The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium

by Gerald Malcolm Durrell

  “I’ll divorce my wife and then you can bloody well marry her,” Reggie roared.

  “Bravo! Queue diplomatie, ” said a Frenchman in the crowd.

  “You can rely on my son to do the proper thing,” declared the Duke, recovering from his shock at Reggie’s announcement. “After all, he had a public school education and so knows how to behave like a gentleman.”

  “But I don’t want to marry her,” gasped Perry.

  “What?” said Reggie.

  “What?” exclaimed the Duke.

  “What?” added Marjorie and Ursula, almost in unison.

  “Ils sont trés drôles, les anglais, n’est-ce pas? ” said the Frenchman in the crowd.

  “I’m too young to get married,” explained Perry, plaintively, “I’m only eighteen.”

  “D’you mean to say you refuse to make an honest woman of my wife?” asked Reggie, trying to get the facts straight in his mind.

  “Well, I’m not going to marry her, if that’s what you mean,” said Perry petulantly.

  “I must say I agree with the boy. Most unsuitable liaison,” put in the Duke, unwisely.

  Reggie looked closely into Perry’s face and then turned and stared at the Duke.

  “Horse shit, both of you,” he said. Before anyone could do anything sensible, he had picked up Perry as if he were a child and tossed him into the Grand Canal, and then turned, seized the Duke, and sent him flying after his son. The sight of a real Duke and his only son and heir surfacing, spluttering, in the Grand Canal was, I must confess, such a rarity that I savoured it to the full. Two carabinieri, who until then had been standing in the crowd quietly enjoying the drama as any true Italian would, now, with the utmost reluctance, decided that, as representatives of law and order, they ought to make some sort of a gesture. Elegant as peacocks they drifted up to Reggie.

  “Pardon, signor,” said one of them in excellent English, “but are you having any trouble?”

  It was Reggie’s big moment and I was lost in admiration at the way that he rose to the occasion.

  “It is kind of you to ask, but I do not require assistance,” he said regally, if unsteadily. “My wife has been seduced by the son of a Duke. I am here to take my wife back home shince I now believe her to be cured of her infatuation. The Duke and his son are that strange couple you see disporting themselves in the Canal there. I have no wish to prefer charges against them. Come, Marjorie, let us away.”

  So saying he took the by then bewildered and submissive Marjorie by the hand and walked off through the crowd, leaving me with a very damp and angry Duke and his son and two courteous but interested members of the Italian police force. It took us two hours to explain what it was all about, who the Duke was, who Perry was, who I was, who Ursula was and who (if they could only have been found) Reggie and Marjorie were. In addition we had to vouchsafe all the extra information that the bureaucratic machine demands: date of birth, whether our grandmothers had in-growing toenails and so on. Eventually, limp with exhaustion, we left the Duke and his sulky son and heir, and Ursula and I repaired to a pleasant bar on the Piazza San Marco.

  “Darling, I do think you handled that wonderfully,” she said, her big blue eyes melting as she gazed at me. “You handled those awful policemen with such aplumb.”

  “Aplomb,” I corrected automatically.

  “That as well,” she agreed. “I was so proud of you.”

  “Thank you,” I said, “what’ll you have to drink?”

  “I’ll have a Graffiti,” she said, “with ice.”

  “Madam will have a Martini and ice and I’ll have a double brandy and soda,” I translated for the waiter.

  “I’m so glad that I managed to sort out Reggie’s problem,” said Ursula, with satisfaction.

  “I was under the impression that he solved his own problem.”

  “Oh, no, darling,” explained Ursula. “If it hadn’t been for me and the Duke, and, of course, all your help, Reggie wouldn’t have known what to do.”

  “Why don’t you stop trying to help your friends?” I asked. “Why don’t you just leave them alone?”

  “You can’t just leave them alone,” said Ursula. “You don’t know what they’re going to do when you leave them alone . . . Now, you must admit that if I hadn’t taken part in the whole affair Reggie and Marjorie wouldn’t be happily together again. In this instance I was a sort of catapult.”

  “Catalyst?” I suggested.

