7

The Paths of Love

Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples for I am sick of love.

SONG OF SOLOMON 5

It had been one of those prodigious, desiccating, earth-cracking summers that was so hot it even bleached the sky to a pale end-of-summer, forget-me-not colour and flattened the sea so that it lay like a great blue pool, unmoving, warm as fresh milk. At night you could hear the floors and shutters and beams of the villa shifting and groaning and cracking in the warm air as the last juices were sucked out of them. The full moon would rise like a red coal, glowering down at us from the hot, velvety sky, and in the morning the sun was already too warm to be comfortable ten minutes after it appeared. There was no wind and the heat pressed down on the island like a lid. On the hillside in the breathless air, the plants and grasses withered and died until they stood there, bleached and blonde as honey, crisp as wood shavings. The days were so hot that even the cicadas started singing earlier and siestaed during the heat of the day, and the ground was baked so that there was nowhere you could walk without shoes.

The villa represented to the local animal life a series of large wooden caves which were perhaps half a degree cooler than the surrounding olive, orange and lemon groves, and so they flocked to join us. At first I was naturally blamed for this sudden influx of creatures but eventually the invasion became so comprehensive that even my family realized I could not be responsible for quite such a large quantity and variety of life forms. Battalions of black ticks marched into the house and beset the dogs, massing in such numbers on their ears and heads that they looked like chain-mail and were just as difficult to remove. In desperation we had to douse them with kerosene, which made the ticks drop off. The dogs, deeply insulted by this treatment, slouched, panting, round the house, reeking of kerosene, shedding ticks in vast quantities. Larry suggested that we put up a notice saying ‘Danger – inflammable dogs’ for, as he rightly pointed out, if anyone lit a match near one of them the whole villa was liable to go up in flames like a tinder box.

The kerosene only gave us a temporary respite. More and more ticks marched into the house until at night one could lie in bed and watch rows of them performing strange route marches around the room. The ticks, fortunately, did not attack us but confined themselves to driving the dogs mad. However, the hordes of fleas that decided to take up residence with us were another matter. They arrived suddenly, out of nowhere, it seemed, like the Tartar hordes, and over-ran us before we realized what was happening. They were everywhere and you could feel them hopping on to you and running up your legs as you walked around the house. The bedrooms became untenable and for a time we took our beds out on to the broad verandas and slept there.

But the fleas were not the most objectionable of the lesser inhabitants of the house. The tiny scorpions, black as ebony, infested the bathroom where it was cool. Leslie going in late one night to clean his teeth was ill-advised enough to go barefoot and was stung on the toe. The scorpion was only half an inch long but the agony of the bite was out of all proportion to the size of the beast and it was some days before Leslie could walk. The larger scorpions preferred the kitchen area, where they would quite blatantly sit on the ceiling looking like misshapen aerial lobsters.

At night when the lamps were lit, thousands of insects appeared; moths of all shapes, from tiny fawn-coloured ones with wings shaped like tattered feathers, to the great big, striped, pink and silver hawk moths, whose death dives at the light were capable of breaking the lantern chimney. Then there were the beetles, some as black as mourners, some gaily striped and patterned, some with short, club-shaped antennae, others with antennae as long and thin as a Mandarin’s moustache. With these came a multitude of lesser forms of life, most of them so small that you needed a magnifying glass to make out their incredible shapes and colours.

Naturally, this conglomeration of insects was marvellous as far as I was concerned. Each evening I hung about the lights, my collecting boxes and bottles at the ready, vying with the other predators for choice specimens. I had to look sharp, for the competition was brisk. On the ceiling were the geckoes, pale, pink-skinned, spread-fingered, bulbous-eyed, stalking the moths and beetles with minuscule care. Alongside them were the green, swaying, hypocritical mantis with their mad eyes and chinless faces, moving on slender, prickly legs like green vampires.

On ground level I had to contend with enormous chocolate-coloured spiders like lanky, furry wolves, who would lurk in the shadows and scuttle out and snatch a specimen almost from my very fingers. They were aided and abetted by the fat map toads in their handsome patchwork skins of green and silvery grey who hopped and gulped their way, wide-eyed with astonishment, through this largesse of food, and the swift, furtive, and somehow sinister scutigera. This form of centipede had a body some three inches long and as thick as a pencil and flattened; around the perimeter was a hedge, a fringe of long, slender legs. When it moved, as each pair of legs came into action, these fringes appeared to undulate in waves, and the animal progressed as smoothly as a stone on ice, silent and unnerving, for scutigera were among the most ferocious and skilful of hunters.

