The Corfu Trilogy (3 page)

As each funeral passed, and the sounds of mourning and the clopping of hooves died away in the distance, Mother became more and more agitated.

‘I’m sure it’s an epidemic,’ she exclaimed at last, peering down nervously into the street.

‘Nonsense, Mother; don’t fuss,’ said Larry airily.

‘But, dear, so
many
of them… it’s unnatural.’

‘There’s nothing unnatural about dying. People do it all the time.’

‘Yes, but they don’t die like flies unless there’s something wrong.’

‘Perhaps they save ’em up and bury ’em in a bunch,’ suggested Leslie callously.

‘Don’t be silly,’ said Mother. ‘I’m sure it’s something to do with the drains. It can’t be healthy for people to have
those
sort of arrangements.’

‘My God!’ said Margo sepulchrally, ‘then I suppose I’ll get it.’

‘No, no, dear; it doesn’t follow,’ said Mother vaguely; ‘it might be something that’s not catching.’

‘I don’t see how you can have an epidemic unless it’s something catching,’ Leslie remarked logically.

‘Anyway,’ said Mother, refusing to be drawn into any medical arguments, ‘I think we ought to find out. Can’t you ring up the health authorities, Larry?’

‘There probably aren’t any health authorities here,’ Larry pointed out, ‘and even if there were, I doubt if they’d tell me.’

‘Well,’ Mother said with determination, ‘there’s nothing for it. We’ll have to move. We must get out of the town. We must find a house in the country
at once
.’

The next morning we started on our house-hunt, accompanied by Mr Beeler, the hotel guide. He was a fat little man with cringing eyes and sweat-polished jowls. He was quite sprightly when we set off, but then he did not know what was in store for him. No one who has not been house-hunting with my mother can possibly imagine it. We drove around the island in a cloud of dust while Mr Beeler showed us villa after villa in a bewildering selection of sizes, colours, and situations, and Mother shook her head firmly at them all. At last we had contemplated the tenth and final villa on Mr Beeler’s list, and Mother had shaken her head once again. Brokenly Mr Beeler seated himself on the stairs and mopped his face with his handkerchief.

‘Madame Durrell,’ he said at last, ‘I have shown you every villa I know, yet you do not want any. Madame, what is it you require? What is the matter with these villas?’

Mother regarded him with astonishment.

‘Didn’t you
notice?
’ she asked. ‘None of them had a bathroom.’

Mr Beeler stared at Mother with bulging eyes.

‘But Madame,’ he wailed in genuine anguish, ‘what for you want a bathroom? Have you not got the sea?’

We returned in silence to the hotel.

By the following morning Mother had decided that we would hire a car and go out house-hunting on our own. She was convinced that somewhere on the island there lurked a villa with a bathroom. We did not share Mother’s belief, and so it was a slightly irritable and argumentative group that she herded down
to the taxi rank in the main square. The taxi drivers, perceiving our innocent appearance, scrambled from inside their cars and flocked round us like vultures, each trying to out-shout his compatriots. Their voices grew louder and louder, their eyes flashed, they clutched each other’s arms and ground their teeth at one another, and then they laid hold of us as though they would tear us apart. Actually, we were being treated to the mildest of mild altercations, but we were not used to the Greek temperament, and to us it looked as though we were in danger of our lives.

‘Can’t you
do
something, Larry?’ Mother squeaked, disentangling herself with difficulty from the grasp of a large driver.

‘Tell them you’ll report them to the British consul,’ suggested Larry, raising his voice above the noise.

‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ said Mother breathlessly. ‘Just explain that we don’t understand.’

Margo, simpering, stepped into the breach.

‘We English,’ she yelled at the gesticulating drivers; ‘we no understand Greek.’

‘If that man pushes me again I’ll poke him in the eye,’ said Leslie, his face flushed red.

‘Now, now, dear,’ panted Mother, still struggling with the driver who was propelling her vigorously towards his car; ‘I don’t think they mean any harm.’

At that moment everyone was startled into silence by a voice that rumbled out above the uproar, a deep, rich, vibrant voice, the sort of voice you would expect a volcano to have.

‘Hoy!’ roared the voice. ‘Whys donts yous have someones who can talks your own language?’

