The Crocodile Bird

by Ruth Rendell

  It took Gracie five minutes to say yes. Yes, she’d stay. Then you can phone my solicitor and ask him to pop in sometime next week, said Mr. Tobias.

  The new will was made and Mr. Frost and Mr. Tobias’s doctor witnessed it. In the presence of the testator and of each other, Eve explained. That was the law.

  Mr. Tobias made a quick recovery after that. Making sure that Gracie would stay spurred him on to get better. He was up and actually walking about the garden by the time Jonathan came home for the long vacation. Gracie’s sister took a friend of hers into the travel agent’s business, a woman who had been secretary to the managing director of a domestic airline.

  Having no secrets from her daughter, Gracie told Eve about the will. It made Eve feel as if Shrove was already hers. She had always felt about Mr. Tobias as if he were her grandfather and now she saw herself inheriting the place as his natural heir. It was true what her mother said that she loved it. All she wanted, at age seventeen, was to live there forever. With Jonathan, of course. Jonathan could come and live there with her.

  Eve got three A-Levels to A and went to Oxford. Jonathan was still there, though he had his degree, and they saw a lot of each other.

  “What does that mean?” said Sean. “D’you mean they was lovers?”

  “I suppose. Yes, I’m sure they were. Eve didn’t actually say. Well, she wouldn’t then. Not to me. I was only ten.”

  “Old enough to see her in bed with one man after another.”

  Liza shrugged. There was no answer to that. Eve and Jonathan must have been lovers. What was there to stop them? Besides, Liza had her own very personal reasons for knowing they were. Back at Shrove, Mr. Tobias lived on. He often had setbacks and once he had a bad fall trying to get down the steps from the terrace, his arm was broken, and while they X-rayed it they found cancer in the bone. Gracie nursed him through it all.

  At the end of her first year at Oxford Eve came home for July and August and September and Jonathan with her. They spent all their time together. But when Eve went back Jonathan didn’t go with her. He stayed behind to be with his grandfather, who everyone said was really dying now. There were no audio books in those days and Jonathan spent hours every day reading aloud to Mr. Tobias.

  Jonathan was going to be “something in the City.” That was what Eve had said. Liza didn’t know what it meant and Sean had only a hazy idea.

  “In a bank maybe,” he said, “or a stockbroker.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Don’t know really. It’s like doing stuff with shares.”

  “Anyway, he didn’t. He didn’t have to because his father died and left him everything, all his money, which was millions—well, a million or two—and the house in London and the place in the Lake District. He got to be something called a ‘name’ at Lloyds, whatever that is, but it wasn’t work. Caroline got the house in France and something called a life interest in a lot more money. Only no one knew.”

  “What d’you mean, no one knew?”

  No one at Shrove knew. Gracie and old Mr. Tobias knew Sir Nicholas Ellison was dead, of course they did, Gracie sent a wreath from Mr. Tobias to the funeral, but they thought all the property had gone to Caroline. Eve knew. Jonathan had written to her at Oxford and told her, but it didn’t occur to her to tell her mother, it didn’t interest her much who got the money, Jonathan or Caroline, one of them was bound to have done.

  Mr. Tobias must have assumed it was all Caroline’s. After all, he had forecast it would be. There was so much money, you see, Liza, Eve said. These people, they don’t know how much money they have got. People like us, we always know, down to the last pound, maybe the last fifty pee, but the Tobiases and the Ellisons of this world, they could have two million or three or something in between, they don’t exactly know. It’s all in different places, making more, accumulating, and they lose count of how much there is.

  There was money slurping around, lots of it, more and more, some coming from here and some from there. Maybe Mr. Tobias didn’t even care, didn’t worry about it, didn’t think about it. He was very old and very ill and very rich and the last thing he was going to get precisely sorted out in his mind was who had what when it came to money.