One evening, the lights had been lit and I was waiting patiently to see what they were going to add to my collection; it was still fairly early so that most of the predators, apart from myself and a few bats, had not put in an appearance. The bats whipped up and down the veranda as fast as whiplashes, taking the moths and other succulent dainties from within inches of the lamp, the wind from their wings making the flames shudder and leap. Gradually, the pale dragon-green afterglow of the sunset faded, the crickets started their prolonged musical trills, the gloom of the olive trees was lit by the cold lights of the fireflies, and the great house, creaking and groaning with sunburn, settled down for the night.

The wall behind the lamp was already covered by a host of various insects which, after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, were clinging there to recover themselves before trying again. At the base of the wall, from a minute crack in the plaster, emerged one of the smallest and fattest geckoes I had ever seen. He must have been newly hatched for he measured only about an inch and a half in length, but obviously the short time he had been in the world had not prevented him from eating prodigiously for his body and tail were so fat as to make him appear almost circular. His mouth was set in a wide, shy smile and his large dark eyes were wide and wondering, like the eyes of a child that sees a table set for a banquet. Before I could stop him he had waddled slowly up the wall and started his supper with a lacewing fly; these creatures, with their transparent wings like green lace and their large green-gold eyes, were favourites of mine and so I was annoyed with him.

Gulping down the last bit of gauzy wing, the baby gecko paused, clinging to the wall, and mused for a bit, occasionally blinking his eyes. I could not think why he had chosen the lacewing, which was a bulky thing to handle, when he was surrounded on all sides by a variety of small insects which would have been easier for him to catch and eat. But it soon became apparent that he was a glutton whose eyes were bigger than his stomach. Having hatched from an egg – and, therefore, lacking a mother’s guidance – he was under the strong but erroneous impression that all insects were edible and that the bigger they were the quicker they would assuage his hunger. He did not even seem to be aware of the fact that for a creature of his size some insects could be dangerous. Like an early missionary, he was so concerned with himself that it never occurred to him that somebody might look upon him simply as a meal.

Ignoring a convention of small and eminently edible moths sitting near him, he stalked a great, fat, hairy oak eggar whose body was almost bigger than his own; he misjudged his run-in, however, and merely caught her by the tip of one wing. She flew off and such was the power of her brown wings that she almost tore the gecko’s grip from the wall and carried him with her. Nothing daunted, after a brief rest, the gecko launched an assault on a longicorn beetle his own size. He would never have been able to swallow such a hard, prickly monster, but this apparently did not occur to him. However, he could not get a grip on the beetle’s hard and polished body, and all he succeeded in doing was knocking it to the floor.

He was just having another brief rest and surveying the battlefield when, with a crisp rustle of wings, an enormous mantis flew on to the veranda and alighted on the wall some six inches away. She folded her wings with a noise like the crumpling of tissue paper and, with viciously pronged arms raised in mock prayer, stared about her with lunatic eyes, twisting her head from side to side as she surveyed the array of insects assembled for her benefit.

The gecko, it was fairly obvious, had never seen a mantis before and did not realize how lethal they could be; as far as he was concerned, it was an enormous green dinner of the sort that he had dreamed about but never hoped to obtain. Without more ado, and ignoring the fact that the mantis was some five times his size, he began to stalk her. The mantis, meanwhile, had singled out a silver-Y moth and was moving towards it on its attenuated, elderly spinster legs, pausing occasionally to sway to and fro, the personification of evil. Hard in her wake came the gecko, head down, grimly determined, pausing whenever the mantis did, and lashing his ridiculous little fat tail to and fro like an excited puppy.

The mantis reached the oblivious moth, paused, swaying, then lashed out with her foreclaws and seized it. The moth, which was a large one, started fluttering frantically and it required all the strength of the mantis’ cruelly barbed forelegs to hold it. As she was struggling with it, looking like a rather inept juggler, the gecko, who had lashed himself into a fury with his fat tail, launched his attack. He darted forward and laid hold of the mantis’ wing case like a bulldog. The mantis was busy trying to juggle the moth round in her claws and so this sudden attack from the rear knocked her off balance. She fell to the ground, carrying with her the moth and the gecko. When she landed she still had the gecko hanging grimly to her wing case. She relinquished the moth, which was by now almost dead, so as to leave her sabre-sharp front claws free to do battle with the gecko.

I had just decided that this was the point where I should step in to add a mantis and a gecko to my menagerie when another protagonist entered the arena. From the shadows of the grapevine a scutigera slid into view, a moving carpet of legs, skimming purposefully towards the still-twitching moth. It reached it, poured itself over the body, and sank its jaws into the moth’s soft thorax. It was a fascinating scene; the mantis bent almost double, slashing downwards with her needle-sharp claws at the gecko who, with eyes protruding with excitement, was hanging on grimly though he was being whipped to and fro by his large antagonist. The scutigera meanwhile, deciding it could not move the moth, lay draped over it like a pelmet, sucking out its vital juices.

