The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium

by Gerald Malcolm Durrell

  “It is notta few love-bitas,” he said, indignantly. “She issa sadism.

  “A sadist,” I corrected.

  “She’s thatta too,” he agreed.

  “But love-bites are very common,” I explained. “They are really a sign of affection, of love.”

  He glanced round once more to make sure we were alone, then unbuttoned his shirt.

  “Issa thissa love, or is she sadism?” he enquired, displaying to me a chest covered with an astrakhan-like pelt of fur, through which could be seen several neat red circles of teeth marks. In several places the skin had been broken, and at one point a piece of sticking-plaster was applied.

  “Well, it may be painful,” I commented, “but I don’t really think it qualifies as sadism.”

  “No?” he queried, indignantly. “Whatta you wanta that she should do? Eata me?”

  “Why don’t you bite her back?” I suggested.

  “I cannot do. She would not like it.”

  He certainly seemed to have a problem and his chief problem was that he had no idea what a real sadist was.

  “Would you like to borrow the book that talks about sadism?” I asked. “Would that help?”

  “Yessa,” he beamed. “Then I reada it to her, and she will see she is a sadism.”

  Well, I wouldn’t read it all to her,” I said, in a precautionary way. “After all, you don’t want to start her on whips and things.”

  “I reada it first,” he said, after a moment’s thought.

  “Yes, I would just censor it first if I were you. I’ll bring it down this evening, Giovanni.”

  “Thanka you, Mr Durrell,” he said, and bowed me out while re-buttoning his shirt.

  Two days later, he returned the book, looking worried.

  “Is all aright,” he whispered.

  “Good,” I said. “What happened?”

  “She thoughta when I’m reading her these things he say, thata I wants to do it to her. So she say, ‘no, no way’. So I say ‘you willa give up being sadism, and I willa too’.”

  “And she agreed?”

  “Yessa. She agree.”

  “And does it work?”

  “Lasts night,” he said, closing one eye and looking at me. “Lasta night, she was gentle like a bird, like a beautiful bird . . . so softa.”

  “Very nice,” I said.

  “No. She is angry with me.”

  “Why?” I asked, puzzled.

  “She was so beautiful, so softa, so gentle, that I bit-a her,” he confessed. “Now she say she no sleepa with me again.”

  “She’ll change her mind,” I reassured him, comfortingly. But he looked doubtful, and by the time I left the hotel his beautiful biter had not given in to his importuning.

  In the unfortunate case of the kitchen porter and the cellar-man, I was, quite unwittingly (with the aid of Havelock), the cause of some upset, of which, I am glad to say, the only really detrimental aspect was that the soup of the day, minestrone, was burnt black. It started because I’d found a short-cut through the cellars underneath the hotel, which led me straight out on to the cliffs instead of having to walk along miles of road. Here, since my short-cut led past the dustbins, I would frequently meet the kitchen porter or the cellarman. The porter was a nice Irish lad, with a lazy smile, very blue eyes, a crop of auburn hair and a face freckled as thickly as a blackbird’s egg. In direct contrast, the cellarman was a rather dark, saturnine individual, whose face, in repose, looked sulky but was transfigured when he smiled. He had a most attractive, deep, husky voice with a real Dorset accent. The news of my apparent endless fund of sexual knowledge (as represented by Havelock Ellis), filtered down into the cellars and both these attractive young men brought their troubles to me. The first one was the cellarman, David.

  “You see, sur,” he confessed, blushing slightly. “I think she’s bloody wonderful. ’ Ur knows I do; ’ ur knows I want to marry ’ ur . But ’ ur won’ let me do it, sur. Not no which way. But ’ ur durn’t want me to do it with anyone else, see? Not tha’ I want to, understand? But what I say is, either she do it wi’ me, or I does it wi’ some’un else. Fair’s fair, sur, don’ you think?”

  “She thinks abstinence makes the heart grow fonder,” I said, and regretted it when he gave me a reproachful look.

  “It’s no jokin’ matter, stir. It’s gettin’ me down, “onest. I wunnered if thur was anythin’ in your book, like, I could give ’ ur to read? Sort of, well . . . encourage ’ ur, I suppose.”

