The Crocodile Bird

by Ruth Rendell

  She was in there for half an hour. Liza kept dodging from the library to the morning room door to check on her. When she heard the howl of the vacuum cleaner from the morning room she went to the door and said she was hungry and could they go home and have lunch?

  The key was in the lock of the door to the secret room. It had to be, of course it did, because Mr. and Mrs. Tobias and their friends were coming. Liza and Mother had their lunch in the Shrove kitchen and all the time Liza was thinking, perhaps the key will still be in that lock after they have gone away again.

  It wasn’t. Liza thought Mother had probably gone over there and put it back on the picture before she was even up. She had seen very little of Mr. and Mrs. Tobias and their friends, just the Mercedes going by once or twice with the other car following behind and once caught a glimpse of Claire and a tall old woman in a tweed skirt down on the Shrove lawn with golf clubs. Could it be Caroline? Could that be the Caroline of the plump white shoulders and the lipstick-colored dress? But one evening, after she had gone to bed, she heard someone come to their front door. There was a low murmur of voices, a man’s and Mother’s.

  She was almost but not quite sure the other voice was Mr. Tobias’s. They were downstairs in the living room, talking, and she crept out of bed to listen at the top of the stairs. But Mother must have heard her because she came out and called up to Liza to go back to bed at once.

  The murmur went on and on, then she heard the front door close and Mother come up to bed. If Mother had been crying it wouldn’t have surprised her, she didn’t know why, but instead Mother was talking out loud to herself. It was uncanny and rather frightening.

  “It’s all over,” Mother was saying. “You have to get it into your head that it’s all over. You have to start again. Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”

  Did that mean they were going away?

  “Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new,” Mother murmured and closed her bedroom door.

  “No, of course we’re not leaving,” Mother said in the morning. “What on earth gave you that idea? Mr. and Mrs. Tobias are leaving and goodness knows when they’ll come back again.”

  Liza saw the cars come down the drive from Shrove House, the Mercedes with Mr. Tobias driving and Mrs. Tobias beside him and Claire in the back. A minute later along came the other car with the man driving and Caroline Ellison beside him. It stopped outside the gatehouse and the man sounded his horn. Liza didn’t know what he meant by it but Mother did. Mother was furious. I’m not going out there, I’m not being summoned in that way, she was fuming, it’s like the Royal Family stopping outside some keeper’s house. But she did go out and talked to Lady Ellison.

  This enabled Liza to get a good look at Mr. Tobias’s mother, who had actually got out of the car. She was so tall she made Mother look child-sized. And Mother made her look like a giantess as well as uglier than ever. Liza thought her hands were like a hawk’s claws that had been dipped in some poor small animal’s blood.

  Mother came back into the house making terrible faces of rage and disgust, which the people in the cars couldn’t see because her back was to them. The cars were hardly out of sight before she and Liza were up at Shrove House, where there was an awful mess to be cleared up. No doubt, Mrs. Tobias thought Dorothy Cooper would be clearing it up. That was when Liza found the secret room door locked and the key, so far as she knew, back on top of the picture.

  It was May now but not very warm, though beautiful to look at, as Mother kept saying. The new leaves were a sharp fresh green and the cream and red flowers on the broom were out, sweet smelling and covered with bees. Last autumn Mr. Frost had planted hundreds of wallflowers. Like folds of multicolored velvet they were, red and amber and gold and chestnut brown, spread across a whole sweep of land with not a blade of green to be seen between them. Liza picked speedwell for her wildflower collection and Mother said she could take one, but just one, cowslip.

  They had lunch at home. The afternoon was for Latin, arithmetic, and geography. Liza was doing long division when the doorbell rang. Because the doorbell hardly ever rang it was always a shock when it did.

  “That will be Mr. Frost wanting something,” Mother said, though he hardly ever did want anything.

