Gerald Durrell - The Corfu Trilogy

‘I really don’t know what you expect me to do,’ he said. ‘Every suggestion I’ve made you’ve disagreed with.’

‘If you made sensible suggestions I wouldn’t disagree.’

‘I don’t see anything ludicrous in anything I suggested.’

‘But, Larry dear, do be reasonable. We can’t just rush to a new villa because some people are coming. I doubt whether we’d find one in time, anyway. And there’s Gerry’s lessons.’

‘All that could easily be sorted out if you put your mind to it.’

‘We are not moving to another villa,’ said Mother firmly; ‘I’ve made up my mind about that.’

She straightened her spectacles, gave Larry a defiant glare, and strutted off towards the kitchen, registering determination in every inch.

The new villa was enormous, a tall, square Venetian mansion, with faded daffodil-yellow walls, green shutters, and a fox-red roof. It stood on a hill overlooking the sea, surrounded by unkempt olive groves and silent orchards of lemon and orange trees. The whole place had an atmosphere of ancient melancholy about it: the house with its cracked and peeling walls, its tremendous echoing rooms, its verandas piled high with drifts of last year’s leaves and so overgrown with creepers and vines that the lower rooms were in a perpetual green twilight; the little walled and sunken garden that ran along one side of the house, its wrought-iron gates scabby with rust, had roses, anemones, and geraniums sprawling across the weed-grown paths, and the shaggy, untended tangerine trees were so thick with flowers that the scent was almost overpowering; beyond the garden the orchards were still and silent, except for the hum of bees and an occasional splutter of birds among the leaves. The house and land were gently, sadly decaying, lying forgotten on the hillside overlooking the shining sea and the dark, eroded hills of Albania. It was as though villa and landscape were half asleep, lying there drugged in the spring sunshine, giving themselves up to the moss, the ferns, and the crowds of tiny toadstools.

It was Spiro, of course, who had found the place, and who organized our move with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of efficiency. Within three days of seeing the villa for the first time the long wooden carts were trailing in a dusty procession along the roads, piled high with our possessions, and on the fourth day we were installed.

At the edge of the estate was a small cottage inhabited by the gardener and his wife, an elderly, rather decrepit pair who seemed to have decayed with the estate. His job was to fill the water tanks, pick the fruit, crush the olives, and get severely stung once a year extracting honey from the seventeen bee-hives that simmered beneath the lemon trees. In a moment of misguided enthusiasm Mother engaged the gardener’s wife to work for us in the villa. Her name was Lugaretzia, and she was a thin, lugubrious individual, whose hair was forever coming adrift from the ramparts of pins and combs with which she kept it attached to her skull. She was extremely sensitive, as Mother soon discovered, and the slightest criticism of her work, however tactfully phrased, would make her brown eyes swim with tears in an embarrassing display of grief. It was such a heart-rending sight to watch that Mother very soon gave up criticizing her altogether.

There was only one thing in life that could bring a smile to Lugaretzia’s gloomy countenance, a glint to her spaniel eyes, and that was a discussion of her ailments. Where most people are hypochondriacs as a hobby, Lugaretzia had turned it into a full-time occupation. When we took up residence it was her stomach that was worrying her. Bulletins on the state of her stomach would start at seven in the morning when she brought up the tea. She would move from room to room with the trays, giving each one of us a blow-by-blow account of her nightly bout with her inside. She was a master of the art of graphic description; groaning, gasping, doubling up in agony, stamping about the rooms, she would give us such a realistic picture of her suffering that we would find our own stomachs aching in sympathy.

‘Can’t you do something about that woman?’ Larry asked Mother one morning, after Lugaretzia’s stomach had been through a particularly bad night.

‘What do you expect me to do?’ she asked. ‘I gave her some of your bicarbonate of soda.’

‘That probably accounts for her bad night.’

‘I’m sure she doesn’t eat properly,’ said Margo. ‘What she probably wants is a good diet.’

‘Nothing short of a bayonet would do her stomach any good,’ said Larry caustically, ‘and I know… during the last week I have become distressingly familiar with every tiny convolution of her larger intestine.’

‘I know she’s a bit trying,’ said Mother, ‘but, after all, the poor woman is obviously suffering.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Leslie; ‘she enjoys every minute of it. Like Larry does when he’s ill.’

‘Well, anyway,’ said Mother hurriedly, ‘we’ll just have to put up with her; there’s no one else we can get locally. I’ll get Theodore to look her over next time he comes out.’

‘If all she told me this morning was true,’ said Larry, ‘you’ll have to provide him with a pick and a miner’s lamp.’

‘Larry, don’t be disgusting,’ said Mother severely.

Shortly afterwards, to our relief, Lugaretzia’s stomach got better, but almost immediately her feet gave out, and she would hobble pitifully round the house, groaning loudly and frequently. Larry said that Mother hadn’t hired a maid, but a ghoul, and suggested buying her a ball and chain. He pointed out that this would at least let us know when she was coming, and allow us time to escape, for Lugaretzia had developed the habit of creeping up behind one and groaning loudly and unexpectedly in one’s ear. Larry started having breakfast in his bedroom after the morning when Lugaretzia took off her shoes in the dining-room in order to show us exactly which toes were hurting.

But, apart from Lugaretzia’s ailments, there were other snags in the house. The furniture (which we had rented with the villa) was a fantastic collection of Victorian relics that had been locked in the rooms for the past twenty years. They crouched everywhere, ugly, ungainly, unpractical, creaking hideously to each other and shedding bits of themselves with loud cracks like musket-shots, accompanied by clouds of dust if you walked past them too heavily. The first evening the leg came off the dining-room table, cascading the food onto the floor. Some days later Larry sat down on an immense and solid-looking chair, only to have the back disappear in a cloud of acrid dust. When Mother went to open a wardrobe the size of a cottage and the entire door came away in her hand, she decided that something must be done.

‘We simply can’t have people to stay in a house where everything comes to bits if you look at it,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing for it, we’ll have to buy some new furniture. Really, these guests are going to be the most expensive we’ve ever had.’

The next morning Spiro drove Mother, Margo, and myself into the town to buy furniture. We noticed that the town was more crowded, more boisterous, than usual, but it never occurred to us that anything special was happening until we had finished bargaining with the dealer and made our way out of his shop into the narrow, twisted streets. We were jostled and pushed as we struggled to get back to the place where we had left the car. The crowd grew thicker and thicker, and the people were so tightly wedged together that we were carried forward against our will.