Turning, we saw an ancient Dodge parked by the curb, and behind the wheel sat a short, barrel-bodied individual, with hamlike hands and a great, leathery, scowling face surmounted by a jauntily tilted peaked cap. He opened the door of the car, surged out onto the pavement, and waddled across to us. Then
he stopped, scowling even more ferociously, and surveyed the group of silent cab drivers.

‘Thems been worrying yous?’ he asked Mother.

‘No, no,’ said Mother untruthfully; ‘it was just that we had difficulty in understanding them.’

‘Yous wants someones who can talks your own language,’ repeated the new arrival; ‘thems bastards… if yous will excuses the words… would swindles their own mothers. Excuses me a minute and I’ll fix thems.’

He turned on the drivers a blast of Greek that almost swept them off their feet. Aggrieved, gesticulating, angry, they were herded back to their cars by this extraordinary man. Having given them a final and, it appeared, derogatory blast of Greek, he turned to us again.

‘Wheres yous wants to gos?’ he asked, almost truculently.

‘Can you take us to look for a villa?’ asked Larry.

‘Sure. I’ll takes yous anywheres. Just yous says.’

‘We are looking,’ said Mother firmly, ‘for a villa with a bathroom. Do you know of one?’

The man brooded like a great, suntanned gargoyle, his black eyebrows twisted into a knot of thoughtfulness.

‘Bathrooms?’ he said. ‘Yous wants a bathrooms?’

‘None of the ones we have seen so far had them,’ said Mother.

‘Oh, I knows a villa with a bathrooms,’ said the man. ‘I was wondering if its was goings to be bigs enough for yous.’

‘Will you take us to look at it, please?’ asked Mother.

‘Sure, I’ll takes yous. Gets into the cars.’

We climbed into the spacious car, and our driver hoisted his bulk behind the steering wheel and engaged his gears with a terrifying sound. We shot through the twisted streets on the outskirts of the town, swerving in and out among the loaded donkeys, the carts, the groups of peasant women, and innumerable dogs, our horn honking a deafening warning. During this our driver seized the opportunity to engage us in conversation.
Each time he addressed us he would crane his massive head round to see our reactions, and the car would swoop back and forth across the road like a drunken swallow.

‘Yous English? Thought so… English always wants bathrooms… I gets a bathroom in my house… Spiro’s my name, Spiro Hakiaopulos… they alls calls me Spiro Americano on accounts of I lives in America… Yes, spent eight years in Chicago… That’s where I learnt my goods English… Wents there to makes moneys… Then after eight years I says, “Spiros,” I says, “yous mades enough…” sos I comes backs to Greece… brings this car… best ons the islands… no one else gets a car like this… All the English tourists knows me, theys all asks for me when theys comes here… Theys knows theys wonts be swindled… I likes the English… best kinds of peoples… Honest to Gods, ifs I wasn’t Greek I’d likes to be English.’

We sped down a white road covered in a thick layer of silky dust that rose in a boiling cloud behind us, a road lined with prickly pears like a fence of green plates each cleverly balanced on another’s edge, and splashed with knobs of scarlet fruit. We passed vineyards where the tiny, stunted vines were laced in green leaves, olive groves where the pitted trunks made a hundred astonished faces at us out of the gloom of their own shadow, and great clumps of zebra-striped cane that fluttered their leaves like a multitude of green flags. At last we roared to the top of a hill, and Spiro crammed on his brakes and brought the car to a dust-misted halt.

‘Theres you ares,’ he said, pointing with a great stubby forefinger; ‘thats the villa with the bathrooms, likes yous wanted.’

Mother, who had kept her eyes firmly shut throughout the drive, now opened them cautiously and looked. Spiro was pointing at a gentle curve of hillside that rose from the glittering sea. The hill and the valleys around it were an eiderdown of olive groves that shone with a fishlike gleam where the breeze touched the leaves. Halfway up the slope, guarded by a group of tall, slim
cypress trees, nestled a small strawberry-pink villa, like some exotic fruit lying in the greenery. The cypress trees undulated gently in the breeze, as if they were busily painting the sky a still brighter blue for our arrival.