  She opened the door. A man was standing there. His car, which was the orange color of a satsuma and looked as if made of painted cardboard, was parked outside their gate. He was quite a young man with curly brown hair long enough to reach his shoulders and very big blue eyes with long lashes like a girl’s. Well, like hers or Mother’s. There were little brown dots, which Mother later explained were freckles, sprinkled on his small straight nose. His lips were red and his small teeth very white. He wore blue jeans and a denim jacket over a check shirt and a gold ornament hanging from a chain around his neck. Liza stared fascinated at the earrings he wore, two gold rings both in the same ear. He was carrying a bag made out of a carpet. It looked as if it was made from one of the Persian rugs at Shrove.

  “Oh, hi,” he said. “This really is the end of the world, isn’t it? I’m amazed that I’ve found you. Let me introduce myself. My name is Bruno Drummond.”

  NINE

  LIZA said she was like Scheherazade, telling her man stories every night. Only Sean wouldn’t chop her head off in the morning, would he, if one night she was so worn out she couldn’t collect her thoughts? Sean said, who was that then, that She-whatever, but Liza was too tired to explain.

  They were both exhausted, picking Coxes. The crop was a particularly big one this year. They picked from first thing in the morning until sunset, which was as long as Mr. Vanner would let them. He said he’d have to take on extra labor to cope with the crop and they wanted to stop him, they wanted to earn all the money that was going, but it was a losing battle. On the third morning a troop of women moved in to help, housewives from the village that was a mile away.

  Sean wanted to hear more about Bruno, but Liza was too tired to tell him, too tired to watch the little colored television set she’d finally bought with the hundred pounds and some apple money, too tired for everything but making love, and they only managed that because it happened in bed and they fell asleep straight afterward.

  The news was something Liza had seldom been able to watch on television even if she had wanted to. It is rarely transmitted between two and five in the afternoon. Now she learned it was for mornings and evenings, so she watched it at breakfast time and, once the women had come and there was no point in working so hard, at six o’clock and nine. She was looking for something about Eve. But there never was anything.

  “That’s because they’ve had her in court,” Sean said, “and now she’s on what-d’you-call-it, remand, that’s it, remand, and the papers and the telly can’t have anything on about her until she comes up in court again.”

  This was very much what Eve herself had told her. She admired him for knowing it. Feeling very pleased that he knew about this legal matter, she realized she had begun accepting that she knew much more than he did about almost everything but the absolutely practical things. Of course he thought he knew more than she, but she could tell that mostly he didn’t. When it was books and music and nature and art and history, she knew it all and he knew nothing, so she was pleasantly surprised.

  “When will that happen, Eve coming up in court?” she asked him.

  “Not for weeks, maybe months.”

  She was disappointed. “Where do they do it, this remand?”

  “In prison.”

  Her knowledge of that had its base on her reading of fiction, A Tale of Two Cities and The Count of Monte Cristo. She saw Victorian hellholes, she saw dungeons with a tiny barred window up in the wall.

  “What do you care?” he said. “You ran away, you got out of that and quite right too.”

  “I’m tired, Sean. I’ve got to go to sleep.”

  She crept into his arms, her naked body close up against his. The nights were starting to get cold. He slid his mouth over hers and entered her smo
othly as if it were the natural next step. They were like that, locked together, when she woke up in the deep night and moved her body gently to arouse him again. He said sleepily that he loved her and she said, I love you too, Sean.

  Next day wasn’t the last one for picking the Coxes but Friday would be. Kevin said he was moving on before the end of the week and why didn’t they follow him. They were advertising for unskilled hands at the Styrofoam packings works on an industrial estate ten miles away. Kevin thought he’d give it a go.

  But Sean wasn’t interested. He knocked off early, spruced himself up, put on a clean shirt and jeans, and went into town to apply for the supermarket job. Liza wasn’t a bit surprised to hear he’d got it. They asked Kevin in to share a couple of bottles of wine. Kevin said his telly wasn’t a patch on hers, it was wonderful, really, the way the colors came up so bright and the picture so sharp on a screen that size.

