The Corfu Trilogy (77 page)

‘Ees smell,’ the Count pointed out. ‘In France ze water ees hygiene.’

I said it would not be long before we left the canal and were out on the lake, where there would be no smell.

‘Ees eating,’ was the Count’s next discovery, mopping his face and moustache with a scent-drenched handkerchief. ‘Ees eating much.’

His pale face had, as a matter of fact, turned a light shade of heliotrope. I was just about to say that that problem, too, would be overcome once we reached the open lake when, to my alarm, I noticed something wrong with the
Bootle-Bumtrinket
. She had settled sluggishly in the brown water and hardly moved to my punting. For a moment I could not imagine what was wrong with her; we had not run aground and I knew that there were no sand banks in this canal. Then suddenly I noticed the swirl of water coiling up over the boards in the bottom of the boat. Surely, I thought, she could not have sprung a leak.

Fascinated, I watched the water rise, to engulf the bottom of the oblivious Count’s shoes. I suddenly realized what must have happened. When I had cleaned out the bilges I had, of course, removed the bung in the
Bumtrinket
’s bottom to let the fresh sea water in; apparently, I had not replaced it with enough care and now the canal water was pouring into the bilges. My first thought was to pull up the boards, find the bung and replace it, but the Count was now sitting with his feet in about two inches of water and it seemed imperative to turn the
Bootle-Bumtrinket
towards the bank while I could still manoeuvre a trifle and get my exquisite passenger on shore. I did not mind being deposited in the canal by the
Bootle-Bumtrinket
– after all I was always in and out of the canals like a water rat in pursuit of water snakes, terrapins, frogs, and other small fry – but I knew that the Count would look askance at gambolling in two feet of water and an
undetermined amount of mud. My efforts to turn the leaden waterlogged boat towards the bank were superhuman. Gradually, I felt the dead weight of the boat responding and her bows turning sluggishly towards the shore. Inch by inch, I eased her towards the bamboos and we were within ten feet of the bank when the Count noticed what was happening.

‘
Mon Dieu!
’ he cried shrilly, ‘ve are submerge. My shoe is submerge. Ze boat, she ave sonk.’

I briefly stopped poling to soothe the Count. I told him that there was no danger; all he had to do was to sit still until I got him to the bank.

‘My shoe!
Regardez
my shoe!’ he cried, pointing at his now dripping and discoloured footwear with such an expression of outrage that it was all I could do not to giggle.

A moment, I said to him, and I should have him on dry land. Indeed if he had done what I had said, this would have been the case, for I had managed to get the
Bootle-Bumtrinket
to within six feet of the bamboos. But the Count was too worried about the state of his shoes and this prompted him to do something very silly. In spite of my warning shout, he looked over his shoulder, saw land looming close, got to his feet and leaped onto the
Bootle-Bumtrinket
’s minute foredeck. His intention was to leap from there to safety when I had manoeuvred the boat a little closer, but he had not reckoned with the
Bootle-Bumtrinket
’s temperament. A placid boat, she had nevertheless a few quirks, and one thing she did not like was anyone standing on her foredeck; she simply gave an odd sort of bucking twist, rather like a trained horse in a cowboy film, and slid you over her shoulder. She did this to the Count now.

He fell into the water with a yell, spread-eagled like an ungainly frog, and his proud yachting cap floated towards the bamboo roots while he thrashed about in a porridge of water and mud. I was filled with a mixture of alarm and delight; I was delighted that the Count had fallen in – though I knew my family would
never believe that I had not engineered it – but I was alarmed at the way he was thrashing about. To try to stand up is an instinctive reaction when finding one is in shallow water, but in this case the effort only made one sink deeper into the glutinous mud. Once Larry had fallen into one of these canals while out shooting and had got himself so deeply embedded that it had required the united efforts of Margo, Leslie, and myself to extricate him. If the Count got himself wedged in the canal bottom I would not have the strength to extricate him single-handed and by the time I got help the Count might well have disappeared altogether beneath the gleaming mud. I abandoned ship and leaped into the canal to help him. I knew how to walk in mud and, anyway, only weighed a quarter of what the Count weighed so I did not sink in so far. I shouted to him to keep still until I got to him.

‘
Merde!
’ said the Count, proving that he was at least keeping his mouth above water.

