The Crocodile Bird

by Ruth Rendell

  It was a pity because Liza couldn’t see her very well. She wasn’t wearing a green shirt this time but a fawn sweater with a neck that came right up to her chin and then folded over. Her hair was fair, a pale blond, it was exactly the same color as the jumper but silky instead of woolly and rough. Her face wasn’t visible. Liza supposed the dogs must be in the back, though she couldn’t see them. She waved and waved until they were out of sight and then she went in to give Mother all the details. That evening she expected them to come or him to come, best of all she would have liked him to come alone, and she sat in the window with Annabel, as if Annabel would draw him in some magic way.

  “It must have been like turning a knife in the wound,” she said to Sean, “the way I went on and on about him. When was he coming? Could we go up there? Poor Eve! But I didn’t know any better. I was only a child.”

  “I shouldn’t worry. You said yourself, she only wanted him for that place of his.”

  “Things aren’t so simple,” said Liza. “Anyway, they came next day, both of them.”

  Mrs. Tobias was tall and slim. (“Quite elegant, I suppose,” Mother said.) Her fair hair, the color of newly sawn wood, was cut very short like a man’s, but her face was painted in a way Liza had never seen before, not in the least like Diana Hayden’s. The effect was more like a wonderful picture or a piece of jewelry. Her mouth reminded Liza of a fuchsia bud and her eyelids were crocus purple. She had fuchsia bud nails and on one finger were Mr. Tobias’s rings, gold and diamonds flashing brilliantly.

  She was very nice and polite to Mother, thanking her for making the house so clean and beautiful and telling her what Mr. Tobias was always saying, how she must, she just must, get a woman in to do all this cleaning. Either she found someone or she, Mrs. Tobias, would absolutely have to find someone herself.

  All the while Mr. Tobias was looking rather strange, rubbing his hands together, walking up and down, then studying their old chromium electric heater as if he was passionately interested in things like that.

  Liza said, “Where are Rudi and Heidi?”

  “I’m afraid Rudi’s dead,” he said.

  He looked more awkward than ever and tried to explain it away, as if it wasn’t important, a dog dying. Rudi was old, he lost his appetite, he’d got a thing called a tumor growing inside him, and the kindest thing was for him to die a peaceful death.

  “Did you shoot him with a gun?” Liza asked.

  Mrs. Tobias screamed out when she said that. “Oh, my God, where does the child get these ideas!”

  “I took him to the vet,” Mr. Tobias said, “and he was very quiet and peaceful and happy. The vet gave him an injection and he went to sleep with his head on my lap.”

  “He never woke up again, he died,” said Mother, getting a very strange look from Mrs. Tobias, who curled back her upper lip and showed her little white top teeth. “What about Heidi?”

  Mr. Tobias said Matt had her with him in Cumbria. Heidi lived with him now, in his council house. “Victoria’s allergic to dogs.”

  “It isn’t something I can help,” Mrs. Tobias said. “Of course I adore them but just having one near me can bring on these horrendous attacks of asthma.”

  After that they saw Mr. and Mrs. Tobias only in the distance. From her bedroom window, one evening, Liza saw them come walking out of the wood with their arms around each other. She heard the car go past several times and when they had been there nearly a week she heard shots.

  “Mr. Tobias never used to shoot things,” she said to Mother. “Why’s he doing it now?”

  “I expect it’s his wife’s influence.”

  “What is he shooting?”

  Mother shrugged. “Pheasants, partridges—rabbits, perhaps.”

  Mr. Tobias called on them and brought a couple of dead pheasants. A brace, he called it. He came alone. Mrs. Tobias had a pain in her back and wasn’t feeling well. Liza didn’t think she would be able to eat things she had seen in the meadows, such beautiful birds, as beautiful as the peacocks she had seen in pictures, but when it came to it and Mother had roasted them she found that she could. When she ate the soft brown meat that seemed to melt in her mouth, she forgot about the shining blue and gold feathers and the bright beady eyes.