  “I do wish you would stop trying to correct me, darling,” said Ursula. “I think you’re ravishing but this constant correcting becomes very irritating.”

  “You think I’m ravishing?” I asked, intrigued.

  “I always thought you were ravishing, but I really don’t see what that’s got to do with Reggie and Marjorie,” said Ursula hurriedly.

  “Frankly, at this precise moment, I am unmoved by anything that may, or may not, happen to Reggie and Marjorie in the future. I feel they deserve each other. I feel that the Duke and his son ought to get married and, to encapsulate the whole incredibly futile affair in a nutshell, I came to Venice to enjoy myself and you are a very beautiful woman. So why don’t we stop talking about the incredibly dull landed gentry of England, and you tell me what we are going to do tonight . . . and I warn you, it’s got to be sexy.”

  Ursula went pink, partly with embarrassment and partly with pleasure.

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said, to my unmitigated delight. “I had thought of going to bed early.”

  “Darling, you couldn’t have suggested anything better,” I exclaimed with enthusiasm.

  “You know perfectly well what I mean,” she went on, bridling.

  “Now that you have solved the various problems of Reggie, Marjorie, Perry and the Duke,” I said, “why don’t you relax? Come and have a disgustingly sexy dinner with me and then decide whether or not you want to spend the next two days of your stay in Venice in that squalid pension of yours or whether you want to have a bedroom the size of a ballroom overlooking the Grand Canal .”

  “Oooo!” she said. “You haven’t got a bedroom looking out over the Grand Canal . . . you perfect pig .”

  “Why don’t you go back to your hotel and change, and I will go back to my hotel and try to get them to resurrect this suit, and I will then pick you up at seven thirty. By that time, I feel, you can have made up your mind whether or not you are going to exchange your squalid abode for one of the finest bedrooms in Venice .”

  We had a splendid dinner, and Ursula was at her best. While we dawdled over coffee and brandy, I asked her whether she had given any thought to her change of abode.

  “Darling, you are romantic,” she said archly, “just like Pasadouble.”

  “Who?” I asked, puzzled.

  “You know, the great Italian lover,” she said.

  “You don’t mean Casanova?” I asked, out of interest.

  “Darling, you’re correcting me again,” pointed out Ursula, coldly.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said contritely, “but I’m terribly flattered that you should think I am as romantic as Pasadouble.”

  “You always were romantic in a peculiar sort of way,” said Ursula candidly. “Tell me, is your bedroom really as big as that and does it really look out over the Grand Canal ?”

  “Yes to both questions,” I said ruefully, “but I must confess that I would be happier if your motivation was based on my personal charms rather than the size and site of my bedroom.”

  “You are romantic,” she murmured vaguely. “Why don’t we go back to your hotel for a nightcap and look at your room?”

  “What a splendid idea,” I agreed heartily. “Shall we walk?”

  “Darling, now you’re being unromantic,” she said. “Let’s go by water.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  She insisted on a gondola, rather than a speedboat.

  “You know,” she said sighing luxuriously, “I’ve only been in Venice for four nights but I’ve had a gondolier every night.
”

  “Don’t tell a soul,” I said, kissing her.

  In her sweeping white dress she looked so attractive ihat even the gondolier (a notoriously hard-bitten and cynical breed of mammal) was impressed.

  “Darling,” said Ursula, pausing theatrically in the lamp light on the jetty, “I think I’m going to enjoy our affair.”

  So saying she went to get into the gondola, broke the heel off her shoe and fell head first into the Canal. I would, with only a modicum of gentlemanly concern have let her struggle out of the water on her own (since I knew she could swim like an otter), but the voluminous dress she was wearing — as soon as it got wet — wrapped itself round her legs and, doubting its weight with water, dragged her down. There was nothing for it: I had to shed my coat, kick off my shoes and go in after her. Eventually, having inadvertently drunk more of the canal water than I thought necessary or prudent, I managed to get her to shore where the gondolier helped me to land her.

  “Darling, you were brave to rescue me . . . I do hope you didn’t get too wet,” she said.

  “Scarcely damp,” I said, getting her into the gondola.

