The Corfu Trilogy Part 23

As I rowed along, I noticed on the smooth waters of the bay what I took to be a large patch of yellow seaweed. Seaweed was always worth investigating, as it invariably contained a host of small life and sometimes, if you were lucky, quite large creatures; so I rowed towards it. But as I got closer, I saw that it was not seaweed, but what appeared to be a yellowish-coloured rock. But what sort of rock could it be that floated in some twenty feet of water? As I looked closer, I saw, to my incredulous delight, that it was a fairly large turtle. Shipping the oars and urging the dogs to silence, I poised myself in the bows and waited, tense with excitement as the Bootle-b.u.mtrinket Bootle-b.u.mtrinket drifted closer and closer. The turtle, outspread, appeared to be floating on the surface of the sea, sound asleep. My problem was to capture him before he woke up. The nets and various other equipment I had in the boat had not been designed for the capture of a turtle measuring some three feet in length, so the only way I felt I could achieve success was by diving in on him, grabbing him, and somehow getting him into the boat before he woke up. In my excitement it never occurred to me that the strength possessed by a turtle of this size was considerable and that it was unlikely he was going to give up without a struggle. When the boat was some six feet away I held my breath and dived. I decided to dive under him so as to cut off his retreat, as it were, and as I plunged into the lukewarm water I uttered a brief prayer that the splash I made would not awaken him and that, even if it did, he would still be too dozy to execute a rapid retreat. I had dived deep and now I turned on my back and there, suspended above me like an enormous golden guinea, was the turtle. I shot up under him and grabbed him firmly by his front flippers, which curved like h.o.r.n.y sickles from out of his sh.e.l.l. To my surprise even this action did not wake him, and when I rose, gasping, to the surface, still retaining my grasp on his flippers, and shook the water from my eyes, I discovered the reason. The turtle had been dead for a fair length of time, as my nose and the host of tiny fish nibbling at his scaly limbs told me. drifted closer and closer. The turtle, outspread, appeared to be floating on the surface of the sea, sound asleep. My problem was to capture him before he woke up. The nets and various other equipment I had in the boat had not been designed for the capture of a turtle measuring some three feet in length, so the only way I felt I could achieve success was by diving in on him, grabbing him, and somehow getting him into the boat before he woke up. In my excitement it never occurred to me that the strength possessed by a turtle of this size was considerable and that it was unlikely he was going to give up without a struggle. When the boat was some six feet away I held my breath and dived. I decided to dive under him so as to cut off his retreat, as it were, and as I plunged into the lukewarm water I uttered a brief prayer that the splash I made would not awaken him and that, even if it did, he would still be too dozy to execute a rapid retreat. I had dived deep and now I turned on my back and there, suspended above me like an enormous golden guinea, was the turtle. I shot up under him and grabbed him firmly by his front flippers, which curved like h.o.r.n.y sickles from out of his sh.e.l.l. To my surprise even this action did not wake him, and when I rose, gasping, to the surface, still retaining my grasp on his flippers, and shook the water from my eyes, I discovered the reason. The turtle had been dead for a fair length of time, as my nose and the host of tiny fish nibbling at his scaly limbs told me.

Disappointing though this was, a dead turtle was better than no turtle at all, and so I laboriously towed his body alongside the Bootle-b.u.mtrinket Bootle-b.u.mtrinket and made it fast by one flipper to the side of the boat. The dogs were greatly intrigued, under the impression that this was some exotic and edible delicacy I had procured for their special benefit. The and made it fast by one flipper to the side of the boat. The dogs were greatly intrigued, under the impression that this was some exotic and edible delicacy I had procured for their special benefit. The Bootle-b.u.mtrinket Bootle-b.u.mtrinket, owing to her shape, had never been the easiest of craft to steer, and now, with the dead weight of the turtle lashed to one side of her, she showed a tendency to revolve in circles. However, after an hour's strenuous rowing, we arrived safely at the jetty, and having tied up the boat, I then hauled the turtle's carca.s.s onto the sh.o.r.e where I could examine it. It was a hawks-bill turtle, the kind whose sh.e.l.l is used for the manufacture of spectacle frames and whose stuffed carca.s.s you occasionally see in opticians' windows. His head was ma.s.sive, with a great wrinkled jowl of yellow skin and a swooping beak of a nose that did give him an extraordinarily hawk-like look. The sh.e.l.l was battered in places, presumably by ocean storms or by the snap of a pa.s.sing shark, and here and there it was decorated with little snow-white cl.u.s.ters of baby barnacles. His underside of pale daffodil-yellow was soft and pliable like thick, damp cardboard.