  The Day of the Pheasant, she called it. She wrote the composition about marriage for Mother and had it given back with just a red tick on the bottom but otherwise no comment. That was the week Mother smacked her, the first and the last time this happened. Mother found her playing with the husband and wife dolls and came upon her just as the rag doll was killing Annabel with a gun made from a twig.

  It was as if she didn’t stop to think but lifted up her hand and smacked Liza on the bottom. Afterward she said she was sorry and that she shouldn’t have done that.

  The weather got cold very suddenly, the night frosts so heavy that in the morning it looked as if snow had fallen. The frost drove the Tobiases away. They called at the gatehouse as they were leaving, and Mrs. Tobias, who was wearing a wonderful coat of white sheepskin, said it was shocking having no bathroom at the gatehouse and one must be put in as a matter of priority. Mr. Tobias had used those very words himself but done nothing about it, Liza remembered. His wife urged Mother once more to get a cleaner. After all, if she knew Mother was doing it on her own she would have to tidy up herself, her conscience would make her.

  “Please, Eve,” said Mr. Tobias, looking more uncomfortable than ever. “And we’ll see about that bathroom.”

  The car had disappeared up the lane for no more than ten minutes before Mother and she were on their way to Shrove House to clear up the mess.

  But there was no mess. Everything was clean and tidy and someone had washed the dishes and done the dusting. Liza couldn’t tell how she knew this but she sensed that Mother, curiously, would have preferred a mess. While Mother was stripping the bed and putting the sheets in the washing machine, Liza made another attempt on the locked door. This time, for the first time ever, it wasn’t locked. She turned the handle and the door came open.

  There were no bodies, no dead brides. She found herself in a small sitting room in which was a writing desk, a pair of occasional tables, three armchairs, and a sofa. On the walls, in frames of polished wood, were the kind of dull gray pictures Mother said were called etchings and a pair of vases with Chinese people on them that held bunches of dried red roses. Facing the sofa and the chairs, on a cabinet made of a rather bright golden wood with a complicated curly grain, stood a large brown, box-shaped thing with a kind of mirror on the front of it. She could see herself in the mirror, but not very clearly, rather in the way she could in a window with dark curtains drawn behind the glass.

  “What was it?” Sean asked. “A TV?”

  “Yes, but I didn’t know that then. I couldn’t think what it was. The extraordinary thing was that I wasn’t very interested in it. I was disappointed. You see I’d given that room such a terrific buildup in my mind, I thought there’d be at least some amazing wild animal in there or a box of jewels, treasure, really, or even a skeleton. I’d seen a picture of a skeleton in one of the books in the library. And all there was was this box thing with a mirror that didn’t even work like mirrors are supposed to.”

  “But you switched it on.”

  “No, I didn’t. Not then, not for ages. I wouldn’t have given it another thought, I’d probably never have gone back there, if Mother hadn’t come in. It was her coming in and being so obviously, well, taken aback that I’d got in there and found the thing that made me so anxious to know what it was.”

  “Kids are like that,” said Sean sagely.

  “Are they? I don’t know. I only knew me. She wasn’t cross. It was more as if she was worried. It’s hard to describe, I have to find an expression, sort of knocked sideways, the wind taken out of her sails. She took my hand and led me out of there and got the key and locked the door again.”

  “But why?”

  “That was the point of the whole thing, wasn’t it? The wh
ole way I was being brought up. The world had treated her so badly, it was so awful out there, that I wasn’t to be allowed to go through any of that. I was to be sheltered from the world, hence no school and no visits to the town, no meeting other people, other people kept down to the minimum, a totally protected childhood and youth.”

  “She taught you to express yourself all right, didn’t she?” he said admiringly and he lit a cigarette as if he needed it.

  Liza wished he wouldn’t. The caravan quickly filled with smoke, it was so small, and it made her cough. She sighed a little before going on. “Television would have undone a lot of her work. Once I’d seen that, I’d know about the world out there, I wouldn’t only want to see it, I’d start talking like the people on TV and learning the sort of ways she thought were bad.”

  “You said the world had treated her bad. I mean, like what? What had it done to her?”