  Liza said good-bye to the dog. She put her arms around it and its cold nose nuzzled her neck. It was a gentle mild creature. The feel of the fine skull and sleek black pelt under her lips reminded her once more of Heidi. It still made her indignant, thinking of how Mr. Tobias had simply ditched Heidi when he married Victoria, handed her over to Matt as if she were a piece of furniture he didn’t need anymore.

  She had still liked Mr. Tobias, but her affection for him had been shaken by his treatment of Heidi. To handle that she had blamed the changes in him on Victoria, as she guessed her mother did. It was Victoria who made him shoot things and Victoria who kept him away from Shrove.

  Perhaps Victoria would die. Dogs died, so why not people? It was about this time that she began fantasizing how life would be if Mr. Tobias married Eve and they both went to live at Shrove House. Like children in books, she would have a father as well as a mother.

  Sean was to start his job on Monday. They’d have to find somewhere else to put the caravan but before that he was going to take advantage of being on Vanner’s land.

  He often called her Teacher when she imparted information. This time, he said, he was going to teach her something. He’d teach her to drive.

  She wouldn’t be old enough to get a license till she was seventeen, which would be in January, but she could drive on the tracks around the orchards, that was private land. They picked the last row of trees on Friday morning and collected the last pay they would get. Then Sean got her up in the driving seat of the Dolomite and taught her how to start it and use the gears. It wasn’t difficult.

  “Like a duck to water,” Sean said, very pleased.

  She wanted to drive out onto the road and take them to wherever the new place they were going to park would be, but Sean said no. It wasn’t worth the risk. They couldn’t afford to pay fines. Reluctantly, Liza agreed.

  “I suppose I can’t risk the police getting hold of me.”

  “Anyway, it’s against the law,” Sean said very seriously.

  She sat in the passenger seat next to him, eating Coxes. She’d filled a cardboard box with apples she’d picked up. Vanner was so mean he didn’t even like the pickers taking home windfalls.

  “You mind he don’t put the fuzz on you,” Sean said, but he laughed and she knew he was joking. Then he said, out of the blue, “Your mum, she ever try to get this Tobias away from his wife?”

  “What made you suddenly ask that?”

  “I reckon I was thinking about the cops and about them catching her and remembering you never said if he come back again after he had all them people there for the weekend.”

  “Well, she never did, no. At least, so far as I know she didn’t. She didn’t get a chance, did she, with him so far away and then we hadn’t a phone or a car, we were trapped down there in a way.”

  “But wasn’t that what she wanted?”

  “Oh, yes, it was what she wanted. She wanted to be at Shrove and be undisturbed and isolated, but what she’d wanted most was to own Shrove. I think she gave up that idea when he got married. I mean, she gave it up for a while. It was very hard for her, she’d counted on it for so long, but she had to give it up. Of course, I don’t know what went on in her mind, I was only a child, but I think she regretted a lot of things, she had bitter recriminations.”

  “Come again?”

  “I mean she was sorry she hadn’t behaved differently. You see, maybe if we’d gone to London with him when he first asked or gone traveling with him, he’d have got so close to her he’d have thought he couldn’t live without her. It might only have been for a year or two and then we could have all come back to Shrove together. He and she were mad about each other then, I’m sure they were, like you and I are.”

  “That’s true anyway,” said Sean with a smile, looking pleased that she’d said it.

  “But she wouldn’t because of me. She was determined to bring me up without—well, the contamination of the world. I wasn’t to be allowed to suffer as she’d suffered. If she’d gone to London with Mr. Tobias she’d have had to send me to school there and I’d have met other children and seen all sorts of things, I suppose. You could say she put me first or perhaps she just put Shrove first. The irony was that she lost Mr. Tobias because she put his house first. As for me, I’d have loved to live at Shrove House and have Jonathan Tobias for my father. You’ll laugh but I used to think that if I lived there and it was mine I could get into that room.”