  “I’ll lend you the volume on sexual education and abstinence,” I promised. “Though I don’t guarantee the results.”

  “Of course not, sur. I unnerstand,” he said. “I jus’ want somethin’ to git ’ ur started, like.”

  So I lent him volume six.

  Next, I was approached by the auburn-haired Michael. He had exactly the same problem with his girl-friend. I reflected that we were supposed to live in a promiscuous and permissive society, and yet everyone in the hotel seemed to behave like early Victorians. Certainly the girls appeared to cling to their maidenheads with the tenacity of limpets.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to wait in the queue, Michael,” I said. “I have just lent the volume you want to David.”

  “Oh, him. Sure, he’s a bloody wash-out,” said Michael. “I didn’t even know he had a girl. He doesn’t even look as though he’d the strength for a pee, let alone anything else.”

  “Well, he has a girl, and he’s suffering just as you are. So, show some sympathy.”

  “It’s sympathy I’m needing,” he replied. “This girl’s driving me mad. She’s ruining me health. Even me religion is suffering and that’s a terrible thing to do to an Irishman.”

  “How is she affecting your religion?” I asked, astonished by this revelation.

  “Sure, an’ I’ve nothing to confess,” he said, indignantly.”And Father O’Malley won’t believe me. The other day, he asked me what I had to confess, and when I said ‘nothing, Father’, he told me to say fifty Hail Marys for lying. The shame of it!”

  “I’ll give you the book the moment I get it back,” I promised. “With luck, it might help you and David.”

  How was I to know that they were courting the same girl, since neither of them knew it either?

  I had been for a walk along the cliffs, visiting that monstrously macabre monument to bad taste, the Russell Coates Museum and Art Gallery, and was taking my short-cut back into the hotel when I came upon an arresting tableau. Michael and David faced each other, each puce in the face, Michael with a bleeding nose and David with a cut on his forehead, being held back from attacking each other again by the rotund chef and his second-in-command. Face downwards on the ground lay my precious copy of Havelock, and nearby lay the trampled, blood-stained chef’s hat and the wickedly sharp meat cleaver. I rescued my book as the two antagonists still strained to get at each other and yelled abuse. I gathered, from the in-coherent mouthings of both of them, that Michael had been shown Havelock by his girl-friend and, knowing it could only have come from one source, had laid in wait for David and chased him with the meat cleaver. David, being agile, had dodged the cleaver, hit Michael on the nose, and run for it. Michael had flung a bottle at him and hit him on the forehead. Before they could get to grips, however, they had been pulled apart by the two chefs.

  “Don’t you think you are behaving stupidly?” I enquired.

  “Stupidly?” roared Michael. “With that creeping Protestant toad giving filthy books to my Angela!”

  “Your Angela!” snarled David. “ ’ Ur ’s not your Angela; ’ ur ’s as good as said she’ll marry me. An’ it’s not a filthy book, neither. It’s Mr Durrell’s.”

  “She wouldn’t marry you, you Protestant carrion. And if that’s not a filthy book, may I never breathe again,” said Michael. “If you’ll excuse me sayin’ so, Mr Durrell, you ought to feel a wave of shame, so you ought, at having helped this conniving bastard to try and despoil one of the fairest and daintiest girls I’ve ever se
en outside Ireland . May God strike me dead if it’s not the truth.”

  “But you wanted to borrow the book to give to Angela yourself,” I pointed out.

  “Sure! An’ it’s all right for me; I’m her fiancé,” said Michael.

  I knew better than to argue with Irish logic.

  “Listen,” I said. “I don’t mind you fighting and killing each other; that’s your affair. You’re both equally guilty, since you both wanted the book for the purpose of getting Angela to bed. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. I will not have my property flung about like this. If I report this to the manager, then you’d both get the sack and neither of you would be able to many Angela. Anyway, I don’t think either of you stand a chance. I saw her out at dinner last night with Nigel Merryweather.”

  Nigel was a handsome young director of the hotel.

  “Nigel Merryweather?” said Michael. “That swine! What’s she doin’ with him?”

  “Merryweather?” said David. “She said ’ ur didn’t like ’im.”

  “Yes,” agreed Michael. “She said he made her feel sick.”

