Marrying Off Mother (12 page)

‘Yes,' said Margo, ‘imagine people saying we understand your mother is living in sin with a piccolo.'

‘Gigolo,' Leslie corrected.

‘We'll just have to wait until he gets back,' said Larry grimly.

‘Yes, and we can really get down to the crutch of the matter,' said Margo.

The beauty of our extremely long driveway was that we could hear and see people coming long before they arrived and when they were bores we all simply vanished into the olive groves and left Mother to entertain them. Spiro's car was equipped with an enormous ancient rubber bulb horn, roughly the size of a large melon, which, when squeezed, emitted a honking sound similar to that of an affronted bull deprived of his nuptial rights, a sound so loud and fearsome it could miraculously make even a Corfu donkey move out of the way. As he entered the drive some half a mile away, he always played a sort of symphony on the horn so that we would know he was coming. Thus were we apprised of Antoine's return and assembled belligerently on the front veranda to do battle. Never did a man have a colder, more implacable and more hostile group to face, a group that emanated enmity as vibrant as seventy-nine Bengal tigresses would produce in defence of their young.

‘Ah,' said Mother, hurrying out on to the veranda, ‘I
thought
I heard Spiro's horn. So Antoine is back — how lovely.'

The car drew to a halt below us and, to our indescribable disgust, Antoine swept off his hat and blew a kiss to Mother.

‘Dear lady, I have returned,' he said. ‘Brandy, champagne, flowers for you and little Margo and éclairs — chocolate ones — for our little Gerry. I think I have forgot nothing.'

‘Except how to speak English,' Larry observed.

Antoine leapt from the car and, in a fine swirl of cloak, raced up the steps and kissed Mother's hand.

‘You have told them?' he asked, anxiously.

‘Yes,' said Mother.

Antoine turned to us as a lion-tamer might turn to a troupe of maladjusted beasts of the jungle.

‘Ah, my dear ones,' he said, throwing wide his arms as if to embrace us all. ‘My adorable adopted family. No man on earth has been so lucky as to have four such saint-like children given to him, as well as a mother who is a gift from heaven.'

The saint-like children glowered at him like an open furnace while Mother simpered.

‘Oh, what joy it will be for us,' Antoine continued, apparently oblivious of the hostility. ‘I shall be able to help in every way as a father. You, dear Larry, I will be able to give you advice on your writing. Leslie, I feel we should lead you away from this obsession with guns and turn your mind to higher things — perhaps a career in banking or something solid like that, eh? And you, dearest Margo, so gauche, so naive, we will see what we can do about making you presentable. And little Gerry — such a ragamuffin, with all his silly animals. I am sure we can make something of him. Even the most unlikely material can be moulded to resemble a human being. Oh, what
fun
we shall have sharing our new lives together.'

‘Oh, Antoine, it will be wonderful,' Mother exclaimed.

Antoine turned to her.

‘Yes, it will be wonderful, and you, my dear Louella — I mean Lucy — Lucinda — I mean . . .' he broke off and stamped his foot. ‘Damn, damn, damn,' he said.

Mother started to laugh.

‘Damn, damn, damn,
repeated Antoine. ‘This was my big scene and I mucked it up.'

‘You did very well up to now,' said Mother, ‘and we were going to tell them anyway.'

‘Tell us what?' asked Margo, wide-eyed.

‘That it was all a bloody leg-pull,' said Larry, irritably.

‘A leg-pull?' asked Leslie. ‘You mean she's not going to marry Antoine?'

‘No, dear,' Mother explained. ‘I was very annoyed at the way you were all behaving — very annoyed indeed. After all, I may be your mother but you have no right to meddle in my affairs. I happened to mention this to Antoine to see whether he thought I was being — well, rather harsh, but he agreed with me. So, together we thought up this little plan to teach you all a lesson.'

‘I have never heard of anything so devious or so immoral, letting us all suffer in this way, imagining Lugaretzia cooking for us,' said Larry indignantly.

‘Yes, you might have thought about us,' said Leslie accusingly. ‘We were all terribly worried.'

‘Yes, we were,' agreed Margo. ‘After all, we didn't want you to marry any old Tom, Dick or Harry.'

‘Or Antoine,' said Larry.