I had recently conducted a long and fascinating dissection of a dead terrapin that I had found and I felt this would be an ideal opportunity to compare the turtle's internal anatomy with that of his fresh-water brother, so I went up the hill, borrowed the gardener's wheelbarrow, and in it transported my prize up to the house and laid him out in state on the front veranda.

I knew there would be repercussions if I endeavoured to perform my dissection of the turtle inside the house, but I felt that n.o.body in his right mind would object to the dissection of the turtle on the front veranda. With my notebook at the ready and my row of saws, scalpels, and razor blades neatly laid out as though in an operating theatre, I set to work.

I found that the soft yellow plastron came away quite easily, compared with the underside of the terrapin, which had taken me three quarters of an hour to saw through. When the plastron was free, I lifted it off like a cover off a dish and there, underneath, were all the delicious mysteries of the turtle's internal organs displayed, multi-coloured and odoriferous to a degree. So consumed with curiosity was I that I did not even notice the smell. The dogs, however, who normally considered fresh cow dung to be the ideal scent to add piquancy to their love life, disappeared in a disapproving body, sneezing violently. I discovered, to my delight, that the turtle was a female and had a large quant.i.ty of half-formed eggs in her. They were about the size of ping-pong b.a.l.l.s, soft, round, and as orange as a nasturtium. There were fourteen of them, and I removed them carefully and laid them in a gleaming, glutinous row on the flagstones. The turtle appeared to have a prodigious quant.i.ty of gut, and I decided that I should enter the exact length of this astonishing apparatus in my already blood-stained notebook. With the aid of a scalpel I detached the gut from the rear exit of the turtle and then proceeded to pull it out. It seemed never-ending, but before long I had it all laid out carefully across the veranda in a series of loops and twists, like a rather drunken railway line. One section of it was composed of the stomach, a rather hideous greyish bag like a water-filled balloon. This obviously was full of the turtle's last meal and I felt, in the interests of science, that I ought to check on what it had been eating just prior to its demise. I stuck a scalpel in the great wobbling mound and slashed experimentally. Immediately the whole stomach bag deflated with a ghastly sighing noise and a stench arose from its interior which made all the other smells pale into insignificance. Even I, fascinated as I was by my investigations, reeled back and had to retreat coughing to wait for the smell to subside.

I knew I could get the veranda cleaned up before the family got back from town, but in my excitement with my new acquisition, I had completely overlooked the fact that Leslie was convalescing in the drawing-room. The scent of the turtle's interior, so pungent that it seemed almost solid, floated in through the French windows and enveloped the couch on which he lay. My first intimation of this catastrophe was a blood-curdling roar from inside the drawing-room. Before I could do anything sensible, Leslie, swathed in blankets, appeared in the French windows.

'What's that b.l.o.o.d.y awful stink?' he inquired throatily. Then, as his glance fell upon the dismembered turtle and its prettily arranged internal organs spread across the flagstones, his eyes bulged and his face took on a heliotrope tinge. 'What the h.e.l.l's that? that?'

I explained, somewhat diffidently, that it was a turtle that I was dissecting. It was a female, I went on hurriedly, hoping to distract Leslie by detail. Here he could see the fascinating eggs that I had extracted from her interior.

'd.a.m.n her eggs,' shouted Leslie, making it sound like some strange medieval oath. 'Get the b.l.o.o.d.y thing away from here. It's stinking the place out.'

I said that I had almost reached the end of my dissection and that I had then planned to bury all the soft parts and merely keep the skeleton and sh.e.l.l to add to my collection.

'You're doing nothing of the sort,' shouted Leslie. 'You're to take the whole b.l.o.o.d.y thing and bury it. Then you can come back and scrub the veranda.'

