The Crocodile Bird

by Ruth Rendell

  The second time she went up there she saw the snowplow as she came out of the cottage gate. It was clearing the lane. The big shovel on the front of it was heaving up piles of snow, spotted like currant pudding by the gravel lodged in it, and casting it up on the verges. Liza felt sure this would somehow open the way for Bruno. It was as if he had been waiting on the other side of the bridge in his orange car for the snowplow to come and make a smooth, clean road for him.

  But when she returned there was no car and no Bruno. She should have asked Mother, she knew that, she should have said to Mother, “Is Bruno coming back?” but she couldn’t bring herself to do this. She was afraid of being told yes and of being given a definite time. Doubt was better than knowing for sure.

  The snow thawed and he hadn’t come. All that was left of the snow were small piles of it lying in the coldest shady places, map-shaped patches of snow on the green grass. Mother’s cold went when the snow did, so there was no more television but plenty of lessons. In February, on a freak warm day, Liza went up into the wood to see if the aconites were out, and when she got back a car was parked outside the cottage, a dark brown car of a shape and make she had never seen before. Instead of a letter of the alphabet at the start of the registration number there was one at the end. She had never seen that before either. The car was called a Lancia.

  The Tobiases, she thought, having long dropped the respectful Mr. and Mrs. They were always getting new cars. She went warily into the house, preparing to say a cool hallo before going upstairs. The memory of the partridges remained with her and now the story of Gracie and the grandfather too.

  She saw Bruno before he saw her, she moved so quietly. He was sitting on the sofa beside Mother, holding both her hands in his and looking into her eyes. Liza stood quite still. He was unchanged, except that his long, soft wavy hair was longer and his freckles had faded. He still wore denim jeans and a leather jacket and the two gold earrings in the lobe of one ear.

  Perhaps there was some truth in the theory she had read that you can sense when someone is staring very intently at you, for although she hadn’t moved or made a sound Bruno suddenly raised his head and met her eyes. For a moment, a very brief instant of time, there came into his face a look of such deep hatred and loathing that she felt a shiver run straight down her back. She had never seen such a look before, but she knew it at once for what it was. Bruno hated her.

  Almost immediately the terrible expression had passed and a look of bland resignation replaced it. Mother also looked around, dropping Bruno’s hands. Mother said, “Goodness, Lizzie, you’re as quiet as a little mouse.”

  Bruno said, “Hi, Liza, how’ve you been?”

  That was the way he talked. Not like an English person and not like an American person—she had heard plenty of them on television—but as if he lived midway between the two countries, which was impossible because it would have been the Atlantic Ocean. She noticed a red blush on Mother’s face. Mother hadn’t told her he was coming. She must have known. Why hadn’t she told her?

  “What d’you reckon to my new jalopy, then?”

  “He means his car,” said Mother.

  “It’s okay,” Liza said, a television expression that made Mother frown. “I liked the orange one.”

  “The orange one, as you call it, has gone to where all bad old cars go when they die, the breakers’ yard.”

  “Where do the good ones go, Bruno?” said Mother.

  “They go to people like me, my sweet. The one outside’s what I mean by a good one. It was my ma’s, still is, as a matter of fact, I’ve never transferred it. She had it for ten years and only did seven thousand miles on it.”

  Mother was laughing. Liza thought, she didn’t tell me because she knows I hate him. I wonder if she knows he hates me? In that moment she lost some of her respect for Mother, though not her love. That was the evening when, as soon as she could get Mother alone, she asked if she could start calling her Eve.

  “Why do you want to?”

  “Everyone else does.”

  If Mother thought “everyone” a bit thin on the ground, she didn’t say so. “You can if you like,” she said, though not in a happy voice.

  Liza had been wrong when she thought Bruno hadn’t changed. She would have understood that he had even if Eve hadn’t pointed it out, if Eve hadn’t said while they were having their dinner, “You never used to care about money, you used to be indifferent to it.”

  He had been talking about all the things “they” could do now he had his mother’s house to sell.

