Marrying Off Mother

by Gerald Durrell

  ‘Oh, and if we have to bury him at sea, try and do it at night, otherwise we will have the ladies in a hellish state of melancholy.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said. ‘I will arrange that.’

  I went into the saloon, where I was met by tears and anxious enquiries after their hero’s health.

  ‘Ladies, I have bad news, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘Our beloved Captain is no longer with us. However . . .’

  But my words were drowned by a burst of lamentation that was overwhelming. They clasped each other, tears rocketing down their cheeks, their sobs heartrending. They were as deeply shocked and affected as if it had been one of their own intimate circle who had died. I had heard of people wringing their hands, but never seen it. This is what they all did. They gave vent to their grief in the complete way that Greeks do, an uninhibited display of their love for the Captain. I signalled the barman, who looked as stunned as we all felt.

  ‘Brandies for everyone,’ I whispered to him, ‘and big ones.’

  When each lady was tremblingly clasping a goblet half full of brandy, half full of tears, I made a speech.

  ‘Ladies,’ I said, ‘I would like you all to listen to me for a moment.’ I felt like Ronald Reagan trying to play Shakespeare.

  Obediently as children, they turned their tear-besmudged faces to me, green and blue eye-shadow awry, eyelashes glued together by tears — and the careful make-up eroded.

  ‘Our beloved Captain has been taken from us,’ I said. ‘He was a dear, kind man and we shall miss him terribly. Now I want you to raise your glasses and drink to a wonderful man, but as you do so I want you to remember three things. Firstly, he would be the last one to want us to be unhappy, for as you all know he did his best to make us happy.’

  There was a loud sob from Mrs Meadowsweet, which was immediately shushed by the other ladies, I was glad to see.

  ‘Secondly,’ I said, ‘I was watching him carefully and I can assure you he died without pain. Isn’t that what we would all like for our nearest and dearest and, indeed, for ourselves when the time comes?’

  There was a murmuration of agreement.

  The third thing is this,’ I continued. ‘When you were all ashore, I had lunch with the Captain and while we talked he confessed to me that having you ladies on board had made his last voyage wonderfully memorable to him. In fact, he confirmed that, if asked, he would have a difficult time in saying which of you ladies he loved the best.’

  There was a faint rustle of satisfaction and pride.

  ‘So let us drink to our friend the Captain, whom we will never forget.’

  ‘Never!’ said the ladies stalwartly.

  We all drank and I signalled the barman for another round. Presently, the ladies, very unsober, but not nearly as hysterical, drifted off to their cabins. I was just about to do the same when the Chief Officer materialized at my elbow. He was the last person I wanted to see. While dealing with the ladies, I also had my own private grief for the Captain to contend with.

  ‘I have done as you suggested, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ I said curtly, ‘although why you are reporting to me I cannot think. You're the bloody captain now.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, ‘and his widow wants his body to be buried at his home town.’

  ‘Well?’ I said. Take him there.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said and paused, his eyes as expressionless as ever. Then he said, ‘I am sorry this happened. I liked the Captain.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said tiredly. ‘He was a nice, kind, gentle man and they are as rare as unicorns.’

  ‘As what, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Never mind, I’m going to bed. Good night.’

  By the morning, the ladies had recovered to a certain extent. There was the odd snuffle, the odd tear, but the Captain was referred to in the past tense as his many virtues were extolled. As we progressed over the miles and miles of blue and empty water — empty that is except for the groups of dolphin, exuberant as children let out of school, who appeared now and then and did a ballet round the ship — the heat became intense. Mrs Meadowsweet and Mrs Farthingale got nasty cases of sunburn, through falling asleep on the deck. Mrs Malrepose suffered from heatstroke and had to be put to bed in a darkened cabin with cold compresses, but apart from that nothing of moment happened. Having been brought up in the sun I revelled in it and I worked hard at building up a tan that would be everybody’s envy. But eventually the blistering heat became too much for me and I retired to my cabin. It was there, in the cool dimness, that the former Chief Officer came to see me.