  “Well, there you are,” I concluded. “It looks as though you’ve both had it.”

  “That settles it,” said Michael. “I’ve finished with women. Like a bleedin’ monk I’ll be livin’ from now on.”

  “After all I did for ’ ur,” complained David. “To play me false with Merryweather, who makes ’ ur feel sick, like she told me.”

  A strong smell of burning now started to emanate from the kitchen.

  “Holy Mary, Mother of God!” said Michael.

  “My minestrone! My minestrone! You bloody bog Irish,” screamed the chef, and he grabbed Michael’s arm and hauled him back into the kitchen at a run.

  The second chef, Charlie, a rubicund cockney from Hammersmith, relinquished his hold on the other heart-broken lover.

  “I don’t know what to think about ’ ur, I really don’t,” said David.

  “Don’t think,” I advised. “Go and have a drink and tell Luigi to put it on my bill.”

  “You’re very kind, sur,” he said, brightening, as he moved towards the upper floors and the bar.

  “Lucky you came along when you did,” said Charlie, when David had disappeared. “They were all set to kill each other, silly idiots — using a bleedin’ meat cleaver, an’ all.”

  “Tell me,” I asked, “who is Angela?”

  Charlie stared at me for a moment. “You mean to say.” he began. Then he started to laugh.

  “Well, I had to say something,” I explained, “or we’d have been here all day.”

  “An’ I suppose you. never seen no Nigel Merryweather neither?” he chortled.

  “I haven’t seen him,” I said, “but I was told he was the most handsome of the younger directors, with something of an eye for the girls, and no shortage of cash.”

  “Quite right,” said Charlie. “A regular gun dog, ’e is.”

  “Gun dog?” I asked, puzzled.

  “Ah, yes, you know, always after the birds,”

  “Yes,” I agreed. Gun dog. What a good description. Well, all’s well that ends well.”

  “Tell me,” said Charlie. Wot was that book they was all so excited about?”

  I explained. “It’s an excellent series of volumes when used properly,” I said, “but in this place, everyone who reads them seems to go berserk.”

  “Would it give advice on marriage in wot one would call an . . . intimate way?” asked Charlie, a pensive look in his eye.

  My heart sank. “Well . . . yes,” I said, “but you must remember that it’s sort of a text-book really.”

  “Yes,” went on Charlie. “It might be just wot I want. A textbook — like a school-book, you might say?”

  “Oh, dear. Are you sure?”

  “Well,” said Charlie confidentially. “Me an’ the missus ’aven’t been rubbin’ along too sharp recently. She’s been a bit depressed, like — an’ a bit naggy, if you get my meaning. Nothin’s right. She went to see one of those blue phonographic films a couple o’ weeks back, an’ now she says I don’t do it right. She says it’s the same old way every time and it’s drivin’ ’er mad. She says I ’aven’t got no imagination. I told ’er she wasn’t no Kama-bleedin’-Sutra, neither — but she says it’s all my fault.”

  “Well, it could be.”

  “Now, this book of yours . . . does it tell you about them things? You know, different ways, and such like?”

  “Yes,” I said, cautiously.

  “Well, then — can I borrow it for a bit?” he pleaded. “To improve me technique, like?”

  How could I resist this pudgy, middle-aged man pleading for the text-book to improve his passionate overtures to his wife? It would have been sheer cruelty.

  “All right,” I said, resignedly. “I’ll lend you volume two.”

  “Thank you, sir.” He grinned. “Con I’ll bet this’ll liven the old girl up. I’ll bet she’ll be ever so pleased.”

  He was wrong. Two days later, as I was having lunch, he limped out of the kitchen and came over to my table, carrying volume two. His right eye was half-closed and swollen and of an interesting series of colours ranging from purple on his cheekbone to scarlet and pink around his eyebrow.

  “Hello,” I said. “What have you done to your eye?”

  He laid Havelock on the table with care.

  “I never done it,” he said. “It’s the old woman wot’s done it. After all that nag, nag about bleedin’ sex, she up and catches me a wollop like a bleedin’ pile-driver. And d’you know why, sir?”

  “Why?” I asked, fascinated.

  He sighed, the weary sigh of a man faced by a woman’s logic. “ ’Cos I brought a dirty book into the house, sir. That’s why,” he said.

