The Crocodile Bird (28 page)

“Paradise destroyed,” Eve said.

Two of the great cedars had gone. The limes were down, most of the ancient trees, only the slender supple birches and the little pyramidal hornbeams remaining. Laying waste the park, the wind had spared the house, which stood staring calmly at them, its glazed eyes all intact, its roof unscathed. All that was changed was that a stone vase had tumbled off a pillar at the foot of the steps.

A pale sun, weak and watery, though no rain had fallen, gleamed like a puddle of silver among the soft drifting clouds. Beyond the gardens, beyond the water meadows, a waste of felled willows and splintered poplars, beyond the shining ribbon of the river, the high hills showed hollow places in their woods, holes in the fabric of tree cover as if scissors had ripped rents in cloth.

The air was scented with sap from the ripped leaves and salt from the distant sea. All was silent, the birds silent, but for a plover making its unearthly cry as it wheeled above them.

“Eve was in an awful state,” Liza said to Sean. “She was like someone bereaved. Well, like I imagine someone bereaved would be. You know you read in books about people tearing out their hair. She almost did that. I found her sitting in our living room clutching handfuls of her hair. She moaned and cried and threw herself about as if she was in pain. I didn’t know what to do, I’d never seen her like that.

“I wonder if she’d have been half as bad if it wasn’t trees that had been destroyed but me. That was when I began to get the feeling Shrove was more important to her than I was. It frightened me and I didn’t know what to do.

“There wasn’t anyone I could turn to, you see. There wasn’t anyone. Well, the milkman came and he was useless. Now the trains didn’t run anymore he could only talk about the weather and I’d had enough of weather for a lifetime. Mr. Frost came to see if there was anything he could do. I said, you could get her a doctor and I think he thought I was crazy. What’s she got wrong with her, then, he said, and I couldn’t answer him, I knew he’d think Eve was mad or I was. No one’s phone was working, he said, and it might be a week before we got our electricity back. I was left alone with her and I felt helpless. I was only eleven.

“She calmed down a bit next day. She lay on the sofa. We couldn’t cook anything but we’d got bread and cheese and fruit. I went up to Shrove and found a packet of a dozen candles. I found a Calor gas burner we could boil a kettle and an egg on, though it took hours. She fell asleep in the afternoon and I went up into the wood, the bit we called our wood.

“I don’t know why I went really. It didn’t upset me the way it had her, but I’d seen enough fallen trees and destruction to last me forever. But I still went up there. Maybe I thought that if somehow the wind hadn’t done much damage there, if for some reason it had escaped, that would be something to tell her and cheer her up.

“Afterward I wished I hadn’t gone. I wished I’d stayed at home with her. It caused me such a lot of worry.”

“What d’you mean?” Sean asked.

“You’ll see. It was what I found there,” she said. “Of course it didn’t matter in the end.”

As soon as she came close to the wood, to what had been the wood, she knew her hope had been forlorn. From a distance you couldn’t see what lay beyond the outer circle of trees, she and Eve hadn’t been able to see when they walked up the lane on the previous day, for the oaks and chestnuts on the perimeter remained standing. Like a whirlwind the gale had bored its way in through the outer ring and once inside behaved like a maddened animal, spinning in circles and destroying every vulnerable thing in its orbit.

Not quite everything, she saw as she came carefully between the standing oaks. A few young trees still stood. Here and there a giant had resisted the onslaught while one or two mature trees leaned at an angle, their final collapse delayed. But between them lay devastation.

The leaves on the tumbled limbs and branches were still fresh. They were still as if growing from twigs that proceeded from branches that grew from a living, rooted trunk. A sea of leaves lay before her. There was no wind now, only a little breeze, a joke of nature playing with destruction, that fluttered all the leaves, scalloped oak and pointed cherry, five-fingered chestnut and oval beech. The leaf sea was a dark quivering green from which protruded here and there an upturned root like a fin, or a broken trunk like the funnel of a wrecked ship. It reminded her of the sea after a storm in a picture in the library at Shrove, for the real sea she had never seen.

