The Corfu Trilogy (25 page)

Mother always left until the last a fat letter, addressed in large, firm, well-rounded handwriting, which was the monthly instalment from Great-Aunt Hermione. Her letters invariably created an indignant uproar among the family, so we all put aside our mail and concentrated when Mother, with a sigh of resignation, unfurled the twenty-odd pages, settled herself comfortably, and began to read.

‘She says that the doctors don’t hold out much hope for her,’ observed Mother.

‘They haven’t held out any hope for her for the last forty years and she’s still as strong as an ox,’ said Larry.

‘She says she always thought it a little peculiar of us, rushing off to Greece like that, but they’ve just had a bad winter and she thinks that perhaps it was wise of us to choose such a salubrious climate.’

‘Salubrious! What a word to use!’

‘Oh, heavens!… Oh, no… oh, Lord!…’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘She says she wants to come and stay… the doctors have advised a warm climate!’

‘No, I refuse! I couldn’t bear it,’ shouted Larry, leaping to his feet; ‘it’s bad enough being shown Lugaretzia’s gums every morning, without having Great-Aunt Hermione dying by inches all over the place. You’ll have to put her off, Mother… tell her there’s no room.’

‘But I can’t, dear; I told her in the last letter what a big villa we had.’

‘She’s probably forgotten,’ said Leslie hopefully.

‘She hasn’t. She mentions it here… where is it?… oh, yes, here you are: “As you now seem able to afford such an extensive establishment, I am sure, Louie dear, that you would not
begrudge a small corner to an old woman who has not much longer to live.” There you are! What on earth can we
do?
’

‘Write and tell her we’ve got an epidemic of smallpox raging out here, and send her a photograph of Margo’s acne,’ suggested Larry.

‘Don’t be silly, dear. Besides, I told her how healthy it is here.’

‘Really, Mother, you are impossible!’ exclaimed Larry angrily. ‘I was looking forward to a nice quiet summer’s work, with just a few select friends, and now we’re going to be invaded by that evil old camel, smelling of mothballs and singing hymns in the lavatory.’

‘Really, dear, you do
exaggerate
. And I don’t know why you have to bring lavatories into it – I’ve never heard her sing hymns anywhere.’

‘She does nothing else
but
sing hymns… “Lead, Kindly Light,” while everyone queues on the landing.’

‘Well, anyway, we’ve got to think of a good excuse. I can’t write and tell her we don’t want her because she sings hymns.’

‘Why not?’

‘Don’t be unreasonable, dear; after all, she
is
a relation.’

‘What on earth’s that got to do with it? Why should we have to fawn all over the old hag because she’s a relation, when the really sensible thing to do would be to burn her at the stake.’

‘She’s not as bad as that,’ protested Mother half-heartedly.

‘My dear mother, of all the foul relatives with which we are cluttered, she is definitely the worst. Why you keep in touch which her I cannot, for the life of me, imagine.’

‘Well, I’ve got to answer her
letters
, haven’t I?’

‘Why? Just write “Gone away” across them and send them back.’

‘I couldn’t do that, dear; they’d recognize my handwriting,’ said Mother vaguely; ‘besides, I’ve opened this now.’

‘Can’t one of us write and say you’re ill?’ suggested Margo.

‘Yes, we’ll say the doctors have given up hope,’ said Leslie.

‘
I’ll
write the letter,’ said Larry with relish. ‘I’ll get one of those lovely black-edged envelopes… that will add an air of verisimilitude to the whole thing.’

‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ said Mother firmly. ‘If you did that she’d come straight out to nurse me. You know what she is.’

‘Why keep in touch with them? That’s what I want to know,’ asked Larry despairingly. ‘What satisfaction does it give you? They’re all either fossilized or mental.’

‘Indeed, they’re
not
mental,’ said Mother indignantly.

‘Nonsense, Mother… Look at Aunt Bertha, keeping flocks of imaginary cats… and there’s Great-Uncle Patrick, who wanders about nude and tells complete strangers how he killed whales with a penknife… They’re
all
bats.’

‘Well, they’re
queer
; but they’re all very old, and so they’re bound to be. But they’re not
mental
,’ explained Mother, adding candidly, ‘Anyway, not enough to be put away.’