  “You won’t believe this, but I don’t know. That is, I don’t know the details. She’d had me without a husband, there was that, she hadn’t got Shrove when she thought she was going to, she told me a lot more about that later, but she never told me what made her, well, bury herself and me down there. When she took me out of that room and locked the door again I hadn’t any idea why and she didn’t explain. I only knew it had something to do with the box with the glass front.”

  “You said she got the key. Where did she get it from?”

  That had been the most interesting thing. Mother had looked around her for the key and clicked her tongue when she saw it lying on top of the glass-fronted cabinet that was full of dolls. She locked the door and then, in Liza’s presence, not bothering to hide from her what she was doing, she climbed onto a chair and from the chair onto the top of a dresser in which was kept breakfast china and cutlery. The top of the dresser was on a level with Liza’s head.

  On the wall above hung a large picture Liza was to learn was called a still life. This one was by Johann Baptist Drechsler and was of a bunch of roses with dew on them and fritillaries and morning glory. The painter had put a Painted Lady butterfly on a blade of grass and on the top left-hand side a moth with brown forewings and yellow underwings and a strange pattern on its back. The picture was in a thick gilt frame that stuck out six inches from the wall. Mother put the key on top of the frame, over to the right-hand side, and while she did so she explained to Liza that the moth was called the death’s-head hawk moth because the pattern on its back looked like a skull, or the bones inside a person’s head. If this was designed to distract Liza’s attention from the key and the locked room, it failed to do so.

  Liza knew she had about as much chance of getting up there as she had of owning a dog. But she wanted to get up there. Soon it became the thing she most wanted to do in all the world. She thought about it a lot and she thought that in that little book that had once come in the post and she had managed to study for five minutes before it was taken away and torn up, in there had been a picture of just such a box as was in the locked room at Shrove House.

  When it was winter and Mother went shopping she was always locked up at Shrove because of the warmth there. Sometimes in the morning room, sometimes in the library, sometimes in one of the bedrooms. When it was the morning room she had been in the habit of spending a lot of the time just gazing at the dolls in the cabinet. The dolls were of historical personages, Mother had said and had named some of them, Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, a man called Beau Brummel and another called Louis Quatorze, Florence Nightingale and Lord Nelson. But now instead she stood staring at the picture of the flowers, the butterfly, and the moth with the skull on its back, knowing the key was lying there on the top of the frame, though she couldn’t see it even if she stood on a chair.

  Her ninth birthday came and went. It was very cold and the grounds of Shrove lay under six inches of snow. A partial thaw came but the half-melted snow froze again, and the house, the stables and coachhouse, the gatehouse, the little castle, and the owl barn were hung with icicles. Hoar frost turned all the trees into pyramids and cascades and towers of silver lace. The lane was blocked with snow drifts and Mother couldn’t get out to catch the bus for town. When she did, at last, she left Liza in the library.

  Reading books, playing with the terrestrial globe, looking out of one window after another at the birds in the snow, Liza came to the far end where it was always rather dark, the darkest place in that light house, and saw, resting against the wall, something long-familiar yet forgotten, the library steps.

  There were eight steps, enough to get even a small person up to the topmost bookshelf. But Liza was locked in the library. Anyway, she thought the steps would be too heavy for her, they looked heavy, they were made of dull gray metal. She touched them, she put both hands to them and clasped the rails that enclosed the treads. She tried to raise them as if they would be heavy and they flew up in her hands. The steps were light, they were nearly as light as if made of cardboard, a little child could lift them, she could lift them with one hand.

  But she was locked in. Mother came for her soon afterward and they went back to the gatehouse through the snow. It snowed even more heavily that night and they spent next morning digging themselves out and the afternoon making cakes of dripping and bread for the bird feeders. Two weeks, three, went by before Mother could go to town again. It was soon after that, in March probably, when the snow had gone but for patches of it left in shady places, that the postman brought the letter that was to change their lives.

  “Tobias again?” said Sean.

  “No, we never heard from him. Well, Eve got her money all right and Mrs. Tobias sent a postcard from Aspen in America that they went skiing, but there was never a thing from him. This letter was from Bruno Drummond.”

