The Corfu Trilogy Read Online Free PDF Page A

bellowed, his huge face flushing red with wrath; ‘whys you never tells me befores? Thems bastards in the customs. I’ll take you down theres tomorrows and fixthems: I knows thems alls, and they knows
me
. Leaves everythings to me – I’ll fix thems.’
    The following morning he drove Mother down to the customs shed. We all accompanied them, for we did not want to miss the fun. Spiro rolled into the customs house like an angry bear.
    ‘Wheres these peoples things?’ he inquired of the plump little customs man.
    ‘You mean their boxes of merchandise?’ asked the customs official in his best English.
    ‘Whats you thinks I means?’
    ‘They are here,’ admitted the official cautiously.
    ‘We’ve comes to takes thems,’ scowled Spiro; ‘gets thems ready.’
    He turned and stalked out of the shed to find someone to help carry the luggage, and when he returned he saw that the customs man had taken the keys from Mother and was just lifting the lid of one of the cases. Spiro, with a grunt of wrath, surged forward and slammed the lid down on the unfortunate man’s fingers.
    ‘Whats fors you open it, you sonofabitch?’ he asked, glaring.
    The customs official, waving his pinched hand about, protested wildly that it was his duty to examine the contents.
    ‘Dutys?’ said Spiro with fine scorn. ‘Whats you means, dutys? Is it your dutys to attacks innocent foreigners, eh? Treats thems like smugglers, eh? Thats whats yous calls dutys?’
    Spiro paused for a moment, breathing deeply; then he picked up a large suitcase in each great hand and walked towards the door. He paused and turned to fire his parting shot.
    ‘I knows you, Christaki, sos donts you go talkings about dutys to me. I remembers when you was fined twelve thousand drachmas for dynamitings fish. I won’t have any criminal talkings to
me
abouts dutys.’
    We rode back from the customs in triumph, all our luggage intact and unexamined.
    ‘Thems bastards thinks they owns the islands,’ was Spiro’scomment. He seemed quite unaware of the fact that he was acting as though he did.
    Once Spiro had taken charge he stuck to us like a burr. Within a few hours he had changed from a taxi driver to our champion, and within a week he was our guide, philosopher, and friend. He became so much a member of the family that very soon there was scarcely a thing we did, or planned to do, in which he was not involved in some way. He was always there, bull-voiced and scowling, arranging things we wanted done, telling us how much to pay for things, keeping a watchful eye on us all and reporting to Mother anything he thought she should know. Like a great, brown, ugly angel he watched over us as tenderly as though we were slightly weak-minded children. Mother he frankly adored, and he would sing her praises in a loud voice wherever we happened to be, to her acute embarrassment.
    ‘You oughts to be carefuls whats you do,’ he would tell us, screwing up his face earnestly; ‘we donts wants to worrys your mothers.’
    ‘Whatever for, Spiro?’ Larry would protest in well-simulated astonishment. ‘She’s never done anything for us… why should we consider her?’
    ‘Gollys, Master Lorrys, donts
jokes
like that,’ Spiro would say in anguish.
    ‘He’s quite right, Spiro,’ Leslie would say very seriously; ‘she’s really not much good as a mother, you know.’
    ‘Donts says that,
donts says that
,’ Spiro would roar. ‘Honest to Gods, if I hads a mother likes yours I’d gos down every mornings and kisses her feets.’
    So we were installed in the villa, and we each settled down and adapted ourselves to our surroundings in our respective ways. Margo, merely by donning a microscopic swim suit and sun-bathing in the olive groves, had collected an ardent band of handsome peasant youths who appeared like magic from an apparently deserted landscape whenever a bee flew too near heror her deck chair needed moving. Mother felt forced to point out that she thought this