  “You’d better wait till you’ve sold it,” said Eve in the dry voice she sometimes used.

  “I’ve practically done that small thing,” Bruno said in his twangy tone. “I’ve got a buyer who’s even keener to buy it than I am to sell.”

  That was in the boom time of five and a half years ago. Eve said she understood you could sell anything these days, a remark that went down less than well with Bruno, who started insisting on how lovely his mother’s house was, how he and she would have been delighted to live in it if only it hadn’t been in the north.

  “You can leave me out of it,” said Eve. “I live here and I’m going to live here for the rest of my life.”

  He wasn’t an anarchist anymore. He had forgotten about money and property being unimportant. Having a big house to sell and a proper car and some thousands of pounds in the bank had gone to his head.

  “I didn’t even have a bank last time I was here, Eve.”

  “Aren’t we going to talk about anything but money?” said Eve.

  She was so rough with him, “scathing” was the word, that Liza really expected him to go off somewhere for the night. But the guitar music went on playing softly and persistently downstairs, sometimes Bruno sang in his Johnny Cash or his Merle Haggard voices, and she wasn’t really surprised when, hours later, their footfalls on the stairs woke her and she heard them go into Eve’s bedroom together.

  The only good that came of Bruno’s return was free afternoons for watching television. Lessons didn’t stop, but once more they became few and far between. Bruno was almost always there and when he was he sneered at Eve’s teaching methods, picked on her for not being a qualified teacher, and went on and on about how “the kid” ought to be at school.

  “Why ought she?” Mother said at last.

  “Come on, Mother, she’s not getting a proper education.”

  “Don’t call me ‘Mother,’ you’re only two years younger than I am. How many children of eleven have you come across that can read, write, and talk French, can do a Latin unseen, recite Lycidas, and give you a thoroughly good precis of at least four Shakespeare plays?”

  “She doesn’t know any science and she doesn’t know any maths.”

  “Of course she doesn’t. She’s only eleven.”

  “That’s the age they’re supposed to start these things, remember?”

  “You teach her, then. You were good at maths, you’re always saying.”

  “I’m not a teacher,” Bruno said. “I’m not like you, I know my limitations. She needs real teachers. I bet that kid couldn’t do a simple sum. I’m not talking about calculus and logarithms and all that, I’m talking about, say, long division. Come on, Liza, you’ve got a bit of paper there. Divide eight hundred and twenty-four by forty-two.”

  Eve snatched the paper away. “Nobody needs to divide eight hundred and twenty-four by forty-two on paper anymore. Even I know that, out of the world as I am. You have calculators to do that for you.”

  “Calculators can’t do algebra,” said Bruno.

  And so it went on. Liza knew very well—though Eve didn’t seem to—that Bruno only wanted her to go to school to be rid of her, to get her out of the way. He didn’t care whether she learned algebra or got to know about biology. He just didn’t want her there when he was there. She understood now, because Bruno had told her, that Eve was breaking the law in not sending her to school. Bruno made a lot of that, he was always saying how
Eve broke the law, though he was breaking it himself not buying a new Road Fund license for his car.

  But for all the fault he found with Eve, Bruno wanted to be with her, he wanted her to be with him. When his mother’s house was sold, he wanted to buy a new one for him and Eve to live in. It could be near Shrove, only in the town, for instance, or in one of the villages on the other side of the valley. He liked it around here, he was happy enough to stay around here, knowing how Eve loved it.

  “I thought you wanted to be free,” Eve said. “That’s what you always used to say, how you loved freedom, how you didn’t want to be tied down.”

  “I’ve changed. Becoming a property owner changes you. You start to understand the meaning of responsibility.”

  “Oh, really, Bruno, you’ll be asking me to marry you next.”

  “I can’t. I’m already married, you know that. But I do want to live with you for the rest of my life.”

  “Really?” said Eve. “I don’t know what I want to do for the rest of my life except stay here.”

  “But that’s what I’m saying. We’ll stay here. You can stay here. You’ll only be four or five miles away.”

