The Corfu Trilogy Read Free

groves. Along the shore curved beaches as white as tusks among tottering cities of brilliant gold, red, and white rocks. We rounded the northern cape, a smooth shoulder of rust-red cliff carved into a series of giant caves. The dark waves lifted our wake and carried it gently towards them, and then, at their very mouths, it crumpled and hissed thirstily among the rocks. Rounding the cape, we left the mountains, and the island sloped gently down, blurred with the silver and green iridescence of olives, with here and there an admonishing finger of black cypress against the sky. The shallow sea in the bays was butterfly blue, and even above the sound of the ship’s engines we could hear, faintly ringing from the shore like a chorus of tiny voices, the shrill, triumphant cries of the cicadas.

1

The Unsuspected Isle
    We threaded our way out of the noise and confusion of the customs shed into the brilliant sunshine on the quay. Around us the town rose steeply, tiers of multi-coloured houses piled haphazardly, green shutters folded back from their windows like the wings of a thousand moths. Behind us lay the bay, smooth as a plate, smouldering with that unbelievable blue.
    Larry walked swiftly, with head thrown back and an expression of such regal disdain on his face that one did not notice his diminutive size, keeping a wary eye on the porters who struggled with his trunks. Behind him strolled Leslie, short, stocky, with an air of quiet belligerence, and then Margo, trailing yards of muslin and scent. Mother, looking like a tiny, harassed missionary in an uprising, was dragged unwillingly to the nearest lamp post by an exuberant Roger and forced to stand there, staring into space, while he relieved the pent-up feelings that had accumulated in his kennel. Larry chose two magnificently dilapidated horse-drawn cabs, had the luggage installed in one and seated himself in the second. Then he looked round irritably.
    ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘What are we waiting for?’
    ‘We’re waiting for Mother,’ explained Leslie. ‘Roger’s found a lamp post.’
    ‘Dear God!’ said Larry, and then hoisted himself upright in the cab and bellowed, ‘Come
on
, Mother, come on. Can’t the dog wait?’
    ‘Coming, dear,’ called Mother passively and untruthfully, for Roger showed no signs of quitting the post.
    ‘That dog’s been a damned nuisance all the way,’ said Larry.
    ‘Don’t be so impatient,’ said Margo indignantly; ‘the dog can’thelp it… and anyway, we had to wait an hour in Naples for
you
.’
    ‘My stomach was out of order,’ explained Larry coldly.
    ‘Well, probably
his
stomach’s out of order,’ said Margo triumphantly. ‘It’s six of one and a dozen of the other.’
    ‘You mean half a dozen of the other.’
    ‘Whatever I mean, it’s the same thing.’
    At this moment Mother arrived, slightly dishevelled, and we had to turn our attentions to the task of getting Roger into the cab. He had never been in such a vehicle, and treated it with suspicion. Eventually we had to lift him bodily and hurl him inside, yelping frantically, and then pile in breathlessly after him and hold him down. The horse, frightened by this activity, broke into a shambling trot, and we ended in a tangled heap on the floor of the cab with Roger moaning loudly underneath us.
    ‘What an entry,’ said Larry bitterly. ‘I had hoped to give an impression of gracious majesty, and this is what happens… we arrive in town like a troupe of mediæval tumblers.’
    ‘Don’t keep
on
, dear,’ Mother said soothingly, straightening her hat; ‘we’ll soon be at the hotel.’
    So our cab clopped and jingled its way into the town, while we sat on the horsehair seats and tried to muster the appearance of gracious majesty Larry required. Roger, wrapped in Leslie’s powerful grasp, lolled his head over the side of the vehicle and rolled his eyes as though at his last gasp. Then we rattled past an alley-way in which four scruffy mongrels were