The Corfu Trilogy (56 page)

‘What a pity,’ said Aunt Fan, and before we could stop her she had led the puppies onto the other escalator and they disappeared once again into the bowels of the earth.

Once we had got rid of the puppies, in spite of feeling somewhat jaded by our experiences, we had quite a satisfactory morning’s shopping. Mother got all the things she needed, Margo got her yeast and maple syrup, and I, while they were purchasing these quite unnecessary items, managed to procure a beautiful red cardinal, a black-spotted salamander as fat and as shiny as an eiderdown, and a stuffed crocodile.

Each satisfied in our own way with our purchases, we returned to Balaklava Mansions.

At Margaret’s insistence, Mother had decided that she would attend the séance that evening.

‘Don’t do it, Louise dear,’ Cousin Prue said. ‘It’s dabbling with the unknown.’

Mother justified her action with a remarkable piece of logic.

‘I feel I ought to meet this Mawake person,’ she said to Prue. ‘After all, he’s giving Margo treatment.’

‘Well, dear,’ said Prue, seeing that Mother was adamant, ‘I think it’s madness, but I shall have to come with you. I can’t let you attend one of those things on your own.’

I begged to be allowed to go too, for, as I pointed out to Mother, I had some little time previously borrowed a book from Theodore on the art of exposing fake mediums, so I felt that my knowledge thus acquired might come in exceedingly useful.

‘I don’t think we ought to take Mummy,’ said Prue. ‘I think it might have a bad effect on her.’

So at six o’clock that evening, with Prue palpitating in our midst like a newly caught bird, we made our way down to Mrs Haddock’s basement room. Here we found quite a collection of people. There was Mrs Glut, the manageress of the hotel; a tall, saturnine Russian with an accent so thick that he sounded as though he were speaking through a mouthful of cheese; a young and very earnest blonde girl; and a vapid young man who, rumour had it, was studying to be an actor, but whom we had never seen do anything more strenuous than doze peacefully in the palm-fringed lounge. To my annoyance, Mother would not let me search the room before we started for hidden cords or fake ectoplasm. However, I did manage to tell Mrs Haddock about the book I had been reading, as I thought that if she was genuine it would be of interest to her. The look she bestowed upon me was anything but benevolent.

We sat in a circle holding hands and got off to a rather inauspicious start, since, as the lights were switched out, Prue uttered a piercing scream and leaped out of the chair she had been sitting in. It was discovered that the handbag she had leaned against the leg of the chair had slipped and touched her leg with a leathery clutch. When we had calmed Prue and assured her that she had not been assaulted by an evil spirit, we all returned to our chairs and held hands again. The illumination was from a night-light that guttered and blinked in a saucer and sent shadows rippling down the room and made our faces look as though they were newly arisen from a very old grave.

‘Now I don’t want any talking and I must ask you all to keep your hands firmly clasped so that we don’t lose any of the essence… Whaaaha,’ said Mrs Haddock. ‘I know there are unbelievers amongst us. Nevertheless I ask you to make your minds quiet and receptive.’

‘What does she mean?’ whispered Prue to Mother. ‘I’m not an unbeliever. My trouble is I believe
too much
.’

Having given us our instructions, Mrs Haddock then took up her position in an arm-chair, and with deceptive ease, went into
a trance. I watched her narrowly. I was determined not to miss the ectoplasm. At first she just sat there with her eyes closed, and there was no sound except for the rustle and quiver of the agitated Prue. Then Mrs Haddock started to breathe deeply; presently she began to snore richly and vibrantly. It sounded like a sack of potatoes being emptied across a loft floor. I was not impressed. Snoring, after all, was one of the easiest things to fake. Prue’s hand clutching mine was moist with perspiration and I could feel her shivers of apprehension running down her arm.

‘Ahaaaaa,’ said Mrs Haddock suddenly, and Prue leaped in her chair and uttered a small, despairing squeak as though she had been stabbed.

‘Ahaaaaaaaa,’ said Mrs Haddock, extracting the full dramatic possibilities from this simple utterance.

‘I don’t like it,’ whispered Prue shakily. ‘Louise, dear, I don’t like it.’

‘Be quiet or you’ll spoil it all,’ whispered Margo. ‘Relax, and make your mind receptive.’

‘I see strangers among us,’ said Mrs Haddock suddenly, with such a strong Indian accent that it made me want to giggle. ‘Strangers who have come to join our circle. To them I say “welcome”.’

