The Crocodile Bird (33 page)

The account was very long, filling nearly half a page. Try as she would, Liza couldn’t take in more than the first two paragraphs.

“I don’t understand it, Sean. I don’t know what it means. It says she’s been charged with the murder of Trevor Hughes. Who’s Trevor Hughes? I’ve never heard of him.”

“You better read it all. Read all three of them. Look, love, I’ve got to go or I’ll be late. I wouldn’t want to be late, not at this juncture. You can stay here in the car, no one’ll see you.”

She sat in the car in the Superway’s underground car park and read the accounts in all the papers. None of them had a word about the murders Liza knew Eve had committed. All the accounts were about this Trevor Hughes, a sales representative, aged thirty-one, who had been missing from home for twelve years. It appeared that he had quarreled with his wife and, instead of leaving for a holiday with her as they had planned, had gone off on his own.

Mrs. Eileen Hughes said she had identified her husband from his watch and his wedding ring, which had his name and hers inside it. A dentist had identified him by his teeth. How did they do that? Liza wondered. If she enquired of Sean he would ask if she wanted to be a dentist as well and tell her to dream on.

They had found shotgun pellets buried with the man. Buried in the wood? But surely only Bruno was up there. Now they were talking about this man being buried as well. It didn’t seem as if Eve had said anything in the court or anyone had said anything on her behalf. But it was going on again today. At the end of the article it said the trial continues.

Liza felt bewildered. She wanted desperately to know, she wished there was someone she could ask, but the only person she could think of was Mr. Spurdell. Reading the newspaper accounts, she had been afraid of coming on her own name but she hadn’t, her name wasn’t mentioned. Would it be mentioned tomorrow?

She passed a tedious yet anxious day mooning about the town. The admiring manager was off today, so it wasn’t even interesting taking a clandestine bath in the Duke’s Head. She bought three paperback books, spending two-thirds of the twenty-four pounds she had earned that week. Sean would be cross. She sensed already that Sean was going to expect her to be pleased if her mother got sent to prison for years and years. How long would it be anyway? At least they’d stopped hanging people.

In the afternoon, after having a hamburger and a sundae in McDonald’s, she went to the cinema and saw
Howard’s End.
Why had she never read any E. M. Forster? Because he was born too late to be in the Shrove library, she thought rather bitterly. Next week she’d buy
A Passage to India,
that was by him she was sure, and anything else he’d written. It took considerable strength of will to make herself leave the cinema and not sit there and watch the program all the way through again.

Sean was waiting. He was sure the trial would be on TV tonight. They switched on at six and again at nine and ten, but it wasn’t on. Liza said, “I’ve been thinking. I know who Trevor Hughes was. He was the man with the beard. It says here he went missing twelve years ago and that was twelve years ago. I was four. I thought the policeman who came called him Hugh. D’you remember I said Hugh? But it wasn’t, it was Trevor Hughes.”

“The man the dogs went for,” said Sean. “The one she shot.”

“They must have searched the gatehouse and found the ring with the initials and the date inside. But why him?”

“It’s a mystery,” said Sean. “Like you say, why pick him? Why not the others?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I feel so ignorant.” Liza thrust her hands through her hair and looked at him mutinously. “We can’t go to the police, there’s no one we can ask. It’s beyond me, it’s driving me mad.”

When he saw the new books, Sean didn’t say a word. She realized that she couldn’t always predict how he would react. He was kind, he was good to her. She thought of the men in the books she’d read and the book she was reading now, she remembered Trevor Hughes and Bruno and Jonathan and thought she was lucky to have Sean. Once or twice she repeated it to convince herself, she was lucky to have Sean.

Quite a long time had passed after Eve told Jonathan the new gardener’s name before Liza met him. She first saw him on the day he started, but didn’t let him see her. It was mid-March and cold, she had been out for a long aimless walk and was coming back, her boots sinking into the marshy ground above the river. That winter she had been taking more and more of these walks, she had been growing increasingly frustrated with solitude, with sameness, with never seeing another face but Eve’s. Lessons had become repetitive and she sensed that Eve had taught her almost all she knew. All that was left now was to write more essays about Shakespeare, examine more pieces of eighteenth-century prose, translate more de Maupassant, and do more Latin unseens. She had read all the books in the Shrove library she would ever want to read. Television was almost forgotten, what it had been like, why she had enjoyed it.

