The Crocodile Bird

by Ruth Rendell

  “I will too, then.”

  “I don’t reckon you can, love. They’ll want your insurance number and you haven’t got none.”

  “Can’t I get one?”

  “Not without giving your name you can’t.”

  They found the family planning clinic too—Liza gave Sean’s name and called herself Elizabeth Holford—and a notice board in a newsagent’s window on which five people were advertising for domestic help. Liza studied it thoughtfully. Housework was something she could do.

  When they got back, the man with the black dog put his head around the door of his camper, said hi and how about a cup of tea?

  Liza could see Sean didn’t want to, but it was rude to say no, so they went into the man’s camper, the kitchen part, where the black dog was sitting on a counter, watching television. Instead of tea the man, who said his name was Kevin, produced a bottle of whiskey and three glasses, which Liza could see made Sean feel a lot better about going in there.

  The little glowing screen fascinated her, the picture was so clear and the colors so bright. But at first she was half-afraid to look in case a policeman appeared describing her own appearance or even Eve herself. There was no need to worry. This was a program about small mammals in some distant part of the world, ratlike creatures and squirrellike creatures, which perhaps accounted for the dog’s absorption.

  He was much smaller than Rudi and Heidi, less sleek and with a real tail, which thumped on the counter when the squirrels jumped about, but just the same he reminded her of Mr. Tobias’s dogs, now long dead. She and Mother had looked after them for three weeks, not two, on that occasion and at the end of that time, without warning, Matt appeared to take them away. When Mother saw his van stop outside and saw him get out of it, his hair longer than ever and tied back now, all the color went out of her face and she grew very white.

  Liza thought she would be bound to ask him where Mr. Tobias was but she didn’t, she hardly spoke to him. The dogs were handed over, Liza having hugged them both and kissed the tops of their heads, and somehow she knew as she watched the van depart that they would never come again, or not both of them, or not in the way they had before. She didn’t know how she knew this, for Mother said not a word about it, didn’t even look out of the window but set the French book in front of Liza and told her quite sharply to begin reading.

  That evening Mother said they must go over to Shrove House, which surprised Liza because they never did. They never went there after about three in the afternoon. It was just after six when they walked across the parkland between the tall trees. There were cowslips in the grass and against the hedges cow parsley and yellow Alexanders. But this time Mother said nothing about how beautiful it was. They walked in silence, hand in hand.

  Mother took her into the library and set her a task: to find the French books, to count them and then to see if she could find one called Emile by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It took Liza no time at all. There weren’t many French books, she could count only twenty-two, Emile among them. She took it down from the shelf, a very old book bound in blue with gilt letters, and went to look for Mother.

  She was in the drawing room, talking into the telephone. Liza had never before seen anyone do that. Of course she had seen the telephone and more or less knew what it was, Mr. Tobias had told her, and on that occasion she remembered, while he was explaining, Mother had frowned and shaken her head. It was Mother using it now. Liza kept very still, listening.

  She heard Mother say, “I’ve said I’m sorry, Jonathan. I’ve never phoned you before.” Her voice went very low so that Liza could hardly hear. “I had to phone. I had to know.”

  Somehow Liza had expected to hear Mr. Tobias’s voice coming out of the other end of the receiver, but there was silence, though she could tell Mother could hear him.

  “Why do you say there’s nothing to know? If there was nothing, you would have come.”

  Liza had never heard Mother speak like that, in a ragged, pleading, almost frightened voice, and she didn’t like it. Mother was always in control of things, all knowing, all powerful, but that wasn’t how she sounded now.

  “Then, will you come? Will you come, Jonathan, please? If I ask you, please to come.”

  Even Liza could tell he wasn’t going to come, that he was saying, no, I can’t, or, no, I won’t. She saw Mother’s shoulders hunch and her head dip down and heard her say in her cold voice, not unlike the one she used to Matt, “I’m sorry to have troubled you. I do hope I haven’t interrupted anything. Good-bye.”

  Liza went up to her then and put out her hand. She showed her the blue book called Emile but Mother seemed to have forgotten what she had asked her to do and everything about it. Mother’s face was as pale as a wax candle and as stiff….

  “You lost in a dream, love?” Sean said. “I offered you a penny for them and you never heard a word I said. Kevin wants to know if you’d like a glass of his Riseling?”

  Liza said, yes, thanks, she’d love some, and when she saw the wine box and read the name she somehow managed to stop herself telling them it was pronounced “reesling,” she thought their feelings might be hurt. Kevin was a small man with a nut-brown face and black hair, though not much of that was left. He might be thirty or he might be forty-five. Liza couldn’t tell, she wasn’t much good at guessing ages, and no wonder.

  The men talked about football and then about the dog that Kevin said was a good little ratter. It had started to rain, Liza could hear it drumming on the roof of the camper. What would become of them if it rained? Mr. Vanner wouldn’t pay them if they couldn’t pick. She suddenly thought, with a fierce hunger, not altogether unlike the desire she often had for Sean, that if she didn’t soon have a book in her hands, if she couldn’t soon read a book, she’d die.