  ‘I am sorry to worry you, sir,’ he said, ‘but I have a problem with the Captain.’

  I was both startled and confused as I had become used to thinking of him as the captain.

  ‘You mean you have a problem with our ex-captain?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, and he shifted rather uneasily from foot to foot and then blurted out, ‘he is starting to be offensive.’

  I could not think what he was talking about.

  ‘How do you mean, offensive?’ I asked in puzzlement. ‘He’s dead.’

  He looked around the small cabin furtively, making sure we had no eavesdroppers.

  ‘He is starting to — to — to — well, he is starting smelling,’ he said in a hushed voice, as one uttering a blasphemy.

  I was horrified.

  ‘D’you mean to say that in this heat you’ve still got his corpse in his cabin?’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘Yes, sir, that is where you told us to put him,’ he said aggrievedly.

  ‘But in this heat, man, it’s ridiculous. Why didn’t you put him in a fridge?’

  He looked startled.

  ‘You mean with the food?’ he said.

  ‘No, but your refrigeration area is huge. Surely there is a corner where you can put him?’

  ‘I will go and see,’ he said, and went off.

  Presently he was back again.

  ‘I have found a place, sir, in the meat locker. I have put him in there,’ he reported.

  ‘Good,’ I said, with a sudden macabre vision of my sweet Captain lying among the swinging sides of beef and lamb. ‘Now, for heaven’s sake, the ladies must not know this on any account, you understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said firmly. ‘They will not know.’

  So the voyage continued and, apart from a little bad weather — nothing more than a gentle rolling swell, but it had the ladies confined to their cabins and the smell of eau de Cologne was overwhelming — everything went smoothly enough. The ladies’ spirits recovered and they even started to accept the Chief Officer as captain, complimenting him and the purser on the wonderful salads, the multi-coloured ice creams and the quality of the lamb chops and steaks. I wondered what they would have said if they had found out that their hero, the Captain, was down there in the frozen darkness among the foodstuffs they were consuming. It was best not to contemplate such a horrific catastrophe.

  It was the night before we docked. The ladies were all busy packing and the sounds of this laborious process echoed up and down from cabin to cabin. There was the usual banging of doors and pattering feet. Cries of ‘Lucinda, have you got my green I lent you?’, ‘Mabel, can you come and sit on my suitcase? I don’t know why it is, but suitcases always seem to bite off more than they can chew,’ and ‘Edna, I swear to you, darling, if you pack that whisky in the bottom of your case, you’ll smell like a refugee from Alcoholics Anonymous when we land.’

  I made my way to the bar for a pre-dinner drink. It was empty except for the Chief Officer who was imbibing a brandy. The bottle stood on the bar in front of him and I saw that he had been making very steady inroads on its contents.

  ‘Good evening,’ I said.

  He straightened up and stared at me. I suspected that he was fairly drunk, but it was difficult to tell from his curious expressionless eyes.

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ he said. Then after a pause he gestured at the bottle. ‘You will have a drink?’r />
  ‘Thank you,’ I said and, since the barman appeared to have become extinct, I got myself a glass from behind the bar and poured myself a drink from his bottle. Silence fell over the two of us like a muffling fog. I let it last for a minute or two and then decided to dispel it.

  ‘Well,’ I said jovially, ‘I expect you’re glad the voyage is over. Now you’ll be able to have a little rest at home. Whereabouts do you live?’

  He looked at me unhearingly.

  ‘I am having trouble with the Captain,’ he said.

  I felt a preliminary tingle of apprehension crawl up my spine.

  ‘What sort of trouble?’ I asked.

  ‘It is my fault, I should have looked,’ he said.

  ‘What sort of trouble?’ I repeated.

  ‘If I had looked it would not have happened,’ he said, and poured himself a formidable whack of brandy.

  ‘What would not have happened?’ I asked.

  He drank deeply and was silent for a moment.

  ‘You remember when we took the Captain from his cabin and put him — put him — put him downstairs?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He was still soft, you understand? Just after that we have bad weather and the ladies are sick.’ He shrugged. ‘Not bad weather for us, but for them, yes. A long rolling swell. It makes people sick.’

