The Corfu Trilogy Read Online Free PDF

sun-bathing was rather
unwise
.
    ‘After all, dear, that costume doesn’t cover an awful lot, does it?’ she pointed out.
    ‘Oh, Mother, don’t be so old-fashioned,’ Margo said impatiently. ‘After all, you only die once.’
    This remark was as baffling as it was true, and successfully silenced Mother.
    It had taken three husky peasant boys half an hour’s sweating and panting to get Larry’s trunks into the villa, while Larry bustled round them, directing operations. One of the trunks was so big it had to be hoisted in through the window. Once they were installed, Larry spent a happy day unpacking them, and the room was so full of books that it was almost impossible to get in or out. Having constructed battlements of books round the outer perimeter, Larry would spend the whole day in there with his typewriter, only emerging dreamily for meals. On the second morning he appeared in a highly irritable frame of mind, for a peasant had tethered his donkey just over the hedge. At regular intervals the beast would throw out its head and let forth a prolonged and lugubrious bray.
    ‘I ask you! Isn’t it laughable that future generations should be deprived of my work simply because some horny-handed idiot has tied that stinking beast of burden near my window?’ Larry asked.
    ‘Yes, dear,’ said Mother, ‘why don’t you move it if it disturbs you?’
    ‘My dear Mother, I can’t be expected to spend my time chasing donkeys about the olive groves. I threw a pamphlet on Theosophy at it; what more do you expect me to do?’
    ‘The poor thing’s tied up. You can’t expect it to untie itself,’ said Margo.
    ‘There should be a law against parking those loathsome beasts anywhere near a house. Can’t one of you go and move it?’
    ‘Why should we? It’s not disturbing us,’ said Leslie.
    ‘That’s the trouble with this family,’ said Larry bitterly; ‘no give and take, no consideration for others.’
    ‘Yo
u
don’t have much consideration for others,’ said Margo.
    ‘It’s all your fault, Mother,’ said Larry austerely; ‘you shouldn’t have brought us up to be so selfish.’
    ‘I like that!’ exclaimed Mother. ‘I never did anything of the sort!’
    ‘Well, we didn’t get as selfish as this without
some
guidance,’ said Larry.
    In the end, Mother and I unhitched the donkey and moved it farther down the hill.
    Leslie meanwhile had unpacked his revolvers and startled us all with an apparently endless series of explosions while he fired at an old tin can from his bedroom window. After a particularly deafening morning, Larry erupted from his room and said he could not be expected to work if the villa was going to be rocked to its foundations every five minutes. Leslie, aggrieved, said that he had to practise. Larry said it didn’t sound like practice, but more like the Indian Mutiny. Mother, whose nerves had also been somewhat frayed by the reports, suggested that Leslie practise with an empty revolver. Leslie spent half an hour explaining why this was impossible. At length he reluctantly took his tin farther away from the house where the noise was slightly muffled but just as unexpected.
    In between keeping a watchful eye on us all, Mother was settling down in her own way. The house was redolent with the scent of herbs and the sharp tang of garlic and onions, and the kitchen was full of a bubbling selection of pots, among which she moved, spectacles askew, muttering to herself. On the table was a tottering pile of books which she consulted from time to time. When she could drag herself away from the kitchen, she would drift happily about the garden, reluctantly pruning and cutting, enthusiastically weeding and planting.
    For myself, the garden held sufficient interest; together Roger and I learned some surprising things. Roger, for example, found that it was unwise to smell hornets, that the peasant dogs ran screaming if he glanced at them through the gate, and that the chickens that leaped suddenly