The Crocodile Bird

by Ruth Rendell

  Liza was just saying they hadn’t got a car—she didn’t count Bruno’s—and thinking of saying she hadn’t got a dad, when the train whistle sounded on the far side of the tunnel. It always whistled going into the tunnel and coming out of it, it was a single-line track and maybe there was a remote possibility of another train meeting it in the dark and going headlong into it. There wouldn’t be any more such possibilities, however.

  “The last train ever,” the man said. “The last poor bloody train.”

  When it came out of the tunnel and whistled again some of the people cheered. Liza could hardly believe her eyes when the four people holding the banner on the other side and three others with placards all began climbing down the embankment toward the line. The seven, four men and three women, took up their positions right across the line, in the path of the oncoming train, holding their banner and their placards aloft. The train could now be seen in the distance, heading this way.

  What if it didn’t stop? What if it came right on, ploughing the people down, as Liza had seen in a television film about the Wild West? She held on tight to the banner, clenching her fists around the cloth, making white knuckles.

  “Look at them,” shouted the woman who had seized her arm. “The Magnificent Seven!”

  As the train came on the crowd began to sing. They sang, “We Shall Overcome.” Liza had never heard it before but the tune was easy, she soon caught on and began singing it too. “We shall overcome one da-a-a-a-ay. Deep in my heart, I do believe that we shall overcome one day!”

  The engine driver saw them in plenty of time. You could hear him applying the brakes, a long, low howl like a dog baying. The train came slowly on and ground to a halt a good hundred yards from where the Magnificent Seven held their banner and placards aloft. The crowd started singing “Jerusalem.” The engine driver and another man in the same kind of uniform got down from the train and came marching up the track to argue with the protestors. All the train doors and windows opened and passengers stuck their heads out. Then they too began getting out and pouring along the line.

  It was more than ever like a Western film when the Indians came or the mob of robbers from Dodge City. Liza and her fellow banner-carriers moved closer to the line to get involved in the arguments. There was a lot of shouting and threatening and one man had to be restrained from punching the engine driver. It wasn’t his fault, anyway. Liza thought it most unfair. But she enjoyed every minute of it, she hadn’t enjoyed anything so much since before Bruno came. In fact, thinking about it afterward, she understood she hadn’t enjoyed anything since the coming of Bruno.

  She stayed with the protestors right over lunch and well into the afternoon. They gave her sandwiches and biscuits from their lunches, all of them believing her parents were down by the station and she had somehow got detached from them. The train people went on arguing. The Magnificent Seven stood firm. After a while some British Rail officials arrived, there was talk of the police, the protestors on the embankments sat on the grass, and a couple of people fell asleep. Liza listened to a discussion about nuclear power, destruction of the environment, and the betrayal of democracy. She noted all the words, stored them in her memory without understanding anything that was said, until at last, growing bored, she wandered away.

  She was still barefoot, her shoes tied to her belt with the socks stuffed inside them. From the position of the sun and the feel of the air she calculated it must be at least three-thirty. She sat down on the grass to put her socks on. As she was tying her shoelaces, she heard the train start and turned around to watch it.

  The protestors must have been persuaded, cajoled, or threatened into leaving the line. Gradually the train gathered speed, passed between the rows of the defeated demonstrators, and came to the station. Liza saw it leave again and finally disappear into the curve that the hills swallowed, the last train forever.

  She went home by way of the Shrove garden, across the smooth lawn cut by Mr. Frost that morning. Mother was sitting on the wall in front of the cottage, eating an apple. The orange car wasn’t there.

  “Where have you been? I was worried when you didn’t come home for lunch.”

  Lies were easier and safer. “I took my lunch with me. I made sandwiches.”

  Mother wouldn’t have known. She’d been in bed with Bruno. Where was he, anyway?

  Before she could ask, Mother said, “Bruno’s gone up to Cheshire to be with his mother. His mother’s very ill.”

  Nothing could have been better, more calculated to make her happy, nothing except to hear he wasn’t coming back.

  “He may be gone a long time,” said Mother.