  “The artist guy.”

  “Yes. The Phoenix Gallery had told him about Eve buying his painting, I don’t think he sold many paintings—well, I know he didn’t. He said he’d wanted to phone her but he couldn’t find her number in the book. Not surprising, was it, since she’d no more have a phone than she would a television. He said the painting ought to be varnished and if she’d bring it to him he’d do it. He told her where he lived and said it was easy to park her car outside!

  “Of course she didn’t answer. She said if the painting needed varnishing she was capable of doing that herself. And she was very annoyed with the gallery for giving him her address. She kept saying, ‘Is nothing sacred? Is there no privacy?’”

  In February the Latin lessons began. Puella, puella, puellam, puellae, puellae, puella. And Puella pulchra est.

  “The girl is beautiful,” said Mother, but it was herself that she looked at in the mirror.

  Liza enjoyed learning Latin because it was like doing a hard jigsaw puzzle. Mother said it would stretch her brain and she read aloud from Caesar’s Invasion of Britain for Liza to get accustomed to the sound of it.

  In March she began her collection of pressed wild-flowers. Mother bought her a big album to keep them in. To the left-hand page she attached the pressed flower and on the right-hand one she painted a picture of it in watercolor. A snowdrop was the first one she put in and next a coltsfoot. Mother let her borrow Wild Flowers by Gilmour and Walters from the library at Shrove so that she could identify the flowers and find their Latin names.

  The weather grew warmer and in April Mr. and Mrs. Tobias came down to Shrove to stay, bringing four other people with them. Claire and Annabel and a man Liza had never seen before and Mr. Tobias’s mother, Lady Ellison.

  “Caroline,” said Liza.

  “Yes,” said Mother, “but you mustn’t call her that.”

  As it turned out, Liza didn’t get the chance to call her anything.

  Before they came, Mrs. (not Mr.) Tobias had written to Mother and said some more about a cleaning woman.

  “Can you imagine having such a person here?” Mother was calm but Liza could tell she was angry. “She would come in a car and we should have that noise and dirt. I would have to let her in,
I couldn’t trust anyone with a key, and then teach her what to do and, just as important, what not to do. Why can’t Victoria Tobias leave it alone? Why can’t she just leave me to do it?”

  Liza couldn’t answer that. Mother thought about it all day, she worried about it, she kept saying she didn’t want any more intruders, Mr. Frost was bad enough, not to mention the postman and the milkman and the man who read the meters and the one who serviced the Shrove central heating, there was no end to it.

  “You could do it yourself and pretend you’d got a lady to do it.”

  At first Mother said, no, she couldn’t, and, how about the money, and then she said, why not? It wouldn’t be dishonest to take the money so long as the work was done, so Mother invented a woman and she and Liza thought up a name for her. They laughed until they almost cried at some of the names Liza thought up. She got them from the wildflower book, Sweet Cicely Pearlwort and Mrs. Sowthistle and Fritillaria Twayblade. But Mother said it mustn’t be funny, it must sound like a real name, so in the end they called her Mrs. Cooper, Dorothy Cooper.

  Mother wrote to Mr. (not Mrs.) Tobias and said she’d found a cleaning woman called Dorothy Cooper who would come once a week and if he sent the money to her she would pay her. In the week before Easter, Mother gave Shrove House a tremendous spring clean while Liza sat in the library reading Jane Eyre. That is, for most of the time she read Jane Eyre. She also carried the steps out of the library and into the morning room.

  At the morning room windows hung long heavy curtains of slate-gray velvet. Even when you pulled the cords that drew them across the windows they still covered about two feet of the gray-and-white wall on either side. Liza put the steps up against the wall on the right-hand side of the right-hand window. The curtains covered them, you couldn’t see they were there.

  It was just as well she hadn’t used them to get the key down and open the door because, when she had finished upstairs, Mother came into the morning room, climbed onto a chair and then onto the sideboard, and reached up for the key on top of the picture frame. Liza crept out of the library and watched her from the morning room doorway. Mother unlocked the door and went into the secret room, pulling the vacuum cleaner behind her.