The Crocodile Bird

by Ruth Rendell

  Bruno’s car remained locked up in the stable. Once every five or six weeks Liza went to make sure that it was still there. Occasionally, she checked Eve’s jewel case to see if the gold ring was still there. It was, it always was. And when Eve wasn’t wearing earrings, there were three pairs in the case.

  Jonathan came and went. If he talked about Victoria it was only to complain about the amount of money she would expect from him when the divorce went through. Money and property. She would want the Ullswater house and no doubt would get it. He sent a postcard from Zimbabwe and that autumn brought two people with him to Shrove that she had never seen before, a man called David Cosby and his wife, Frances. They came down for the shooting.

  “David is Jonathan’s cousin,” said Eve.

  Liza knew about cousins, she had read about them in Victorian novels.

  “He can’t be his cousin,” she objected. “Not if Caroline didn’t have brothers or sisters and his father didn’t.”

  “David is his second cousin. He is old Mr. Tobias’s nephew’s son. He loves Shrove, he loves it nearly as much as I do, I know he wishes it was his.”

  “If he loves it so much why hasn’t he been before?”

  “He’s been living in Africa for twelve years but now he’s come home for good.”

  David Cosby’s face was as dark and shiny a brown as the paneling in the library at Shrove while his wife’s was wrinkled and yellow. The result of the suns of Africa, thought Liza, who had just read King Solomon’s Mines. They stayed two weeks. This time Eve seemed to be in a rather different position. Liza noticed it without quite being able to say how it was different. Perhaps it was that the three of them at Shrove, unlike Victoria and her friends, didn’t treat Eve in any way like a servant. She went up there for dinner three times—Jonathan had caterers to come in and cook the partridges they shot—and left the washing up for Mrs. Cooper to do in the morning.

  The funny thing was, of course, that there was no Mrs. Cooper, so Eve had to run up there while they were all out with the guns or in their car and play her pretending-to-be-the-cleaner game. It was a strange thing to do and it made Liza uneasy.

  Eve became altogether rather strange in those two uneventful years. Or perhaps she had always been strange and when she was a child Liza hadn’t noticed. She had just been Mother. Now, although Liza still knew very few people, she knew more than she ever had before. She could make comparisons. She could begin to question their way of life at the gatehouse, particularly her own. Why did Eve never want to know anyone or go anywhere? Did other people have such a passionate attachment to a place as she had to Shrove? What was the purpose of doing such a lot of lessons, doing them all the time, on Saturdays and Sundays as well, Eve teaching and she learning for hours on end day in and day out? Why?

  Eve had stopped going into town. She had found a grocer who would deliver once a week, and what he didn’t bring the milkman would. When she did go, a rare once every two or three months, it was to buy books for Liza to learn from, and for another, stranger, reason: to take money out of the bank. Now Jonathan’s checks were sent to the bank by post and the money later drawn out to be hidden at home.

  One day, after Eve had come back from town, having paid her only visit there of the entire winter, Liza saw her go into the little castle, carrying a small brown paper parcel. Eve, as far as she knew, had never possessed a handbag. Liza only knew handbags existed because she had seen Victoria and Claire and Frances Cosby carrying them. She saw Eve go into the little castle with the package and come out after a minute or two without it.

  Later on, choosing a time when Eve was up at Shrove being Mrs. Cooper, Liza investigated the little castle. It appeared quite empty. There was nothing now to show it had ever been occupied, either by dog or man. She didn’t take long to find the loose brick and thence the iron box and the money.

  Dozens of notes filled the box, five-, ten-, twenty-, and even fifty-pound notes. She didn’t try to count them, she could see there were hundreds of pounds. Besides, she had very little idea of what money was worth. She could have said what five pounds would buy in the time of Anthony Trollope but not what it would buy today, though she suspected a lot less. Eve had never hinted at the amount of money Jonathan gave her. All that Liza knew was that it came in checks. She sent these checks to the bank, brought back the money and hid it here in the wall.

  Wasn’t that the purpose of a bank, to look after your money? Liza didn’t really know. Perhaps everyone behaved like this. Perhaps no one really trusted banks.

  But Liza found herself often watching her mother after that, watching her behavior, anxious to see what she would do next. She watched her as once she had listened at doors. There was no listening anymore because Eve never talked to anyone but Liza and occasionally Jonathan on his rare appearances. Sometimes she tried to catch Eve unawares, watch her when she didn’t know she was being watched. She would go to bed early, then creep downstairs to watch Eve unobserved from the stairs. But she never saw her do anything except ordinary expected things, reading and listening to music or marking one of Liza’s essays or test papers.

  She was fourteen before she began asking herself, what will become of me when I grow up? Shall I live here with Eve forever? When she has taught me all the English there is to learn and all the history and French and Latin, what will we do then? What shall I do with all of it?

  “Be me,” Eve had said, “me as I might have been if I stayed here, happy and innocent and good.”

  Did she want to be Eve? Did she want to be those things?

  That spring, while Jonathan was staying at Shrove on his own, the woodsmen came back to clear the “little” wood.