It was at that point that Theresa Olive Agnes Dierdre, known as Dierdre for short, made her appearance. Dierdre was one of a pair of enormous common toads that I had found, tamed with comparative ease, and established in the tiny walled garden below the veranda. Here they lived a blameless life among the geraniums and tangerine trees, venturing up onto the veranda when the lights were lit to take their share of the insect life.

So taken up was I by the strange foursome in front of me that I had forgotten all about Dierdre and when she appeared on the scene I was unprepared, lying as I was on my stomach with my nose some six inches from the battlefield. Unbeknownst to me, Dierdre had been watching the skirmishing from beneath a chair. She now hopped forward fatly, paused for a brief second, then, before I could do anything, leaped forward in the purposeful way that toads have, opened her huge mouth and with the aid of her tongue flipped both scutigera and moth into her capacious maw. She paused again, gulping so that her protuberant eyes disappeared briefly, and then turned smartly to the left and flapped both mantis and gecko into her mouth. Only for a moment did the gecko’s tail protrude, wriggling like a worm between Dierdre’s thick lips, before she stuffed it firmly into her mouth, toad-fashion, with her thumbs.

I had read about food chains and the survival of the fittest but this I felt was carrying things too far.

Apart from anything else, I was annoyed with Dierdre for spoiling what was proving to be an absorbing drama. So that she would not interfere with anything else I carried her back to the walled garden she shared with her husband, Terence Oliver Albert Dick, under a stone trough full of marigolds. I reckoned she had eaten quite enough for one evening anyway.

So it was to a house baked crisp as a biscuit, hot as a baker’s oven, and teeming with animal life that Adrian Fortescue Smythe made his appearance. Adrian, a school friend of Leslie’s, had spent one holiday with us in England and as a result had fallen deeply and irrevocably in love with Margo, much to her annoyance. We were all spread out on the veranda reading our fortnightly mail when the news of Adrian’s imminent arrival was broken to us by Mother.

‘Oh, how nice,’ she said. ‘That will be nice.’

We all stopped reading and looked at her suspiciously.

‘What will be nice?’ asked Larry.

‘I’ve had a letter from Mrs Fortescue Smythe,’ said Mother.

‘I don’t see anything nice about that,’ said Larry.

‘What does the old hag want?’ Leslie inquired.

‘Leslie, dear, you mustn’t call her an old hag. She was very kind to you, remember.’

Leslie grunted derisively

‘What’s she want anyway?’

‘Well, she says Adrian’s doing a tour of the Continent and could he come to Corfu and stay with us for a bit.’

‘Oh good,’ said Leslie, ‘it’ll be nice to have Adrian to stay.’

‘Yes, he’s a nice boy,’ admitted Larry magnanimously.

‘Isn’t he!’ said Mother enthusiastically. ‘Such nice manners.’

‘Well, I’m not pleased he’s coming,’ contributed Margo. ‘He’s one of the most boring people I know. He makes me yawn just to look at him. Can’t you say we’re full up, Mother?’

‘But I thought you liked Adrian,’ said Mother, surprised. ‘He certainly liked you, if I remember.’

‘That’s just the point. I don’t want him drooling all over the place like a sex-starved spaniel.’

Mother straightened her spectacles and looked at Margo.

‘Margo, dear, I don’t think you ought to talk about Adrian like that, I don’t know where you get these expressions. I’m sure you’re exaggerating. I never saw him look like a … like a … well … like what you said. He seemed perfectly well behaved to me.’

‘Of course he was,’ said Leslie belligerently. ‘It’s just Margo; she thinks every man is after her.’

‘I don’t,’ said Margo indignantly. ‘I just don’t like him. He’s squishy. Every time you looked around, there he was, dribbling.’

‘Adrian never dribbled in his life.’

‘He did. Nothing but dribble, dribble, drool.’

‘I never saw him dribbling,’ said Mother, ‘and anyway I can’t say he mustn’t stay just because he dribbles, Margo. Do be reasonable.’

‘He’s Les’ friend. Let him dribble over Les.’

‘He doesn’t dribble. He’s never dribbled.’

‘Well,’ said Mother, with the air of one solving a problem. ‘There’ll be plenty for him to do so I dare say he won’t have time to dribble.’

