The Crocodile Bird (18 page)

The little castle had a north light, which Bruno said was good for artists. Good or not, he never seemed to go in there very much, though he filled it up with his things, stacks and stacks of canvases and frames as well as brushes and jars and dirty paint rags. And he never went to town, painting people’s houses.

It was at this time that Liza stopped going into Mother’s bedroom in the morning. Once she had gone in, having first knocked on the door, but even so had found Bruno on top of Mother, kissing her mouth, his long brown curly hair hiding her face. Liza felt heat run up into her face and burn her cheeks, she didn’t know why. She retreated in silence.

Her life had changed. She was never again to be quite as happy as she had been in those early years. A cloud had come halfway across her sun and partially eclipsed it. Until Bruno came she had sometimes been alone and enjoyed aloneness, but now she knew what it was to be lonely.

Her consolation was the television set at Shrove. She found out what it was called from Bruno. Not that she told him what she watched up at the house whenever she got the chance. It was he who asked Mother why they hadn’t got one.

“I can bring mine over from the flat,” he said. “The flat” meant his rooms over the greengrocer’s.

Mother said no, thank you very much, that was something they could happily do without. He could go home and watch his own, if that was what he wanted. You know what I want, he said, looking at Mother as the saint looked at the clouds.

More often alone and often lonely, Liza found it easy to go to Shrove more or less when she liked. She grew adept at climbing up for the key and hiding the steps. But—and she had no idea why—Mother had grown reluctant to lock her in anywhere since Bruno came. She had the run of the house now and carried the steps back and forth between the library and the morning room. Aged ten, she discovered to her astonishment and pleasure that she no longer needed the steps. She had grown. Like Mother, she could reach the key by mounting a chair and standing on the cabinet.

When Mother sat by Bruno while he painted, she watched television. On the rare occasions that Bruno took Mother out in the car, she watched television. From the television she began to learn about the world out there.

It was Bruno who put into her head the idea that it was time she saw the reality for herself.

She sat in the back of the little orange car. Mother was in the passenger seat next to Bruno, and Liza could tell by the rigidity of her shoulders and the stiffness of her neck how deeply opposed to this outing she still was. She had allowed Bruno and Liza herself to win her over.

Bruno had said, “I’m being quite selfish about this, Mother. Maybe you’ll think I’m being brutally honest but the fact is I want to take you out and about and to do that we have to take the kid with us.” He always called her “the kid” just as he always called Mother “Mother” when Liza was being discussed. “Taking her into town’ll be a start. Get her into that and next we can all have a day out.” He whispered the next bit but Liza heard. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t rather be on our own if there’s any option.”

“I can’t keep going out, anyway,” Mother said. “I haven’t got time. For one thing, Liza has to have her lessons.”

“That kid ought to go to school.”

“I thought you were an anarchist,” said Mother.

“Anarchists aren’t against education. They’re all in favor of the right sort of education.”

“Liza is getting the right sort. If you set her beside other children of her age, she’d be so far ahead, she would be years in advance of them, it would be laughable.”

“She ought to be in school for social reasons. How’s she going to learn to interact with other people?”

“My mother interacted with other people and she died a miserable disappointed woman in a rented room in her sister’s house. I interacted with other people and look what happened to me. I want Liza kept pure, I want her untouched, and most of all I want her
happy.
‘A violet by a mossy stone, half-hidden from the eye.’”

Bruno made a face. “I ask myself what’s going to happen to that kid. How’s she going to earn her living? Who’s she going to have relationships with?”

“I earn my living,” said Mother. “
I
have what you call ‘relationships,’ horrid word. She will be me, but without the pain and the damage. She will be me as I might have been, happy and innocent and good, if I had been allowed to stay here.”

“All that aside,” said Bruno, who liked arguments only when he was winning them, “I still think she ought to come into town with us, Mother, for her own good.”

And eventually Mother had agreed. Just for this once. She could come for once.

Nothing happened for a while that Liza hadn’t expected. There was the lane and then the bridge, the village, and at last the bigger road. Cars passed them and once they overtook a car, a very slow one because Bruno’s orange cardboard car couldn’t go fast. Most of the things Liza saw she had seen before or else seen them on television, if not in color. It was different in the town, mainly because there were so many people. The number of people staggered her so, she was afraid.