He tried to get up once but, at the terrible, gobbling clutch of the mud, uttered a despairing cry like a bereaved seagull and lay still. Indeed, he was so frightened of the mud that when I reached him and tried to pull him shorewards he screamed and shouted and accused me of trying to push him in deeper. He was so absurdly childlike that I had a fit of the giggles and this of course only made him worse. He had relapsed into French, which he was speaking with the rapidity of a machine gun so, with my tenuous command of the language, I was unable to understand him. Eventually, I got my unmannerly laughter under control, once more seized him under the armpits and started to drag him shorewards. Then it suddenly occurred to me how ludicrous our predicament would seem to an onlooker, a twelve-year-old boy trying to rescue a six-foot man, and I was overcome again and sat down in the mud and laughed till I cried.

‘Vy you laughing? Vy you laughing?’ screamed the Count, trying to look over his shoulder at me. ‘You no laughing, you pulling,
vite, vite!
’

Eventually, swallowing great hiccups of laughter, I started to pull at the Count again and eventually got him fairly close to the shore. Then I left him and climbed out onto the bank. This provoked another bout of hysteria.

‘No going avay, no going avay!’ he yelled, panic-stricken. ‘I am sonk. No going avay!’

I ignored him. Choosing seven of the tallest bamboos in the vicinity, I bent them over one by one until their stems splintered but did not snap; then I twisted them round until they reached the Count and formed a sort of green bridge between him and the shore. Acting on my instructions, he turned on his stomach and pulled himself along until at last he reached dry land. When he eventually got shakily to his feet he looked as though the lower half of his body had been encased in melting chocolate. Knowing that this glutinous mud could dry hard in record time, I offered to scrape some of it off him with a piece of bamboo. He gave me a murderous look.

‘
Espèce de con!
’ he said vehemently.

My shaky knowledge of the Count’s language did not allow me to translate this but the enthusiasm with which it was uttered led me to suppose that it was worth retaining in my memory. We started to walk home, the Count simmering vitriolically. As I had anticipated, the mud on his legs dried at almost magical speed and within a short time he looked as though he were wearing a pair of trousers made out of a pale brown jigsaw puzzle. From the back, he reminded me so much of the armour-clad rear of an Indian rhinoceros that I almost got the giggles again.

It was unfortunate, perhaps, that the Count and I should have arrived at the front door of the villa just as the huge Dodge driven by our scowling, barrel-shaped self-appointed guardian angel, Spiro Hakiopoulos, drew up with the family, flushed with wine, in the back of it. The car came to a halt and the family stared at the Count with disbelieving eyes. It was Spiro who recovered first.

‘Gollys, Mrs Durrells,’ he said, twisting his massive head round and beaming at Mother, ‘Master Gerrys fixes the bastards.’

This was obviously the sentiment of the whole family but Mother threw herself into the breach.

‘My goodness, Count,’ she said in well-simulated tones of horror, ‘what
have
you been doing with my son?’

The Count was so overcome with the audacity of this remark that he could only look at Mother open-mouthed.

‘Gerry dear,’ Mother went on, ‘go and change out of those wet things before you catch cold, there’s a good boy.’

‘Good boy!’ repeated the Count, shrilly and unbelievingly. ‘
C’est un assassin! C’est une espèce de
…’

‘Now, now, my dear fellow,’ said Larry, throwing his arm round the Count’s muddy shoulders, ‘I’m sure it’s been a mistake. Come and have a brandy and change your things. Yes, yes, rest assured that my brother will smart for this. Of course he will be punished.’

Larry led the vociferous Count into the house and the rest of the family converged on me.

‘What did you do to him?’ asked Mother.

I said I had not done anything; the Count and the Count alone was responsible for his condition.

‘I don’t believe you,’ said Margo. ‘You always say that.’

I protested that had I been responsible I would be proud to confess. The family were impressed by the logic of this.

‘It doesn’t matter a damn if Gerry did it or not,’ said Leslie. ‘It’s the end result that counts.’

‘Well, go and get changed, dear,’ said Mother, ‘and then come to my room and tell us all about how you did it.’