A fortnight later a starving, exhausted Adrian arrived, having cycled with practically no money all the way from Calais on a bicycle, which had given up the unequal struggle and fallen to bits at Brindisi. For the first few days we saw little of him since Mother insisted he went to bed early, got up late, and had another helping of everything. When he did put in an appearance I watched him narrowly for signs of dribbling, for of all the curious friends we had had staying with us, we had never had one that dribbled before and I was anxious to witness this phenomenon. But apart from a tendency to go scarlet every time Margo entered the room and to sit looking at her with his mouth slightly open (when honesty compelled me to admit he did look rather like a spaniel), he betrayed no other signs of eccentricity. He had extravagantly curly hair, large, very gentle hazel eyes, and his hormones had just allowed him to achieve a hairline moustache of which he was extremely proud. He had bought, as a gift for Margo, a record of a song which he obviously considered to be the equivalent of Shakespearian sonnets set to music. It was called ‘At Smokey Joe’s’ and we all grew to hate it intensely, for Adrian’s day was not complete unless he had played this cacophonous ditty at least twenty times.

‘Dear God,’ Larry groaned at breakfast one morning as he heard the hiss of the record, ‘not again, not at this hour.’

‘At Smokey Joe’s in Havana,’ the gramophone proclaimed loudly in a nasal tenor voice, ‘I lingered quenching my thirst …’

‘I can’t bear it. Why can’t he play something else?’ Margo wailed.

‘Now, now, dear. He likes it,’ said Mother placatingly.

‘Yes, and he bought it for you,’ said Leslie. ‘It’s your bloody present. Why don’t you tell him to stop?’

‘No, you can’t do that, dear,’ said Mother. ‘After all, he is a guest.’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ snapped Larry. ‘Just because he’s tone deaf, why should we all have to suffer? It’s Margo’s record. It’s her responsibility.’

‘But it seems so impolite,’ said Mother worriedly. ‘After all, he brought it as a present; he thinks we like it.’

‘I know he does. I find it hard to credit such depths of ignorance,’ said Larry. ‘D’you know he took off Beethoven’s Fifth yesterday halfway through to put on that emasculated yowling! I tell you he’s about as cultured as Attila the Hun.’

‘Sshh, he’ll hear you, Larry dear,’ said Mother.

‘What, with that row going on? He’d need an ear trumpet.’

Adrian, oblivious to the family’s restiveness, now joined the recorded voice to make a duet. As he had a nasal tenor voice remarkably similar to the vocalist’s the result was pretty horrible.

‘I saw a damsel there … That was really where … I saw her first … Oh, Mama Inez … Oh, Mama Inez … Oh, Mama Inez … Mama Inez …’ warbled Adrian and the gramophone more or less in unison.

‘God in heaven!’ Larry exploded. ‘That’s really too much! Margo, you’ve got to speak to him.’

‘Well, do it politely, dear,’ said Mother. ‘We don’t want to hurt his feelings.’

‘I feel just like hurting his feelings,’ said Larry.

‘I know,’ said Margo, ‘I’ll tell him Mother’s got a headache.’

‘That will only give us a temporary respite,’ pointed out Larry.

‘You tell him Mother’s got a headache and I’ll hide the needle,’ suggested Leslie triumphantly. ‘How about that?’

‘Oh, that’s a brainwave,’ Mother exclaimed, delighted that the problem had been solved without hurting Adrian’s feelings.

Adrian was somewhat mystified by the disappearance of the needles and the fact that everyone assured him they could not be obtained in Corfu. However, he had a retentive memory, if no ability to carry a tune, so he hummed ‘At Smokey Joe’s’ all day long, sounding like a hive of distraught tenor bees.

As the days passed, his adoration for Margo showed no signs of abating; if anything, it grew worse, and Margo’s irritation waxed with it. I began to feel very sorry for Adrian, for it seemed that nothing he could do was right. Because Margo said she thought his moustache made him look like an inferior gentlemen’s hairdresser, he shaved it off, only to have her proclaim that moustaches were a sign of virility. Furthermore, she was heard to say in no uncertain terms that she much preferred the local peasant boys to any English import.

‘They’re so handsome and so sweet,’ she said to Adrian’s obvious chagrin. ‘They all sing so well. They have such nice manners. They play the guitar. Give me one of them instead of an Englishman any day. They have a sort of ordure about them.’

‘Don’t you mean aura?’ asked Larry.

‘Anyway,’ Margo continued, ignoring this, ‘they’re what I call men, not namby-pamby dribbling wash-outs.’

‘Margo, dear,’ said Mother, glancing nervously at the wounded Adrian. ‘I don’t think that’s very kind.’

‘I’m not trying to be kind,’ said Margo, ‘and most of cruelty is kindness if it’s done in the right way.’