Was the whole of life going to be like this? Sean had asked her later on why she hadn’t run away. He hadn’t understood the extent of her learning and the depths of her ignorance. At the thought of running away, before she met him, she had felt almost faint with fear. She had never been on a bus or in a train, never bought anything in a shop herself, scarcely been in one, never made a phone call, and most important of all, never had any sort of relationship with a contemporary.

So she went for long walks, sometimes to the isolated villages, there to gaze at a village shop or the notice board inside a church porch, to read a bus timetable or stand outside a school and watch the children come out. She was teaching herself about the world Eve had kept from her. Once, anticipating Sean’s question, she had even said, I could run away. But the very words, unspoken except in her mind, had terrified her. She saw herself standing in an empty street at night with no idea where to go, how to find food or a place to sleep. She imagined herself not running away but running
home,
throwing herself pathetically into Eve’s arms.

But what was going to become of her? She often imagined the future and in the blackest way. She saw herself old, thirty or more, and Eve a really old woman, the two of them going on just the same, everything the same except that the new trees had grown tall with thick trunks and spreading crowns. Would she become the Shrove gardener when Eve was too old to do the work? Or the successor to Mrs. Cooper? She would be sent to town with the shopping basket and list, to cross the bridge and wait for the bus.

She saw herself crossing the marketplace, avoiding with fear the jostling teenagers, let out like effervescent water from an opened bottle. Stepping into the road to avoid them, keeping her eyes downcast like a nun she had seen in a picture. Afraid to speak to anyone but shopkeepers, and then only to ask in a whisper for what she wanted.

Thinking this way, she came dispiritedly up among those trees that were still saplings and saw someone in the Shrove garden. He was a long way off and for a moment she thought he must be Jonathan. But Jonathan wouldn’t be clipping the yew hedge. Jonathan never did anything, he never pulled out a weed or plucked a dead head from a rose.

The man was working on the hedge with a pair of hand clippers. It must be the new gardener. She was still too far away from him to see much, but even from a hundred yards off she could tell he was young. Not young as Jonathan or Bruno were, but really young, the same sort of age as herself. She had never thought of hiding from Mr. Frost or Gib, but she was suddenly urgently sure that this man mustn’t see her. He mustn’t be allowed to see her casually approaching him.

It was easy to avoid his eye, a matter of keeping to the trees and, when the garden was reached, making her way toward the house. Why she was behaving so covertly she didn’t ask herself, for she couldn’t have replied.

She approached stealthily, careful not to step on a twig or, when she reached the path, let her feet make a sound on the gravel. Now he was no farther away from her than the length of their sitting room in the gatehouse. She looked at him between the branches and the dull pointed leaves of evergreens. He had finished the hedge and was lifting armfuls of clippings into a wheelbarrow, a tall, straight young man, a boy, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. His hair was raven black. She thought of it like that because that was the way the poets wrote. His face was turned away from her. She thought she might shriek with disappointment if she didn’t see his face. But at the same time she knew she’d make no sound whatever he did, wherever he went.

Had she made a sound? She wasn’t aware of it, unless her breathing itself had become noisy. There must have been something to make him turn from the barrow he was about to wheel away and look in her direction.

He couldn’t see her. She could tell that. She stared. He was absolutely beautiful. His face was a pale olive color but with a flush on the cheeks, and his eyes were a dark bright blue. She saw a perfect nose and perfect lips and thought of the stars in those old films she had seen and of engravings of statues in ancient books and portraits by Titian.

His hands were long and brown. Once she had admired Jonathan’s hands but no longer. This man had stars in his eyes and his gaze showed that he dreamed of wonderful things. The gods she read about lived in groves like this, half-concealed by leaves.