  I decided that Havelock had caused quite enough problems and so I would call in all the volumes I had out on loan. Besides, I was leaving in twenty-four hours and, such was the success of Havelock as light reading, I was afraid that I might not get all the books back.

  I had just been round the hotel leaving messages for Dennis, Gavin and Stella (a chambermaid who was worried about her boy-friend: “All ’e ever thinks about is sex. Honest, ’e doesn’t even take an interest in football.”), when I ran into the manager, Mr Weatherstone-Thompson.

  “Ah! Good afternoon, Mr Durrell,” he said. “I understand that you are leaving us the day after tomorrow?”

  “Yes, alas,” I said, “I have to get back to Jersey .”

  “Of course, of course, you must be so busy with all your gorillas and things,” he laughed unctuously. “But we have enjoyed having you here.”

  “And I’ve enjoyed being here,” I replied, backing towards the lift.

  “And the staff will all miss you,” said Mr Weatherstone-Thompson, adroitly getting between me and the lift, “and I they will even miss your little . . . Ha, ha! . . . library.”

  I groaned inwardly, Mr Weatherstone-Thompson was an overweight, wheezing, always-slightly-moist fifty, who smelt strongly of whisky, Parma violets and cheap cigars. He was married to a suicide blonde (dyed by her own hand) some twenty-five years his junior. She did not just have an eye for the men, she had a seine net out for them. Mr Weatherstone-Thompson had problems, but I was not going to let him borrow Havelock to solve them. Skilfully, I got round him and in line with the lift again.

  “Oh, yes, Havelock Ellis,” I said. “A most interesting series of volumes.”

  “I’m sure, I’m sure,” said Mr Weatherstone-Thompson eagerly. “I was wondering if perhaps, when the rest of the staff have finished . . . er . . . drinking at this fountain of knowledge, if I might . . .”

  “Oh, what a pity!” I said, remorsefully. “You should have told me before. I’ve just packed them up and sent them on ahead to Jersey .”

  His disappointment was pathetic, but I hardened my heart. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, well. Never mind. It can’t be helped. What I always say is that that sort of book is interesting in its way, but re
ally, if you’re an experienced man like you and I are . . . well, there’s not much it can teach us.”

  “No, indeed,” I said, “I should think it would take more than a book to add to your knowledge.”

  Mr Weatherstone-Thompson laughed and his eyes brightened as he mentally reviewed his imaginary prowess.

  “Well, I’ll not deny I’ve had my moments,” he said, chuckling.

  “I’m sure you have,” I agreed, as I got into the lift. “In fact. you should be writing the books, not reading them.”

  I left him (Casanova, Mark Antony, Ramon Navarro rolled into one) laughing protestingly at my compliment to his powers as a seducer.

  By the following morning I had retrieved all my Havelock Ellis except the one I had lent to Gavin. Havelock, I found, was still weaving his spell. Dennis confessed that he was now thoroughly confused. Before Havelock, he had always thought there was only one sort of sex and that was chaste and pure. Stella said that, instead of Havelock making her boy-friend take an interest in football, it made him worse than ever, and she had had a terrible time the previous night retaining her virginity.

  It only remained to get back the volume I had lent Gavin. This was the one dealing with normal sex, since Gavin had been working his way steadily through all nine volumes. They told me that he had gone up to Sheffield for the week-end but was due back the Monday morning I was supposed to leave.

  The morning of my departure dawned bright and clear and I was awakened by the door of the passage-way leading into the suite opening, followed by a thump. Then the door closed again. I thought perhaps they had brought my breakfast.

  “Come in,” I called sleepily, but there was no response. I decided it was probably some over-enthusiastic chambermaid, waiting to do out the room at the crack of dawn, rolled over and went back to sleep again.

  It was not until I got up later to go and have a bath that I saw the copy of Havelock Ellis lying just inside the doorway in the hall. So it had been Gavin I had heard, returning volume eight. As I picked it up, a note fell out.

  “Thanks for book,” it said. “Wish I’d never borrowed the bloody thing. Lent it to Rupert and got back to find him in my bed with a girl. Am giving up sex. Yours truly, Gavin.”