The Crocodile Bird (25 page)

“Did she give in to him, then?” said Sean.

“I don’t know. I don’t exactly know what happened. I never saw him again.”

Sean put up his eyebrows. “What, you mean you never saw him after that night?”

“I told you, I didn’t get up very early. I came downstairs at about nine and Eve said he’d gone out painting. It was midsummer, you see, and sometimes the light was best for painting very early in the morning. He often went out early. Now he didn’t need to, he painted all the time. We had our lessons. We’d got into the way of having them while he was out of the house. I can’t remember but I think it was French that morning and maybe history. Yes, it was history because I remember Eve wanted me to read Carlyle’s
French Revolution
and I couldn’t, it was too hard for me, too many difficult words.”

“Surprise, surprise,” said Sean.

“She was cross. She grumbled at me and called me a coward for not trying harder. I mean, you have to understand she was hardly ever cross with me and never about things like that. But she was irritable and jumpy that morning. When it got to midday she said she’d made a picnic lunch for me, it was too nice a day to stay in, I should be out in the fresh air. That was unusual too, if there was to be a picnic she always came with me, but not this time. You may wonder how I remember all this, all the details, but the fact is I’ve thought about that day a lot ever since. I’ve turned it over and over in my mind.”

Bruno’s car was parked outside the cottage, where he always left it. That signified one thing to Liza, that he couldn’t be far off. If he went to paint more than a mile away he always went in the car. Carrying her picnic, she made her way cautiously toward Shrove House. This time she wasn’t going to let herself come upon him by chance as she had when she went marching confidently through the station. He was nowhere to be seen, he must have gone northward through their wood or down the lane toward the river bridge.

The sun was too hot to walk or sit out in, and in the shade under the trees flies swarmed. She let herself into Shrove, into its silent rooms that were as cool in summer as they were warm in winter, replaced
Kim
on the library shelves and took down
Stalky and Co.
For the next four hours she sat watching television.

On those days when she had been out for a long time she always had to brace herself before going home and confronting him again. It had got worse as she knew him more thoroughly, not better, and on the way home she reflected how terrible the future was, filled with days of meeting and being with Bruno, or else—and she hardly knew if this would be worse—going away to the school of his choosing. And still she would see him, for her weekends and holidays would be spent in the “monstrosity,” exiled from Shrove.

His car was gone. Her heart leapt up, then dipped again. Of course it most likely only meant he and Eve had driven off somewhere and would return in time for supper. She went despondently into the house. Eve was at home and alone, preparing a chicken to roast, mixing the stuffing, and setting the giblets on to boil.

“Where’s he gone?” She no longer used his name when speaking of him.

Eve’s face showed nothing, neither happiness nor sadness, it was blank, her large brown eyes empty. “He’s gone. Gone for good. He’s left us.”

At once Liza was enormously happy, bubbling over with delight, with joy. Some precocious sense of what was fitting restrained her from crowing or cheering. She said nothing, she just looked at Eve. Her mother set down the spoon she was holding, rinsed her hands under the tap, dried them, and put her arms around Liza, hugging her tight.

That evening they read Shakespeare together. Liza took Macbeth’s part and Eve Lady Macbeth. As Eve predicted, there was a lot of the scene where the wife urges the husband to murder the old king that Liza couldn’t understand, but Eve didn’t get cross when Liza spoke sentences wrong or put incorrect stresses on certain words. Afterward, they played a tape of Mozart’s
Sinfonia Concertante
and then had a French conversation, all things they hadn’t been able to do when Bruno was there.

Liza was so happy that she should have slept soundly that night but she didn’t. She fancied she heard all sorts of sounds, creaking boards and thumps and something heavy being dragged down the stairs. It could all have been in dreams, it was impossible to know. For instance, she had no reason to believe Eve didn’t come to bed until four or five in the morning, only a feeling or intuition that she hadn’t. It wasn’t as if she had been into the other bedroom to look. The car she thought she heard at one point was probably farther away than she believed, not passing the gatehouse door but a hundred yards away in the lane.