  She took Liza into the house and when they were inside and the door was closed she put her arms around her and said, “I’m sorry, Liza. I’ve been neglecting you, I haven’t been a good mother to you lately. I can’t explain, but you’ll understand one day. I promise things will be like they used to be now we’re alone again. Will you forgive me?”

  Mother had never apologized to her before. She hadn’t had to until Bruno came. Liza would have forgiven her anything now Bruno was gone. It had been the Day of the Last Train.

  Sean said gruffly, “Did he ever do anything to you, this Bruno guy?”

  “Hit me, d’you mean?”

  Sean said, no, not that, and explained what he did mean.

  “I never heard of that,” Liza said. “Do men really do that?”

  “Some do.”

  “Well, he didn’t. I told you, he hated me. He wanted to be alone with Eve and I got in his way. It wasn’t always like that, he quite liked me at first, he painted that portrait of me, the one I told you about. He was always painting pictures of Eve and then he said he’d do one of me. I sat on a chair inside the little castle and he painted me. He was very kind then. I had to sit still for a long time and he bought cranberry juice for me, I’d never had that before, and biscuits with icing on that Eve wouldn’t let me have. He used to buy lots of things for me when they went shopping. When I look back, I think he was just trying to ingratiate himself with Eve.”

  “Do what?”

  “Ingratiate himself. Make her like him more. But then he must have realized he didn’t have to do that, she liked him enough. And he changed. When he was ill and he realized he couldn’t persuade Eve even to send me to a day school, that was when he changed. I can’t tell you how relieved I was when I knew he’d gone, I was so happy.”

  Sean turned off the television. It was a concession,

  Liza realized that and closed her book. He put his arm around her.

  “Who was that woman you were talking about, the one who told her husband stories?”

  He’d remembered, Liza thought, pleased. “Scheherazade. She was an Eastern woman, an Arab, I suppose. Her husband was a king who used to marry women and have them executed the morning after their wedding nights. He’d have their heads chopped off.”

  “Why did he?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t remember. Scheherazade was determined not to have hers chopped off. On their wedding night she started telling him a story, a very long one that she couldn’t finish, but he longed to know the end so much that he said he’d keep her alive until the morning after the next night so that he could hear the end. But it didn’t end or she started another, and so it went on until he got sort of addicted to her stories and couldn’t have her killed, and in the end he fell in love with her and they lived happily ever after.”

  “What about all the other poor women he’d killed?”

  “Too bad for them,” said Liza. “I don’t suppose that bothered her. Why did you ask about Scheherazade?”

  “I don’t know. I wanted you to tell me a bit more about what happened. You’ve stopped telling me.”

  “Lucky to be alive, then, am I?” She laughed but he didn’t. “What happened next, after Bruno’d gone that is, is that Mr. and Mrs. Tobias came down. It was the first time for about a year. Mr. Tobias said he wanted to meet Bruno, and Eve had to tell him wh
ere Bruno had gone. Seeing his paintings was the next best thing, Mr. Tobias said, so Eve took him and Mrs. Tobias into the little castle and the first thing they saw was the portrait of me.

  “Of course they saw other pictures, too, and Mrs. Tobias, Victoria, said she’d like to buy one. She wanted one he’d done of Shrove by moonlight. ‘Oh, I adore it,’ she said and she clapped her hands, and when Eve said four hundred pounds she didn’t even flinch. Mr. Tobias—Jonathan, why do I keep on calling him that, like a child?—he wrote a check for it there and then and gave it to Eve.”

  “Didn’t she wait to ask Bruno?”

  “I suppose she knew he wanted to sell them. Anyway, she didn’t wait. She was very pleased about getting money for him. Next day Jonathan started shooting and Victoria did too. There was a pair of partridges used to strut about, I’d got fond of them, red legs they were and a beautiful pattern on their backs. She shot them both. I wish I’d had a gun, I’d have shot her. When they’d shot all the birds they wanted they went back to London and as soon as they’d gone Eve sat down with me and told me the whole story of old Mr. Tobias and Caroline and her mother and why she never got Shrove for herself.”

