The Crocodile Bird (30 page)

Liza was explaining that while it wasn’t very difficult to do, it took a long time, you had to allow yourself half an hour, when Mrs. Spurdell arrived with her purse in her left hand and a handful of loose change in the other. Liza could tell she didn’t at all like finding her conversing on equal terms with her daughter.

“Perhaps you should have been a hairdresser,” she said unpleasantly. “When you’ve finished the demonstration, I’d like to get through the business of your pay.”

Jane Spurdell looked ashamed of her mother, as well she might, Liza thought, and even more embarrassed when she asked for a loan of two pound coins to bring the total up to twelve. Mr. Spurdell had gone upstairs but as she was going he appeared in the hall with paperbacks of
Little Dorrit
and
Vanity Fair.
Liza said nothing about having already read
Vanity Fair.
She was watching, with barely suppressed laughter, Mrs. Spurdell’s face as Jane said good-bye and it had been nice to meet her.

In the car, going home, she thought of telling Sean about Jane, how nice-looking she was and how friendly. But she didn’t tell him. Without quite knowing why, she sensed he wouldn’t like it. He had hated school, alternatively called the teachers power mad and a bunch of snobs. He would think being an educationalist a job for a woman only if she couldn’t get a man.

Instead, because he was curious to know, she spoke about the year at Shrove that followed the hurricane. It was strange how much he loved stories. How would he manage if he ever got a girlfriend who couldn’t tell him stories? But, of course, he never would get another girlfriend, for they were to be together forever and ever.

“My TV was broken in the storm—well, I thought of it as mine—and I knew I’d never get another. I did lessons all the time instead and gradually Eve got better. It was a lovely summer that year, that was the start of all the lovely summers, the best we’d ever had.”

“The greenhouse effect,” said Sean.

She was surprised he knew and then angry with herself for being surprised. “Well, maybe,” she said. “I wouldn’t know. Eve said they had summers like that at the beginning of the century, before the First World War.”

“How did she know? She wasn’t old enough to know.”

Liza shrugged, the way Eve did. “The milkman said, hot enough for you? He said it every day, he must have picked it up somewhere. The heat didn’t stop the men. They worked hard at Shrove, clearing up all the mess, and it didn’t look so bad. They’d even planted some new trees in the park and down by the river. The trees did very well because it was like wetlands down there. Even Eve said things weren’t as bad as she’d feared and Mr. Frost said every cloud has a silver lining and now with them big old trees gone you could see views you’d never seen before. I think that was the longest sentence I ever heard him speak.

“Jonathan came down to Shrove a lot that year. It was funny really, he never seemed to notice that I was home all the time. I mean, through May and June and July, when everyone else of my age was at school. And in the same sort of way he didn’t seem to notice that Mrs. Cooper never came to clean while he was staying at Shrove, though once he was there for nearly two weeks. I suppose he’d had people waiting on him all his life, he took it for granted things got done, cleaning and meals got ready, and his clothes washed. He ate his meals with us, or Eve took them up to him at Shrove. She collected his washing too and washed and ironed it and took it back to him.

“I never heard him say thank-you or even mention it, though perhaps he did when I wasn’t there. There were nights I think she spent at Shrove with him, then and at lots of times in the future. If she did, she left the gatehouse after I was asleep and came back very early in the morning. Things were back where they had been before he married Victoria, or she thought they were. She hoped they were.

“They talked for hours about his marriage. They forgot I was there, I didn’t have to listen outside the door. She was always asking him about Victoria and the divorce, but I never heard him say a word about Bruno. And all the time Bruno’s car was up in his stables and Bruno’s dead body was lying in his wood. Rotting in his wood and the worms eating him.”

“Liza,” said Sean warningly. “Do you mind?”

“Sorry. You
are
squeamish. I don’t think Jonathan was interested, I don’t think he cared. He was only interested in Jonathan Tobias, and people were important to him only as being useful to Jonathan Tobias. Maybe we’re all like that. Are we?”

“I’d put you first, I know that.”