  Something unexpected happened next. Eve had been two years at Oxford; Jonathan divided his time between visiting her and visiting his grandfather; Mr. Tobias at eighty-four was very feeble and needing constant attention but not in danger. It was autumn. Gracie, who had been fit all her life, suddenly had alarming symptoms. They did tests and told her she had cancer of the womb. She was rushed to hospital for a hysterectomy.

  There was nothing for it but nurses, a nurse for the day and a nurse for the night. Jonathan couldn’t manage the bedpans and the blanket baths. The nurses were there all the time, a rota of nurses coming and going. Jonathan sat with his grandfather, wrote letters to Eve, shot pheasants. What else happened while Gracie was in hospital became clear after Mr. Tobias was dead.

  He bitterly resented her leaving him. It was impossible to make him understand that she had had no choice, that it was her life that was threatened. Perhaps she should have explained to him more carefully what was happening to her. But she was afraid. For once, she was thinking of no one but herself.

  As for him, it was as if he refused to admit that anyone but himself could have a life-endangering disease. He spoke to her in the tone of a disappointed father whose daughter has let him down by behaving immorally or in some criminal way. He constantly alluded to “the time you left me on my own.”

  Gracie took over the care of him once more. The nurses left. Jonathan left for France and his mother. Gracie had been told not to lift heavy weights for six months, and Mr. Tobias, though so old and thin, was very heavy. When she couldn’t lift him up in bed properly and prop him on pillows, he grumbled and reproached her.

  Eve came home at Christmas, and returned to Oxford in January. She was expected to get a first.

  “What’s that?” said Sean.

  “The best kind of degree. Like getting a first prize.”

  By the time the spring came, Mr. Tobias couldn’t be at home anymore, he was too ill. He was taken to a nursing home, where he went into a coma, lingered for a few weeks, and died in May. Gracie was sad in a way, but he had been so unkind to her those past months that she had lost most of her affection for him. She knew Shrove was hers now, when she woke up on the morning after Mr. Tobias’s death, she had gone outside and laid her hands on the brickwork of the wall, saying, “You’re mine, you’re mine.” But she thought she should phone the solicitor to ask when she could legally take possession.

  He told her his client had left everything to Jonathan Tobias Ellison, known as Jonathan Tobias. Well, not quite everything. There was a legacy for her of a thousand pounds.

  “He had made a new will while she was in hospital,” said Liza. “He got Jonathan to send for the solicitor and the nurses were witnesses. In the presence of the testator and of each other.”

  “You mean Jonathan fixed it.”

  “Eve says not. She says he told his grandfather he didn’t need Shrove, he had what his father left him. But Mr. Tobias didn’t understand or didn’t want to. He told him he wouldn’t leave it to ‘that woman who’s deserted me.’”

  “What did your grandma do?”

  “What could she do? Eve didn’t mind too much, not then. It would be all the same to her in the end because she and Jonathan were going to get married.”

  Jonathan asked Gracie to stay on at the gatehouse. He might live at Shrove one day but not yet. All she would have to do would be a kind of caretaker. No nursing, no cooking, it would be almost the same as if it were actually hers. Gracie wouldn’t, she was too humiliated. As for Eve, it made her furious. Where was she supposed to go on the holidays until she and Jonathan were married? Gracie was adamant. She went off to Coventry and rented her sister’s spare bedroom.

  That was nearly the end. Eve didn’t come into the story for a while and when she reappeare
d she had no degree, first or otherwise, but she did have a baby.

  “Me,” said Liza.

  “Is that all you know?”

  “She said she’d tell me when I was older.”

  Eve knew Jonathan was going to South America. He had already started going to places “just to see what it was like.” “Come too,” he said, but of course she couldn’t go to Brazil or Peru or wherever it was at the start of the university term. They quarreled a bit about that and didn’t see each other for a fortnight, but the day he went to catch his plane for Rio, Eve went to Heathrow with him to see him off.

  He was expected back after three months, after six months, but he didn’t come back, he stayed and stayed. Eve had to leave Oxford because she was going to have a baby. In a Coventry hospital Gracie was dying. She hadn’t had the hysterectomy soon enough.