She said nothing about it in the morning, for she and Eve had never been in the habit of telling each other their dreams. Nothing could be more boring, Eve sometimes said, than other people’s dreams. But later, while her mother was up at Shrove, cleaning the house in her role as Mrs. Cooper, Liza went into the little castle that Bruno had used as a studio.

His easel was there and his two boxes of paints as well as innumerable extra tubes of color, the names of which fascinated her, though she had never cared to show her interest in front of him. Rose madder tint, light viridian, Chinese white, burnt umber. How strange of him to have gone without his painting things. Even stranger that he hadn’t cleaned the brushes he always complained were so expensive, but left them dipped in an inch of turpentine in a jam jar. Pictures, finished, half-finished, blank canvases, rested against the wall. Her own portrait was there.

It was not for a long time that she connected the paint rags in the little castle with Bruno’s departure. Then, during that morning visit, they were just rags, a rather larger than usual pile of them filling up nearly half the floor space. A much larger than usual pile, in fact. Old skirts of Eve’s torn into strips, a sheet that went on her own bed until she put her toe through a hole in it, a ragged towel.

Another odd thing about the paint rags, which didn’t particularly register at the time but remained in her memory, was the color of the paint on them. One had a streak of sap green on the edge of it and another looked as if it had mopped up a spill of Prussian blue, but for the most part they were stained reddish-brown—and not just stained, coated in that color.

Liza tried to decide what color it might be. Not crimson or scarlet lake or vermilion, it wasn’t bright enough for that. Too dark for rose madder tint and not dark or dull enough for Vandyke brown. Light sienna? Burnt sienna? Either was possible but that didn’t explain why Bruno had used so much of it.

Did the mess in here and the stack of canvases mean he was coming back? She looked for his clothes in Eve’s wardrobe, the leather jacket, the check shirts, the sweatshirt with UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY mysteriously printed on it. Everything was gone. Sometimes he had left his gold earrings on Eve’s dressing table, but these too had gone with him. The awful possibility that, having gone, he might still tell tales of Eve to the Tobiases or to education authorities brought her down from euphoria into the depths again.

She had to ask.

“He won’t be telling anyone anything,” Eve said. “Believe me. I promise.”

A letter came addressed to him and Eve opened it. He had asked her to do that, she said. Inside the envelope was a note from an estate agent who wrote that he would have phoned but it appeared that Mr. Drummond and Mrs. Beck were not in the directory. Was Mr. Drummond still interested in making an offer for The Conifers? The name, for some reason, made Eve laugh a lot.

She wrote a letter to the estate agent but Liza didn’t see what she had said. They went out together to post it, up the lane to the main road where there was a little old post box with VR on it for Victoria Regina, which meant it had been there for a hundred years.

The month was July and Liza was eleven and a half. The good weather lasted for only a short time, it rained and grew cold and Eve and Liza stayed in, doing more lessons than they had for months. Liza could write French composition now and recite from memory Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”

Because it was so wet, the Tobiases didn’t come down as they had said they would, and in August Jonathan Tobias came alone. Liza noticed he had some gray in his hair. Perhaps because Victoria wasn’t with him, he spent more time at their house than he had done for years. Liza couldn’t help overhearing some of the things that were said, for Jonathan seemed to think that when a person was reading they were deaf to everything.

Victoria, he said, was in Greece with friends. To Liza, Greece was a place full of gray stone temples with colonnades and marble statues and where gods lived in the rivers and trees. It hardly accorded with her ideas to hear that Victoria and her friends found beaches there to sunbathe on and big hotels to stay in, the kind of thing, Jonathan said, that they preferred over Shrove or Ullswater.

Sometimes, aware that she had looked up from her book, he would lean closer to Eve and speak in a whisper. Wishy-wishy-wishy, the way she remembered Heather murmuring. And Eve nodded and looked sympathetic and whispered something back. It troubled Liza that Jonathan seemed to think Bruno was only temporarily away, for this made his departure seem less than permanent.

“I can’t help being envious, Eve,” he said one sunny afternoon.

The summer had come back and they were all having tea in the garden, under the cherry tree. The bird cherries were ripening to yellow and red and there was scarlet blossom on Eve’s runner beans. The courgette plants had flowers shaped like yellow lilies and the gooseberries were dark red beads, but beads that grew hair on their crimson skins.