For a while she stood there, just looking. Then she waded into the sea of green. Once she began, the image ceased to hold, the comparison was wrong. This was not a matter of striding through water, but of clambering across a rough terrain. Where once had been paths and clearings were broken wood and torn brambles, concealed stumps to trip her up and shattered logs to block her way.

Yesterday she would have been incredulous if anyone had told her she might not find her way through the wood. But so it was. Everything was different. The wind had laid it waste and made a nearly impenetrable wilderness where yesterday morning had stood the ranks of trees and between them, in the depths, had stretched aisles of mysterious green shade. All was havoc now and all was curiously the same. Was it here, for instance, that the great isolated beech had stood, spreading its branches in an arc so huge as to form a circle of deep shade with a radius of fifty yards in which no grass or plant could grow? Or was it here that the larches had been, conifers leafless in the winter but green with new needles in the spring? She couldn’t tell, but when she found the beech, felled and prone, its vast trunk gray as a wet seal, its wrenched-out roots clotted with earth and stones, when she saw that she could have cried like Eve.

Struggling onward, climbing over fallen trunks and pushing aside sheaths of thick foliage, she made her way aimlessly, hardly knowing what she was seeking. Somewhere it hadn’t happened? A region of the wood miraculously untouched?

There was just one place. But this only because no trees had stood in the clearing she came to. She had an idea where she was now, in the very heart of the ruined wood, its center, where once a ring of cherry trees and field maples had encircled a grassy space. On the tree stump in the middle of that grass she had sometimes picnicked.

She moved toward it now and sat down on the broad, flat, smooth stump. She looked about her, aware for the first time of the silence. No birds sang. There had always been birds in the wood but at the hurricane’s assault they had departed.

The maples and cherries were mostly fallen but some still stood, the biggest and oldest leaning at a steep angle. She wondered if it would be possible to save those half-fallen trees, if there was some way of hauling them up and holding them. Who would do it? Who was there to care? She got up and made her way to the half-toppled cherry, put her hands on its trunk. It felt firm, as steady as an upright, growing tree.

There was nothing to do now but go back, to try to find her way back through the welter of broken branches. She ducked under an overhanging limb of maple, looked down and recoiled, jumping backward and hitting her head. She scarcely felt the pain. Her breath indrawn sharply, she put her hand up over her mouth, though she had no inclination to cry out.

Almost at her feet, at her feet until she had retreated that step or two, lay a long bundle of sacking. She could see it was a sack, of the kind Eve said they used to put potatoes in and of which there was a pile in the stable at Shrove, though it was stiff with earth and gravel. And it wasn’t just a sack, it was a bundle with something inside it. A length of string, now quite black, had been tied around the top and another length around the bottom.

No, not the top and the bottom, Liza found herself saying, not that but the head and the feet. She came a little closer, not frightened but awed. It had made her flinch and jump back at first; now she was curious. Whatever this was, the storm had unearthed it, tearing up a tree root and heaving it out of its burying place.

Its burying place … She was conscious of the smell now. It was a smell she had never smelled before. Strange, then, that she knew it was of something rotten, something that decayed, reminding her—yes, she knew what it was—of long ago, when Heidi and Rudi used to come. One of them had buried a meaty bone and later, perhaps weeks later, Eve while gardening had dug it up, stinking, maggoty, as green as jade, a beautiful color really….

She knelt down. She held her breath, somehow knowing she must hold her breath. There was a tear in the sacking at the top of the bundle just above the string. She picked at it, making the hole bigger. It split open quite suddenly and a flood of soft brown, silky hair spilled out. It spilled into her hands, thick and slippery. The hair came off in her hands and she was holding it. She stumbled away and was sick among the broken branches.

SIXTEEN

I
T
was Bruno?” Sean said.

She nodded.

“You poor kid. A kid might never get over something like that.”

She wished he wouldn’t say “somefink” but there was nothing to be done about it.

“Well, I did. I got over it. I didn’t even dream about it. It’s a funny thing, you know, but you can’t help being sick. It’s not what your mind does, it’s your body. I was curious, I really wanted to know, I suppose you could say I was
interested.
I knew it was Bruno’s hair, I knew it was Bruno dead in there, and I hadn’t liked Bruno, I’d hated him, I was glad he was dead, but I threw up just the same. Weird, isn’t it?”