The villa was small and square, standing in its tiny garden with an air of pink-faced determination. It shutters had been faded by the sun to a delicate creamy green, cracked and bubbled in places. The garden, surrounded by tall fuchsia hedges, had flower beds worked in complicated geometrical patterns, marked with smooth white stones. The white cobbled paths, scarcely as wide as a rake’s head, wound laboriously round beds hardly larger than a big straw hat, beds in the shape of stars, half-moons, triangles, and circles, all overgrown with a shaggy tangle of flowers run wild. Roses dropped petals that seemed as big and smooth as saucers, flame red, moon white, glossy, and unwrinkled; marigolds like broods of shaggy suns stood watching their parents’ progress through the sky. In the low growth the pansies pushed their velvety, innocent faces through the leaves, and the violets drooped sorrowfully under their heart-shaped leaves. The bougainvillæa that sprawled luxuriously over the tiny front balcony was hung, as though for a carnival, with its lantern-shaped magenta flowers. In the darkness of the fuchsia hedge a thousand ballerina-like blooms quivered expectantly. The warm air was thick with the scent of a hundred dying flowers, and full of the gentle, soothing whisper and murmur of insects. As soon as we saw it, we wanted to live there; it was as though the villa had been standing there waiting for our arrival. We felt we had come home.

Having lumbered so unexpectedly into our lives, Spiro now took over complete control of our affairs. It was better, he explained, for him to do things, as everyone knew him, and he would make sure we were not swindled.

‘Donts you worrys yourselfs about anythings, Mrs Durrells,’ he had scowled; ‘leaves everythings to me.’

So he would take us shopping, and after an hour’s sweating and roaring he would get the price of an article reduced by perhaps two drachmas. This was approximately a penny; it was not the cash, but the principle of the thing, he explained. The fact that he was Greek and adored bargaining was, of course, another reason. It was Spiro who, on discovering that our money had not yet arrived from England, subsidized us, and took it upon himself to go and speak severely to the bank manager about his lack of organization. That it was not the poor manager’s fault did not deter him in the least. It was Spiro who paid our hotel bill, who organized a car to carry our luggage to the villa, and who drove us out there himself, his car piled high with groceries that he had purchased for us.

That he knew everyone on the island, and that they all knew him, we soon discovered was no idle boast. Wherever his car stopped, half a dozen voices would shout out his name, and hands would beckon him to sit at the little tables under the trees and drink coffee. Policemen, peasants, and priests waved and smiled as he passed; fishermen, grocers, and café owners greeted him like a brother. ‘Ah, Spiro!’ they would say, and smile at him affectionately as though he were a naughty but lovable child. They respected his honesty and his belligerence, and above all they adored his typically Greek scorn and fearlessness when dealing with any form of governmental red tape. On arrival, two of our cases containing linen and other things had been confiscated by the customs on the curious grounds that they were merchandise. So, when we moved out to the strawberry-pink villa and the problem of bed linen arose, Mother told Spiro about our cases languishing in the customs, and asked his advice.

‘Gollys, Mrs Durrells,’ he bellowed, his huge face flushing red with wrath; ‘whys you never tells me befores? Thems bastards in the customs. I’ll take you down theres tomorrows and fix
thems: I knows thems alls, and they knows
me
. Leaves everythings to me – I’ll fix thems.’

The following morning he drove Mother down to the customs shed. We all accompanied them, for we did not want to miss the fun. Spiro rolled into the customs house like an angry bear.

‘Wheres these peoples things?’ he inquired of the plump little customs man.

‘You mean their boxes of merchandise?’ asked the customs official in his best English.

‘Whats you thinks I means?’

‘They are here,’ admitted the official cautiously.

‘We’ve comes to takes thems,’ scowled Spiro; ‘gets thems ready.’

He turned and stalked out of the shed to find someone to help carry the luggage, and when he returned he saw that the customs man had taken the keys from Mother and was just lifting the lid of one of the cases. Spiro, with a grunt of wrath, surged forward and slammed the lid down on the unfortunate man’s fingers.

‘Whats fors you open it, you sonofabitch?’ he asked, glaring.

The customs official, waving his pinched hand about, protested wildly that it was his duty to examine the contents.

‘Dutys?’ said Spiro with fine scorn. ‘Whats you means, dutys? Is it your dutys to attacks innocent foreigners, eh? Treats thems like smugglers, eh? Thats whats yous calls dutys?’

Spiro paused for a moment, breathing deeply; then he picked up a large suitcase in each great hand and walked towards the door. He paused and turned to fire his parting shot.

‘I knows you, Christaki, sos donts you go talkings about dutys to me. I remembers when you was fined twelve thousand drachmas for dynamitings fish. I won’t have any criminal talkings to
me
abouts dutys.’