“Would you? That’s nice. I kept remembering the story she’d told me about old Mr. Tobias and my grandmother and how Eve’d thought then that she and Jonathan were going to get married. It didn’t matter about her mother not getting Shrove because she and Jonathan were going to be married. She’d thought like that when I was little and he came down for those three weeks and it was all happening again.

“She thought he’d marry her when he got his divorce. She’d been trying to get him for seventeen years.”

SEVENTEEN

W
HEN
you’re telling someone a serial story you don’t say that now you’ve come to a bit where nothing much happened. It makes your listener not care much about the outcome. Somehow Liza knew this and stopped herself saying it to Sean. Yet, when she was twelve and thirteen, nothing much had happened. Eve had made her work ferociously hard at English and history and languages. She had taught her to sew and to knit and unraveled old sweaters for Liza to knit up again. They had listened to music together, but there had been no drawing or painting, as this perhaps was a reminder of Bruno. Liza missed the television and felt sad on the day the council rubbish collectors came and she saw the old set thrown into the back of the truck. But nothing of great moment happened. No one came to clear the wood. The British Rail workmen did take up the rails and sleepers where the line had been, but they didn’t fill in or block up the tunnel, and the tunnel mouth now yawned like the opening of a cave.

Bruno’s car remained locked up in the stable. Once every five or six weeks Liza went to make sure that it was still there. Occasionally, she checked Eve’s jewel case to see if the gold ring was still there. It was, it always was. And when Eve wasn’t wearing earrings, there were three pairs in the case.

Jonathan came and went. If he talked about Victoria it was only to complain about the amount of money she would expect from him when the divorce went through. Money and property. She would want the Ullswater house and no doubt would get it. He sent a postcard from Zimbabwe and that autumn brought two people with him to Shrove that she had never seen before, a man called David Cosby and his wife, Frances. They came down for the shooting.

“David is Jonathan’s cousin,” said Eve.

Liza knew about cousins, she had read about them in Victorian novels.

“He can’t be his cousin,” she objected. “Not if Caroline didn’t have brothers or sisters and his father didn’t.”

“David is his second cousin. He is old Mr. Tobias’s nephew’s son. He loves Shrove, he loves it nearly as much as I do, I know he wishes it was his.”

“If he loves it so much why hasn’t he been before?”

“He’s been living in Africa for twelve years but now he’s come home for good.”

David Cosby’s face was as dark and shiny a brown as the paneling in the library at Shrove while his wife’s was wrinkled and yellow. The result of the suns of Africa, thought Liza, who had just read
King Solomon’s Mines.
They stayed two weeks. This time Eve seemed to be in a rather different position. Liza noticed it without quite being able to say how it was different. Perhaps it was that the three of them at Shrove, unlike Victoria and her friends, didn’t treat Eve in any way like a servant. She went up there for dinner three times—Jonathan had caterers to come in and cook the partridges they shot—and left the washing up for Mrs. Cooper to do in the morning.

The funny thing was, of course, that there was no Mrs. Cooper, so Eve had to run up there while they were all out with the guns or in their car and play her pretending-to-be-the-cleaner game. It was a strange thing to do and it made Liza uneasy.

Eve became altogether rather strange in those two uneventful years. Or perhaps she had always been strange and when she was a child Liza hadn’t noticed. She had just been Mother. Now, although Liza still knew very few people, she knew more than she ever had before. She could make comparisons. She could begin to question their way of life at the gatehouse, particularly her own. Why did Eve never want to know anyone or go anywhere? Did other people have such a passionate attachment to a place as she had to Shrove? What was the purpose of doing such a lot of lessons, doing them all the time, on Saturdays and Sundays as well, Eve teaching and she learning for hours on end day in and day out? Why?

Eve had stopped going into town. She had found a grocer who would deliver once a week, and what he didn’t bring the milkman would. When she did go, a rare once every two or three months, it was to buy books for Liza to learn from, and for another, stranger, reason: to take money out of the bank. Now Jonathan’s checks were sent to the bank by post and the money later drawn out to be hidden at home.

