The Corfu Trilogy (74 page)

‘Yes,’ said Leslie solemnly, ‘hundreds of them.’

‘Did you know there were flamingoes, Theodore?’ asked Mother.

‘I… er… you know… caught a glimpse of them down on Lake Hakiopoulos,’ said Theodore, not deviating from the truth but omitting to mention that this had been three years previously and the only time flamingoes had ever visited Corfu. I had a handful of pink feathers to commemorate it.

‘Jee-hovah!’ said Lumy Lover. ‘Could we catch a glimpse of them, Les, dear? D’you suppose we could sneak up on them?’

‘Sure,’ said Leslie airily, ‘easiest thing in the world. They migrate over the same route every day.’

The following morning Leslie came into my room carrying what looked like a strange form of trumpet made out of a cow’s horn. I asked him what it was and he grinned.

‘It’s a flamingo decoy,’ he said with satisfaction.

I was deeply interested and said I had never heard of a flamingo decoy.

‘Neither have I,’ Leslie admitted. ‘It’s an old cow’s horn powder
container, for muzzle-loaders, you know. But the end’s broken off so you can blow on it.’

By way of illustration, he raised the pointed end of the cow’s horn to his lips and blew. The horn produced a long, sonorous sound somewhere between a foghorn and a raspberry, with very vibrant overtones. I listened critically and said that it did not sound a bit like a flamingo.

‘Yes, but I bet Lumy Lover and Harry Honey don’t know that,’ said Leslie. ‘Now all I need is to borrow your flamingo feathers.’

I was somewhat reluctant to part with such rare specimens from my collection until Leslie explained why he wanted them and promised that they would come to no harm.

At ten o’clock Lumy and Harry appeared, having been dressed by Leslie for flamingo hunting. Each wore a large straw hat and gumboots, for, as Leslie explained, we might have to follow the flamingoes into the swamps. Lumy and Harry were flushed and excited at the prospect of this adventure and their enthusiasm when Leslie demonstrated the flamingo decoy knew no bounds. They blew such resounding blasts on it that the dogs went mad and howled and barked and Larry, furious, leaned out of his bedroom window and said that if we were all going to carry on like a meet of the bloody Quorn hunt he was going to move.

‘And you’re old enough to know better!’ was his parting shot as he slammed the window, addressed to Mother who had just joined us to see what the noise was all about.

We eventually got our bold hunters into the field and walked them about two miles, by which time their enthusiasm for flamingo hunting was on the wane. Then we scrambled them up to the top of an almost inaccessible hillock, stationed them inside a bramble bush and told them to keep calling to attract the flamingoes. For half an hour they blew on the horn in turns with great dedication, but their wind started to give out. Towards the
end the noise they were making was beginning to sound more like the despairing cry of a mortally wounded bull elephant than anything in the bird line.

Then it was my turn. Panting and excited, I rushed up the hillock and told our hunters that their efforts had not been in vain. The flamingoes had indeed responded but, unfortunately, they had settled in a valley below a hill half a mile to the east. If they hurried there, they would find Leslie waiting. I was lost in admiration at their American tenacity. Thumping along in their ill-fitting gumboots, they galloped off to the farther hill, pausing periodically as per my instructions to blow gaspingly on the flamingo decoy. When, in an ocean of sweat, they reached the top of the hill, they found Leslie. He said that if they remained there and continued to blow on the decoy he would make his way around the valley and drive the flamingoes up to them. He gave them his gun and game bag so that, as he explained, he could stalk more easily. Then he faded away.

It was at this point that our favourite policeman, Filimona Kontakosa entered the act. Filimona was without doubt the fattest and most somnambulistic of all the Corfu policemen; he had been in the force for thirty-odd years and owed his lack of promotion to the fact that he had never made an arrest. He had explained to us at great length that he was, in fact, physically incapable of doing so; the mere thought of being harsh to a criminal would fill his pansy-dark eyes with tears, and on feast days the slightest sign of altercation among the wine-happy villagers and you could see him waddling resolutely in the opposite direction. He preferred to lead a gentle life and every fortnight or so he would pay us a visit to admire Leslie’s gun collection (for which we had no permits) and bring gifts of smuggled tobacco to Larry, flowers to Mother and Margo, and sugared almonds to me. He had, in his youth, been a deck hand on a cargo boat and had acquired a tenuous command of the English language, and this, combined with the fact that all Corfiotes
adore practical jokes, made him perfect for our purposes. He rose to the occasion magnificently.