  “I mean here. Here. On this spot. You may as well make up your mind to it, Bruno. You can buy a house if you want, I’ll even drop in sometimes if you ask me, but I’m staying here.”

  Bruno never said anything about Liza living in the house he was proposing to buy. She wanted to ask Eve what was really going to happen. Did she mean it when she said she wouldn’t leave here in any circumstances? Was she definite about not living in Bruno’s house? And what about Liza? Would Eve give in to Bruno and send her away to school? Liza longed to ask Eve for the truth, she desperately wanted to know, but she was never alone with Eve, Bruno was always there.

  In March, when the weather got a bit warmer, he and Eve started going for a lot of drives in the brown car with the out-of-date Road Fund license that had been Bruno’s mother’s. Eve tried to get Liza to come with them, but Liza wouldn’t. She went up to Shrove instead and watched television. Bruno had said, and Eve hadn’t denied it, that they went on trips looking at houses that were for sale.

  “If I did come with you,” Eve said one evening when they were all sitting around the fire in the cottage, “if I did, which I wouldn’t dream of, but if I did, what would we live on? Have you thought of that? Your mother’s bit of money won’t last forever. It won’t last for long. While you’re here, you live off me, in case you need reminding, but if I left here my money would stop. I get paid for being here, have you forgotten that?”

  “I’m a painter. If I don’t make much it’s because I refuse to compromise, you know that. But things are looking up. You know what they say, nothing succeeds like success. Those Tobiases bought my painting, didn’t they? Or we could start up in business, you and me, we could be interior decorators, for instance.” Something she had said seemed to strike him for the first time. “What d’you mean, you wouldn’t dream of it? Why’ve you been coming to look at all these houses with me if you wouldn’t dream of it?”

  “I’ve told you,” she said, “I’ve told you a hundred times. You buy a house, go on, if you want to, I’ll go with you and look at it, but I’m not living in it. I’m living here in this house, at Shrove. Is that clear?”

  They had this conversation every evening, or one very like it, until Liza didn’t listen anymore. She sat reading her book or went up to bed while they argued. But one evening things took a different turn. It had been a bad day, a day on which a nasty, frightening thing happened, something quite unforeseen.

  The weather was perfect, the kind of April day that might have been June, but clearer and fresher than June would be. Bruno was out painting somewhere. This meant that Liza could have her Latin lesson without fear of interruption, which might be a sarcastic comment or derive simply from his presence, silent, looming, his eyes sometimes cast upward.

  If Liza had been able to express it in words, she would have said Bruno was taking them over, controlling them, setting the pace, or calling the tune. But she knew none of these expressions, only that where Eve had ruled he was fast becoming the ruler. Eve was sharp with him or scathing but she resisted him less and less. She was gradually ceasing to give Liza lessons because of his disapproval.

  They could have this one because he wasn’t there. As if it was something wrong or against the law, they had to do it in secret. The French lesson had to be outside in the garden. This, Liza suspected, was because if he came back sooner than he had said, he would think they had gone out somewhere, he wouldn’t look for them down there under the cherry tree.

  The cherry blossoms were out everywhere and the woods were white, not sprinkled with white as when the blackthorn flowered in March, but a pure, clean white like a fallen cloud. When the lesson was over, Liza and Eve went out walking to look at all the cherry trees because Eve said, quoting a poet, you could see it only once a year, which meant that at her age she probably only had forty more chances. They went to the woods down by the bridge and to their own wood, and after that Eve went home in case Bruno was already there.

  Liza wandered off on her own. She crossed the bridge and began walking along the old railway line, disused for six months now, but the rails and sleepers still there. If you followed the line, just walking along it and through the quarter mile of tunnel, out the other side into another valley, eventually you’d come to the town and then another town and at last to the big city. Not yet, but perhaps one day, she would do that.