  She asked Kevin how much his TV cost and could tell at once from Sean’s expression that she shouldn’t have. But Kevin didn’t seem to mind. He said he didn’t know, he hadn’t a clue, because it was one of the things he’d brought with him from their household when he and his wife split up and he reckoned it was she who bought it in the first place.

  “Not thinking of getting married, are you?” he said when she and Sean were going. “Only you want to think twice. Hang on to your freedom while you can.”

  “Of course we’re not thinking of getting married,” said Liza, and she laughed at the very idea, but Sean didn’t laugh.

  She hadn’t said much to Sean at all about Eve and Mr. Tobias, it had all been in her head, all memories. It was he who brought the subject up next day, he must have been thinking about it, she didn’t know why. They were still in bed, though it was quite late in the morning, but there was no point in trying to go out and pick with the rain pouring down.

  When she first woke she had been quite disorientated, not knowing where she was but imagining she must be in the gatehouse. The rain made it unnaturally dark. Half-asleep still, she had looked for the book that should have been open and face-downward on the bedside cabinet. But there was no bedside cabinet and no book, and when she turned over she rolled into the warm eager arms of Sean. Instead of reading she cajoled and kissed him into making love to her—never a hard task—which he would have said was better any day, and often she would agree.

  Suddenly he said, “This guy Tobias, he slept with your mum? I mean, they was in the same bed?”

  “They were lovers, they were like us.”

  “That wasn’t right,” Sean said very seriously, “not with you in the house, not with a little kid.”

  “Why not?”

  She didn’t know what he meant and she could tell he found it hard to explain.

  “Well, it’s just not. Everyone knows that. They wasn’t married. Your mum should have known better, an educated woman like her. It’s one thing just the two of them, but not with a little kid in the house. You got to have principles, you know, love.”

  She said, no, she didn’t know, but he took no notice. “D’you reckon she thought he’d marry her?”
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  “She hoped he would.”

  “Yeah, she must have been lonely. It wasn’t right, him taking advantage of her like that.”

  Liza told him about the phone call and how Eve had been afterward, quiet and preoccupied and sometimes as if she was frightened.

  “Well, she was in love, wasn’t she?” Romantic Sean pressed his lips into her neck. He stroked her hair. “She loved him and she thought she’d lost him, you got to pity her.”

  “I don’t know about being in love,” Liza said. “Maybe a bit. She wanted Shrove House, that was what all that was about. She wanted Shrove House for herself, to make sure she’d never be parted from it. That was the only way. If she married Mr. Tobias it’d have been hers.”

  He was shocked. “That’s not right.”

  “I can’t help it. It’s the way it was. It was always like that. She wanted that place, to be there all the time and to be sure she could be, more than anything in the world. It was all she wanted.”

  “It sounds crazy to me.” She could feel him shaking his head as it lay on the pillow beside hers. “Whatever happened, then?”

  “He married someone else,” said Liza. “He married Victoria.”

  EIGHT

  LIZA was eight years old and for as long as she could remember she had never been away from Shrove. Once a week Mother went on the bus into town to do the shopping, but Liza had never asked if she could come. Now, when she thought about it, she couldn’t imagine why she had never said, “Can I come?” Locked up in her bedroom or else locked up in one of the rooms at Shrove, she had been content or she had accepted.

  “That was wrong.” Sean was in a censorious mood. “Suppose something had happened to you.”

  “It didn’t.”

  “Maybe not. Just as well for her. You might have hurt yourself or the place caught on fire.”

  She thought but didn’t say that the place burning down would have been a bigger tragedy for Eve. Shrove on fire would be worse than Liza dying in it.

  “If they’d found out what was going on they could have took you away and put you in care.”

  “They didn’t know, whoever they are.”

  “Wasn’t you scared?”

  “No, I don’t think I was, not ever. Well, for a bit after the man with the beard, but I saw what she did about that, you see. It showed me she’d always look after me. I liked being locked up in the library at Shrove best, there or in the morning room. It was so warm.”

  “What d’you mean, warm? The place was empty, wasn’t it?”

  “The heating was always on from October to May.”

  “He must be rolling in it,” Sean said disapprovingly. “Central heating blasting away when no one lived there and there’s poor buggers sleeping rough on the streets.”

  She wasn’t interested, she hardly knew what he meant. “I used to read the books. Of course there were lots I didn’t begin to understand, they were years and years too old for me. Eve said to me once, I just wonder what people would say, the ones who think you ought to have gone to school, if they could have seen you trying to read Ruskin and Matthew Arnold at seven-and-a-half.”

  Sean had no comment to make on that.

  “Anyway, I was never left for more than two hours. Then Eve would come for me and she’d always have something nice, some treat, colored pencils to draw with or a new pair of socks or a painted egg. I remember once she came home with a pineapple, I’d never seen one before. Then one day she brought a picture.”

  It was a painting of Shrove House. Mother had to tell her what it was or she might not have known, the painting was so strange, the colors so strong and the house not looking the way she had ever seen it. But when Mother explained that this was just one man’s, the painter’s, view of it, that he had chosen to paint it at sunset and after a storm, that he saw it as a symbol of wealth and power and had therefore accentuated all the yellows to express gold and the dark purples to reveal strength, then she began to understand. Mother had seen the painting in the window of a place she called a gallery and had bought it “on an impulse.” It was cheap, she said, for what it was.