He waddled to the top of the hill, resplendent in his uniform, every kilo of him looking the personification of law and order and a credit to the force. He found our hunters blowing in a desultory fashion on their decoy. Benignly, he asked them what they were doing. Responding to kindness like two puppies, Lumy Lover and Harry Honey were only too delighted to compliment Filimona on his truncated English and explain matters to him. To the Americans’ consternation, he suddenly changed from a kindly, twinkling, fat policeman to the cold, brutal personification of officialdom.

‘You no know flamongoes you no shoot?’ he snapped at them. ‘Is forbidden to shoot flamongoes!’

‘But, darling, we’re not shooting them,’ said Lumy Lover falteringly. ‘We only want to
see
them.’

‘Yes. Gee, you got it all wrong,’ said Harry Honey ingratiatingly. ‘We don’ wanna shoot the little fellas; we just wanna see ’em. No shoot, see?’

‘If you no shoot, why you have gun?’ asked Filimona.

‘Oh, that,’ said Lumy Lover, reddening. ‘That belongs to a friend of ours… er… amigo… savvy?’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Harry Honey, ‘friend of ours. Les Durrell. Maybe you know him? He’s well known around these parts.’

Filimona stared at them coldly and implacably.

‘I no know this friend,’ he said at last. ‘Please to open bag.’

‘Well, now, steady on, see here,’ protested Lumy Lover. ‘This isn’t
our
bag, officer.’

‘No, no,’ said Harry Honey. ‘It belongs to this friend of ours, Durrell.’

‘You have gun. You have bag,’ Filimona pointed out. ‘Please to open bag.’

‘Well, I must say I think you’re exceeding your duty just a tiny bit, officer, I really do,’ said Lumy Lover, while Harry Honey
nodded eager assent. ‘But if it’ll make you feel any easier, well then, I don’t suppose there’s much harm in letting you have a little peek.’

He wrestled briefly with the straps of the bag, opened it, and handed it to Filimona. The policeman peered into it, gave a triumphant grunt, and pulled from the interior the plucked and headless body of a chicken to which were adhering numerous bright pink feathers. Both the stalwart flamingo hunters went white with emotion.

‘But see here now… er… wait a moment…’ Lumy Lover began, and his voice trailed away before Filimona’s accusing look.

‘Is forbidden shoot flamongo, I tell you,’ said Filimona. ‘I arrest you both.’

He herded them, alarmed and protesting, down to the village police station and kept them there for several hours, during which they nearly went mad writing out statements and getting so muddled through nerves and frustration that they kept contradicting each other’s stories. To add to their alarm Leslie and I had assembled a crowd of our village friends who shouted and roared in the terrifying way Greeks have, periodically bellowing ‘Flamongo!’ and throwing the odd stone at the police station.

Eventually Filimona allowed his captives to send a note to Larry, who stormed down into the village, told Filimona it would be more to the point if he caught some evil-doers rather than indulged in practical jokes, and brought our two flamingo hunters back to the bosom of the family.

‘This has got to stop!’ said Larry angrily. ‘I will not have my guests subjected to ill-bred japes perpetrated by a pair of half-witted brothers.’

I must say Lumy Lover and Harry Honey were wonderful.

‘Don’t be angry, Larry darling,’ said Lumy Lover. ‘It’s just high spirits. It’s just as much our fault as Les’.’

‘Yes,’ said Harry Honey. ‘Lumy’s right. It’s our fault for being so gullible, silly old us.’

To show that there was no ill-feeling, they even went down to the town and brought back a crate of champagne to have a party and they went down to the village themselves to fetch Filimona up to the house for it. They sat on the terrace, one on each side of the policeman, toasting him coyly in champagne while Filimona, in a surprisingly good tenor, sang love songs that brightened his great dark eyes with tears.

‘You know,’ Lumy Lover confided to Larry at the height of the party, ‘he’d be really very good looking if he went on a diet. But don’t tell Harry I said so, darling, will you?’

Behold, the Heavens do open, the Gods look down and the unnatural scene they laugh at.