Lugaretzia, our cook, attracted by the uproar, appeared in the French windows next to Leslie. She opened her mouth to inquire into the nature of this family quarrel when she was struck amidships by the smell of the turtle. Lugaretzia always had fifteen or sixteen ailments worrying her at any given moment, which she cherished with the same loving care that other people devote to window-boxes or Pekingese. At this particular time it was her stomach that was causing her the most trouble. In consequence she gasped two or three times, feebly, like a fish, uttered a strangled 'Saint Spiridion!' and fell into Leslie's arms in a well-simulated faint.

Just at that moment, to my horror, the car containing the rest of the family swept up the drive and came to a halt below the veranda.

'h.e.l.lo, dear,' said Mother, getting out of the car and coming up to the steps. 'Did you have a nice morning?'

Before I could say anything, the turtle, as it were, got in before me. Mother uttered a couple of strange hiccuping cries, pulled out her handkerchief and clapped it to her nose.

'What,' she demanded indistinctly, 'is that terrible smell?'

'It's that b.l.o.o.d.y boy,' roared Leslie from the French windows, making ineffectual attempts to prop the moaning Lugaretzia against the door jamb.

Larry and Margo had now followed Mother up the steps and caught sight of the butchered turtle.

'What...?' began Larry and then he too was seized with a convulsive fit of coughing.

'It's that d.a.m.ned boy,' he said, gasping.

'Yes, dear,' said Mother through her handkerchief. 'Leslie's just told me.'

'It's disgusting,' wailed Margo, fanning herself with her handkerchief. 'It looks like a railway accident.'

'What is is it, dear?' Mother asked me. it, dear?' Mother asked me.

I explained that it was an exceedingly interesting hawks-bill turtle, female, containing eggs.

'Surely you don't have to chop it up on the veranda?' said Mother.

'The boy's mad,' said Larry with conviction. 'The whole place smells like a b.l.o.o.d.y whaling ship.'

'I really think you'll have to take it somewhere else, dear,' said Mother. 'We can't have this smell on the front veranda.'

'Tell him to bury the d.a.m.ned thing,' said Leslie, clasping his blankets more firmly about him.

'Why don't you get him adopted by a family of Eskimos?' inquired Larry. 'They like eating blubber and maggots and things.'

'Larry, don't be disgusting,' said Margo. 'They can't eat anything like this. The very thought of it makes me feel sick.'

'I think we ought to go inside,' said Mother faintly. 'Perhaps it won't smell as much in there.'

'If anything, it smells worse in here,' shouted Leslie from the French windows.

'Gerry dear, you must clean this up,' said Mother as she picked her way delicately over the turtle's entrails, 'and disinfect the flagstones.'

The family went inside and I set about the task of clearing up the turtle from the front veranda. Their voices arguing ferociously drifted out to me.

'b.l.o.o.d.y menace,' said Leslie. 'Lying here peacefully reading, and I was suddenly seized by the throat.'

'Disgusting,' said Margo. 'I don't wonder Lugaretzia fainted.'

'High time he had another tutor,' said Larry. 'You leave the house for five minutes and come back and find him disembowelling Moby d.i.c.k on the front porch.'

'I'm sure he didn't mean any harm,' said Mother, 'but it was rather silly of him to do it on the veranda.'

'Silly!' said Larry caustically. 'We'll be blundering round the house with gas-masks for the next six months.'

I piled the remains of the turtle into the wheelbarrow and took it up to the top of the hill behind the villa. Here I dug a hole and buried all the soft parts and then placed the sh.e.l.l and the bone structure near a nest of friendly ants, who had, on previous occasions, helped me considerably by picking skeletons clean. But the most they had ever tackled had been a very large green lizard, so I was interested to see whether they would tackle the turtle. They ran towards it, their antennae waving eagerly, and then stopped, thought about it for a bit, held a little consultation and then retreated in a body; apparently even the ants were against me, so I returned dispiritedly to the villa.

Here I found that a thin, whining little man, obviously made belligerent by wine, was arguing with Lugaretzia on the still-odoriferous veranda. I inquired what the man wanted.

'He says,' said Lugaretzia, with fine scorn, 'that Roger has been killing his chickens.'

'Turkeys,' corrected the man. 'Turkeys.'

'Well, turkeys then,' said Lugaretzia, conceding the point.