  “Bruno had been dead for nearly three years. I wanted to know how long it took before a body turned into a skeleton but I didn’t know how to find out. There weren’t any medical books at Shrove or any on forensics. You see, I thought that if he was bones by now, they might not notice so much if they dug him up. I was hoping the sack would have rotted and Bruno just be—well, scattered bones.”

  “It beats me,” said Sean, “the way you can talk about it. A lovely young girl like you, it’s weird. You’re always the same, like talking about death and stuff that makes other people throw up, you talk about them like they’re normal.”

  She smiled at him. “I suppose it is normal for me.

  Dead bodies don’t upset me. I know I was sick when Bruno’s hair came off in my hand but that wasn’t me, it was a sort of reflex. I expect even doctors do that when they first start.”

  “You could have been a doctor, d’you know that?”

  “I still could,” said Liza. “But that’s not the point. Maybe other people are taught as children to flinch from death and blood and all that, I mean they’re conditioned, but I never was. You’ve got to remember Eve taught me everything she knew about academic things, but there must be thousands of things children know who lead an ordinary life and go to school that I never heard of. There can’t,” she said rather proudly, “be many people who’ve read the whole of Virgil’s Aeneid in the original and seen two people murdered by the time they’re sixteen.”

  He recoiled a little. The look on his face made her smile again. “Don’t worry about it, Sean. It can’t be changed, that’s the way it is. I’m different from other girls and in some ways I expect I always will be.”

  “You’ve got me now,” he said. It was something he liked saying and when he said it he always took hold of her hand.

  “Yes, I’ve got you now. Anyway, as I was telling you, the men went up to start working in the wood and I was very anxious. I don’t know if Eve was. She was always out and about with Jonathan when she wasn’t teaching me. But as it turned out they never found anything. Jonathan had given them instructions to leave some of the logs lying and some dead trees to provide habitats for the wildlife. The cherry log was one they left. It was just chance or luck, whatever you like to call it.”

  “Luck?” said Sean.

  “L
uck for Eve, wasn’t it? I think she’d been waiting to see what happened. As soon as she knew all was well up there, she got Jonathan to recharge the battery on Bruno’s car.”

  “She did what?”

  There hadn’t been any real risk. Jonathan hadn’t suspected Bruno was dead. In his eyes, Bruno was just a young healthy man who had been living with Eve, who got tired of her or of whom she got tired, and who moved away. True, he had left his car behind, but Eve had furnished Jonathan with all sorts of reasons for that: it had been his mother’s, it was old, where he would be living he had nowhere to park a car. Jonathan was no doubt pleased to be told the car was going at last, Bruno was coming for it, the Shrove stable would be vacated. Recharging the battery on jump leads from his own car engine was a small price to pay for that. Liza didn’t know if this was how it was, she told Sean, but it seemed a fair guess.

  Eve didn’t say a word to Liza about Bruno. It was Liza who overheard her telling Jonathan that Bruno would come for the car tomorrow, the day incidentally that Jonathan himself was going back to London.

  “I wondered what she’d do, how she was going to handle it. I even pretended to go out for a long walk in the afternoon to give her a chance to move the car. She did move it and she went off in it, but only to town. She came back an hour later with the boot full of groceries and left the car parked outside the cottage.”

  “What did she say when you asked when Bruno was coming?”

  “I never did ask,” said Liza. “She expected me to ask, but I didn’t. I knew where Bruno was. I knew he couldn’t be coming. I knew his body was up in the wood under the leaves I’d piled around it. We were absolutely silent with each other about it. There was Bruno’s car and she was using it—we were using it, she drove me to the village once and into town, I had a rash and had to see the doctor—but she never mentioned Bruno and neither did I. Then one day the car wasn’t there anymore.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “She got rid of it. I don’t know how or where. But she must have done. She must have driven it somewhere in the night. I’ve no idea what happened to it, I don’t know about things like that, I don’t know how you’d get rid of a car.”

  “Just leave it parked somewhere, I reckon. Hopefully someone’d nick it.” Sean considered. “If the police got it in the end they’d try to find the owner and they could, that’d be easy, they’d do it in seconds on the computer.”

  Liza said thoughtfully, “The owner was dead. I don’t mean Bruno, I mean his mother. It was still in her name, he said so.”

  “I don’t reckon they’d go to the trouble of tracing who the car’d been passed on to and if they tried they wouldn’t find him, would they? And they wouldn’t search either, not for a man of his age. They’d reason he’d gone off abroad somewhere. Your mum was clever.”

  “Oh, yes, she was. If they searched for him they never came near us. We never saw a policeman since that one came about Hugh with the beard. When Mr. Frost died it was an ambulance that came, not the police.”

  Mrs. Spurdell greeted Liza with the news that her daughter Jane had just been appointed Senior Adviser for Secondary Education to the County Council. She was bursting with pride. Since Liza had very little idea what this appointment signified she could only smile and nod. Mrs. Spurdell said it was a team leadership role and payment was on the Soulbury Scale, information that served only to confuse Liza further.

  Though she had said nothing about an errand of mercy two days before—and Mrs. Spurdell spoke constantly of her advance plans—she announced that she was on her way out to visit a friend in the hospital. Liza guessed the visit was taking place only because there was exciting news to impart and wondered just how ill the friend was when she saw her employer take some weary-looking grapes from the refrigerator as a gift and transfer them to a clean plastic bag.