The only extraordinary thing about this, as far as I was concerned, was that Mrs Haddock was no longer stringing her words together and no longer uttering that strange inhalation of breath. She mumbled and muttered for a moment or so, incomprehensibly, and then said clearly, ‘This is Mawake.’

‘Ooo!’ said Margaret, delighted. ‘He’s come! There you are, Mother! That’s Mawake!’

‘I think I’m going to faint,’ said Prue.

I stared at Mrs Haddock in the dim, shaky light and I could not see any signs of ectoplasm or trumpets.

‘Mawake says,’ announced Mrs Haddock, ‘that the white girl must have no more punctures.’

‘There!’ said Margaret triumphantly.

‘White girl must obey Mawake. Must not be influenced by disbelievers.’

I heard Mother snort belligerently in the gloom.

‘Mawake says that if white girl trusts him, before the coming of two moons she will be cured. Mawake says…’

But what Mawake was about to say was never vouchsafed to us, for, at that moment, a cat that had been drifting round the room, cloudlike and unobserved, jumped onto Prue’s lap. Her scream was deafening. She leaped to her feet shouting, ‘Louise, Louise, Louise!’ and blundered like a bedazzled moth round the circle of people, screaming every time she touched anything.

Somebody had the good sense to switch on the lights before Prue, in her chicken-like panic, could do any damage.

‘I say, it’s a bit much, what?’ said the vapid young man.

‘You may have done her great harm,’ said the girl, glaring at Prue and fanning Mrs Haddock with her handkerchief.

‘I was touched by something. It touched me. Got into my lap,’ said Prue tearfully. ‘Ectoplasm.’

‘You spoiled everything,’ said Margo angrily. ‘Just as Mawake was coming through.’

‘I think we have heard quite enough from Mawake,’ said Mother. ‘I think it’s high time you stopped fooling around with this nonsense.’

Mrs Haddock, who had remained snoring with dignity throughout this scene, suddenly woke up.

‘Nonsense,’ she said fixing her protuberant blue eyes on Mother. ‘You dare to callitnon sense?… Whaaaha.’

It was one of the very few occasions when I had seen Mother really annoyed. She drew herself up to her full height of 4 feet 3½ inches and bristled.

‘Charlatan,’ she said uncharitably to Mrs Haddock. ‘I said it was nonsense and it
is
nonsense. I am not having
my
family
mixed up in any jiggery-pokery like this. Come Margo, come Gerry, come Prue. We will leave.’

So astonished were we by this display of determination on the part of our normally placid mother, that we followed her meekly out of the room, leaving the raging Mrs Haddock and her several disciples.

As soon as we reached the sanctuary of our room, Margo burst into floods of tears.

‘You’ve spoiled it. You’ve spoiled it,’ she said, wringing her hands. ‘Mrs Haddock will never talk to us again.’

‘And a good job, too,’ said Mother grimly, pouring out a brandy for the twitching and still-distraught Prue.

‘Did you have a nice time?’ asked Aunt Fan, waking suddenly and beaming at us owlishly.

‘No,’ said Mother shortly, ‘we didn’t.’

‘I can’t get the thought of that ectoplasm out of my mind,’ said Prue, gulping brandy. ‘It was like a sort of… like… well, you know, squishy.’

‘Just as Mawake was coming through,’ howled Margo. ‘Just as he was going to tell us something
important
.’

‘I think you are wise to come back early,’ said Aunt Fan, ‘because even at this time of year it gets chilly in the evening.’

‘I felt sure it was coming for my throat,’ said Prue. ‘I felt it going for my throat. It was like a sort of… a kind of… well a squishy sort of
hand
thing.’

‘And Mawake’s the only one that’s done me any good.’

‘My father used to say that at this time of the year the weather can be very treacherous,’ said Aunt Fan.

‘Margo, stop behaving so stupidly,’ said Mother crossly.

‘And Louise dear, I could feel this horrible sort of squishy fingers groping up towards my throat,’ said Prue, ignoring Margo, busy with the embroidery of her experience.

‘My father always used to carry an umbrella, winter and
summer,’ said Aunt Fan. ‘People used to laugh at him, but many’s the time, even on quite hot days, when he found he needed it.’

‘You always
spoil
everything,’ said Margo. ‘You always interfere.’

‘The trouble is I don’t interfere enough,’ said Mother. ‘I’m telling you, you’re to stop all this nonsense, stop crying, and we are going back to Corfu immediately.’

