The Corfu Trilogy (87 page)

‘Christ Almighty!’ said Larry. ‘What the hell’s that fool Velvit playing at?’

‘My hat,’ panted Mother. ‘Somebody get my hat!’

‘I’ll gets it, Mrs Durrells, don’ts you worrys,’ roared Spiro.

‘Most unnerving, most unnerving,’ said Kralefsky, his eyes closed, mopping his brow with his handkerchief. ‘Far too militant for small boys.’

‘Small boys! Bloody little fiends,’ cried Larry angrily, shaking gravel out of his hair.

‘I felt sure something else would happen,’ added Theodore with satisfaction, happy now that Corfu’s reputation for calamities was secure.

‘They must have had some sort of explosive,’ said Leslie. ‘I can’t think what Colonel Velvit was playing at. Damned dangerous.’

It became obvious a little later that it was not the colonel’s fault. Having rather shakily lined up his troop and marched them away, he returned to the scene of the carnage to apologize to Mother.

‘I cannot tell you how mortified I am, Mrs Durrell,’ he said, tears in his eyes. ‘Those little brutes got some dynamite from
some fishermen. I assure you, I knew absolutely nothing about it, nothing.’

In his dust-stained uniform and battered hat, he looked very pathetic.

‘Oh, don’t worry, Colonel,’ said Mother, shakily lifting a brandy and soda to her lips. ‘It’s the sort of thing that could happen to anyone.’

‘Happens all the time in England,’ said Larry. ‘Never a day passes…’

‘Do come and have dinner with us,’ interrupted Mother, giving Larry a quelling look.

‘Thank you, dear lady, you are too kind,’ said the colonel. ‘I must go and change.’

‘I was very interested in the reaction of the spectators,’ said Theodore, with scientific relish. ‘You know… er… the ones who were blown down.’

‘I should think they were damned annoyed,’ said Leslie.

‘No,’ went on Theodore proudly, ‘this is Corfu. They all… you know… helped each other up, brushed each other down, and remarked on how good the whole thing was… er… how realistic. It didn’t seem to occur to them that there was anything strange in Boy Scouts having dynamite.’

‘Well, if you live long enough in Corfu, you cease to be surprised at anything,’ said Mother with conviction.

Eventually, after a prolonged and delicious meal in town, during which we tried to convince Colonel Velvit that his bridge demolition had been the high spot of the day, Spiro drove us home through the cool, velvety night. The scops owls called ‘toink toink’ to each other, chiming like strange bells among the trees; the white dust billowed behind the car and remained suspended like a summer’s cloud in the still air; the dark cathedral groves of the olives were pricked out with the pulsing green lights of fireflies. It had been a good, if exhausting, day, and we were glad to be home.

‘Well,’ said Mother, stifling a yawn as she picked up her lamp and made her way to the stairs, ‘King or no King, I’m staying in bed until twelve tomorrow.’

‘Oh…’ said Larry contritely, ‘didn’t I tell you?’

Mother paused halfway up the stairs and looked at Larry, the wavering lamplight making her shadow quiver and leap on the white wall.

‘Tell me what?’ she asked suspiciously.

‘About the King,’ said Larry. ‘I’m sorry I should have told you before.’

‘Told me what?’ said Mother, now seriously alarmed.

‘I’ve asked him to lunch,’ said Larry.

‘Larry! You haven’t! Really, you are thoughtless…’ Mother began, and then realized that she was having her leg pulled.

She drew herself up to her full five foot.

‘I don’t think that’s funny,’ she said frigidly. ‘Anyway, the laugh would have been on him for I’ve only got eggs in the house.’

With great dignity, ignoring our laughter, she made her way to bed.

Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples for I am sick of love.

S
ONG OF
S
OLOMON 5

It had been one of those prodigious, desiccating, earth-cracking summers that was so hot it even bleached the sky to a pale end-of-summer, forget-me-not colour and flattened the sea so that it lay like a great blue pool, unmoving, warm as fresh milk. At night you could hear the floors and shutters and beams of the villa shifting and groaning and cracking in the warm air as the last juices were sucked out of them. The full moon would rise like a red coal, glowering down at us from the hot, velvety sky, and in the morning the sun was already too warm to be comfortable ten minutes after it appeared. There was no wind and the heat pressed down on the island like a lid. On the hillside in the breathless air, the plants and grasses withered and died until they stood there, bleached and blonde as honey, crisp as wood shavings. The days were so hot that even the cicadas started singing earlier and siestaed during the heat of the day, and the ground was baked so that there was nowhere you could walk without shoes.