My heart sank. One calamity was being succeeded by another. Roger, we knew, had the most reprehensible habit of killing chickens. He derived a lot of innocent amus.e.m.e.nt in the spring and summer by chasing swallows. They would drive him into an apoplectic fury by zooming past his nose and then flying along the ground just ahead of him while he chased them, bristling with rage, uttering roars of fury. The peasants' chickens used to hide in the myrtle bushes and then, just as Roger was pa.s.sing, they would leap out with a great flutter of wings and insane hysterical cackling right into his path. Roger, I was sure, was convinced that these chickens were a sort of ungainly swallow that he could get to grips with and so, in spite of yells of protest on our part, he would leap on them and kill them with one swift bite, all his hatred of the teasing summer swallows showing in his action. No punishment had any effect on him. He was normally an extremely obedient dog, except about this one thing, and so, in desperation, all we could do was to recompense the owners, but only on condition that the corpse of the chicken was produced as evidence.

Reluctantly I went in to tell the family that Roger had been at it again.

'Christ!' said Leslie, getting laboriously to his feet. 'You and your sodding animals.'

'Now, now, dear,' said Mother placatingly. 'Gerry can't help it if Roger kills chickens.'

'Turkeys,' said Leslie. 'I bet he'll want a h.e.l.l of a lot for those.'

'Have you cleaned up the veranda, dear?' inquired Mother.

Larry removed a large handkerchief, drenched in eau-de-Cologne, which he had spread over his face. 'Does it smell as though he's cleaned up the veranda?' he inquired.

I said hastily that I was just about to do it and followed Leslie to see the outcome of his conversation with the turkey owner.

'Well,' said Leslie belligerently, striding out onto the veranda, 'what do you want?'

The man cringed, humble, servile, and altogether repulsive.

'Be happy, kyrie kyrie, be happy,' he said, greeting Leslie.

'Be happy,' Leslie replied in a gruff tone of voice that implied he hoped the man would be anything but. 'What do you wish to see me about?'

'My turkeys, kyrie kyrie,' explained the man. 'I apologize for troubling you, but your dog, you see, he's been killing my turkeys.'

'Well,' said Leslie, 'how many has he killed?'

'Five, kyrie kyrie,' said the man, shaking his head sorrowfully. 'Five of my best turkeys. I am a poor man, kyrie kyrie, otherwise I wouldn't have dreamed...'

'Five!' said Leslie startled, and turned an inquiring eye on me.

I said I thought it was quite possible. If five hysterical turkeys had leaped out of a myrtle bush, I could well believe that Roger would kill them all. For such a benign and friendly dog, he was a very ruthless killer when he got started.

'Roger is a good dog,' said Lugaretzia belligerently.

She had joined us on the veranda and she obviously viewed the turkey owner with the same dislike as I did. Apart from this, in her eyes Roger could do no wrong.

'Well,' said Leslie, making the best of a bad job, 'if he's killed five turkeys, he's killed five turkeys. Such is life. Where are the bodies?'

There was a moment of silence.

'The bodies, kyrie kyrie?' queried the turkey owner tentatively.

'The bodies, the bodies,' said Leslie impatiently. 'You know, the bodies of the turkeys. You know we can't pay until you produce the bodies.'

'But that's not possible,' said the turkey owner nervously.

'What do you mean, not possible?' inquired Leslie.

'Well, it's not possible to bring the bodies, kyrie kyrie,' said the turkey owner with a flash of inspiration, 'because your dog has eaten them.'

The explosion that this statement provoked was considerable. We all knew that Roger was, if anything, slightly overfed, and that he was of a most fastidious nature. Though he would kill a chicken, nothing would induce him to feed upon the carca.s.s.

'Lies! Lies!' shrilled Lugaretzia, her eyes swimming with tears of emotion. 'He's a good dog.'

'He's never eaten anything in his life that he's killed,' shouted Leslie. 'Never.'

'But five of my turkeys!' said the little man. 'Five of them he's eaten!'

'When did he kill them?' roared Leslie.

'This morning, kyrie kyrie, this morning,' said the man, crossing himself. 'I saw it myself, and he ate them all.'