Because he couldn’t see her and could now hear nothing, he shrugged a little and began wheeling the barrow away. He should have had a spear and a winged chariot but all he had were shears and a wheelbarrow. Liza didn’t mind. She didn’t even mind him going and she didn’t want him to come back. In a strange way she had had as much as she could take for the present. An unexpected energy filled her and she ran all the way home, arriving breathless and throwing herself down on the sofa.

In a voice as casual as she could make it, she said to Eve, “Which days does the new gardener come?”

“Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Why?”

“Nothing. I just wondered.”

The following afternoon she went to Shrove and searched for a picture he might resemble. She had done that when Bruno came, but this was different. That had been for the satisfaction of curiosity, this was an act of worship. Upstairs, next to the painting of Sodom and Gomorrah, was a portrait of a young man in black silk and silver lace. Eve called it “indifferent eighteenth-century two-a-penny stuff,” but Liza had always liked it and now she gazed in wonder. Their new gardener in elegant fancy dress made her shiver, but pleasurably.

The next day was Friday and she watched for his car from Eve’s bedroom window. It was a big old car, dark blue with patches of rust on the bodywork, and if she hadn’t known a car had to have a driver she’d have thought it was moving along by its own volition. Rain fell all day on Monday, so he couldn’t come, and it was Wednesday before she had a glimpse of him. His car was parked on the gravel by the coach house. She let herself into the house, went upstairs and into the bedroom with the fine views, the one Victoria had used and where she had left her clothes in the wardrobe. It made her jump to see him just outside the window, almost directly below her.

Clematis climbed across the garden front of Shrove House. He was on the steps, the old ones that used to be in the library, tying the clematis vines to the trellis. If he had turned his head to the right and lifted it a little he would have seen her. Any noise she might make wouldn’t attract his attention today. He was wearing a headset and had a Walkman attached to the belt of his jeans.

In the week that had gone by she had sometimes wondered if she was remembering him as more beautiful than he actually was. Now she saw that he was even more beautiful than she remembered. Why did she care so much? She was dreadfully bewildered by it all. Was it just because he was the first person of her own age she had ever known? But she didn’t know him.

He looked around suddenly and saw her. She was seized with shyness, with shame almost, and felt the blood rush into her face and burn her cheeks. He put up one hand in a salute and grinned. This made her retreat at once and run out of the bedroom. There was a mirror in a gilt frame hanging on the wall halfway down the stairs. Although she had never done this before, she stopped on the staircase and looked at herself in this mirror.

She thought she was—well, very pretty. Better than that perhaps. Nice eyes, big and dark, a full mouth, good skin, Eve always said, and lots of long dark hair. But—did all girls look like this? She need not be quite so naive. In the town she had seen others, but how could she judge? The old television images had grown vague and misty now. Why, anyway, did it matter? She continued to stare at herself, as if contemplating a great mystery.

For a moment or two, for five minutes perhaps, she had forgotten the boy on the steps. Narcissistically, she communed with herself, studying her smooth face and soft pink lips, the slim body and full breasts. How would she look in a dress like Caroline’s? Red silk, low-cut. That almost made her laugh. She was wearing blue jeans, a black sweater with a polo neck, and Eve’s old brown parka.

Because she knew he was in the back garden, she let herself out of the front door without a thought. She didn’t peer from a window first but came straight out. And there he was, standing on the paving, studying the climbing hydrangea that clustered all across the front of Shrove House.

She stood quite still, staring at him, not knowing what to do, without a word to say.

He smiled. “Hi, there.”

Something tied her tongue.

“D’you live here?”

She must speak. This time she wasn’t blushing. She fancied she had gone pale.

“I saw you at the window, so I thought maybe you lived here. But the lady said no one did. At any rate you’re not a ghost.”

That should have made her laugh but she couldn’t laugh. She found her tongue but not her poise. “That was my mother said that. We live at the Lodge.”

“Out in the sticks, isn’t it? It could give you the creeps.”

Eve would hate him for “the creeps.” “The sticks” she failed altogether to understand. “I have to go,” she said. “I’m late.”