  TWELVE

  EVE’S parents had gone to work for old Mr. Tobias and his wife when Eve was five and Jonathan was nine. Jonathan didn’t live at Shrove at that time, but he came down for the holidays with his mother and father, Caroline, who was Lady Ellison, and her husband, Sir Nicholas Ellison. Then Sir Nicholas left Caroline and Caroline went back home to her parents.

  Eve’s father was a German called Rainer Beck, he’d been a prisoner of war in this country and after the war was over he didn’t go back to Germany but stayed on and married Gracie, the daughter of the farmer he worked for. They were married for ages without having any children and Gracie had given up hope. She couldn’t believe it when, after ten years, she became pregnant. The baby was a girl and they called her Eva, after Rainer’s mother in Hildesheim.

  Agricultural laborers were nearly the worst paid of all workers and, in any case, as farms became mechanized and hundreds of acres could be run with only a couple of men, they weren’t much needed. Gracie saw the housekeeper and handyman’s jobs advertised in The Lady magazine while she was at the dentist’s, so they applied for it and got it. One of the inducements was that a house went with the job.

  Old Mr. and Mrs. Tobias interviewed Gracie and offered her the job at once. Rainer was too hard for them to pronounce, so they called him Ray.

  The Tobiases liked making people change their names. Jonathan had been christened Jonathan Tobias Ellison but at his grandfather’s suggestion he dropped the Ellison and became Jonathan Tobias. He went away to his public school but he was at Shrove during the holidays, and he and Eve grew up together. That was the way she put it, grew up together. They were inseparable, they were best friends.

  Old Mrs. Tobias was ill. She died when Gracie and Rainer had been there a year, and soon after that Caroline went off with a man she’d met on holiday in Barbados. Jonathan remained at Shrove. Sometimes he went to stay with his father, but mostly he was at Shrove telling Eve he was going to marry her when he grew up. He and she would marry and live together at Shrove forever until death parted them.

  Ray wasn’t a gardener or a butler but a handyman. Mr. Frost, who was quite young then, came up from the village on his bicycle—the same bicycle, Eve said—to do the garden. There wasn’t enough work for Ray to do full-time. By a great stroke of luck he got a job in the village working for a builder as a bricklayer, the job he’d been trained for all those years ago in Germany. Ray put in a few hours every week at Shrove, cleaning the windows and the cars. It was Gracie who was the important one. But for Gracie the place would have fallen apart. With Mr. Frost’s daughter to help her three times a week, she kept Shrove clean and did all the cooking. She did the washing and ironing, ordered the groceries, made jam and pickles, acted as secretary to Mr. Tobias and, increasingly, as his nurse. She was indispensable.

  Eve went first to the village school, then to the school in town where you had to pay fees. Mr. Tobias paid her fees. She was very bright, brighter than Jonathan, Mr. Tobias said, and he adored Jonathan. Gracie thought he was going soft in the head, maybe it was the onset of Alzheimer’s, when he said Eve would very likely get to Oxford. Gracie’s sister had had nine months at a secretarial college and she looked on that as the summit of academic ambition.

  Mr. Tobias didn’t have Alzheimer’s but a very slow growing cancer. He was eighty and malignant growths proceed slowly in people of that age. He could get up and walk about, go out in the car with Ray to drive him, and lead quite a normal life. But sometimes he had to go into hospital for radiotherapy and then, when he came home, he was very ill for a while. There was plenty of money and he could easily have afforded private nursing, but he didn’t want anyone near him but Gracie.

  The doctors at the hospital—they were called oncologists, Eve explained—called him their longest surviving cancer patient. The primary cancer had been detected nine years before and still he lived on. It wasn’t Mr. Tobias who died but Rainer Beck. The planning authority had given permission for some “in-filling” in the village and Ray’s employer was putting up a house on the site between the row of cottages and the village hall. While Ray was laying bricks for the front wall he keeled over and died of a heart attack with his trowel still in his hand.

  “He was clutching on to it and the cement got hard,” said Liza. “The cement stuck it onto his dead hand and they had to prize it open. They had to break his fingers. It was either that or burying him with that trowel in his hand.”

  Sean turned his mouth down. “Yuck. Do you mind?”