I interrupted to say that Roger had been out that morning in the Bootle-b.u.mtrinket Bootle-b.u.mtrinket with me and, intelligent dog though he was, I did not see how he could be consuming the prodigious quant.i.ty of five turkeys on this man's farm and be out in the boat with me at the same time. with me and, intelligent dog though he was, I did not see how he could be consuming the prodigious quant.i.ty of five turkeys on this man's farm and be out in the boat with me at the same time.

Leslie had had a trying morning. All he had wanted was to lie peacefully on the sofa with his manual of ballistics, but first he had been almost asphyxiated by my investigations into the internal anatomy of the turtle and now he was being faced by a drunken little man, trying to swindle us for the price of five turkeys. His temper, never under the best of control, bubbled over.

'You're a two-faced liar and a cheat,' he snarled. The little man backed away and his face went white.

'You are the liar and the cheat,' he said, with drunken belligerence. ' are the liar and the cheat,' he said, with drunken belligerence. 'You are the liar and the cheat. You let your dog kill everybody's chickens and turkeys and then when they come to you for payment, you refuse. are the liar and the cheat. You let your dog kill everybody's chickens and turkeys and then when they come to you for payment, you refuse. You You are the liar and the cheat.' are the liar and the cheat.'

Even at that stage, I think that sanity could have prevailed, but the little man made a fatal mistake. He spat copiously and wetly at Leslie's feet. Lugaretzia uttered a shrill wail of horror and grabbed hold of Leslie's arm. Knowing his temper, I grabbed hold of the other one, too. The little man, appalled into a moment of sobriety, backed away. Leslie quivered like a volcano and Lugaretzia and I hung on like grim death.

'Excreta of a pig,' roared Leslie. 'Illegitimate son of a diseased wh.o.r.e...' of a pig,' roared Leslie. 'Illegitimate son of a diseased wh.o.r.e...'

The fine Greek oaths rolled out, rich, vulgar, and biological, and the little man turned from white to pink and from pink to red. He had obviously been unaware of the fact that Leslie had such a command over the fruitier of the Greek insults.

'You'll be sorry,' he quavered. 'You'll be sorry.'

He spat once more with a pathetic sort of defiance and then turned and scuttled down the drive.

It took the combined efforts of the family and Lugaretzia three quarters of an hour to calm Leslie down, with the aid of several large brandies.

'Don't you worry about him, kyrie kyrie Leslie,' was Lugaretzia's final summing up. 'He's well known in the village as a bad character. Don't you worry about him.' Leslie,' was Lugaretzia's final summing up. 'He's well known in the village as a bad character. Don't you worry about him.'

But we were forced to worry about him, for the next thing we knew, he had sued Leslie for not paying his debts and for defamation of character.

Spiro, when told the news, was furious.

'Gollys, Mrs Durrells,' he said, his face red with wrath. 'Why don'ts yous lets Masters Leslies shoot the son of a b.i.t.c.h?'

'I don't think that would really solve anything, Spiro,' said Mother. 'What we want to know now is whether this man has any chance of winning his case.'

'Winnings!' said Spiro with fine scorn. 'That b.a.s.t.a.r.d won't wins anythings. You just leaves it to me. I'll fixes it.'

'Now, don't go and do anything rash, Spiro,' said Mother. 'It'll only make matters worse.'

'I won'ts do anything rash, Mrs Durrells. But I'll fixes that b.a.s.t.a.r.d.'

For several days he went about with an air of conspiratorial gloom, his bushy eyebrows tangled in a frown of immense concentration, only answering our questions monosyllabically. Then, one day, a fortnight or so before the case was due to be heard, we were all in town on a shopping spree. Eventually, weighed down by our purchases, we made our way to the broad, tree-lined Esplanade and sat there having a drink and exchanging greetings with our numerous acquaintances who pa.s.sed. Presently Spiro, who had been glaring furtively about him with the air of a man who had many enemies, suddenly stiffened. He hitched his great belly up and leaned across the table.

'Master Leslies, you sees that mans over there, that one with the white hair?'

He pointed a sausage-like finger at a small, neat little man who was placidly sipping a cup of coffee under the trees.

'Well, what about him?' inquired Leslie.

'He's the judges,' said Spiro.

'What judge?' said Leslie, bewildered.