  By the time we got to the hotel she was shivering, and so I made her take a hot bath. By the time she had done this she was running a temperature. In spite of her protests that there was nothing wrong with her I made her go to bed in my ballroom-sized bedroom. By midnight her fever was such that I was seriously worried and called a doctor, a sleepy and irritated Italian who did not appear to have ever come within spitting distance of the Hippocratic oath. He gave her some tablets and said she would be all right. The next day I procured a doctor of my own choice and discovered that Ursula had pneumonia.

  I nursed her devotedly for two weeks until the medical profession agreed that she was well enough to travel. Then I took her down to the airport to see her off. As the flight was called she turned to me, her huge blue eyes brimming with tears.

  “Darling, I did so enjoy our affair,” she said. “I hope you did too.”

  “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” I agreed, kissing her warm mouth.

  Even Passadouble, I felt, could not have been more tactful than that.

  THE HAVOC OF HAVELOCK

  Coming from a family which treated books as an essential ingredient of life, like air, food and water, I am always appalled at how little the average person seems to read or to have read. That the dictators of the world have always looked upon books with mistrust had appeared to me peculiar, for books, I considered, provided a myriad of friends and teachers. That books could influence people, I knew — The Origin of Species, Das Kapital, the Bible — but to what extent a book could wreak havoc was never really brought home to me until I introduced Haveloek Ellis to the Royal Palace Highclifle Hotel.

  On arrival in Bournemouth, I had made my way as rapidly as possible to my favourite bookshop, H. G. Cummin in Christ-church Road . Here, in a tall, narrow house, is housed a vast and fascinating collection of new and second-hand books. On the ground floor and in the basement all the new books glare at you somewhat balefully in their multicoloured dust-jackets, but climb the creaking, uneven staircase to the four floors above, and you are transported into a Dickensian landscape. Here, from floor to ceiling in every room are amassed arrays of old books. They line the walls of the narrow staircases, they surround you, envelop you, a wonderful, warm, scented womb.

  Pluck the books out; and each smells different. One smells not only of dust but of mushrooms; another, autumn woods or broom flowers in the hot sun, or roasting chestnuts; and some have the acrid, damp smell of coal burning; and others smell of honey. And then, as if smells alone were not enough, there is the feel of them in the heavy leather bindings, sleek as a seal, with the golden glitter of the type buried like a vein in the glossy spine.

  Books the dimensions of a tree trunk, books as slender as a wand, books printed on paper as thick and as soft as a foxglove leaf, paper as white and as crisp as ice, or as delicate and brittle as the frost layer on a spider’s web. Then the colours of the bindings: sunsets and sunrises, autumn woods aflame, winter hills of heather; the multicoloured, marbled end-papers like some Martian cloud formation. And all this sensuous pleasure to drug and delight you before you have even examined the titles: (The Great Red Island — Madagascar; Peking to Lhasa; Through the Brazilian Wilderness; Sierra Leone — it’s People, Products and Secret Societies ), and come to the splendid moment when you open the book as you would a magic door.

  Immediately the shop around you disappears and you stand, smelling the rich smell of the Amazon with Wallace, you bargain for ivory with Mary Kingsley, you face a charging gorilla with du Challu, you make love to a thousand beautiful women in a thousand novels, you march to the guillotine with Sidney Carton, you laugh with Edwardian gentlemen in a boat, you travel to China with Marco Polo; all this you do standing on the uneven, uncarpeted floor, with a magic passport in your hands, without the expenditure of a penny. Or perhaps I should say one can do this without the expenditure of a penny, but I seem incapable of entering a bookshop empty-handed or of leaving it in the same condition. Always, my cheque book is slimmer, and I generally have to order a taxi to transport my purchases.

  On this particular occasion, I had already spent much more than I had intended (but who if he has any resolve in his makeup, strength in his character, can refuse to buy a book on Elephants or the Anatomy of The Gorilla?), when I suddenly saw, squatting peacefully on a shelf level with my eyes (so I could not possibly miss it) a series of volumes I had long wanted to acquire. This set was bound in a dark maroon coloured cloth and, apart from the difference in the thickness of each volume, they were identical. The title, in block, was so obscure as to be almost unreadable, and indeed I might easily have missed this Pandora’s box of books if a stray shaft of winter’s sunlight had not wandered through the dusty window at that precise moment and illuminated the volumes and their tides: The Psychology of Sex, by Havelock Ellis.