  He took another drink.

  ‘And,’ he continued, ‘it made the Captain move.’

  ‘Move?’ I said, startled. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We laid him flat but with the movement of the ship he rolled and his legs came up.’

  He lifted one of his bent legs to waist height and slapped his thigh.

  ‘It was my fault. I did not check. You see he was still warm and so he froze like that, in that position.’

  He paused and drank again.

  ‘The carpenter had made the coffin, so this evening we went down to put the Captain in it, how you say in English? So he is all shipshape and Bristol fashion ready for his wife.’

  I would not have put it quite like that, but it was not a moment for a lesson in English colloquialisms. I was beginning to feel rather sick.

  ‘We tried everything,’ he said, ‘everything. I got the two strongest men on the ship, but they could not straighten his legs. It was impossible. And we had to have him in the coffin tonight. The paper work, you know? We had not time to — you know — thaw him.’

  He flooded a large, golden pool of brandy into his glass and gulped it down.

  ‘So I broke his legs with a mallet,’ he said, and turned and left the bar, weaving slightly from side to side.

  I shivered and poured myself a brandy of equal size to the one the Chief Officer had just downed. I stood for a moment remembering the Captain, his charm, his gallantry with the ladies, his gentleness, but above all I remembered how he was going to draw, play his flute, and lie in bed with his beloved wife and watch the seagulls go past their bedroom window. I decided that retirement was something you should take a little bit of every day, like a tonic, for you never knew what awaited you around the corner.

  I also decided that I didn’t want any dinner.

  Marrying Off Mother

  That summer in Corfu was a particularly good one. The night skies were a heavy velvety blue with, apparently, more stars than ever before, like a crop of tiny burnished mushrooms glinting in the vast blue meadow. The moon seemed twice as large as normal, starting — as we turned towards her and she lifted herself into the night sky — as orange as a tangerine and then undergoing colour changes from apricot to daffodil yellow before hatching out into a miraculous white, as white as a bride’s gown, the light from which cast pools of bright silver among the hunched and twisted olives. Excited by the warmth and beauty of these nights, the fireflies would attempt to emulate and outdo the stars and so formed their own glittering, throbbing conglomerations among the trees where the Scops owls chimed like mournful little bells. At dawn the eastern sky would have a blood red line drawn across, the sword of the approaching sun. This would change to canary yellow, then lilac, and finally as the sun made his splendid appearance over the horizon the sky would suddenly turn as blue as flax and the stars would be extinguished as one blows out candles after a gigantic ball.

  I used to wake just before the sun’s rim flooded our world with light and contemplate my room and its contents. The room was large with two big windows and slatted shutters that used to make friendly musical noises when touched by the slightest wind. In winter it was an orchestra. The floor was a wooden one of plain scrubbed boards that creaked and grumbled, in one corner of which were two elderly blankets and a pillow on which my three dogs, Roger, Widdle and Puke, slept in a snoring, twitching huddle. The other accoutrements of a normal bedroom were lacking. True, there was a cupboard, allegedly for hanging up my clothes, but in reality most of its space was taken up with more sensible things, like my various forked sticks for catching snakes, my different nets for catching insects, for delving into ponds and ditches and stouter ones for marine captures, as well as fishing rods and useful poles with three large hooks on the end for pulling pond or seaweed within reach and thus facilitating the capture of those creatures that dwelt in their green, feathery grottoes.

  There was, of course, a table, but this was piled high with my nature notes, books, test-tubes full of specimens and, on this particular day, I recall, the semi-dissected corpse of a hedgehog I had found which, even by my broad-minded standards, was starting to make its presence felt. Round the room there were shelves containing aquariums and glass-fronted cages in which crouched bulbous-eyed mantids who regarded you malevolently, tree frogs like green velvet, geckos with stomach skin so fine you could see their internal organs through it, newts in their watery world and baby terrapins the size of walnuts. Presiding over all this on top of the window pelmet was Ulysses, my Scops owl, looking like a slim statue carved from ash-grey wood streaked with Maltese crosses in black, his eyes like oriental slits against the intrusive sunlight.