  It was six o’clock in the evening but not yet sunset. The warmth had lasted and there was no wind. She walked along the line the other way, toward the station at Ring Valley Halt. Would they have taken the station name away? And what had become of the building, red brick with a canopy and a gingerbread trim, with windowboxes and tubs of flowers, which had also been the signalman’s house?

  She didn’t see Bruno until she was no more than a few feet from him, until she couldn’t avoid him or hide. The station house looked just the same from a distance, but as she came closer she saw that the curtains upstairs were gone and the door marked PRIVATE stood open. Instead of flowers in the windowboxes and the beds that ran along the backs of both platforms, weeds had sprung up. Where last year there had been daffodils and grape hyacinths grew dandelions. Liza climbed up onto the platform and made her way through the door marked EXIT into the room where people had bought tickets, through that room and, suspecting nothing, out of the main door onto the sandy lane that had been the station approach.

  Bruno was sitting there, not on his camp stool but on the low wall with his easel in front of him. He was holding up a brush loaded with gamboge and he was staring straight at her.

  Of course, what he had really been staring at was the station entrance from which she had come. She went closer, she went right up to him, because retreat was impossible. The picture he was painting was of what could be seen through those open doors, the empty line, the deserted platform, paint peeling off the gingerbread fringe on the canopy, the sunflower faces of the dandelions.

  When Eve wasn’t there he didn’t bother with any of that “hi, and how are you?” He cast up his eyes, the way he often did when he saw her. She was at a loss, suddenly frightened with no real reason to feel fear. Could she just pass on? Was it possible to ignore him and go on up the sandy path until she was out of his sight?

  The brush approached the canvas, touched it, painted in the dandelion petals. His box of paints, the heap of paint-stained rags, the jar of sticky brushes were on the wall beside him. He drew the brush away and began wiping it on a strip of cloth, which she saw had been torn from an old skirt of Eve’s, a skirt she remembered her wearing years before, when first they came to Shrove.

  He spoke in a tone that was at first mild and conversational. “You’re old enough to realize what’s being done to you. She’s denying you your birthright—well, what’s the birthright of kids living in civilized countries. We’re not talking about the Thi
rd World. This is the United Kingdom in the nineteen-eighties, in case she hasn’t noticed.”

  Liza said nothing.

  “She’s crippling you. She might as well have chopped off one of your legs or arms. In another way she’s buried you. You’re not dead, but she’s buried you just the same. In one of the remotest parts of England. She’s cut you off. You’re not much better than one of those poor devils that get lost as babies and bears or wolves raise them.”

  “Romulus and Remus,” said Liza.

  “There you are, you see. That’s just it. You know all that stuff, that god-awful useless crap, but I bet you can’t tell me who the president of the United States is.”

  Liza shrugged, the way Eve did.

  “You’re so like your goddamn mother you might be her clone, not her daughter. Maybe you are, eh? Only you don’t know what a clone is, any more than you know what H2O is or pi or anything that’s not Shakespeare or fucking Virgil.”

  The word was new to her. Strange, then, that she sensed he shouldn’t have used it, it shouldn’t be uttered in her presence. A blush climbed up her neck and made her face hot.

  “I’m gonna say just one more thing to you and then you can go home to her and tell tales out of school. That’s a laugh, isn’t it? Out of school is right. I’m gonna say one more thing and it’s this: If you don’t get yourself sent to school right now, in the next six months at the very outside, if you don’t you won’t have a chance of life, you’ll be lost forever. All that learning’ll be wasted. It’s all very well her saying education doesn’t have a purpose, it’s not for anything, it’s all very well her quoting fucking Aristotle or Plato or whoever and saying it’s for turning the soul’s eye toward the light or some shit like that, but you try telling that tale when you want to go to college, when you want a job, when you haven’t got any qualifications, not even O-Levels. Who’s going to give a shit about your French and your Romulus and Remus then?”

  “I hate you,” Liza said softly.

  “Big deal. I’m not surprised. I’ve been telling you this in your best interests and maybe you’ll realize it one day. When it’s too late. The best thing you can do is go home and tell her you want to go to school. The term starts next week. You go and tell her that.”