‘Well, if we’re going to be invaded by relations, there’s only one thing to do,’ said Larry resignedly.

‘What’s that?’ inquired Mother, peering over her spectacles expectantly.

‘We must move, of course.’

‘Move? Move where?’ asked Mother, bewildered.

‘Move to a smaller villa. Then you can write to all these zombies and tell them we haven’t any room.’

‘But don’t be stupid, Larry. We can’t
keep
moving. We moved here in order to cope with your friends.’

‘Well, now we’ll have to move to cope with the relations.’

‘But we can’t
keep
rushing to and fro about the island. People will think we’ve gone mad.’

‘They’ll think we’re even madder if that old harpy turns up. Honestly, Mother, I couldn’t stand it if she came. I should probably borrow one of Leslie’s guns and blow a hole in her corsets.’

‘Larry! I do wish you
wouldn’t
say things like that in front of Gerry.’

‘I’m just warning you.’

There was a pause, while Mother polished her spectacles feverishly.

‘But it seems so… so…
eccentric
to keep changing villas like that, dear,’ she said at last.

‘There’s nothing eccentric about it,’ said Larry, surprised; ‘it’s a perfectly logical thing to do.’

‘Of course it is,’ agreed Leslie; ‘it’s a sort of self-defence, anyway.’

‘Do be sensible, Mother,’ said Margo; ‘after all, a change is as good as a feast.’

So, bearing that novel proverb in mind, we moved.

As long liveth the merry man (they say)
As doth the sorry man, and longer by a day.

–
UDALL
,
Ralph Roister Doister

Perched on a hill-top among olive trees, the new villa, white as snow, had a broad veranda running along one side, which was hung with a thick pelmet of grape-vine. In front of the house was a pocket-handkerchief-sized garden, neatly walled, which was a solid tangle of wild flowers. The whole garden was overshadowed by a large magnolia tree, the glossy dark green leaves of which cast a deep shadow. The rutted driveway wound away from the house, down the hillside through olive groves, vineyards, and orchards, before reaching the road. We had liked the villa the moment Spiro had shown it to us. It stood, decrepit but immensely elegant, among the drunken olives, and looked rather like an eighteenth-century exquisite reclining among a congregation of charladies. Its charms had been greatly enhanced, from my point of view, by the discovery of a bat in one of the rooms, clinging upside down to a shutter and chittering with dark malevolence. I had hoped that he would continue to spend the day in the house, but as soon as we moved in he decided that the place was getting overcrowded and departed to some peaceful olive trunk. I regretted his decision, but, having many other things to occupy me, I soon forgot about him.

It was at the white villa that I got on really intimate terms with the mantids; up till then I had seen them, occasionally, prowling through the myrtles, but I had never taken very much notice of them. Now they forced me to take notice of them, for the hill-top on which the villa stood contained hundreds, and most of them were much larger than any I had seen before. They squatted disdainfully on the olives, among the myrtles, on the smooth green magnolia leaves, and at night they would converge
on the house whirring into the lamplight with their green wings churning like the wheels of ancient paddle-steamers, to alight on the tables or chairs and stalk mincingly about, turning their heads from side to side in search of prey, regarding us fixedly from bulbous eyes in chinless faces. I had never realized before that mantids could grow so large, for some of the specimens that visited us were fully four and a half inches long; these monsters feared nothing, and would, without hesitation, attack something as big as or bigger than themselves. These insects seemed to consider that the house was their property, and the walls and ceilings their legitimate hunting grounds. But the geckos that lived in the cracks in the garden wall also considered the house their hunting ground, and so the mantids and the geckos waged a constant war against each other. Most of the battles were mere skirmishes between individual members of the two forms of animals, but as they were generally well matched the fights rarely came to much. Occasionally, however, there would be a battle really worth watching. I was lucky enough to have a grandstand view of such a fight, for it took place above, on, and in my bed.

During the day most of the geckos lived under the loose plaster on the garden wall. As the sun sank and the cool shadow of the magnolia tree enveloped the house and garden they would appear, thrusting their small heads out of the cracks and staring interestedly around with their golden eyes. Gradually they slid out into the wall, their flat bodies and stubby, almost conical tails looking ash-grey in the twilight. They would move cautiously across the moss-patched wall until they reached the safety of the vine over the veranda, and there wait patiently until the sky grew dark and the lamps were lit. Then they would choose their hunting areas and make their way to them across the wall of the house, some to the bedrooms, some to the kitchen, while others remained on the veranda among the vine leaves.