‘Well, Antoine played his part wonderfully, in fact he acted so well I began to dislike him a bit myself,' Mother said.

‘I can have no greater praise,' said Antoine.

‘Well, I think it was perfectly horrible of you to keep us all in suspension,' said Margo. ‘I think the least you can do is to promise us you won't get married without our consent.'

‘But I don't mind not being married,' said Mother, ‘and in any case it would be very difficult to find anyone to measure up to your father. And if I
did
find anyone to compare with him, I'm afraid he would never, ever, propose.'

‘Why not?' asked Margo, suspiciously.

‘Well, dear, what man in his right mind would take on four children like you?' asked Mother.

I
t has always been said by the British that the Germans have no sense of humour. I have always suspected this of being a sweeping generalization and, like most sweeping generalizations, probably untrue. My very limited experience with the German race had not led me towards the belief that they were overwhelmingly humorous but then, as I have generally been discussing the wisdom teeth of chimpanzees or ingrowing toe-nails in elephants with a German zoo director, it is easy to see why humour has not crept into the conversation. But nevertheless, I felt that somewhere there must lurk a German with a sense of humour, in the same way that one always feels that somewhere there must lurk an English hotel that can produce good food. I felt that the fact that they were classed as humourless must have percolated through to them and added to their many complexes, but also that the younger German, horrified by this slander, might, by now, with his amazing technical skills, have manufactured a sense of humour. So I was quite prepared, should our paths cross, to deal with him (or, preferably, her) with the utmost tenderness and to assure him (or her) that I did not believe this foul calumny. As always happens when you make altruistic vows like this, your chance comes sooner than you think.

I found myself having extreme marital difficulties and, as this sort of home atmosphere is not conducive to the efforts that go into writing a book, I packed my things and went off to the south coast town of Bournemouth, where I had lived as a young man. It was sufficiently remote to make it unlikely that I would be worried by bores as it was out of season. In fact, for most of the time I was there, I was the only resident guest. It gives you a very curious feeling, being the only guest in a large hotel, as if you were the last person left on the
Titanic.
It was here that I met the redoubtable Ludwig and, if he did not restore my sanity — I never had very much of that, anyway — he certainly restored my sense of humour, though he was totally unaware of his good deed.

On my first morning, before going out to sample the delights of the town, I made my way to the bar at an hour when I thought it was lawful for the democratic British to imbibe intoxicating drinks without risk of arrest, only to find to my chagrin that the bar was firmly shut. Muttering uncomplimentary things about the fatuity of the licensing laws, I was turning away when I saw approaching me a youngish man in striped trousers, dark coat and a delicately frilled white shirt whose brilliance would have shamed the Arctic, embossed with a bow tie as neat as any butterfly. Obviously, he came fairly high in the managerial pecking order. He approached me, his head slightly on one side, his blue eyes wide, innocent and expectant. He had, I noticed, started to go prematurely bald and so he had, with great skill, grown his back hair long, combed it forward, and had it cut to a pointed sort of fringe, like a widow's peak, which, with his bony, rather handsome face, had a very good effect. It made him look rather like a young Napoleon.

‘Is there anything wrong, sir?' he asked, and from his accent I felt he must be German.

‘What time does the bar open?'

If he had told me that I would have to wait until twelve o'clock, I was more than prepared to tell him in detail what I thought of British licensing laws, of the drinking habits of the British as compared with those on the Continent, and to end up by saying that I thought they had passed some masterly bill or other in order to allow grown-up people to drink in their hotels at any hour they liked. However, he took the wind out of my sails.

The barman has not yet arrived, sir,' he said, apologetically. ‘But if you want a drink, I will open the bar for you.'

‘Oh,' I said. ‘Are you sure it's all right? I mean, I don't want to put you to any trouble.'

‘No trouble at all, sir,' he said, suavely, ‘if you will wait while I get the key.'

He presently got the key, opened the bar and poured me out the lager I desired.

‘Will you join me?' I asked.

‘That is very kind of you, sir,' he said, smiling, his blue eyes lighting up with pleasure. ‘I will have the same.'

We drank in silence for a while and then I asked him what his name was.

‘Ludwig Dietrich,' he said and added, a touch defensively, ‘I am a German.'

