The Crocodile Bird (29 page)

“Don’t hesitate to come back if we can help you at all,” the man said as she left.

At the rear of Superway she got into the car and started the engine. She drove around the town, teaching herself things Sean hadn’t been able to teach her on the airfield. How to start on a hill, for instance, and how to stop in a hurry. He would have been cross because she hadn’t got a license or insurance, but that didn’t matter because she wasn’t going to tell him.

After returning the car, she had to wait nearly an hour for the bus to get her back and then there was a mile-long walk from the bus stop in the rain.

The days that followed her discovery of Bruno’s body remained very fresh in her mind. They were dark days, there was no electricity and they lit log fires to keep themselves warm. Because Eve did almost nothing, sat staring at the wall or hid herself in bed, Liza did her best to clear up the front garden, moving all but the biggest and heaviest branches. She went up to Shrove every day on her own, fetching back useful things from the kitchens, firelighters and nightlights, stone hot-water bottles, tinned food, coffee and sugar. It was stealing, she now supposed, though she hadn’t thought of that at the time.

One afternoon she went up to watch television. She hadn’t associated the television with the electricity supply but she did when she switched it on and nothing happened. It occurred to her to try the phone, though she had never used a phone, but that too seemed dead and stayed silent no matter how many of the buttons she pressed.

She and Eve had no idea of what might be happening in the outside world. That, she now understood, was what Eve had always wanted, to be isolated, to be cut off from all that lay beyond Shrove. But she had hardly wanted it to this extent. Liza suddenly thought of the radio in Bruno’s car. That didn’t work off the main electricity, somehow it worked off the car itself, perhaps by some means from the engine.

Bruno’s radio would tell them what the hurricane had done, if the whole world was devastated, if the electricity had gone for good, if all the phones had been destroyed. But it was no good thinking of that. She wouldn’t know how to start the engine or turn the radio on and, even if she could find out, the car was locked away in the stable and the key hidden somewhere.

The next day it no longer mattered, for the electricity men came to mend the lines. Their van went past the gatehouse, bumping over broken twigs and dead leaves. Later, when she went out, she came upon them up on the high poles, restringing cables, and one of them, thinking perhaps that she came from Shrove itself, called out to her that her TV antenna was broken. The storm had torn it from the roof and it was hanging over one of the chimneys.

Liza didn’t know what he meant. She had never heard of a TV antenna. To her the complicated grid thing that looked like one of the shelves from their oven was just something you saw on roofs, probably a kind of weather vane. After the men had gone and the lights and heating came on again, she went up to Shrove to watch television.

This time it came on but not properly. The picture ran about all over the place, it rolled over as if someone were turning a handle inside it, lines formed, or the screen looked like a piece of coarsely woven gray material. You couldn’t see the people’s faces clearly and their voices sounded as if they all had colds.

It was a long time before Liza made the connection between the failure of the television and the broken oven shelf on the roof. She thought it had simply gone wrong. It was old and it had gone wrong. She felt helpless, knowing there was nothing she could do without telling Eve. Her viewing afternoons were over. Jonathan never watched television, this set had been his grandfather’s and he certainly wouldn’t get a new one or have the antenna mended.

She walked sadly back to the gatehouse. Watching Eve, who hardly spoke, who went through the motions of getting their supper while her thoughts were far away, Liza decided that her mother had no more cause for grief than she had, who had lost just as much, who had lost her only friend.

She had grown up a lot in the weeks that followed the hurricane. It was as if she aged three or four years. She began to know all sorts of things, she was sure, that people don’t usually know at eleven. For instance, how to be alone with a woman nearly mad with misery and grief, while feeling—yes, she’d felt it even then—that somehow it was wrong to care so much about a
thing,
a place, a piece of land, a house. If she cared in the same way about the television set, she was only a child while Eve was grown up. It only made her pity her mother the more. She had to look after her, be kind, not trouble her, encourage her in the only thing that distracted her: giving lessons, imparting knowledge. Liza sometimes worked at her textbooks from early morning until late in the evening just to keep Eve’s mind off the destruction and the mess out there.