Leaving us with this baffling piece of philosophy, she went off to see her latest conquest, a richly tanned fisherman with a luxuriant moustache. Adrian was so obviously mortified that the family felt it must try and alleviate his mood of despair.

‘Don’t take any notice of Margo, Adrian dear,’ said Mother soothingly. ‘She doesn’t mean what she says. She’s very headstrong, you know. Have another peach.’

‘Pig-headed,’ said Leslie. ‘And I ought to know.’

‘I don’t see how I can be more like the peasant boys,’ mused Adrian, puzzled. ‘I suppose I could take up the guitar.’

‘No, no, don’t do that,’ said Larry hastily, ‘that’s quite unnecessary. Why not try something simple? Try chewing garlic.’

‘Garlic?’ asked Adrian, surprised. ‘Does Margo like garlic?’

‘Sure to,’ said Larry, ‘you heard what she said about those peasant lads’ auras. Well, what’s the first bit of their aura that hits you when you go near them? Garlic!’

Adrian was much struck by the logic of this and chewed a vast quantity of garlic, only to be told by Margo, with a handkerchief over her nose, that he smelled like the local bus on market day.

Adrian seemed to me to be a very nice person; he was gentle and kind and always willing to do anything that anyone asked of him. I felt it my duty to do something for him, but short of locking Margo in his bedroom – a thought which I dismissed as impractical and liable to be frowned on by Mother – I could think of nothing very sensible. I decided to discuss the matter with Mr Kralefsky in case he could suggest anything. When we were having our coffee break I told him about Adrian’s unsuccessful pursuit of Margo, a welcome respite for us both from the insoluble mysteries of the square on the hypotenuse.

‘Aha!’ he said. ‘The paths of love never run smooth. One is tempted to wonder, indeed, if life would not be a trifle dull if the road to one’s goal were always smooth.’

I was not particularly interested in my tutor’s philosophical flights but I waited politely. Mr Kralefsky picked up a biscuit delicately in his beautifully manicured hands, held it briefly over his coffee cup and then christened it in the brown liquid before popping it into his mouth. He chewed methodically, his eyes closed.

‘It seems to me,’ he said at last, ‘that this young Lochinvar is trying too hard.’

I said that Adrian was English but, in any case, how could one try too hard; if one didn’t try hard one didn’t achieve success.

‘Ah,’ said Mr Kralefsky archly, ‘but in matters of the heart things are different. A little bit of indifference sometimes works wonders.’

He put his fingertips together and gazed raptly at the ceiling. I could tell that we were about to embark on one of his flights of fancy with his favourite mythological character, ‘a lady’.

‘I remember once I became greatly enamoured of a certain lady,’ said Kralefsky. ‘I tell you this in confidence, of course.’

I nodded and helped myself to another biscuit. Kralefsky’s stories were apt to be a bit lengthy.

‘She was a lady of such beauty and accomplishments that every eligible man flocked round her, like … like … bees round a honey pot,’ said Mr Kralefsky, pleased with this image. ‘From the moment I saw her I fell deeply, irrevocably, inconsolably in love and felt that she in some measure returned my regard.’

He took a sip of coffee to moisten his throat, then he trellised his fingers together and leaned across the desk, his nostrils flaring, his great, soulful eyes intense.

‘I pursued her relentlessly as a … as a … hound on the scent, but she was cold and indifferent to my advances. She even mocked the love that I offered her.’

He paused, his eyes full of tears, and blew his nose vigorously.

‘I cannot describe to you the torture I went through, the burning agony of jealousy, the sleepless nights of pain. I lost twenty-four kilos; my friends began to worry about me, and, of course, they all tried to persuade me that the lady in question was not worthy of my suffering. All except one friend … a … an experienced man of the world, who had, I believe, had several affairs of the heart himself, one as far away as Baluchistan. He told me that I was trying too hard, that as long as I was casting my heart at the lady’s feet she would be, like all females, bored by her conquest. But if I showed a little indifference, aha! my friend assured me, it would be a very different tale.’

Kralefsky beamed at me and nodded his head knowingly. He poured himself out more coffee.

And had he shown indifference, I asked.

‘Indeed I did,’ said Kralefsky. ‘I didn’t lose a minute. I embarked on a boat for China.’

I thought this was splendid; no woman, I felt, could claim to have you enslaved if you suddenly leaped on a boat for China. It was sufficiently remote to give the vainest woman pause for thought. And what happened, I inquired eagerly, when Mr Kralefsky returned from his travels?

‘I found she had married,’ said Mr Kralefsky, rather shamefacedly, for he realized that this was somewhat of an anticlimax.

‘Some women are capricious and impatient, you know. But I managed to have a few moments of private conversation with her and she explained it all.’

