the bamboos. But the count was worried about the state of his shoes, and this prompted him to do something very silly. He looked over his shoulder and saw land looming close, and in spite of my warning shout, he got to his feet and leapt onto the Bootle Bumtrinket’s minute foredeck. His intention was to leap from there to safety when I had maneuvered the boat a little closer, but he had not reckoned with the Bootle Bumtrinket’s temperament. A placid boat, she had nevertheless a few quirks, and one thing she did not like was anyone standing on her foredeck; she simply gave an odd sort of bucking twist, rather like a trained horse in a cowboy film, and, as it were, slid you over her shoulder. She did this to the count now.
He fell into the water with a yell, spread-eagled like an ungainly frog, and his proud yachting cap floated towards the bamboo roots while he thrashed about in a porridge of water and mud. I was filled with a mixture of alarm and delight; I was delighted that the count had fallen in – though I knew my family would never believe that I had not engineered it – but I was alarmed at the way he was thrashing about. It is an instinctive action, when finding you are in shallow water, to try to stand up, but this action only makes you sink deeper into the glutinous mud. Once, Larry had fallen into one of these canals while out shooting and had made such a fuss and got himself so deeply embedded that it had required the united efforts of Margo, Leslie and myself to get him out. If the count got himself too wedged in the canal bottom, I would not have the strength to extricate him single-handed, and by the time I got help he might well have disappeared altogether beneath the gleaming mud. I abandoned ship and leapt into the canal to help him. Firstly, I knew how to walk in mud, and secondly, I weighed only a quarter of what the count weighed so I did not sink in so far. I shouted to him to keep quite still until I got to him.
“Merde!” said the count, proving that he was at least keeping his mouth above water.
He tried to get up once, but at the terrible, gobbling clutch of the mud, he uttered a despairing cry like a bereaved sea gull and lay still. Indeed, he was so frightened of the mud that when I reached him and tried to pull him shorewards he screamed and shouted and accused me of trying to push him in deeper. He was so absurdly childlike that I had a fit of the giggles, and this of course only made him worse. He had relapsed into French, which he was speaking with the rapidity of a machine gun, so with my tenuous command of the language I was unable to understand him. Eventually I got my unmannerly laughter under control and once more seized him under the armpits and started to drag him shorewards, but it suddenly occurred to me how ludicrous our predicament would seem to an onlooker – a twelve-year-old boy trying to rescue a six-foot man – and I was overcome again and sat down in the mud and laughed till I cried.
“Vy you laughing? Vy you laughing?” screamed the count, trying to look over his shoulder at me. “You no laughing, you pulling, vite, vite!”
Eventually, swallowing great hiccups of laughter, I started to pull the count again and eventually got him fairly close to the shore. Then I left him and climbed out onto the bank. This provoked another bout of hysteria.
“No going avay! No going avay!” he yelled, panic-stricken. “I am sonk. No going avay!”
I ignored him, and choosing seven of the tallest bamboos in the vicinity, I bent them over one by one until their stems splintered but did not snap, and then I twisted them round until they reached the count and formed a sort of green bridge between him and the shore. Acting on my instructions, he turned on his stomach and pulled himself along on this until at last he reached dry land. When he eventually got somewhat shakily to his feet, he looked as though the lower half of his body had been encased in melting chocolate. Knowing that this glutinous mud could dry hard in record time, I offered to scrape some of it off him with a piece of bamboo. He gave me a murderous look.
“Espèce de con!” he said vehemently.
My shaky knowledge of the count’s language did not allow me to translate this, but the enthusiasm with which it was uttered led me to suppose that it was worth retaining in my memory, which I did. We started to walk home, the count simmering vitriolically. As I had anticipated, the mud on his legs dried at an almost magical speed and within a short time he looked as though he were wearing a pair of trousers made out of a pale brown jigsaw puzzle. From the back, he reminded me so much of the armor-clad rear of an Indian rhinoceros that I almost got the giggles again.
It was unfortunate, perhaps, that the count and I should have arrived at the front door of the villa just as the huge Dodge driven by our scowling, barrel-shaped, self-appointed guardian angel, Spiro Halikiopoulos, drew up with the family, flushed with wine, in the back of it. The car came to a halt and the family stared at the count with disbelieving eyes. It was Spiro who recovered first.
“Gollys, Mrs. Durrells,” he said, twisting his massive head round and beaming at Mother, “Master Gerrys fixes the bastards.”
This was obviously the sentiment of the whole family, but Mother threw herself into the breach.
“My goodness, Count,” she said in well-simulated tones of horror, “what have you been doing with my son?”
The count was so overcome with the audacity of this remark that he could only look at Mother open-mouthed.
“Gerry dear,” Mother went on, “go and change out of those wet things before you catch cold, there’s a good boy.”
“Good boy!” repeated the count, shrilly and unbelievingly. “C’est un assassin! C’est une espèce de – ”
“Now, now, my dear fellow,” said Larry, throwing his arm round the count’s muddy shoulders, “I’m sure it’s been a mistake. Come and have a brandy and change your things. Yes, yes, rest assured that my brother will smart for this. Of course he will be punished.”
Larry led the vociferous count into the house, and the rest of the family converged on me.
“What did you do to him?” asked Mother.
I said I had not done anything; the count and the count alone was responsible for his condition.
“I don’t believe you,” said Margo. “You always say that.”
I protested that had I been responsible I would be proud to confess. The family were impressed by the logic of this.
“Well, it doesn’t matter a damn if Gerry did it or not,” said Leslie. “It’s the end result that counts.”
“Well, go and get changed, dear,” said Mother, “and then come to my room and tell us all about how you did it.”
But the affair of the Bootle Bumtrinket did not have the effect that everyone hoped for; the count stayed on grimly, as if to punish us all, and was twice as offensive as before. However, I had ceased feeling vindictive towards him; whenever I thought of him thrashing about in the canal, I was overcome with helpless laughter, which was worth any amount of insults. And, furthermore, the count had unwittingly added a fine new phrase to my French vocabulary. I tried it out one day when I made a mistake in my French composition and I found it tripped well off the tongue. The effect on my tutor, Mr. Kralefsky, was, however, very different. He had been pacing up and down the room, hands behind him, looking like a humpbacked gnome in a trance. At my expression, he came to a sudden stop, wide-eyed, looking like a gnome who had just had an electric shock from a toadstool.
“What did you say?” he asked in a hushed voice.
I repeated the offending phrase. Mr. Kralefsky closed his eyes, his nostrils quivered, and he shuddered.
“Where