  Now, anyone who studies, keeps or, most important, breeds, rare animals knows how important sex is, and the study of sexual impulses in an animal which can talk and write of its experiences and feelings — the human animal, man — is of enormous help in the study of the less articulate members of the animal kingdom. Though I possessed a fairly extensive library on the subject of human sex, it was lacking one master work for which I had been searching for some time — the classic Havelock Ellis, to a large extent now superseded by modern research but still an important early study on that subject, and certainly a wealth of information.

  The young lady who helped me carry the books downstairs obviously thought that a man of my age should not be buying nine volumes on the subject of sex. John Ruston, the owner of the shop who had known me for a good many years, was more sympathetic.

  “Yes,” he said, swaying to and fro like a dancing bear. “Yes, Ellis. We don’t get him in often.”

  “I’ve been trying to find him for ages,” I replied. “I’m delighted.”

  “It’s a nice, clean copy,” said John, with unconscious humour, picking up the volume dealing with homosexuality and examining it.

  So my Havelock Ellis was packed up, together with a few last-minute purchases (who, with red blood in his veins, could resist The Speech of Monkey ; or A Slave Trader’s Journal or The Patagonians ?), and John Ruston had me driven round to the hotel where, for the next week, I devoted myself almost exclusively to Havelock, carrying him around, a volume at a time, and marking with a pencil those parts which I thought applicable to animal breeding generally. What I didn’t realize was that, at mid-winter in a nearly deserted hotel, my movements were studied by the staff about as carefully as I studied my own animals. What they saw was me deeply absorbed in a book (since all the volumes looked much the same), in which I kept marking passages as I drifted from cocktail bar to restaurant, from restaurant to deserted lounge. When they brought up my breakfast at seven-thirty, I was lying in bed reading Havelock and the night porters would find me still
engrossed in him at two o’clock in the morning. Obviously there must be something about the book that kept me riveted and silent for such long periods.

  I was totally unaware of the interest that my absorption with Havelock was arousing, until Luigi, the Italian barman, said to me:

  “That seems to be a very interesting book you are reading, Mr Durrell.”

  “It is,” I said vaguely. “ Havelock Ellis.”

  He said no more, not wishing to confess that he did not know who Havelock Ellis was. Then Stephen Grump, the Viennese Under-Manager, said to me:

  “That seems to be an interesting book you are reading.”

  “Yes,” I said. “ Havelock Ellis.”

  He, too, not wishing to appear ignorant, merely nodded his head wisely.

  So enchanted was I, not only by the research work that Havelock had done, but by the character that seemed to emerge from his prose — earnest, pedantic, humourless, as only Americans can be when they take a subject seriously; an omelette made up of the meticulousness of a Prussian officer, the earnestness of a Swedish artist, and the cautiousness of a Swiss banker — that I was oblivious of the fact that all around there were people who were dying to know what I was reading. The dull red cover, the almost undecipherable title, gave them no clue. Then one day, quite by accident, my secret was out, and immediately pandemonium broke loose on a scale that I had rarely seen equalled. It all happened quite innocently in the restaurant, where I was reading Havelock as I demolished an avocado pear and an excellent lasagne (for the restaurant was exclusively run by Italians though some of the kitchen staff were English). In between mouthfuls of pasta heavily laced with Parmesan cheese, I was reading Havelock on the different aspects of beauty in women, and what attracts and does not attract in different parts of the world. I came to a phrase used in Sicily which I suspected would provide much food for thought if only I had the remotest idea what it meant.

  * * * *

  Irritatingly, Havelock assumed that everyone spoke fluent Italian and so there was no footnote with a translation. I puzzled over the phrase for a moment and then recalled that the head waiter, Innocenzo, was from Sicily . Little realizing I was setting alight the fuse that led to a powder keg, I called him over to my table.