One day, after Eve had come back from town, having paid her only visit there of the entire winter, Liza saw her go into the little castle, carrying a small brown paper parcel. Eve, as far as she knew, had never possessed a handbag. Liza only knew handbags existed because she had seen Victoria and Claire and Frances Cosby carrying them. She saw Eve go into the little castle with the package and come out after a minute or two without it.

Later on, choosing a time when Eve was up at Shrove being Mrs. Cooper, Liza investigated the little castle. It appeared quite empty. There was nothing now to show it had ever been occupied, either by dog or man. She didn’t take long to find the loose brick and thence the iron box and the money.

Dozens of notes filled the box, five-, ten-, twenty-, and even fifty-pound notes. She didn’t try to count them, she could see there were hundreds of pounds. Besides, she had very little idea of what money was worth. She could have said what five pounds would buy in the time of Anthony Trollope but not what it would buy today, though she suspected a lot less. Eve had never hinted at the amount of money Jonathan gave her. All that Liza knew was that it came in checks. She sent these checks to the bank, brought back the money and hid it here in the wall.

Wasn’t that the purpose of a bank, to look after your money? Liza didn’t really know. Perhaps everyone behaved like this. Perhaps no one really trusted banks.

But Liza found herself often watching her mother after that, watching her behavior, anxious to see what she would do next. She watched her as once she had listened at doors. There was no listening anymore because Eve never talked to anyone but Liza and occasionally Jonathan on his rare appearances. Sometimes she tried to catch Eve unawares, watch her when she didn’t know she was being watched. She would go to bed early, then creep downstairs to watch Eve unobserved from the stairs. But she never saw her do anything except ordinary expected things, reading and listening to music or marking one of Liza’s essays or test papers.

She was fourteen before she began asking herself, what will become of me when I grow up? Shall I live here with Eve forever? When she has taught me all the English there is to learn and all the history and French and Latin, what will we do then? What shall I do with all of it?

“Be me,” Eve had said, “me as I might have been if I stayed here, happy and innocent and good.”

Did she want to be Eve? Did she want to be those things?

That spring, while Jonathan was staying at Shrove on his own, the woodsmen came back to clear the “little” wood.

“Bruno had been dead for nearly three years. I wanted to know how long it took before a body turned into a skeleton but I didn’t know how to find out. There weren’t any medical books at Shrove or any on forensics. You see, I thought that if he was bones by now, they might not notice so much if they dug him up. I was hoping the sack would have rotted and Bruno just be—well, scattered bones.”

“It beats me,” said Sean, “the way you can talk about it. A lovely young girl like you, it’s weird. You’re always the same, like talking about death and stuff that makes other people throw up, you talk about them like they’re normal.”

She smiled at him. “I suppose it is normal for me.

Dead bodies don’t upset me. I know I was sick when Bruno’s hair came off in my hand but that wasn’t
me,
it was a sort of reflex. I expect even doctors do that when they first start.”

“You could have been a doctor, d’you know that?”

“I still could,” said Liza. “But that’s not the point. Maybe other people are taught as children to flinch from death and blood and all that, I mean they’re conditioned, but I never was. You’ve got to remember Eve taught me everything she knew about academic things, but there must be thousands of things children know who lead an ordinary life and go to school that I never heard of. There can’t,” she said rather proudly, “be many people who’ve read the whole of Virgil’s
Aeneid
in the original and seen two people murdered by the time they’re sixteen.”

He recoiled a little. The look on his face made her smile again. “Don’t worry about it, Sean. It can’t be changed, that’s the way it is. I’m different from other girls and in some ways I expect I always will be.”

“You’ve got me now,” he said. It was something he liked saying and when he said it he always took hold of her hand.

“Yes, I’ve got you now. Anyway, as I was telling you, the men went up to start working in the wood and I was very anxious. I don’t know if Eve was. She was always out and about with Jonathan when she wasn’t teaching me. But as it turned out they never found anything. Jonathan had given them instructions to leave some of the logs lying and some dead trees to provide habitats for the wildlife. The cherry log was one they left. It was just chance or luck, whatever you like to call it.”