I waited expectantly.

‘She said,’ Mr Kralefsky continued, ‘that she had thought I had gone for good to become a Lama so she married. Yes, the little dear would have waited for me had she known, but, torn with grief, she married the first man who came along. If I had not misjudged the length of the voyage she would have been mine today.’

He blew his nose violently, a stricken look on his face. I digested this story, but it did not seem to give any very clear clues as to how to help Adrian. Should I perhaps lend him my boat, the Bootle-Bumtrinket, and suggest that he rowed over to Albania? Apart from the risk of losing my precious boat, I did not think that Adrian was strong enough to row that far. No, I agreed with Kralefsky that Adrian was being too eager but, knowing how capricious my sister was, I felt she would greet her admirer’s disappearance from the island with delight rather than with despair. Adrian’s real difficulty lay in the fact that he could never get Margo alone. I decided that I would have to take Adrian in hand if he was going to achieve anything like success.

The first thing was for him to stop following Margo around like a lamb following a sheep and to feign indifference, so I inveigled him into accompanying me when I went out to explore the surrounding countryside. This was easy enough to do. Margo, in self-defence, had taken to rising at dawn and disappearing from the villa before Adrian put in an appearance so he was left pretty much to himself. Mother had tried to interest him in cooking but after he had left the icebox open and melted half our perishable foodstuffs, set fire to a frying pan full of fat, turned a perfectly good joint of lamb into something closely resembling biltong, and dropped half a dozen eggs on to the kitchen floor, she was only too glad to back up my suggestion that Adrian should accompany me.

I found Adrian an admirable companion, considering that he had been brought up in a city. He never complained, he would patiently obey my terse instructions to ‘Hold that!’ or ‘Don’t move – it’ll bite you!’ to the letter, and seemed genuinely interested in the creatures we pursued.

As Mr Kralefsky had predicted, Margo became intrigued by Adrian’s sudden absence. Although she did not care for his attentions she felt perversely piqued when she was not receiving them. She wanted to know what Adrian and I did all day long. I replied rather austerely that Adrian was helping me in my zoological investigations. I said that moreover he was shaping up very well and if this went on I would have no hesitation in proclaiming him a very competent naturalist by the end of the summer.

‘I don’t know how you can go around with anyone so wet,’ she said. ‘I find him an incredible bore.’

I said that was probably just as well as Adrian had confessed to me that he was finding Margo a bit boring too.

‘What?’ said Margo, outraged. ‘How dare he say that, how dare he!’

Well, I pointed out philosophically, she had only herself to blame. After all, who would not find someone boring if they carried on like she did, never going swimming with him, never going walking with him, always being rude.

‘I’m not rude,’ said Margo angrily, ‘I just speak the truth. And if he wants a walk I’ll give him one. Boring indeed!’

I was so pleased with the success of my scheme that I overlooked the fact that Margo, like the rest of my family, could be a powerful antagonist when aroused. That evening she was so unexpectedly polite and charming to Adrian that everyone, with the victim’s exception, was amazed and alarmed. Skilfully, Margo steered the conversation round to walks and then said that, as Adrian’s time in the island was growing short, it was essential that he saw more of it. What better method than walking? Yes, stammered Adrian, that was really the best way of seeing a country.

‘I intend to go for a walk the day after tomorrow,’ said Margo airily, ‘a lovely walk. It’s a pity you’re so busy with Gerry, otherwise you could have come with me.’

‘Oh, don’t let that worry you. Gerry can fend for himself,’ said Adrian, with what I privately considered to be callous and impolite indifference. ‘I’d love to come!’

‘Oh good,’ fluted Margo. ‘I’m sure you’ll enjoy it; it’s one of the nicest strolls around here.’

‘Where?’ inquired Leslie.

‘Liapades,’ said Margo airily, ‘I haven’t been there for ages.’

‘Liapades?’ echoed Leslie. ‘A stroll? It’s right the other side of the island. It’ll take you hours.’

‘Well, I thought we’d take a picnic and make a day of it,’ said Margo, adding archly, ‘that is, if Adrian doesn’t mind.’

It was obvious that Adrian would not mind if Margo had suggested swimming underwater to Italy and back in full armour. I said I thought I would accompany them, as it was an interesting walk from a zoological point of view. Margo shot me a baleful look.

‘Well, if you come you must behave yourself,’ she said enigmatically.