  As soon as Mrs. Spurdell had gone, Liza had a bath. Then she went into Mr. Spurdell’s study to see if he had any new books and spent a happy half hour reading a short story by John Mortimer. It was about courts and barristers and judges and opened to her a whole unknown new world. It also made her think about Eve and wonder when there would be anything in the papers about her. How long must it be before she came to trial?

  To save buying one, she always went quickly through Mr. Spurdell’s newspaper. As usual, there was nothing. Time to get down to the cleaning, but before she started she looked up Jane Spurdell in the telephone directory. It was the first time she had ever looked up anyone in a phone book but it wasn’t hard to do. She was listed twice, not as “Miss” but as Dr. J. A. Spurdell. Liza would never forget the address. By a curious coincidence that might be a good omen of something, the number was the year of her birth and the street name startlingly familiar: 76 Shrove Road.

  She’d never forget it but why should she want it? Perhaps it was only that she’d liked her, she liked her better than any woman she’d ever known except Eve. Of course that wasn’t difficult, seeing that the other women she’d known were Heather and Victoria and Frances Cosby and Mrs. Spurdell. When you liked people, Liza decided, you wanted to know everything you could about them.

  Mrs. Spurdell kept her waiting while she rummaged about in one handbag after another for fifty pee. This made her late and Sean was already there, out on the pavement, when she got to Superway. He had news for her, he was quite excited, but insisted on saving it up until they were in the car on the way home.

  “They want me to go on a training course.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Superway. It’s a management training course. They’re pleased with me, the way I do my work and the way I always get in on time and all that. It’s in Scotland, it’s a six-month course, and hopefully at the end of it if I’m any good I’d go on to what they call Phase Two.”

  Liza didn’t know what to say. She didn’t really understand, so she listened.

  “I’ve never said any of this to you, love. I’ve never talked about myself much. But I’ve always reckoned to not being much, if you know what I mean—well, rubbish, to be perfectly honest with you. I was useless at school and I left the day after I was sixteen. I’d been skiving off for months before that. No one ever suggested CSEs to me, I mean it’d have been a laugh. I never even saw myself doing nothing but unskilled laboring work, and that’s what I did do. Then Mum got her new fella and they didn’t want me, so I moved out. Well, I reckon I’ve told you all that. I got the car and the van and I took to the road and if I thought about it at all I reckoned I’d be living from one odd job to another until the time come to draw my pension. And now this has come up. It’s sort of shook me. It’s given me something to think about, I can tell you.”

  She was moved by him because she hadn’t known he could be so articulate. He was so beautiful. It would mean something to her if he could speak and think as handsomely as he looked.

  “What will you be?” she said slowly.

  “I don’t know about ‘will.’ I said it’s given me something to think about. As for what I’d be—well, hopefully I’d be a manager one day. I’d sort of have my own store, maybe one of them big new ones on an estate.”

  “We went to one of those, Eve and Bruno and me.”

  He made a movement as if to brush this aside impatiently. “Yes, you said. I’d have a lot to learn. I’d be an assistant manager first. It’d take a while. But I’m young, love, and I’m keen.”

  She wouldn’t mind going to Scotland. Now she had begun, she liked traveling about and imagined moving from place to place during the next few years. “Are you going to, then?”

  “I told them I’d like to think about it. I said to give me a couple of days.”

  The caravan was cold and damp. It usually was these evenings when they got home. Liza lit the burners on the oven, the oven itself, opening the door, and started the oil heater. Very soon the condensation began, the water running down the windows and lying in pools. She didn’t much mind, as she said to Sean, you didn’t have to look at it. So lon
g as she had fish and chips or takeaway, books to read, and a warm bed with Sean to make love with, she didn’t care much. Now that she had television and knew she could have it whenever she wanted, she seldom watched it. There was something to be said for being brought up without luxury, without many material possessions. Unlike Eve, she had never wanted Shrove or thought it might be hers.

  One gloomy evening rather like this one when Jonathan was in a gloomy mood, she heard him tell her mother he had made his will and was leaving Shrove to David Cosby.

  “It should remain in our family,” he said like a character in a Victorian novel.

  “He’s ten years older than you,” said Eve.

  “His son can have it, then. They’re all fond of the place. There’s one thing, Victoria won’t want it, she won’t ask for this place in settlement, she hates it.”

  Aged fourteen, taller than Eve, looking like a young woman, Liza was developing a woman’s understanding. She had begun to ask herself how it could be that Jonathan, who had known Eve since he was a boy, who had been close to her, her lover off and on (and now very probably on again), could have so little comprehension of how she felt about Shrove. He could talk with casual indifference about it to Eve, who loved it better than any person, better, perhaps, Liza sometimes thought, than her own child. He could talk about it to her as if it were just a piece of property, a parcel of land, even a nuisance. And he could talk about leaving it to a cousin whom, until this year, he hadn’t seen for twelve years, without its apparently crossing his mind that he might leave it to Eve, as his grandfather had promised to leave it to Eve’s mother.