There was a particular gecko that had taken over my bedroom as his hunting ground, and I grew to know him quite well and
christened him Geronimo, since his assaults on the insect life seemed to me as cunning and well planned as anything that famous Red Indian had achieved. Geronimo seemed to be a cut above the other geckos. To begin with, he lived alone, under a large stone in the zinnia bed beneath my window, and he would not tolerate another gecko anywhere near his home; nor, for that matter, would he allow any strange gecko to enter my bedroom. He rose earlier than the others of his kind, coming out from beneath his stone while the wall and house were still suffused with pale sunset light. He would scuttle up the flaky white plaster precipice until he reached my bedroom window, and poke his head over the sill, peering about curiously and nodding his head rapidly, two or three times, whether in greeting to me or in satisfaction at finding the room as he had left it, I could never make up my mind. He would sit on the windowsill, gulping to himself, until it got dark and a light was brought in; in the lamp’s golden gleam he seemed to change colour, from ash-grey to a pale, translucent pinky-pearl that made his neat pattern of goose-pimples stand out, and made his skin look so fine and thin that you felt it should be transparent so that you could see the viscera, coiled neatly as a butterfly’s proboscis, in his fat tummy. His eyes glowing with enthusiasm, he would waddle up the wall to his favourite spot, the left-hand outside corner of the ceiling, and hang there upside down, waiting for his evening meal to appear.

The food was not long in arriving. The first shoal of gnats, mosquitoes, and lady-birds, which Geronimo ignored, was very soon followed by the daddy-longlegs, the lacewing flies, the smaller moths, and some of the more robust beetles. Watching Geronimo’s stalking tactics was quite an education. A lacewing or a moth, having spun round the lamp until it was dizzy, would flutter up and settle on the ceiling in the white circle of lamplight printed there. Geronimo, hanging upside down in his corner, would stiffen. He would nod his head two or three times very
rapidly, and then start to edge across the ceiling cautiously, millimetre by millimetre, his bright eyes on the insect in a fixed stare. Slowly he would slide over the plaster until he was six inches or so away from his prey, whereupon he stopped for a second and you could see his padded toes moving as he made his grip on the plaster more secure. His eyes would become more protuberant with excitement, what he imagined to be a look of blood-curdling ferocity would spread over his face, the tip of his tail would twitch minutely, and then he would skim across the ceiling as smoothly as a drop of water, there would be a faint snap, and he would turn round, an expression of smug happiness on his face, the lacewing inside his mouth with its legs and wings trailing over his lips like a strange, quivering walrus moustache. He would wag his tail vigorously, like an excited puppy, and then trot back to his resting place to consume his meal in comfort. He had incredibly sharp eyesight, for I frequently saw him spot a minute moth from the other side of the room and circle the ceiling in order to get near enough for the capture.

His attitude towards rivals who tried to usurp his territory was very straightforward. No sooner had they hauled themselves over the edge of the sill and settled down for a short rest after the long climb up the side of the villa, than there would be a scuffling noise, and Geronimo would flash across the ceiling and down the wall, to land on the window-sill with a faint thump. Before the newcomer could make a move, Geronimo would rush forward and leap on him. The curious thing was that, unlike the other geckos, he did not attack the head or body of his enemy. He made straight for his opponent’s tail, and seizing it in his mouth, about half an inch from the tip, he would hang on like a bulldog and shake it from side to side. The newcomer, unnerved by this dastardly and unusual mode of attack, immediately took refuge in the time-honoured protective device of the lizards: he would drop his tail and scuttle over the edge of the sill and down the wall to the zinnia bed as fast as he could. Geronimo, panting
a little from the exertion, would be left standing triumphantly on the sill, his opponent’s tail hanging out of his mouth and thrashing to and fro like a snake. Having made sure his rival had departed, Geronimo would then settle down and proceed to eat the tail, a disgusting habit of which I strongly disapproved. However, it was apparently his way of celebrating a victory, and he was not really happy until the tail was safely inside his bulging stomach.