Adrian was, needless to say, full of the walk and Margo’s kindness in asking him. I was not so sure. I pointed out that Liapades was a long way and that it was very hot, but Adrian said he did not mind a bit. Privately, I wondered, since he was rather frail, whether he would last the pace but I could not say this without insulting him. At five o’clock on the appointed day we assembled on the veranda. Adrian was wearing an enormous pair of hob-nailed boots he had acquired from somewhere, long trousers and a thick flannel shirt. To my astonishment, when I ventured to suggest that this ensemble was not suitable for a walk across the island in a temperature of over a hundred in the shade, Margo disagreed. Adrian was wearing perfect walking kit, chosen by herself, she said. The fact that she was clad in a diaphanous bathing suit and sandals and I was in shorts and an open-necked shirt did not deter her. She was armed with a massive pack on her back, which I imagined contained our food and drink, and a stout stick. I was carrying my collecting bag and butterfly net.

Thus equipped, we set out, Margo setting an unreasonably fast pace, I thought. Within a short space of time Adrian was sweating profusely and his face turned pink. Margo, in spite of my protests, stuck to open country and shunned the shade-giving olive groves. In the end I kept pace with them but walked in the shade of the trees a few hundred yards away. Adrian, afraid of being accused of being soft, followed doggedly and moistly at Margo’s heels. After four hours, he was limping badly and dragging his feet; his grey shirt was black with sweat and his face was an alarming shade of magenta.

‘Would you like a rest?’ Margo inquired at this point.

‘Just a drink, perhaps,’ said Adrian in a parched voice like a corncrake.

I said I thought this was a splendid idea so Margo stopped and sat down on a red hot rock in the open sun-soaked ground on which you could have roasted a team of oxen. She fumbled surreptitiously in her pack and produced three small bottles of Gazoza, a fizzy and extremely sweet local lemonade.

‘Here,’ she said, handing us a bottle each. ‘This’ll buck you up.’

In addition to being fizzy and over-sweet, the Gazoza was very warm so, if anything, it increased rather than assuaged our thirst. By the time it was nearing midday we were in sight of the opposite coast of the island. The news brought a spark of hope into the lacklustre eyes of Adrian. Once we reached the sea we could rest and swim, Margo explained. We reached the wild coastline and made our way down through the jumble of gigantic red and brown rocks strewn along the sea shore like an uprooted giants’ cemetery. Adrian threw himself down in the shade of an enormous block of rock topped with a wig of myrtle and a baby umbrella pine and tore off his shirt and boots. His feet, we discovered, were almost the same startling red as his face, and badly blistered. Margo suggested that he soak them in a rock pool to harden them and this he did while Margo and I swam. Then, much refreshed, we squatted in the shade of the rocks and I said I thought some food and drink would be welcome.

‘There is none,’ said Margo.

There was a stunned silence for a moment. ‘What d’you mean, there is none?’ asked Adrian. ‘What’s in that pack?’

‘Oh, those are just my bathing things,’ said Margo. ‘I decided I wouldn’t bring any food because it was so heavy to carry in this heat, and anyway, we’ll be back for supper if we start soon.’

‘And what about something to drink?’ inquired Adrian hoarsely. ‘Haven’t you got any more Gazoza?’

‘No, of course not,’ said Margo irritably. ‘I brought three. That’s one each, isn’t it? And they’re terribly heavy to carry. I don’t know what you’re fussing about anyway; you eat far too much. A little rest’ll do you good. It’ll give you a chance to un-bloat.’

Adrian came as close to losing his temper as I had ever seen him.

‘I don’t want to un-bloat, whatever that means,’ he said icily, ‘and if I did I wouldn’t walk half across the island to do it.’

‘That’s just the trouble with you. You’re namby-pamby,’ snorted Margo. ‘Take you for a little walk and you’re screaming for food and wine. You just want to live in the hub of luxury all the time.’

‘I don’t think a drink on a day like this is a luxury,’ said Adrian. ‘It’s a necessity.’

Finding this argument profitless, I took the three empty Gazoza bottles half a mile down the coast to where I knew there was a tiny spring. When I reached it I found a man squatting by it, having his midday meal. He had a brown, seamed, wind-patterned face, and a sweeping black moustache. He was wearing the thick, sheepswool socks that the peasants wore when working in the fields and beside him lay his short, wide-bladed hoe.

‘Kalimera,’ he greeted me without surprise, and waved his hand in a courteous gesture towards the spring, as if he owned it.

I greeted him and then lay face downwards on the small carpet of green moss that the moisture had created, and lowered my face to where the bright spring throbbed like a heart under some maidenhair ferns. I drank long and deeply and I could never remember water having tasted so good. I soaked my head and neck with it and sat up with a satisfied sigh.

‘Good water,’ said the man. ‘Sweet, huh? Like a fruit.’

I said the water was delicious and started to wash the Gazoza bottles and fill them.

