Gerald Durrell - The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium

“Horse shit, both of you,” he said. Before anyone could do anything sensible, he had picked up Perry as if he were a child and tossed him into the Grand Canal, and then turned, seized the Duke, and sent him flying after his son. The sight of a real Duke and his only son and heir surfacing, spluttering, in the Grand Canal was, I must confess, such a rarity that I savoured it to the full. Two carabinieri, who until then had been standing in the crowd quietly enjoying the drama as any true Italian would, now, with the utmost reluctance, decided that, as representatives of law and order, they ought to make some sort of a gesture. Elegant as peacocks they drifted up to Reggie.

“Pardon, signor,” said one of them in excellent English, “but are you having any trouble?”

It was Reggie’s big moment and I was lost in admiration at the way that he rose to the occasion.

“It is kind of you to ask, but I do not require assistance,” he said regally, if unsteadily. “My wife has been seduced by the son of a Duke. I am here to take my wife back home shince I now believe her to be cured of her infatuation. The Duke and his son are that strange couple you see disporting themselves in the Canal there. I have no wish to prefer charges against them. Come, Marjorie, let us away.”

So saying he took the by then bewildered and submissive Marjorie by the hand and walked off through the crowd, leaving me with a very damp and angry Duke and his son and two courteous but interested members of the Italian police force. It took us two hours to explain what it was all about, who the Duke was, who Perry was, who I was, who Ursula was and who (if they could only have been found) Reggie and Marjorie were. In addition we had to vouchsafe all the extra information that the bureaucratic machine demands: date of birth, whether our grandmothers had in-growing toenails and so on. Eventually, limp with exhaustion, we left the Duke and his sulky son and heir, and Ursula and I repaired to a pleasant bar on the Piazza San Marco.

“Darling, I do think you handled that wonderfully ,” she said, her big blue eyes melting as she gazed at me. “You handled those awful policemen with such aplumb.”

“Aplomb,” I corrected automatically.

“That as well,” she agreed. “I was so proud of you.”

“Thank you,” I said, “what’ll you have to drink?”

“I’ll have a Graffiti,” she said, “with ice.”

“Madam will have a Martini and ice and I’ll have a double brandy and soda,” I translated for the waiter.

“I’m so glad that I managed to sort out Reggie’s problem,” said Ursula, with satisfaction.

“I was under the impression that he solved his own problem.”

“Oh, no, darling,” explained Ursula. “If it hadn’t been for me and the Duke, and, of course, all your help, Reggie wouldn’t have known what to do.”

“Why don’t you stop trying to help your friends?” I asked. “Why don’t you just leave them alone?”

“You can’t just leave them alone ,” said Ursula. “You don’t know what they’re going to do when you leave them alone . . . Now, you must admit that if I hadn’t taken part in the whole affair Reggie and Marjorie wouldn’t be happily together again. In this instance I was a sort of catapult.”

“Catalyst?” I suggested.

“I do wish you would stop trying to correct me, darling,” said Ursula. “I think you’re ravishing but this constant correcting becomes very irritating.”

“You think I’m ravishing?” I asked, intrigued.

“I always thought you were ravishing, but I really don’t see what that’s got to do with Reggie and Marjorie,” said Ursula hurriedly.

“Frankly, at this precise moment, I am unmoved by anything that may, or may not, happen to Reggie and Marjorie in the future. I feel they deserve each other. I feel that the Duke and his son ought to get married and, to encapsulate the whole incredibly futile affair in a nutshell, I came to Venice to enjoy myself and you are a very beautiful woman. So why don’t we stop talking about the incredibly dull landed gentry of England, and you tell me what we are going to do tonight . . . and I warn you, it’s got to be sexy.”

Ursula went pink, partly with embarrassment and partly with pleasure.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said, to my unmitigated delight. “I had thought of going to bed early.”

“Darling, you couldn’t have suggested anything better,” I exclaimed with enthusiasm.

“You know perfectly well what I mean,” she went on, bridling.

“Now that you have solved the various problems of Reggie, Marjorie, Perry and the Duke,” I said, “why don’t you relax? Come and have a disgustingly sexy dinner with me and then decide whether or not you want to spend the next two days of your stay in Venice in that squalid pension of yours or whether you want to have a bedroom the size of a ballroom overlooking the Grand Canal .”

“Oooo!” she said. “You haven’t got a bedroom looking out over the Grand Canal . . . you perfect pig .”

“Why don’t you go back to your hotel and change, and I will go back to my hotel and try to get them to resurrect this suit, and I will then pick you up at seven thirty. By that time, I feel, you can have made up your mind whether or not you are going to exchange your squalid abode for one of the finest bedrooms in Venice .”

We had a splendid dinner, and Ursula was at her best. While we dawdled over coffee and brandy, I asked her whether she had given any thought to her change of abode.

“Darling, you are romantic ,” she said archly, “just like Pasadouble.”

“Who?” I asked, puzzled.

“You know, the great Italian lover,” she said.

“You don’t mean Casanova?” I asked, out of interest.

“Darling, you’re correcting me again,” pointed out Ursula, coldly.

“I’m so sorry,” I said contritely, “but I’m terribly flattered that you should think I am as romantic as Pasadouble.”

“You always were romantic in a peculiar sort of way,” said Ursula candidly. “Tell me, is your bedroom really as big as that and does it really look out over the Grand Canal ?”

“Yes to both questions,” I said ruefully, “but I must confess that I would be happier if your motivation was based on my personal charms rather than the size and site of my bedroom.”

“You are romantic,” she murmured vaguely. “Why don’t we go back to your hotel for a nightcap and look at your room?”

“What a splendid idea,” I agreed heartily. “Shall we walk?”

“Darling, now you’re being unromantic,” she said. “Let’s go by water.”

“Of course,” I said.

She insisted on a gondola, rather than a speedboat.

“You know,” she said sighing luxuriously, “I’ve only been in Venice for four nights but I’ve had a gondolier every night.”

“Don’t tell a soul,” I said, kissing her.

In her sweeping white dress she looked so attractive ihat even the gondolier (a notoriously hard-bitten and cynical breed of mammal) was impressed.

“Darling,” said Ursula, pausing theatrically in the lamp light on the jetty, “I think I’m going to enjoy our affair.”

So saying she went to get into the gondola, broke the heel off her shoe and fell head first into the Canal. I would, with only a modicum of gentlemanly concern have let her struggle out of the water on her own (since I knew she could swim like an otter), but the voluminous dress she was wearing — as soon as it got wet — wrapped itself round her legs and, doubting its weight with water, dragged her down. There was nothing for it: I had to shed my coat, kick off my shoes and go in after her. Eventually, having inadvertently drunk more of the canal water than I thought necessary or prudent, I managed to get her to shore where the gondolier helped me to land her.