Fauna and Family. Gerald Durrell
Behold! the heavens do ope,
The gods look down, and this unnatural scene
They laugh at.
SHAKESPEARE, Coriolanus
THE ISLAND LAY bent like a misshapen bow, its two tips nearly touching the Greek and Albanian coastlines, and the blue waters of the Ionian Sea were caught in its curve like a blue lake. Outside our villa was a wide flagstoned verandah roofed with an ancient vine from which the great green clusters of grapes hung like chandeliers; from here one looked out over the sunken garden full of tangerine trees and the silver-green olive groves to the sea, blue and smooth as a flower petal. In fine weather we always had our meals on the verandah at the rickety marble-topped table, and it was here that all the major family decisions were taken.
It was at breakfast time that there was liable to be the most acrimony and dissension, for it was then that letters, if any, were read and plans for the day were made, remade and discarded; it was during these early-morning sessions that the family fortunes were organized, albeit haphazardly, so that a simple request for an omelette might end in a three-month camping expedition to a remote beach, as had happened on one occasion. So when we assembled in the brittle morning light, one was never quite sure how the day was going to get on its feet. To begin with, one had to step warily, for tempers were fragile, but gradually, under the influence of tea, coffee, toast, homemade marmalade, eggs and bowls of fruit, a lessening of the early-morning tension would be felt and a more benign atmosphere would begin to permeate the verandah.
The morning that heralded the arrival of the count among us was no different from any other. We had all reached the final cup of coffee stage, and each was busy with his own thoughts; Margo, my sister, her blonde hair done up in a bandana, was musing over two pattern books, humming gaily but tunelessly to herself; Leslie had finished his coffee and produced a small automatic pistol from his pocket, dismantled it, and was absentmindedly cleaning it with his handkerchief; my mother was perusing the pages of a cookery book in pursuit of a recipe for lunch, her lips moving soundlessly, occasionally breaking off to stare into space while she tried to remember if she had the necessary ingredients for the recipe she was reading; Larry, my elder brother, clad in a multicolored dressing gown, was eating cherries with one hand and reading his mail with the other.
I was occupied feeding my latest acquisition, a young jackdaw, who was such a singularly slow eater I had christened him Gladstone, having been told that that statesman always chewed everything several hundred times. While waiting for him to digest each mouthful, I stared down the hill at the beckoning sea and planned my day. Should I make a trip to the high olive groves in the center of the island to try and catch the agamas that lived on the glittering gypsum cliffs, where they basked in the sun, tantalizing me by wagging their yellow heads at me and puffing out their orange throats? Or should I go down to the small lake in the valley behind the villa, where the dragonfly larvae should be hatching? Or should I perhaps – happiest thought of all – take my new boat on a major sea trip?
In spring the almost enclosed sheet of water that separated Corfu from the mainland would be a pale and delicate blue, and then as spring settled into hot, crackling summer, it seemed to stain the still sea a deeper and more unreal color, which in some lights seemed like the violet blue of a rainbow, a blue that faded to a rich jade green in the shallows. In the evening when the sun sank, it was as if it were drawing a brush across the sea’s surface, streaking and blurring it to purples smudged with gold, silver, tangerine and pale pink. To look at this placid, land-locked sea in summer when it seemed so mild-mannered, a blue meadow that breathed gently and evenly along the shoreline, it was difficult to believe that it could be fierce; but even on a still, summer’s day, somewhere in the eroded hills of the mainland, hot fierce wind would suddenly be born and leap, screaming, at the island, turning the sea so dark it was almost black, combing each wave crest into a sheaf of white froth and urging and harrying them like a herd of panic-stricken blue horses until they crashed exhausted on the shore and died in a hissing shroud of foam. And in winter, under an iron-grey sky, the sea would lift sullen muscles of almost colorless waves, ice-cold and unfriendly, veined here and there with mud and debris that the winter rains swept out of the valleys and into the bay. To me, this blue kingdom was a treasure house of strange beasts which I longed to collect and observe, and at first it was frustrating for I could only peck along the shoreline like some forlorn seabird, capturing the small fry in the shallows and occasionally being tantalized by something mysterious and wonderful cast up on the shore. But then I got my boat, the good ship Bootle Bumtrinket, and so the whole of this kingdom was opened up for me, from the golden red castles of rock and their deep pools and underwater caves in the north to the long, glittering white sand dunes lying like snowdrifts in the south.
I decided on the sea trip, and so intent was I on planning it that I had quite forgotten Gladstone, who was wheezing at me with the breathless indignation of an asthmatic in a fog.
“If you must keep that harmonium covered with feathers,” said Larry, glancing up irritably, “you might at least teach it to sing properly.”
He was obviously not in the mood to receive a lecture on the jackdaw’s singing abilities, so I kept quiet and shut Gladstone up with a mammoth mouthful of food.
“Marco’s sending Count Rossignol for a couple of days,” Larry said casually to Mother.
“Who’s he?” asked Mother.
“I don’t know,” said Larry.
Mother straightened her glasses and looked at him.
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” she asked.
“What I say,” said Larry. “I don’t know; I’ve never met him.”
“Well, who’s Marco?”
“I don’t know; I’ve never met him either. He’s a good artist though.”
“Larry, dear, you can’t start inviting people you don’t know to stay,” said Mother. “It’s bad enough entertaining the ones you do know without starting on the ones you don’t know.”
“What’s knowing them got to do with it?” asked Larry, puzzled.
“Well, if you know them, at least they know what to expect,” Mother pointed out.
“Expect?” said Larry coldly. “You’d think I was inviting them to stay in a ghetto or something, the way you go on.”
“No, no, dear, I don’t mean that,” said Mother, “but it’s just that this house so seldom seems normal. I do try, but we don’t seem able to live like other people somehow.”
“Well, if they come to stay here, they must put up with us,” said Larry. “And anyway, you can’t blame me; I didn’t invite him. Marco’s sending him.”
“But that’s what I mean,” said Mother. “Complete strangers sending complete strangers to us, as if we were a hotel or something.”
“Trouble with you is you’re antisocial,” said Larry.
“And so would you be if you had to do the cooking,” said Mother indignantly. “It’s enough to make one want to be a hermit.”
“Well, as soon as the count’s been, you can be a hermit if you want to,” said Larry. “No one’s stopping you.”
“A lot of chance I get to be a hermit, with you inviting streams of people to stay.”
“Of course you can, if you organize yourself,” said Larry. “Leslie will build you a cave down in the olive groves; you can get Margo to stitch a few of Gerry’s less smelly animal skins together to wear, a pot of blackberries, and there you are. I can bring people down to see you. ‘This is my mother,’ I shall say. ‘She has deserted us to become a hermit.’ ”
Mother glared at him.
“Really,