The Crocodile Bird (21 page)

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 was 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.

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.