The villa represented to the local animal life a series of large wooden caves which were perhaps half a degree cooler than the surrounding olive, orange and lemon groves, and so they flocked to join us. At first I was naturally blamed for this sudden influx of creatures but eventually the invasion became so
comprehensive that even my family realized I could not be responsible for quite such a large quantity and variety of life forms. Battalions of black ticks marched into the house and beset the dogs, massing in such numbers on their ears and heads that they looked like chain-mail and were just as difficult to remove. In desperation we had to douse them with kerosene, which made the ticks drop off. The dogs, deeply insulted by this treatment, slouched, panting, round the house, reeking of kerosene, shedding ticks in vast quantities. Larry suggested that we put up a notice saying ‘Danger – inflammable dogs’ for, as he rightly pointed out, if anyone lit a match near one of them the whole villa was liable to go up in flames like a tinder box.

The kerosene only gave us a temporary respite. More and more ticks marched into the house until at night one could lie in bed and watch rows of them performing strange route marches around the room. The ticks, fortunately, did not attack us but confined themselves to driving the dogs mad. However, the hordes of fleas that decided to take up residence with us were another matter. They arrived suddenly, out of nowhere, it seemed, like the Tartar hordes, and over-ran us before we realized what was happening. They were everywhere and you could feel them hopping on to you and running up your legs as you walked around the house. The bedrooms became untenable and for a time we took our beds out on to the broad verandas and slept there.

But the fleas were not the most objectionable of the lesser inhabitants of the house. The tiny scorpions, black as ebony, infested the bathroom where it was cool. Leslie going in late one night to clean his teeth was ill-advised enough to go barefoot and was stung on the toe. The scorpion was only half an inch long but the agony of the bite was out of all proportion to the size of the beast and it was some days before Leslie could walk. The larger scorpions preferred the kitchen area, where they would quite blatantly sit on the ceiling looking like misshapen aerial lobsters.

At night when the lamps were lit, thousands of insects appeared; moths of all shapes, from tiny fawn-coloured ones with wings shaped like tattered feathers, to the great big, striped, pink and silver hawk moths, whose death dives at the light were capable of breaking the lantern chimney. Then there were the beetles, some as black as mourners, some gaily striped and patterned, some with short, club-shaped antennae, others with antennae as long and thin as a Mandarin’s moustache. With these came a multitude of lesser forms of life, most of them so small that you needed a magnifying glass to make out their incredible shapes and colours.

Naturally, this conglomeration of insects was marvellous as far as I was concerned. Each evening I hung about the lights, my collecting boxes and bottles at the ready, vying with the other predators for choice specimens. I had to look sharp, for the competition was brisk. On the ceiling were the geckoes, pale, pink-skinned, spread-fingered, bulbous-eyed, stalking the moths and beetles with minuscule care. Alongside them were the green, swaying, hypocritical mantis with their mad eyes and chinless faces, moving on slender, prickly legs like green vampires.

On ground level I had to contend with enormous chocolate-coloured spiders like lanky, furry wolves, who would lurk in the shadows and scuttle out and snatch a specimen almost from my very fingers. They were aided and abetted by the fat map toads in their handsome patchwork skins of green and silvery grey who hopped and gulped their way, wide-eyed with astonishment, through this largesse of food, and the swift, furtive, and somehow sinister scutigera. This form of centipede had a body some three inches long and as thick as a pencil and flattened; around the perimeter was a hedge, a fringe of long, slender legs. When it moved, as each pair of legs came into action, these fringes appeared to undulate in waves, and the animal progressed as smoothly as a stone on ice, silent and unnerving, for scutigera were among the most ferocious and skilful of hunters.