  After she was dead, Eve and Liza stayed with Eve’s aunt. She made it plain she didn’t want a niece and a great-niece in her little house, she didn’t like babies, but she meant to do her duty. Eve had a hard time making ends meet. For one thing, she was in a bad psychological state. She’d never got over what happened before Liza was born, though she never wished she’d had an abortion. She’d never considered it, she wanted Liza to know that.

  “Fine thing to tell a kid of ten,” said Sean.

  “Okay, I know what you think of her. You don’t have to go on and on.”

  Heather got in touch with her and said, come and live with me. Eve was so unhappy with her aunt that she accepted, though Heather’s flat in Birmingham was tiny with only one bedroom. They all three lived there as best they could. Heather found Eve a job teaching in a private school where they would take on staff who weren’t qualified. She put Liza with a baby-minder, but that wasn’t very satisfactory. When she went to pick her up in the afternoon she found the babies, all six of them, strapped into push-chairs that were stuck in front of the television.

  “So I had seen television before, when I was one, but I couldn’t remember.”

  It made Eve determined never to let her child watch television. And that started a train of other ideas about bringing up her child. If only she had somewhere to live, but there was only one place in the world she really wanted that to be.

  Jonathan didn’t know where she was. She’d changed her job twice and the baby-minder three times before he found her.

  Liza was three and Eve had had a job handing out freebie magazines in the street, another trying to be a secretary and learning to type at the same time, and Liza had fallen over at the baby-minder’s and cut her head. Jonathan had found a letter at Shrove with the aunt’s address on it and, thinking it worth a try, came to find her. One evening he rang the bell at Heather’s flat.

  When he said he’d a proposal to put before her she thought for one mad moment he was going to ask her to marry him, even now, even after all that had happened. He was friendly but cool. Would she like to live in the gatehouse at Shrove in exchange for keeping an eye on the house? That was the expression he used, “keeping an eye on.” He would pay her a salary, a handsome one, as it turned out.

  She accepted. She really had no choice.

  “It got her back there, you see. It got her to the one place in the world she wanted to be, even though in the gatehouse she was like the Peri outside the gates of paradise.”

  “The what? ”

  “Peris were superhuman beings in Persian mythology, sometimes called Pairikas. They were bad spirits, though they hid their badness under a charming appearance, but of course they couldn’t get into paradise.”

  “Of course not,” Sean said sarcastically.

  “And that was it, you see. That was how we came to live there and it all began.”

  THIRTEEN

  BRUNO was gone and life went back to what it had once been. Lessons resumed. It was just as well Liza liked learning, because she seldom had a chance in his absence to get up to Shrove and watch television. Mother taught her relentlessly. Sometimes the way she instructed and lectured was almost ferocious in its intensity.

  Winter came and with it the sunless days and long nights. Every morning the two of them went walking, but they were gone for only an hour and the rest of the day was spent with Liza’s books. Occasionally Mother would insist that they spoke only French, so breakfast, lunch, and supper were eaten in French and their discussions of other subjects were in French. She set Liza an examination in English, history, and Latin. Liza learned whole pages of poetry by heart and in the evenings she and Mother read plays aloud, Mother taking all the male parts and she the female. They read Peter Pan and Where the Rainbow Ends and The Blue Bird.

  Bruno was never mentioned. If letters came from him, Mother never said so. Now that Liza was older she didn’t get up so early, Mother was always up before her, so Liza wouldn’t have known if letters had come. She knew Heather sometimes wrote, her letters were left about. The Tobiases sent a Christmas card, as did Heather and the aunt. Did we send them cards? Liza wanted to know. Mother said no, certainly not. It was absurd celebrating Christmas if you didn’t believe in the Christian God, or indeed any god at all, but she gave Liza a lesson on the Christian religion just as she taught her about Judaism and Islam and Buddhism.