He didn’t understand. “You must have been shattered to bits. You didn’t know what you was doing.”

Useless to persist. She gave up trying. “I didn’t know what to do next. There wasn’t anything I could do but go back home and leave that thing lying there for anyone to find.”

“Let’s get this straight,” said Sean. “She’d killed him, right? She’s real bad news, your mum, isn’t she? She’d killed him like she killed the man the dogs went for?”

“Oh, yes, she’d killed him. I don’t know how. I never said anything about it to her. I was only eleven but I knew she’d killed him and—well, there didn’t seem anything to say, if you know what I mean.”

He didn’t know. She could tell that. “She was in a state, anyway. She was depressed, in a real black depression, for quite a long time. I wasn’t going to tell her a thing like that, not something that would worry her as well.”

“There must have been someone you could tell. Tobias, like, or the old chap—Frost was his name? No one’d have expected you to get the police, not at your age, but hopefully they’d have done that for you. Didn’t you never think of that?”

It was dark in the caravan. She looked at him in the dark and made out his puzzled expression. “She’s my
mother,
” she said quietly. He didn’t respond, and when she said how it had worked out for the best, how the body was concealed once more, he hardly reacted. “She killed him because he threatened everything,” Liza said. “He was going to part her and me and make us leave Shrove.”

“Okay. No need to get excited.” Sean hesitated. “How did she do it?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t hear any shots that day he disappeared, but I wouldn’t have so far away. You remember that blood on the rags in the little castle? I think she may have used a knife.”

He had gone a little pale. “Wasn’t you scared of being with her? I mean, she could have turned on you.”

“Oh, no.” Liza laughed. “I was like the bird that lived inside the crocodile’s mouth, I was safe whoever else wasn’t.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me, not that about the sack and the hair. I shan’t get no sleep.”

“I shall,” said Liza, and she was asleep very quickly, her arm around his waist and her forehead pressed between his shoulder blades. If he lay awake, haunted by what she’d told him, she was oblivious of it.

Cautiousness made her rather quiet next morning. She boiled the water for their tea and her perfunctory face-washing in silence. It was perhaps unwise to go into too many details with him. She had told him rather too much on the previous night but now she would be more careful. That remark of his about the police she hadn’t liked. Eve had been arrested, had no doubt appeared in one court, was somewhere in a prison, but still there must be many things they didn’t know and need not know.

It wasn’t one of her days at Mrs. Spurdell’s, but still, “I’ll come into town with you,” she said. It was almost the first thing she’d said that morning. She took the spare set of car keys with her.

For the first time she went all the way into the Superway car park with him, noting where he put the car. He went off into the store and she, having bought a pair of bath towels at Marks and Spencer, wandered casually into the Duke’s Head, where she encountered no one in the front hall or on the stairs.

There was no soap in the bathroom. She should have thought of that but how was she to know? She took a bath just the same, enjoying a prolonged soak in the hot water, free from any anxiety about Mrs. Spurdell returning unexpectedly, and dried herself on both of the thick fleecy towels. On her way out a man in a suit and tie asked her if she needed help. Liza said she was looking for Mrs. Cooper. She didn’t know many names, having come across so few people, and had to fall back on those from fiction or, as in this case, the name of Eve’s invented cleaner.

“Is she staying in the hotel?”

Liza said she was expected today or tomorrow. The man looked in his book and said she’d made a mistake but cast no suspicious glances at the Marks and Spencer’s carrier full of wet towels. He didn’t seem at all cross or anxious for her to go and as he talked to her about the fictitious Mrs. Cooper, speculating as to where this woman might be staying or how a member of his staff could have made an error, Liza was aware that the way he looked at her and the way he spoke were full of admiration. As Sean would put it, he fancied her.

From Sean alone had she experienced this, had accepted it without thinking others might share his feelings. Now she was beginning to understand desiring her wasn’t some idiosyncracy of his but might even be common. She felt her power.