But the affair of the
Bootle-Bumtrinket
did not have the effect that everyone hoped for; the Count stayed on grimly, as if to punish us all, and was twice as offensive as before. However, I had ceased feeling vindictive towards the Count; whenever I thought of him thrashing about in the canal I was overcome
with helpless laughter; which was worth any amount of insults. Furthermore, the Count had unwittingly added a fine new phrase to my French vocabularly. I tried it out one day when I made a mistake in my French composition and I found it tripped well off the tongue. The effect on my tutor, Mr Kralefsky, was, however, very different. He had been pacing up and down the room, hands behind him, looking like a humpbacked gnome in a trance. At my expression, he came to a sudden stop, wide-eyed, looking like a gnome who had just had an electric shock from a toadstool.

‘
What
did you say?’ he asked in a hushed voice.

I repeated the offending phrase. Mr Kralefsky closed his eyes, his nostrils quivered, and he shuddered.

‘
Where
did you hear that?’ he asked.

I said I had learned it from a Count who was staying with us.

‘Oh. Well, you must never say it again, do you understand,’ Mr Kralefsky said, ‘never again! You… you must learn that in this life sometimes even
aristocrats
let slip an unfortunate phrase in moments of stress. It does not behove us to imitate them.’

I did see what Kralefsky meant. Falling into a canal, for a Count, could be called a moment of stress, I supposed.

But the saga of the Count was not yet over. A week or so after he had departed, Larry, one morning at breakfast, confessed to feeling unwell. Mother put on her glasses and stared at him critically.

‘How do you mean, unwell?’ she asked.

‘Not my normal, manly, vigorous self.’

‘Have you got any pains?’

‘No,’ Larry admitted, ‘no actual pains. Just a sort of lassitude, a feeling of ennui, a debilitated, drained feeling, as if I had spent the night with Count Dracula, and I feel that, for all his faults, our late guest was not a vampire.’

‘Well, you look all right,’ said Mother, ‘though we’d better get you looked at. Dr Androuchelli is on holiday, so I’ll have to get Spiro to bring Theodore.’

‘All right,’ said Larry listlessly, ‘and you’d better tell Spiro to nip in and alert the British cemetery.’

‘Larry, don’t say things like that,’ said Mother, getting alarmed. ‘Now, you go up to bed and, for heaven’s sake, stop there.’

If Spiro could be classified as our guardian angel to whom no request was impossible of fulfilment, Dr Theodore Stephanides was our oracle and guide to all things. He arrived, sitting sedately in the back of Spiro’s Dodge, immaculately dressed in a tweed suit, his Homburg at just the correct angle, his beard twinkling in the sun.

‘Yes, it was really… um… very curious,’ said Theodore, having greeted us all, ‘I was just thinking to myself how nice a trip… er… was an especially beautiful day… um… not too hot, and that sort of thing, you know… er… and suddenly Spiro turned up at the laboratory. Most fortuitous.’

‘I’m so glad that my agony is of benefit to
someone
,’ said Larry.

‘Aha! What… er… you know… seems to be the trouble?’ asked Theodore, eyeing Larry with interest.

‘Nothing concrete,’ Larry admitted. ‘Just a general feeling of death being imminent. All my strength seems to have drained away. I’ve probably, as usual, been giving too much of myself to my family.’

‘I don’t think
that’s
what’s wrong with you,’ said Mother decisively.

‘I think you’ve been eating too much,’ said Margo; ‘what you want is a good diet.’

‘What he wants is a little fresh air and exercise,’ contributed Leslie. ‘If he took the boat out a bit…’

‘Yes, well, Theodore will tell us what’s wrong,’ said Mother.

‘I can’t find anything… er… you know… organically wrong,’ said Theodore judiciously, rising and falling on his tiptoes, ‘except that he is perhaps a trifle overweight.’

‘There you are! I told you he needed a diet,’ said Margo triumphantly.

‘Hush, dear,’ said Mother. ‘So what do you advise, Theodore?’

‘I should keep him in bed for a day or so,’ said Theodore. ‘Give him a light diet, you know, nothing very oily, and I’ll send out some medicine… er… that is to say… a
tonic
for him. I’ll come out the day after tomorrow and see how he is.’

Spiro drove Theodore back to town and in due course reappeared with the medicine.

‘I won’t drink it,’ said Larry eyeing the bottle askance. ‘It looks like essence of bat’s ovaries.’

‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ said Mother, pouring some into a spoon, ‘it will do you good.’

‘It won’t. It’s the same stuff as my friend Dr Jekyll took, and look what happened to him.’