‘There’s a spring up there,’ said the man, pointing up the precipitous mountainside, ‘but the water is different, bitter as a widow’s tongue. But this is sweet, kind water. You are a foreigner?’

While I filled the bottles I answered his questions but my mind was busy with something else. Nearby lay the remains of his food – half a loaf of maize bread, yellow as a primrose, some great fat white doves of garlic and a handful of large, wrinkled olives as black as beetles. At the sight of them my mouth started to water and I became acutely aware of the fact that I had been up since dawn with nothing to eat. Eventually the man noticed the glances I kept giving his food supply and, with the typical generosity of the peasants, pulled out his knife.

‘Bread?’ he asked. ‘You want bread?’

I said that I would love some bread but that the problem was that there were three of me, as it were. My sister and her husband, I lied, were also starving somewhere among the rocks. He snapped his knife shut, gathered together the remains of his lunch and held it out to me.

‘Take it for them,’ he said grinning. ‘I’ve finished and it’s not right for the good name of Corfu that foreigners should starve.’

I thanked him profusely, put the olives and garlic into my handkerchief, tucked the bread and the Gazoza bottles under my arm and set off.

‘Go to the good,’ the man called after me. ‘Keep away from the trees, we’ll be having a storm later.’

Looking up at the blue and burnished sky, I thought the man was wrong but did not say so. When I got back I found Adrian sitting glumly with his feet in a rock pool and Margo sunbathing on a rock and singing tunelessly to herself. They greeted the food and water with delight and fell on it, tearing at the golden bread and gulping the olives and garlic like famished wolves.

‘There,’ said Margo brightly when we had finished, as if she had been responsible for providing the viands, ‘that was nice. Now I suppose we’d better be getting back.’

Immediately, a snag became apparent; Adrian’s feet, cool and happy from the rock pool, had swollen and it took the united efforts of Margo and myself to get his boots on again. Even when we had succeeded in forcing his feet into the boots he could only progress at a painfully slow pace, limping along like an elderly tortoise.

‘I do wish you’d hurry up,’ shouted Margo irritably after we had progressed a mile or so and Adrian was lagging behind.

‘I can’t go any faster. My feet are killing me,’ Adrian said miserably.

In spite of our protests, that he would get sunburned, he had taken off his flannel shirt and exposed his milk-white skin to the elements. It was when we were a couple of miles from the villa that the peasant’s prophecy about the storm became fact. These summer storms would be hatched in a nest of cumulus clouds in the Albanian mountains and ferried rapidly across to Corfu by a warm, scouring wind like the blast from a baker’s oven. The wind hit us now, stinging our skins and blinding us with dust and bits of leaf. The olives changed from green to silver like the sudden gleam of a turning school of fish, and the wind roared its way through a million leaves with a noise like a giant breaker on the shore. The blue sky was suddenly, miraculously, blotted out by bruise-coloured clouds that were splintered by jagged spears of lavender-coloured lightning. The hot, fierce wind increased and the olive groves shook and hissed as though shaken by some huge, invisible predator. Then came the rain, plummeting out of the sky in great gouts, hitting us with the force of sling-shot. A background to all this was the thunder, stalking imperiously across the sky, rumbling and snarling above the scudding clouds like a million stars colliding, crumbling and avalanching through space.

This was one of the best storms we had ever experienced and Margo and I were thoroughly enjoying it, for after the heat and Stillness we found the stinging rain and the noise exhilarating. Adrian did not share our view; he was one of those unfortunate people who were terrified of lightning, so to him the whole thing was monstrous and alarming. We tried to take his mind off the storm by singing but the thunder was so loud that he could not hear us. We struggled on grimly and at last, through the gloomy, rain-striped, olive groves we saw the welcoming lights of the villa. As we reached it and Adrian staggered in through the front door, seeming more dead than alive, Mother appeared in the hall.

‘Where have you children been? I was getting quite worried,’ she said, and then, catching sight of Adrian; ‘Good heavens, Adrian dear, what have you been doing?’

She might well have asked, for those parts of Adrian’s anatomy that were not scarlet with sunburn were interesting shades of blue and green; he could hardly walk and his teeth were chattering so violently that he could not talk. Being scolded and commiserated in turns, he was whisked away to bed by Mother, where he lay, with mild sun-stroke, a severe cold and septic feet, for the next few days.

‘Really, Margo, you do make me angry sometimes,’ said Mother. ‘You know he’s not strong. You might have killed him.’

‘Serves him jolly well right,’ said Margo callously. ‘He shouldn’t have said I was boring. It’s an eye for an ear.’

Adrian, however, unwittingly got his own back; when he recovered he found a shop in the town that stocked gramophone needles.