  “Besides, we’ve got quite a lot of money,” Mother said, and proudly, “We don’t fritter money away.”

  She hung the painting on the wall in their living room where the gun had once been. When Liza climbed up on a stool to look more closely at it she saw that the words Bruno Drummond were written in red in the bottom right-hand corner with the date 1982.

  It was the next morning, or perhaps the morning after next, that the postman came and brought with him the letter from Mr. Tobias. Mother tore open the envelope and read it. She threw the envelope into the rubbish bin, read the letter a second time, and folded it up. She said a strange thing, she said it in an intense concentrated way while she stared at the folded letter in her hand.

  “In ancient times they used to kill a messenger who was a bearer of bad news. It’s fortunate for that postman that things have changed.”

  Liza could hear his van going back up the lane. She waited for Mother to tell her what Mr. Tobias had written, but Mother didn’t tell her and there was something in her face that stopped her asking. There were more lessons than usual that week and sometimes they went on into the evening. That was one of the signs that something had happened to upset Mother, an increase in lessons.

  On the Saturday morning, while Liza was eating her breakfast, Mother said, “Mr. Tobias is getting married today. This is his wedding day.”

  “What’s wedding?” said Liza.

  So Mother explained about getting married. She turned it into a lesson. She talked about marriage customs in different parts of the world, how in some countries, for instance, a man could have several wives, but not here, here people could be married only one at a time. It was called monogamy. She told Liza about Islam and about the Mormons, about Christian brides in white dresses being married in churches and Jewish people under canopies stamping on glass. Then she read out something from the Book of Common Prayer about marriage being forever until the two people were parted by death. Mr. Tobias wouldn’t be married like that, however, but in an office by a registrar.

  “Were you ever married?” Liza asked.

  “No, I never was,” said Mother.

  At a quarter past twelve she said it must all be over now and they were man and wife. Liza said, wasn’t he a man before, and Mother said she was quite right, it was just an expression and not a very good one. They were husband and wife.

  “Will they come and live here?” said Liza.

  Mother didn’t answer and Liza was going to repeat the question, but she didn’t because Mother had gone a dark red color and clenched her fists. Liza thought it best to say no more about it. She married Annabel to the rag doll in a ceremony of her own invention but she did it upstairs in the privacy of her bedroom.

  And of course Mr. and Mrs. Tobias never did come to live at Shrove, though they stayed there from time to time, the first time being a fortnight after the wedding.

  Another letter came first. Mother read it, screwed it up, and looked cross.

  “What does he mean, get a woman in to get the place ready? He knows I’ll never do that. He knows I clean it and that I’ll clean it ready for his wife.” And she said those final two words again. “His wife.”

  She and Liza spent the afternoon at Shrove. Mr. Tobias would no longer be sleeping in his old bedroom but in the one that had been Caroline Ellison’s in the four-poster with yellow silk curtains. With Victoria, Liza thought, though Mother hadn’t said so. The four-poster was quite different from the Venetian one and made of dark brown carved wood with a carved wood roof Mother called a tester. She said that in olden times before there was glass in windows and when ceilings were very high, birds used to fly in and roost in the rafters on cold nights. You needed a roof on your bed to protect you from owl and hawk droppings.

  While Mother put clean white sheets on the four-poster and mats of yellow silk and white lace out on the dressing tab
le, Liza tried the handle of the door to the locked room on the off-chance of its not being locked for once. But it was, it always was.

  Mother had said she must start writing compositions—well, stories really—and asked her to do one about getting married. Liza was already working it out in her head. She was going to have a girl called Annabel get married to a man called Bruno who brought her home to his big house in the country by a river. Annabel found the locked room while Bruno was out riding on his horse and then she found the key to the door in the pocket of his dressing gown. Next time he went out she unlocked the door and inside she found the dead bodies of three women that he’d killed before he married her because only Moslems could have more than one wife. Liza didn’t know what would happen next but she’d think of something.

  She expected Mr. Tobias to come running to their door as he had in the past, the dogs at his heels. Mother was busy sewing, her back to the window, her feet working the treadle on the machine faster than usual and her hands guiding the cloth, but Liza sat on the step outside, waiting for him. It was October but warm and sunny, the leaves on the balsam tree still green, the blackberries and the elderberries over and the holly berries turning from green to gold. The morning had been misty but now the air was clear, the sky blue, and everything very still.

  They were late. Liza was almost at the point of giving up and going indoors when at last the car came, not the Range Rover but the Mercedes. Later on Liza was to learn to identify many makes of cars, but at that time she only knew a Range Rover, a Ford Transit van, a Mercedes, and whatever kind it was the police used. The Mercedes was going quite fast, it was going to sweep straight in through the open gates, but Mr. Tobias did see Liza, and he stuck his arm out of the window and waved. Of course he was on the near side of the car, the side nearest to her. On the other side sat the lady who had worn the green shirt. Victoria. Mrs. Tobias.