‘Alas,' I said, with regret I did not feel, ‘I have only visited Germany once, for a very short time, so I can't say that I know it.'

I did not say that I had found the hotel staff boorish, the food inedible, and the whole experience like being encased in a suet pudding for three days; I might just have been unfortunate. However, I decided that maybe here stood the German I was seeking, the German with a sense of humour. So, after having a couple of beers with Ludwig, like some fisherman baiting a pool, I tried him out with some crumbs of humour. True, they were simple crumbs, but he laughed and my soul expanded like a rose. I, of all mortals, was the lucky one. I had found the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. I had found the only German with a sense of humour, rare as a man with six heads. Alas, I was to learn that two laughs in a bar, like a couple of mal-orientated swallows, do not make a summer.

When I left him, I sallied forth into Bournemouth to revisit some of the scenes of my youth and gloat over the cultural treasures of this most smug of south coast resorts. To my horror, I discovered that in twenty-five years so many changes had taken place that I hardly recognized anything.

However, certain things remained intact. There were the Pleasure Gardens, for instance, with their well-ordered flowerbeds, their rockeries, waterfalls and ponds — the ponds reflection-less with thin ice, the rockeries padded with cushions of snow from the last fall, speckled with brave canary-yellow and mauve crocuses. There was the pier, windswept with foam-chained waves rolling under its iron legs and dying in snow-like froth scallops on the beach. There was the Pavilion, that throbbing heart of Bournemouth culture, where I had once had to chase a white Pekinese puppy through the indignant legs of music-lovers endeavouring to enjoy Mozart.

I remembered the girl responsible for this, her delicious nose and her delicious use of the English language. Should I phone her up, I wondered? Then I realized that I did not know her whereabouts. I turned, and headed into the town. The wind was icy but the sky was blue and the sunlight daffodil yellow with some heart in it. I made my way through the arcade, still intact I was glad to see, and opposite, to my great delight, my favourite pub, the Victoria Bar. I entered its warm interior; with its long bar well polished, its red velvet sofas and chairs, its strange, wrought-iron tables painted gold, it was as I remembered it. I ordered a pint of draught Guinness, dark as an Abyssinian maiden, and with a white head on it like a burst of May blossom, and sat watching the sun flood through the great glory of the pub, the windows carefully etched and engraved, three of them. True, they had not Whistler's craftsmanship, but they were gloriously Victorian and work that you could not get repeated now. The bar was full of Dickensian characters such as only congregate in English pubs of this sort. Old ladies with faces like walnuts, crouched comfortably over their port and lemon; a tall, lean-faced man with a coal black coat and a velvet collar and wide-brimmed black hat (some faded thespian from the twenties) eyeing, like a pale shrike, any good-looking young man who came in; two men deep in conversation, their hands protectively curled round their pints, while at their feet, snuffling, panting and exuberant, an Old English bulldog sat, exuding bonhomie to everyone who passed by doing a hula with its backside that would have been envied in Bali; a little old lady who must have been nearly ninety, wearing a hat in shocking pink shaped like a policeman's helmet, with matching gloves and bootees and silver stockings, talking earnestly to a very stout lady wearing a black hat with ostrich plumes in it, and a fur coat that looked as if it had been ripped untimely from a very ancient musk ox. The air was redolent of ale and port and various spirit smells, as a good French hotel is redolent of well-cooked meals. Like a beautiful woman enhanced by perfume, the bar wafted to you the delicate scents of a million drinks enjoyed. At any moment, as I supped the creamy darkness of my Guinness, I expected Sherlock Holmes, trailed by a bewildered, puzzled Watson, to appear and voice the crisp comment: When you want to know anything, my dear Watson, go to the local pub.

Reluctantly, I finished my drink and went outside into the cold. I paused for a moment, uncertain where to go. The only improvement I could see to Bournemouth was that now it had become almost a university town and so whilst, in my day, all you saw in the streets were portly brigadiers and elderly ladies, now you were greeted and warmed by the sight of woolly-headed, chocolate-brown Africans, dark, sloe-eyed Iranians and clusters of beautiful Chinese and Japanese girls, like flocks of butterflies or enchanting pale amber birds, their hands, finely boned as fans, doing ballets of explanation as they trotted along.