– S
HAKESPEARE
,
Coriolanus

The island lay bent like a misshapen bow, its two tips nearly touching the Greek and Albanian coastlines, and the blue waters of the Ionian Sea were caught in its curve like a blue lake. Outside our villa was a wide flagstoned veranda roofed with an ancient vine from which the great green clusters of grapes hung like chandeliers; from here one looked out over the sunken garden full of tangerine trees and the silver-green olive groves to the sea, blue and smooth as a flower petal.

In fine weather we always had our meals on the veranda at the rickety marble-topped table and it was here that all the major family decisions were taken. It was at breakfast that there was liable to be most acrimony and dissension, for it was then that letters, if any, were read and plans for the day made, remade, and discarded; it was during these early morning sessions that the family fortunes were organized, albeit haphazardly, so that a simple request for an omelet might end in a three-month camping expedition to a remote beach, as had happened on one occasion. So when we assembled in the brittle morning light we were never quite sure how the day was going to get on its feet. To begin with, one had to step warily for tempers were fragile but, gradually, under the influence of tea, coffee, toast, home-made marmalade, eggs and bowls of fruit, a lessening of the early
morning tension would be felt and a more benign atmosphere begin to permeate the veranda.

The morning that heralded the arrival of the Count among us was no different from any other. We had all reached the final cup of coffee stage and each was busy with his own thoughts; Margo, my sister, her blonde hair done up in a bandana, was musing over two pattern books, humming gaily but tunelessly to herself; Leslie had finished his coffee and produced a small automatic pistol from his pocket, dismantled it, and was absent-mindedly cleaning it with his handkerchief; my mother was perusing the pages of a cookery book in pursuit of a recipe for lunch, her lips moving soundlessly, occasionally breaking off to stare into space while she tried to remember if she had the necessary ingredients; Larry, clad in a multi-coloured dressing gown, was eating cherries with one hand and reading his mail with the other.

I was busy feeding my latest acquisition, a young jackdaw, who was such a singularly slow eater that I had christened him Gladstone, having been told that that statesman always chewed everything several hundred times. While waiting for him to digest each mouthful I stared down the hill at the beckoning sea and planned my day. Should I take my donkey, Sally, and make a trip to the high olive groves in the centre of the island to try to catch the agamas that lived on the glittering gypsum cliffs, where they basked in the sun, tantalizing me by wagging their yellow heads and puffing out their orange throats? Or should I go down to the small lake in the valley behind the villa, where the dragonfly larvae should be hatching? Or, should I perhaps – happiest thought of all – take my latest acquisition, my boat, on a major sea trip?

In spring the almost enclosed sheet of water that separated Corfu from the mainland would be a pale and delicate blue; then, as spring settled into hot, crackling summer, it seemed to stain the still sea a deeper and more unreal colour that in some lights
was like the violet blue of a rainbow, a blue that faded to a rich jade-green in the shallows. In the evening when the sun sank it was as if it were drawing a brush across the sea’s surface, streaking and blurring it to purples smudged with gold, silver, tangerine, and pale pink.

To look at this placid, land-locked sea in summer it seemed mild-mannered, a blue meadow that breathed gently and evenly along the shoreline; it was difficult to believe that it could be fierce; but even on a still, summer’s day, somewhere in the eroded hills of the mainland, a hot fierce wind would suddenly be born and leap, screaming, at the island, turning the sea so dark it was almost black, combing each wave crest into a sheaf of white froth and urging and harrying them like a herd of panic-stricken blue horses until they crashed exhausted on the shore and died in a hissing shroud of foam. And in winter, under an iron-grey sky, the sea would lift sullen muscles of almost colourless waves, ice-cold and unfriendly, veined here and there with mud and debris that the winter rains swept out of the valleys and into the bay.

To me, this blue kingdom was a treasure-house of strange beasts which I longed to collect and observe. At first it was frustrating for I could only peck along the shoreline like some forlorn sea-bird, capturing the small fry in the shallows and occasionally being tantalized by something mysterious and wonderful cast upon the shore. But then I got my boat, the good ship
Bootle-Bumtrinket
, and the whole of this kingdom was opened up for me, from the golden red castles of rock and their deep pools and underwater caves in the north to the long, glittering white sand dunes lying like snow drifts in the south.