  Sean did laugh. “But he married someone else and that was the end of her love life.”

  “Oh, no, you could say it was the beginning of it. That was when Bruno came. Now that I’m grown up, I think I know what went through her mind. She thought, I’ve lost Jonathan, I can’t waste my whole life mooning over him, so I might as well cut my losses and have a new lover. She was only a bit over thirty, Sean, she was young. She couldn’t give up everything.”

  “How about that bathroom? Did he have it done?”

  “In the end. Not for years. He forgot about it the minute Shrove was out of sight. He meant to do it but he just forgot, he was very thoughtless. When I think about it all now I really believe that when Shrove was out of sight he forgot about Eve too. She’d come into his mind once or twice a year and then he’d send her a postcard.”

  The place they found to park the caravan was a piece of waste ground at the point where a bridle path turned off a lane. No one used it much. People on horseback might notice they were there, but it could be weeks before whoever owned the land did. Law-abiding Sean had tried to find out who that was but had failed. The difficulty was that there was no water supply apart from the stream that tumbled over rocks under the stone bridge a little way up the lane. That was all right to drink, Liza told the dubious Sean. Mostly they’d boil it, anyway. They could get washed in the public swimming pool next to the supermarket he’d be working at. She was full of plans. Of much of the world she might be ignorant, but she knew how to manage.

  The day he started she was left alone. Winter was coming and it had started to get cold. They heated the caravan with bottled gas and an oil heater, so that was all right, but for the first time in her life she had nothing to do.

  It was rainy and cold out there, but she went out and walked along the public footpath down to the stream and over the bridge close by the ford. The leaves were falling now, gently and sadly dropping from the boughs because there was no wind. They floated down to make another layer on the wet slippery mass underfoot. Leaves coated the surface of the sluggish stream. The sky was gray and of a uniform unbroken cloudiness. She walked for miles along woodland paths and meadow edges, keeping the church tower always in sight so that she would know how to find her way back.

  Once or twice she crossed a road, but she saw no one and no traffic passed her. A muntjac stag appeared under the trees, showed her his top-heavy antlers, and fled through the bracken. Jays called to one another to warn of her approach. She gathered all kinds of fungus but, in spite of her knowledge, feared to cook them and shed a trail of agarics and lepiotas as she walked. When it was about noon, according to her haphazard
but usually accurate calculations, she made for home.

  There, with no prospect of Sean coming home for four hours, she was at a loss. Never before had she been without something to read. There was no paper in the caravan and nothing to write with, no means of playing music, no collections to pore over, no needles or thread to sew with. At last she turned on the television. An old Powell and Pressburger film with Wendy Hiller in it mystified her as such films had when the Shrove House set was available to her. Had such people ever existed, talked like that, dressed in those clothes? Or was it as much a fairy tale as Scheherazade?

  When Sean came back she had fallen asleep. The television was still on and he got cross, saying she was wasting power. Next day she went with him into the town and applied for the job with Mrs. Spurdell.

  Liza said she was eighteen. She had no references because she had never worked for anyone before, but she knew all about housework. She had watched Eve and later on helped Eve.

  The house in Aspen Close was a little like the house Bruno had wanted them all to live in. But inside was different. She had never before seen anything like this large, dull, ugly room carpeted and curtained in beige, with no pictures on the walls and no mirrors and, as far as she could see, no books. Flowers that could not be real, artificial white peonies and blue delphiniums and pink chrysanthemums filled beige pottery bowls. Across the middle of a table and along the top of a cabinet lay pale green lace runners.

  Mrs. Spurdell was the same color, except that her hair was white. Her fat body was squeezed into a pale green wool dress and underneath that, Liza thought, must be some kind of controlling rubber garment that made her shape so smooth, yet segmented and undulant. Like a plump caterpillar shortly to become a chrysalis. The shoes she wore, shiny beige with high heels, looked as if they hurt her ankles, which bulged over the sides of them.