“Of
me?
” said Eve. “Envious of me?”

“You’ve got someone you can be happy with. You’re in a good relationship.”

Liza waited for Eve to deny it or even tell him not to say “relationship.” She didn’t. She gave Jonathan a mysterious sidelong glance, her eyes half-closed.

“I don’t want you to envy me,” she said. “I’d rather you were jealous.”

There was silence. At last Jonathan said, “Of him?”

“Why not? How do you think I have felt about Victoria?”

Eve got up then and carried the tea things into the house. Instead of following her, Jonathan sat there on the grass, looking glum. He pulled a daisy out of the lawn and picked the petals off. Liza thought he was getting to look old. The freshness had gone out of his face and there were lines across his forehead. His eyes had once been of the most piercing clear blue, but the color was muddied like a blue china bowl with dirty water in it.

She expected him to stay to supper and perhaps for the night. Where Bruno had been, beside Eve in bed, he would be found in the morning. But he didn’t even stay to eat with them and was gone by seven. The next day Liza thought Eve seemed particularly pleased and happy and she connected this with the appearance of Jonathan at their door at nine in the morning, calling in to say good-bye on his way back to London.

Sean said, “This is five years ago you’re talking about, right?”

She nodded. They were in bed now, snuggled close together for warmth under the two quilts. Sean had bought a second one he’d seen in a closing-down sale. The caravan got bitterly cold at night, but if they kept a heater burning, the condensation was streaming down the walls by morning and their pillows felt damp. Liza, her head on his shoulder, his arms tightly around her, thought of those warm dry weeks, her bedroom with the windows wide open at night, lessons, lessons, lessons, every day in the garden, and Eve saying, “You see, if you went to a so-called proper school you’d be on holiday now, you wouldn’t be learning anything but just running wild.”

“Wasn’t that around about the time of the big storm? What they called the hurricane? I remember because it was when I’d just got to be sixteen. I’d got my first job and I had to get up at five. I was in our kitchen at home, making myself a cup of tea, and the oak tree next door blew over and came through the roof. It was only a lean-to, our kitchen, and the roof broke like an eggshell. Lucky I was quick off the mark, I got out just in time. It must have been like September.”

“It was October. October the fifteenth.”

“What a memory! I reckon you had a lot of trees come down at Shrove. Is that how you remember?”

The Day of the Hurricane, the last day she ever gave a name to.

“You’re not to hurry me, Sean. I’ll get to that soon. We got the hurricane very badly at Shrove. We were one of the worst-hit places, and you’ll see why I remember it, the precise date and everything. But there was something else happened first.”

The outbuildings at Shrove House were seldom used. They had been stables once and there was a coach house. The stables were built in the same architectural style as the house, of small red bricks with white facings, a pediment over the central building, and above it a clock tower on which the clock face was blue and the clock hands gold. The weathervane on the tower was a running fox with brush extended.

Mr. Frost kept his lawn mowers, the big one he rode on and the small one with which he did around the flowerbeds, in the section of stable to the left of the coach house. Other garden tools were kept in there as well as a ladder and an industrial vacuum cleaner. As far as Liza knew, no one had ever kept cars in the stables. Perhaps they might have done so when old Mr. Tobias was alive, but Jonathan always left his car standing out in the courtyard in front of the stables, and visitors left their cars there too. The stables were really useless, no one went into them, and they remained standing, Liza had heard Jonathan say, only because they were pretty and also a listed building. That meant they were of historic value and must never be pulled down.

She had never been inside them, though she had once seen Mr. Frost come riding out of the section by the coach house on the little tractor that pulled the mower. She came to search them as a last resort.

It was years since she had needed the library steps to climb up to the picture frame for the key to the television room. At nearly twelve she was almost as tall as Eve, would be much taller by the time she was grownup. Eve, in any case, had long ceased to bother to hide the key or even take it out of the lock. She must have decided Liza was too old now to be seduced by the charms of television, too mature to be intrigued by locked rooms, or thoroughly conditioned in the discipline of a sequestered life. These days she even pushed the vacuum cleaner about in that room in Liza’s presence and seemed to take it as quite natural her daughter never asked what the box with the screen on it was.