Bruno put the car in a car park where hundreds were already parked. Liza couldn’t believe there were so many cars in the world. She walked along in silence between Mother and Bruno and, to her own surprise, scarcely aware of doing it, she took Mother’s hand. The people clogged the pavement, they were everywhere: walking fast, dawdling, chatting to each other, standing still in conversation, running, dragging along small children or pushing them in chairs on wheels. You had to take care not to bump into them. Some smoked cigarettes, like on the television, and you smelled them as they passed. Quite a lot were eating things out of bags.

Liza stared. She would have liked to sit on the low wall outside that building Mother said was a church and just watch the people. Most of them in her eyes were ugly and awkward, fat or crooked, grotesque or semi-savage. They compelled her gaze, but as a toad might or a frightening picture in a book, with horrified fascination.

“How beauteous mankind is!” said Mother in the special voice she put on when she was saying something from a book. “O, brave new world that has such people in it.” The laugh she gave was a nasty one as if she hadn’t meant those words seriously.

As for a brave new world, Liza thought most of the shops nasty and boring. There were clothes in one window, magazines in another. The flowers in the flower shop weren’t as nice as those at Shrove. The places that interested her most were the shop with four boxes like the one in the locked room at Shrove in its window, four blank screens, and the one that was full of books, but new ones with bright pictures on their covers.

She wanted to go in that shop but Mother wouldn’t let her, nor was she allowed inside the one that sold newspapers, though Bruno was sent in there to buy a tape of Mozart’s horn concertos. They went to the greengrocer’s and bought fruit, then through a side door and upstairs to where Bruno used to live. It smelled so nasty in there, like the kitchen at Shrove after the Tobiases and their guests had gone and as if things had been left to go bad, that Liza started to cough.

Mother opened the windows. They collected some stuff of Bruno’s, which he packed into a case, and then he picked up off the doormat the heap of letters that had come for him while he was away. For a man whose whereabouts no one knew he got a lot of letters.

Looking about her, Liza began to understand what Mother had meant when she said those things about most places being horrible. She wrinkled up her nose. Bruno’s flat was very horrible, dirty and uncomfortable, with nothing in it that looked as if it had been cared for, every piece of furniture bruised or broken, the windows blue-filmed and with dead flies squashed against the panes. The only books were on the floor, in disorderly heaps.

She was glad to get out again, and said so, even though being out meant once more avoiding bumping into people. There seemed more of them than ever and a good many were of her own age or a bit older. They had come out of school, said Bruno with a meaningful look at Mother, school stopped each day at three-thirty.

Liza had never seen children before. Well, except on the television, that is. She had never seen a real person who was less than in his or her twenties. She took back what she had thought about all mankind being ugly. These people weren’t. There was a boy with a black face and a girl she thought might be Indian with deep-set dark eyes and a long black pigtail. She wondered how it would be to talk to them.

Then a boy walking along in front of her stuck out his leg and tripped up the boy beside him so that the second one staggered and nearly fell into the road in front of an oncoming car and a girl screamed and another one started shouting. Liza felt herself shrink back against Mother and hold on to her hand more tightly. She had realized what was making her feel dizzy: the noise.

Once she had turned up the sound on the television by mistake. It was like that here, a continuous meaningless roar of sound, interspersed with the squeals of brakes, music that wasn’t real music strumming out of car windows, the peep-peep-peep of the pedestrian signal at a traffic light crossing, the revving up of engines. As they made their way back to the car park, a siren started up. Bruno told her it was the siren on a police car and he said the sound it made was supposed to imitate a woman screaming.

“Oh, it can’t be, Bruno,” Mother said. “Where on earth did you get that from?”

“It’s a fact. You ask anyone. They invented it in the States and we copied it. That’s supposed to be the sound that most gets under people’s skins, a woman screaming.”

“Well, don’t talk about it to me, please,” Mother said, so loudly and sharply that one of the ugly people turned to stare at her. “I don’t want to hear. It just expresses the worst side of men.”

