates scabby with rust, had roses, anemones, and geraniums sprawling across the weed-grown paths, and the shaggy, untended tangerine trees were so thick with flowers that the scent was almost overpowering; beyond the garden the orchards were still and silent, except for the hum of bees and an occasional splutter of birds among the leaves. The house and land were gently, sadly decaying, lying forgotten on the hillside overlooking the shining sea and the dark, eroded hills of Albania. It was as though villa and landscape were half asleep, lying there drugged in the spring sunshine, giving themselves up to the moss, the ferns, and the crowds of tiny toadstools.
It was Spiro, of course, who had found the place, and who organized our move with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of efficiency. Within three days of seeing the villa for the first time the long wooden carts were trailing in a dusty procession along the roads, piled high with our possessions, and on the fourth day we were installed.
At the edge of the estate was a small cottage inhabited by the gardener and his wife, an elderly, rather decrepit pair who seemed to have decayed with the estate. His job was to fill the water tanks, pick the fruit, crush the olives, and get severely stung once a year extracting honey from the seventeen bee-hives that simmered beneath the lemon trees. In a moment of misguided enthusiasm Mother engaged the gardener’s wife to work for us in the villa. Her name was Lugaretzia, and she was a thin, lugubrious individual, whose hair was forever coming adrift from the ramparts of pins and combs with which she kept it attached to her skull. She was extremely sensitive, as Mother soon discovered, and the slightest criticism of her work, however tactfully phrased, would make her brown eyes swim with tears in an embarrassing display of grief. It was such a heart-rending sight to watch that Mother very soon gave up criticizing her altogether.
There was only one thing in life that could bring a smile to Lugaretzia’s gloomy countenance, a glint to her spaniel eyes, and that was a discussion of her ailments. Where most people are hypochondriacs as a hobby, Lugaretzia
had turned it into a full-time occupation. When we took up residence it was her stomach that was worrying her. Bulletins on the state of her stomach would start at seven in the morning when she brought up the tea. She would move from room to room with the trays, giving each one of us a blow-by-blow account of her nightly bout with her inside. She was a master of the art of graphic description; groaning, gasping, doubling up in agony, stamping about the rooms, she would give us such a realistic picture of her suffering that we would find our own stomachs aching in sympathy.
‘Can’t you do something about that woman?’ Larry asked Mother one morning, after Lugaretzia’s stomach had been through a particularly bad night.
‘What do you expect me to do?’ she asked. ‘I gave her some of your bicarbonate of soda.’
‘That probably accounts for her bad night.’
‘I’m sure she doesn’t eat properly,’ said Margo. ‘What she probably wants is a good diet.’
‘Nothing short of a bayonet would do her stomach any good,’ said Larry caustically, ‘and I know… during the last week I have become distressingly familiar with every tiny convolution of her larger intestine.’
‘I know she’s a bit trying,’ said Mother, ‘but, after all, the poor woman is obviously suffering.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Leslie; ‘she enjoys every minute of it. Like Larry does when he’s ill.’
‘Well, anyway,’ said Mother hurriedly, ‘we’ll just have to put up with her; there’s no one else we can get locally. I’ll get Theodore to look her over next time he comes out.’
‘If all she told me this morning was true,’ said Larry, ‘you’ll have to provide him with a pick and a miner’s lamp.’
‘Larry, don’t be disgusting,’ said Mother severely.
Shortly afterwards, to our relief, Lugaretzia’s stomach got better, but almost immediately her feet gave out, and she would hobble pitifully round the house, groaning loudly and frequently. Larry said that Mother hadn’t hired a maid, but a ghoul, and suggested buying her a ball and chain. He pointed out that this would at least let us know when she was coming, and allow us time to escape, for Lugaretzia had developed the habit of creeping up behind one and groaning loudly and unexpectedly in one’s ear. Larry started having breakfast in his bedroom after the morning when Lugaretzia took off her shoes in the dining-room in order to show us exactly which toes were hurting.
The Corfu Trilogy (the corfu trilogy) Page 9