  In the garden below I could hear the yapping of my seagull Alecko calling for fish and the wicked witch’s cackle of my two magpies. The half-closed shutters were making a pattern of tiger stripes across the bare boards. The air was hot even at that hour. The sheets were hot and, even though I slept naked and it was only just past dawn, I could feel areas of sweat on my body. I got out of bed and padded across to open the shutters and a blinding flood of dandelion-coloured sunlight poured into the room. The dogs stretched, yawned, clippered themselves briefly with their front teeth to disturb a brood of worrying fleas and stood up wagging their tails. Having ascertained that Sally, my donkey, was still tethered to the almond tree where I had left her the evening before, and that no dastardly member of the peasantry had stolen her, I got dressed. This was a simple process. Slip on shorts and a cobweb linen shirt, slide feet into well worn sandals and I was ready to face what the day might bring. The first hurdle to overcome was having breakfast with my family and being as unobtrusive as possible in case my elder brother Larry had smelt the hedgehog. His olfactory senses were far too well developed for a brother to possess, in my opinion. We had breakfast in the little sunken garden that ran along and below our broad, flagged veranda, cloaked in vine. The garden was very Victorian looking, with small flowerbeds in squares, rounds, triangles or stars, carefully rimmed with white stone. In each bed stood a small tangerine tree, whose scent, when the sun shone on them, was almost overpowering. In the beds at their feet grew nice old-fashioned flowers, forget-me-nots, pinks, lavender, sweet-william, night-scented stock, tobacco plants and lilies of the valley. It was a sort of Piccadilly Circus for the local insects and so was a favourite hunting ground of mine, for there was everything from butterflies to antlions, lacewing flies to rose beetles, great fat burring bumble bees to tiny wasps.

  The table was set in the shade of the tangerine trees, and round it arranging plates and knives would hobble Lugaretzia, our maid, groaning gently to herself. She was a professional h
ypochondriac and was always cherishing and cosseting six or seven ailments at any time and would, if you were not careful, give you vivid and sometimes disgusting descriptions of what the interior of her stomach was doing, or how her varicose veins throbbed like a savage tribe’s tom-toms when on the warpath.

  This day I noted with satisfaction that we were having scrambled eggs. Mother used to simmer chopped onions until they were transparent and then add the beaten eggs that had yolks as brilliant as the sun and came from our own family of chickens. One day my sister Margo, in a philanthropic mood, let all the chickens out of their pen for a walk. They found a patch of wild garlic and feasted on it, with the result that the omelettes for breakfast the next morning were thoroughly impregnated. My brother Leslie complained that it was like eating the upholstery out of a Greek bus.

  Scrambled eggs were really something to start the day on. I generally had two helpings and then followed this up with four or five huge slices of brown toast covered with a thick coating of honey from our own hives. Lest I be thought greedy, let me hasten to say that eating this much toast and honey was much like following a natural history lesson or an archaeological dig. The hives were in the charge of Lugaretzia’s husband, a fragile-looking man who seemed to have the cares of the world on his shoulders, as, indeed, he had, as anyone spending ten minutes in his wife’s company would readily perceive. Whenever he deprived our five hives of bees of their carefully garnered provender he was always stung so severely that he would have to spend several days in bed. As he was being stung, however, he inevitably dropped several honeycombs on the ground, where they became a magnificent sticky trap for any insect that happened to be around. In spite of Mother’s desperate attempts to strain the honey before it came to table, there was always a small and interesting zoological collection lurking there. So spreading the musky, brown-gold delicacy on your bread was like spreading out liquid amber in which you might find almost anything from tiny moths and caterpillars to beetles and small centipedes. Once, to my delight, I found a species of earwig that was unknown to me. So breakfast was always a biologically interesting meal. The rest of my family, who, to my chagrin, remained defiantly unzoological, did not share my pleasure at the rich bounty the honey provided.