Marrying Off Mother by Gerald Durrell Page A

must unbend her,’ said Margo. ‘Try and keep her on the rails, watch out she doesn’t meet too many men. Keep an eye on her.’
    â€˜She seems all right,’ Leslie said, doubtfully.
    â€˜Planting passion flowers,’ Larry pointed out.
    â€˜Exactly,’ said Margo. ‘We must watch her. I tell you, where there’s no smoke, there’s no fire.’
    So bearing this in mind we all dispersed and went about our various tasks, Larry to write, Margo to work out what to do with seventeen yards of red velvet she had bought at a knock-down price, Leslie to oil his guns and make cartridges and me to try and catch a mate for one of my toads, for the marital affairs of my animals were infinitely more important to me than those of my mother.
    Three days later, hot, sweaty and hungry, after an unsatisfactory hunt for Leopards snakes in the hills, I arrived back at the villa just when Antoine de Vere was decanted by Spiro from the Dodge. He was wearing an enormous sombrero, a black cloak with a scarlet lining and a suit of pale blue corduroy. He stepped out of the car, closed his eyes, raised his arms to the heavens and intoned in a deep, rich voice, ‘Ah! The majesty that is Greece,’ and inhaled deeply. Then he swept off his sombrero and looked at me, dishevelled and surrounded by dogs, all of whom were growling ominously. He smiled, a flash of teeth in his brown face, so perfect they might have been newly constructed. His hair was curly and glistening. His eyes were large and shiny, the colour of a newly emerged horse chestnut, and under them the skin was dark like a plum. He was undeniably handsome, one had to admit, but in what Leslie would have described as a dago-ish sort of way.
    â€˜Ah!’ he said, pointing a long finger at me. ‘You must be Lawrence’s baby brother.’
    From not particularly liking him at first sight, I had been willing to give him a chance, but now my opinion dropped to zero. I had become used to being described in a variety of derogatory ways by both my family and our friends, and I had adopted a stoical attitude to these unkind, untrue and probably slanderous assaults on my character. But no one had ever had the temerity to call me ‘baby’ before. I was wondering which room he was occupying and whether the insertion of a dead water-snake (which I happened to possess) into his bed would be advantageous, when Larry emerged and whisked Antoine away to the kitchen to meet Mother.
    The next few days were, to say the least of it, interesting. Within twenty-four hours Antoine had succeeded in alienating the whole family with the exception — to our astonishment — of Mother. Larry was obviously bored with him and made only the most desultory attempt at being polite. Leslie’s opinion was that he was a bloody dago and should be shot and Margo thought he was fat, old and greasy. But Mother for some inexplicable reason apparently found him charming. She was constantly asking him to tour the garden with her and suggest where she should plant things, or inviting him to the kitchen to taste the casserole she was making and to suggest what ingredients to add. She even went so far as to have Lugaretzia, moaning like a Roman galley slave, hobble up three flights of stairs carrying an enormous tray loaded down with enough eggs, bacon, toast, marmalade and coffee to feed a regiment. This was a luxury never afforded us unless we were ill and so, not unnaturally, our dislike of Antoine grew. He appeared to be totally oblivious of our ill-concealed feelings and dominated every conversation and made meal-times intolerable. The personal pronoun had obviously been invented for him, and nearly every sentence began with ‘I think’ or ‘I believe’, ‘I know’ or ‘I am of the opinion’. We were counting the days to his departure.
    â€˜I don’t like it,’ said Margo, worriedly. ‘I don’t like the way he