  One day, shortly before Liza’s eleventh birthday, she was looking through Mother’s desk for a pad of lined paper Mother said was in the middle section, when she came upon a letter in Bruno’s writing. She recognized the writing at once. Without ever having been told, she somehow knew that reading other people’s private correspondence was wrong. It must have come from all the highly moral Victorian books she read from the Shrove library, the works among others of Charlotte M. Yonge and Frances Hodgson Burnett. She read it just the same.

  Mother had gone upstairs. She could hear her moving about overhead. Liza read the address, which was somewhere called Cheadle, and the date, which was the previous week, and the first page of the letter. It started, “My darling lovely Eve.” Liza wrinkled up her nose but read on. “I miss you a lot. I wish I could call you, it’s crazy us not being able to call each other in this day and age. Please ring me. You can call me collect if you’re afraid of J.T. getting his knickers in a twist. Now my ma is dead I’m not poor anymore, do you realize that? It won’t be much longer now, I’ve just got all this stuff to see to, inevitable really, and I must grin and bear it. Just to hear your voice would—”

  She had to stop there because she heard Mother’s footsteps on the stairs. She didn’t dare turn the page over. Much of what she had read about “calling” and “collect” was incomprehensible, but not “it won’t be much longer now.” He was coming back. For a moment she wondered why his mother’s dying stopped him being poor, but then she remembered the tale of Shrove and old Mr. Tobias and understood.

  It was a hard winter. A little snow fell before Christmas, but the first heavy fall came in early January. It lay in deep drifts, masking the demarcations between the road surface and the grass verge, then piling up to hide the ditch and spreading a thick concealing cloak over the hedgerow. And when it melted a little it froze again, more fiercely than ever, so that the thawed snow, falling in drops and trickles, turned into icicles, pointed as needles and sharp as knives.

  Icicles hung around the eaves of the gatehouse like fringe on a canopy. A crust of ice lay on top of the thick snow. It had been two days since a car had been able to get down the lane. The council, Mother said, hadn’t bothered to snowplow it because they were the only ones living there and they hadn’t a car.

  The postman stopped coming, which pleased Liza because it meant no more letters from Bruno. While the lane was blocked like this, Bruno couldn’t come. The little orange car would never get through where the post van failed. And still the snow fell, day after day, adding more and more layers to the deep quilt of crisp whiteness that covered everything.

  They fed the birds. They had a bird table for bread crumbs, two bird feeders made of wire mesh to fill with nuts, and they hung up pieces of fat on string
. One morning Liza saw a woodpecker at one of the wire feeders and a tree creeper hanging on its tail, both pecking at the nuts. Remembering Jonathan taking photographs, she said she wished they had a camera, but Mother said, no, your own mind is the best recording instrument, let your memory photograph it.

  And then she said the bird was like Trochilus, a kind of hummingbird. So Liza looked Trochilus up in the encyclopedia and she thought she saw what Mother meant, for its other name was the crocodile bird, so called because it is the only creature that can enter with impunity the mouth of a crocodile and pick its teeth. It also cries out to warn the crocodile of an impending foe.

  Liza loved the snow. She was too old to make snowmen, but she made them. She made herself an igloo. When it was finished she sat inside her igloo, eating a picnic of Marmite sandwiches and Nice biscuits and rejoicing in the snow that would keep Bruno away, wishing as hard as she could that more and more snow would fall, that it would lie heavy and impenetrable in the lane until March, until April. Mother had told her about a very bad winter when she was a little girl, even before she and Gracie and Ray came to Shrove, when the snow started in January and lasted for seven weeks and all the water pipes froze. It was a bad winter, but to herself Liza called it a “good” winter.

  Mother had a cold that she must have caught in town the last time she went there before the snow came. Coughing kept her awake at night so she lay down to rest in the afternoons, and when she did Liza made her way up to Shrove for an hour or two of television. She had missed the old films and school programs and quiz shows. She was beginning to understand too, in a vague, puzzled way, that the small square screen was her window to a world of which she otherwise knew very little.