The other thing that helped this fast growing up was her anxiety over Bruno’s body. Eve had buried it in the first place because she wanted it hidden, because if it was found she might be in serious trouble. Liza had some inkling of the kind of trouble from reading the Victorian novelists.
Oliver Twist
was her handbook and so was
The Woman in White.
Did they still hang murderers? She couldn’t ask Eve. And what did hanging actually mean? What bit of you was hung up? She knew a lot more about beheading. From reading about the French Revolution and Mary Queen of Scots and the wives of Henry VIII, she knew quite a lot about chopping off heads.

Would they hang Eve? She was really frightened when she thought of that, she was a child again, more like five than eleven, afraid of bad men coming and taking her mummy away. Like Eve and the spoiled woods, she wanted to hide herself and pretend it wasn’t real. Besides, if she asked Eve about hanging it might make her think she had something more to worry about. Liza didn’t ask. She and Eve worked at English literature and history and Latin from morning till night.

Until the day came when Eve didn’t get up at all. She lay in bed with her face turned to the wall. Liza went out for the first time for days. It was the last day of October, the thirty-first, Halloween, a dry gray breezy morning.

The ruined wood looked different because all the leaves had died. They hadn’t turned brown like the leaves on the remaining living trees, but still green, had dried up and curled and shriveled. As she pushed her way through the wreckage the dead leaves crackled. From the depths a pheasant gave its rattling cry and above her in the single standing tree she heard doves cooing. The birds had come back.

Her heart was in her mouth (as she had read) or perhaps she was only starting to feel sick again as she came to the clearing where the flat, smooth stump stood. But there was no fear of being sick this time or of smelling the smell of maggoty bone, for the bundle had gone.

She had a moment of absolute panic, of wanting to run and not knowing where to run to. Someone had come and found Bruno and taken him away. Then she saw what had happened. The body in the sack was still there, was somewhere down there,
inside
there. The leaning cherry tree had fallen and hidden it. The cherry tree she had clasped in her hands to test how stable it was had not been stable at all, had fallen next time the wind blew, and its broad solid trunk dropped on top of the bundle, driving it back into its grave.

Liza examined the place carefully. There wasn’t a sign of that bundle unless you knew what to look for, unless you detected the corner of a sack protruding from where the lowest branch grew out of the cherry trunk. She tried pushing it under but it wouldn’t go, so she dragged across branches and fetched armfuls of twigs, piling them up to conceal what remained of Bruno.

No one could find it now until men came to clear the wood. She hadn’t thought of that at the time, she had simply been relieved, had believed it hidden forever, but no more than a few days after this a lot of workmen came in a lorry with chainsaws and axes. Jonathan came too. The men began by clearing the gatehouse garden and then they started work on the fallen and damaged trees in Shrove park.

That worried Liza a lot. She was sure they would move into the wood and begin shifting the logs and broken trees. For a whole day she worried about it until Jonathan—who sat for hours in the cottage with Eve, the two of them sighing and shaking their heads over what the hurricane had done—remarked in passing that the “little” wood was to be the last place to be cleared. It might be two years before they began to clear the “little” wood.

Eve got up for Jonathan and pulled herself together. She washed her hair and braided it on the back of her head, she put on her tight black top and her blue and purple skirt and smiled and made herself beautiful for Jonathan.

He came and he did what Liza hadn’t seen him do for years, put his arms around Eve and kissed her. When Eve sent her away and said to write her history essay upstairs—she called it her “homework” as if all her lessons weren’t done at home—Liza listened outside the door. She heard Eve tell Jonathan it was half-term. Perhaps it was. In that case what she said wasn’t really untrue. Of course, that depended on what you meant by a lie. It was a lie if by lying you meant intending to deceive. Eve certainly intended to deceive Jonathan into thinking Liza went to school.

They talked for a long time about the hurricane damage. Both knew a lot of statistics about this being the first hurricane in England for so many hundred years and about so many million trees being destroyed. They talked about the Great Storm of 1703. It was all rather boring. After she’d heard the bit about delaying till last the clearing of the wood where Bruno’s body lay, Liza decided to go upstairs and start writing about the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. At that moment Jonathan changed the subject and told Eve quite abruptly that Victoria had left him for a lover and the two of them were living in Caracas. There was no hope of a reconciliation, this was what the court called “irretrievable breakdown.”