  “I’m only telling you how it was.”

  “You don’t have to go into details.”

  When Ray was dead Gracie began worrying about her future. One week she had a husband’s income to depend on and the next week she hadn’t. She never would have again. She had no home of her own, a sixteen-year-old daughter dependent on her, and an employer who might die and leave her jobless at any moment. Caroline occasionally reappeared at Shrove, beautifully dressed, arriving in a big new car, still not divorced, still married to Sir Nicholas and supported by him, but often with a man friend in tow. She had never liked Gracie, disapproved of the friendship between her son and “the housekeeper’s girl,” and made it plain Gracie wouldn’t last there a week after her father was dead.

  Gracie laid her troubles before Mr. Tobias. She was young enough to get a job if she left now. Her sister was a travel agent with a small business in Coventry, from which her partner had just pulled out. If Gracie would join her, learn the business, and take the partner’s place, she’d help her with a mortgage on a flat. But it would have to be now, not next year or in five years’ time when Gracie would be well over fifty.

  It happened that she said all this just at the time the doctors had discovered another lump on Mr. Tobias’s spine. Once it was removed, he’d have more radiotherapy and be convalescent for weeks. He begged Gracie not to leave him. Caroline had gone off again. Not that she ever did a hand’s turn in the house and moreover she was too squeamish, she said, to be a nurse. Jonathan was up at Oxford. If Gracie left he would have to resort to private nurses and that would kill him.

  Gracie told her sister she would need a while longer to make up her mind. Meanwhile Mr. Tobias went into hospital and the growth on his back was surgically removed. He became extremely ill.

  “I expect she hoped he’d die,” said Liza.

  “Come on, Liza, the poor old fellow. He was all on his own with no one giving a bugger what happened to him. It’s only natural he didn’t want her to go.”

  “She had to think of her future. Rich people like him just use people like my grandmother, Eve said. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t afford to pay nurses.”

  “Money never brings happiness,” said Sean with a sigh.

  “How do you know? Have you ever known any rich people? I have. Jonathan w
as ever so rich all the time I knew him and he was happy for years and years.”

  Mr. Tobias came home and Gracie nursed him. She moved herself and Eve out of the gatehouse and up to Shrove. For a whole two weeks before he could get up she had to give him bedpans and dress the wound on his back, which started suppurating. The doctor came every day and said she was wonderful. Meanwhile Eve sat for her O-Levels and passed in eleven subjects. Mr. Tobias called her into his bedroom to congratulate her and gave her fifty pounds “to buy some dresses.”

  What about me, said Gracie when he was up and about again, what’s going to become of me? My sister’s starting to get impatient. Mr. Tobias had been thinking about it and he told her the decision he’d come to.

  If she would guarantee to stay with him until he died, having sole care of him and nursing him—she could have any help in the house she wanted—if she’d do all that, he would leave her Shrove House in his will. He knew she loved it, he knew how she appreciated this beautiful place.

  It’s my daughter that loves it, said Gracie, so shocked by what he’d said that she couldn’t think of any other answer to make. It’s Eve who couldn’t bear the thought of leaving. This had held her back from agreeing to her sister’s proposition nearly as much as Mr. Tobias’s dependency on her. Eve worked so hard and did so well at school, was such a happy girl, because she loved Shrove and its surroundings and the whole lovely valley. And being with Jonathan whenever he was at home, thought Gracie, though not saying this aloud. She hadn’t dared tell Eve there was a chance they might leave and go up to Coventry.

  So what do you think of my idea? Mr. Tobias had perhaps expected more enthusiasm. It came. Gracie was stunned, Gracie couldn’t believe what he’d said. Did he really mean it? What about Caroline? Wasn’t it Caroline’s by right?

  Caroline hates the place, said Mr. Tobias, confirming what Gracie had long known. She couldn’t wait to get away. Besides, she may not have lived with Nicholas for the past ten years but he’s still mad about her and he’ll leave her everything he’s got, you’ll see. He’s not a well man, poor Nicholas, he’ll not last as long as I will, and when he goes Caroline will be a rich woman, even allowing for the bulk of his fortune going to Jonathan.