‘If I hadn’t leaped up when I did,’ said Prue, ‘it would have fastened itself in my jugular.’

‘There’s nothing more useful than a pair of galoshes, my father used to say,’ said Aunt Fan.

‘I’m not going back to Corfu. I won’t. I won’t.’

‘You will do as you’re told.’

‘It wound itself round my throat in such an evil way.’

‘He never approved of gum-boots, because he said they sent the blood to the head.’

I had ceased listening. My whole being was flooded with excitement. We were going back to Corfu. We were leaving the gritty, soulless absurdity of London. We were going back to the enchanted olive groves and blue sea, to the warmth and laughter of our friends, to the long, golden, gentle days.

By May the olive-picking had been in progress for some time. The fruit had plumped and ripened throughout the hot summer days and now it fell and lay shining in the grass like a harvest of black pearls. The peasant women appeared in droves carrying tins and baskets on their heads. They would then crouch in circles round the base of the olive tree, chattering as shrilly as sparrows as they picked up the fruit and placed it in the containers. Some of the olive trees had been producing crops like this for five hundred years, and for five hundred years the peasants had been gathering the olives in precisely the same way.

It was a great time for gossip and for laughter. I used to move from tree to tree, joining the different groups, squatting on my haunches, helping them pick up the glossy olives, hearing gossip about all the relatives and friends of the olive-pickers and occasionally joining them as they ate under the trees, wolfing down the sour black bread and the little flat cakes wrapped in vine leaves that were made out of last season’s dried figs. Songs would be sung, and it was curious that the peasants’ voices, so sour and raucous in speech, could be plaintively sweet when raised in harmony together. At that time of year, with the yellow, waxy crocuses just starting to bubble up among the olive roots, and the banks purple with campanulas, the peasants gathered under the trees looked like a moving flower-bed and the songs would echo down the naves between the ancient olives, the sound as melancholy and as sweet as goat bells.

When the containers were piled high with the fruit, they would be hoisted up, and we would carry them down to the olive press in a long, chattering line. The olive press, a gaunt,
gloomy building, was down in a valley through which ran a tiny, glittering stream. The press was presided over by Papa Demetrios, a tough old man, as twisted and bent as the olive trees themselves, with a completely bald head and an enormous moustache, snow-white except where it was stained yellow by nicotine, and reputed to be the biggest moustache in the whole of Corfu. Papa Demetrios was a gruff, bad-tempered old man, but for some reason he took a fancy to me and we got along splendidly. He even allowed me into the holy of holies itself, the olive press.

Here was a great circular trough like an ornamental fishpond and mounted in it a gigantic grindstone with a central strut of wood jutting from it. This strut was harnessed to Papa Demetrios’ ancient horse, which, with a sack over its head so that it did not get giddy, would circle the trough, thus rolling the great grindstone round and round so that it could crush the olives as they were poured into it in a glinting cascade. As the olives were crushed, a sharp, sour smell rose in the air. The only sounds were the solid ploddings of the horse’s hooves and the rumbling of the great grindstone and the steady drip, drip of the oil trickling out of the vents of the trough, golden as distilled sunlight.

In one corner of the press was a huge black crumbling mound that was the residue from the grinding: the crushed seeds, pulp, and skin of the olives forming black crusty cakes, like coarse peat. It had a rich, sweet-sour smell that almost convinced you it was good to eat. It was in fact fed to the cattle and horses with their winter food and it was also used as a remarkably efficient, if somewhat over pungent, fuel.

Papa Demetrios, because of his bad temper, was left severely alone by the peasants, who would deliver their olives and depart from the press with all speed. For you were never certain whether anybody like Papa Demetrios might not have the evil eye. In consequence, the old man was lonely and so he welcomed my intrusion into his domain. From me he would get all the local
gossip: who had given birth and whether it was a boy or a girl; who was courting whom; and sometimes a more juicy item such as that Pepe Condos had been arrested for smuggling tobacco. In return for my acting as a sort of newspaper for him, Papa Demetrios would catch specimens for me. Sometimes it would be a pale-pink gulping gecko, or a praying mantis, or the caterpillar of an oleander hawk-moth, striped like a Persian carpet, pink and silver and green. It was Papa Demetrios who got me one of the most charming pets that I had at that time, a spade-footed toad, which I christened Augustus Tickletummy.