“All right, all right,” said Bruno. “Sorry I spoke. Please excuse me for living. Will madam condescend to accept a lift home, her and her charming, courteous offspring?”

As soon as she was in the car Liza fell asleep. She was exhausted. The people and the noise and the newness of it all had worn her out. At home she lay on the sofa and slept, though not so deeply that she failed to hear Mother tell Bruno she had told him so, Liza hadn’t liked it, it had been too much for her and no wonder. Wasn’t it a horrible place, a travesty of what a country town should be and once had been, noisy, dirty, and tawdry?

“She wouldn’t feel that way if you hadn’t sheltered her from everything the way you have.”

“I feel it and God knows I haven’t been sheltered.”

“You know what you’ll do, don’t you, Mother? You’ll turn the kid psychotic. Or maybe schizophrenic, one of those what-d’you-call-its.”

“Talk about what you understand, Bruno, why don’t you?”

With half an eye open, she thought they would start quarreling again. They were always quarreling. But instead they did what often impeded or ended their quarrels. Their eyes met, they reached for each other and began kissing, the kind of kissing that soon got out of hand, so that they were grappling and climbing all over each other, grunting and moaning. Liza turned over and squeezed her eyes tightly shut.

In the days that followed she felt unwell, what Bruno called “under the weather,” something unusual for her. She remembered the town and its people not with longing or nostalgia, but with revulsion. The peace of Shrove and its lands was more than usually pleasurable. She lay in the long grass and the cow parsley, watching the insect life moving among the mysterious green stems and the nodding seed heads, saw a raspberry-winged cinnabar moth climbing a ragwort stalk. There was no sound but the occasional heavy hum of a bumble bee passing overhead.

A week after their day out in the town she became ill with chicken pox.

ELEVEN

H
ADN’T
you had any of those things, measles and whatever?”

“I’d had some immunizations when I was a baby. I got chicken pox because I hadn’t built up any natural immunity. I’d never been with people.”

“Did the doctor come?”

“Eve phoned him from Shrove. He said he’d come if I got worse but otherwise there was nothing to be done but let it take its course. I wasn’t very bad. Eve was strict about scratching. She said if I scratched my face she’d tie my hands up, so I didn’t except for one awful big spot on my forehead.”

Liza pulled back a lock of dark hair and showed him the small round hole on her left temple. “She was afraid of me getting those all over.”

“I know you didn’t,” said Sean, giving her a sidelong sexy look.

“No, nothing like that. All that happened was that I gave Bruno shingles.”

“You what?”

“The virus or whatever you call it, it makes chicken pox in children and shingles in grown-ups. It’s the same thing. Eve didn’t catch anything, but Bruno caught shingles.”

“My grandma had that. She had it around her middle and she was dead scared because if it meets around your waist you die. That’s a fact.”

Liza doubted it but she didn’t say so. “He got it on the side of his face and down the back of his neck. He was quite ill and he looked quite ugly with all that red on his face. I thought he disliked me because I gave him shingles, that was the way I reasoned when I was ten. But if he hadn’t made me go into town with them I wouldn’t have caught chicken pox and couldn’t have given him shingles, so it was his fault, really. That was how I saw it. Of course now I know it wasn’t that at all. I was in the way, I was a nuisance, I came between him and Eve.”

Now she was more or less grown-up herself and sexually involved, Liza could understand what had held Eve and Bruno together. She hadn’t understood at the time. It puzzled her and made her increasingly uneasy that two people could quarrel so much, could behave as if they hated each other, but still seem to need each other’s company in a hungry way.

She was aware too of something else. There was something Bruno wanted to do with her mother that he couldn’t do unless Liza wasn’t there. It was to do with the kissing and struggling and lying on top of Mother. Liza knew and had known for some time the facts of human and animal reproduction, Eve had taken care to educate her in these matters, but for some reason she never connected them with what Bruno wanted to do with Mother. And what, though less urgently, Mother wanted to do with Bruno. She didn’t understand and she shied away from understanding. All she knew was that Bruno wanted her out of the house as much as she could feasibly be out of it and that Mother to some lesser extent went along with this.