One evening, the lights had been lit and I was waiting patiently to see what they were going to add to my collection; it was still fairly early so that most of the predators, apart from myself and a few bats, had not put in an appearance. The bats whipped up and down the veranda as fast as whiplashes, taking the moths and other succulent dainties from within inches of the lamp, the wind from their wings making the flames shudder and leap. Gradually, the pale dragon-green afterglow of the sunset faded, the crickets started their prolonged musical trills, the gloom of the olive trees was lit by the cold lights of the fireflies, and the great house, creaking and groaning with sunburn, settled down for the night.

The wall behind the lamp was already covered by a host of various insects which, after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, were clinging there to recover themselves before trying again. At the base of the wall, from a minute crack in the plaster, emerged one of the smallest and fattest geckoes I had ever seen. He must have been newly hatched for he measured only about an inch and a half in length, but obviously the short time he had been in the world had not prevented him from eating prodigiously for his body and tail were so fat as to make him appear almost circular. His mouth was set in a wide, shy smile and his large dark eyes were wide and wondering, like the eyes of a child that sees a table set for a banquet. Before I could stop him he had waddled slowly up the wall and started his supper with a lacewing fly; these creatures, with their transparent wings like green lace and their large green-gold eyes, were favourites of mine and so I was annoyed with him.

Gulping down the last bit of gauzy wing, the baby gecko paused, clinging to the wall, and mused for a bit, occasionally blinking his eyes. I could not think why he had chosen the lacewing, which was a bulky thing to handle, when he was surrounded on all sides by a variety of small insects which would have been easier for him to catch and eat. But it soon became
apparent that he was a glutton whose eyes were bigger than his stomach. Having hatched from an egg – and, therefore, lacking a mother’s guidance – he was under the strong but erroneous impression that all insects were edible and that the bigger they were the quicker they would assuage his hunger. He did not even seem to be aware of the fact that for a creature of his size some insects could be dangerous. Like an early missionary, he was so concerned with himself that it never occurred to him that somebody might look upon him simply as a meal.

Ignoring a convention of small and eminently edible moths sitting near him, he stalked a great, fat, hairy oak eggar whose body was almost bigger than his own; he misjudged his run-in, however, and merely caught her by the tip of one wing. She flew off and such was the power of her brown wings that she almost tore the gecko’s grip from the wall and carried him with her. Nothing daunted, after a brief rest, the gecko launched an assault on a longicorn beetle his own size. He would never have been able to swallow such a hard, prickly monster, but this apparently did not occur to him. However, he could not get a grip on the beetle’s hard and polished body, and all he succeeded in doing was knocking it to the floor.

He was just having another brief rest and surveying the battlefield when, with a crisp rustle of wings, an enormous mantis flew on to the veranda and alighted on the wall some six inches away. She folded her wings with a noise like the crumpling of tissue paper and, with viciously pronged arms raised in mock prayer, stared about her with lunatic eyes, twisting her head from side to side as she surveyed the array of insects assembled for her benefit.

The gecko, it was fairly obvious, had never seen a mantis before and did not realize how lethal they could be; as far as he was concerned, it was an enormous green dinner of the sort that he had dreamed about but never hoped to obtain. Without more ado, and ignoring the fact that the mantis was some five times
his size, he began to stalk her. The mantis, meanwhile, had singled out a silver-Y moth and was moving towards it on its attenuated, elderly spinster legs, pausing occasionally to sway to and fro, the personification of evil. Hard in her wake came the gecko, head down, grimly determined, pausing whenever the mantis did, and lashing his ridiculous little fat tail to and fro like an excited puppy.

The mantis reached the oblivious moth, paused, swaying, then lashed out with her foreclaws and seized it. The moth, which was a large one, started fluttering frantically and it required all the strength of the mantis’ cruelly barbed forelegs to hold it. As she was struggling with it, looking like a rather inept juggler, the gecko, who had lashed himself into a fury with his fat tail, launched his attack. He darted forward and laid hold of the mantis’ wing case like a bulldog. The mantis was busy trying to juggle the moth round in her claws and so this sudden attack from the rear knocked her off balance. She fell to the ground, carrying with her the moth and the gecko. When she landed she still had the gecko hanging grimly to her wing case. She relinquished the moth, which was by now almost dead, so as to leave her sabre-sharp front claws free to do battle with the gecko.