Just as Eve began to say something Liza thought might be interesting there came a great thudding at the front door.

Eve said in a theatrical way, “What fresh hell is this?” and then explained with a laugh that someone called Dorothy Parker had said it first.

The person at the door was only one of the workmen looking for Jonathan to ask about some tree or other, whether to chop it down or leave it as it was, a torn-in-half tree. Liza went upstairs and, not being sure whether Caracas was the capital of Venezuela or Ecuador, looked it up in her atlas.

Jonathan stayed for less than a week. Just one night Liza was almost sure he’d spent in Eve’s bedroom. It was a feeling she had, no more, for she hadn’t heard them go to bed, had slept soundly all night, and when she came down in the morning there was no sign of him. But she was older, she was beginning to be very aware of things like that. In January she was twelve.

Next time Liza went to Mrs. Spurdell’s it was for one of the afternoon stints, so there was time to put up her hair the way Eve had for special occasions, in a thick braid on the back of her head. It made her look several years older, she decided. She took with her the books she had borrowed.

Mr. Spurdell seldom got home before she left but he did that day, and he had been in no more than ten minutes when a woman arrived in a red car. Cleaning the bedroom windows, Liza saw her come up the path toward the front door. She was tall and good-looking in a masculine way, with dark hair tied back at the nape of her neck. Her trouser suit was dark gray with pinstripes and her shirt was red silk. But the most attractive thing about her was her warm and intelligent expression that made her look incapable of saying an unpleasant or stupid thing.

Liza waited for the doorbell to ring. Instead she heard the front door open. She must have a key of her own, she thought, and guessed who this was. Jane, who wrote in her books that they had been stolen from her. But she had been much younger then, of course. Jane, the daughter who had something to do with education. Now she could see a resemblance to the photograph.

How could a poor shriveled-up little man like Mr. Spurdell and a fat white-haired creature like his wife have a daughter as nice to look at as this? It was a great mystery. She finished her windows and went downstairs. No one bothered to introduce her, she wasn’t surprised about that. Mr. and Mrs. Spurdell just went on talking as if she wasn’t there, as if she were a robot cleverly programmed to sweep floors and dust furniture.

Liza said to Mrs. Spurdell that she had finished. Was there anything more she wanted her to do? Mrs. Spurdell said no, there wasn’t, and gave her a look as from a feudal lady to a serf, so Liza went into the kitchen and sat at the table, waiting to get her money.

After a moment or two Mr. Spurdell appeared. He saw the books she had brought back on the kitchen table and began to interrogate her about their contents. Who was Miss Gradgrind? What did Dickens mean by Mrs. Sparsit’s Coriolanian nose? What did Mr. Boffin collect? Who was Silas Wegg? Liza was surprised but not disconcerted. She had had plenty of this from Eve and was answering his questions with the enthusiasm of the scholar who thoroughly knows her subject, when the good-looking education woman came into the kitchen.

She raised her eyebrows and gave Liza a wink. “Come off it, Dad, what d’you think you’re doing, putting her through an examination? You’re lucky she’s too polite to tell you where you can put your questions.” She held out her hand to Liza and said, “Jane Spurdell. You must excuse my father. He never really leaves school.”

“That’s all right,” she said and, thinking quickly, gave Sean’s name. The elder Spurdells had never asked her surname. “Liza Holford.”

Mr. Spurdell wasn’t at all put out. “This young lady is a dark horse, Jane. I caught her reading my Dickens. I suspect she is on sabbatical, or else she is in our house cleaning for purposes of research. What can they be, I ask myself. Shall we set out to discover her secret?”

“Speak for yourself, Dad,” Jane Spurdell said, “and leave me out of it. Her secret, if she has one, is her own affair.” She smiled at Liza in a very friendly way. “I say, I do like the way you’ve done your hair. Is it very difficult?”