The Crocodile Bird (40 page)

Would she have done better if she’d grown up in a London street and been to boarding school?

Sean had finished at Superway. He had unpacked his last carton of cornflakes and last can of tomatoes. A little wary of her still but no longer sullen, he described how the manager had shaken hands with him and wished him well.

“Does anyone know about me?” Liza asked him. “I mean, the people at your work? Do they know you’ve got a girlfriend who lives with you and who I am and all that?”

“No, they don’t. I keep my private affairs to myself. So far as they know, I’m all on my own.”

“Will you drive to Scotland?”

“’Course I’ll drive. What you got in mind? First-class train tickets and a stopover in a luxury hotel? You’ve got a lot to learn about money, love.”

He began fretting about a new law that had come in, excluding caravans from all land except where the owner’s express permission was given. The sooner they were gone the better. Would the law in Scotland be different? He’d heard it sometimes was. Liza knew more about it than he did, she had read it up in Mr. Spurdell’s newspaper. For instance, she knew that if your caravan was turned off a piece of land and you weren’t allowed to park it anywhere else, the local authority was bound to house you. It might not be a real house or a flat, it might be only a room, even a hotel room, but it would be
somewhere.
She wasn’t going to say any of this to Sean and risk a sneer about her cleverness and her aspirations.

All the time they had been there she had kept the caravan very clean. Cleanliness was ingrained in her, Eve had seen to that, and she could no more have left her home dirty than she could have failed to wash herself. For all that, it was a poor place, everything about it shabby, worn, scraped, scuffed, chipped, broken, cracked, and makeshift-mended. But the gatehouse had been shabby too. Would she want anything like the “monstrosity” Bruno had picked or the Spurdells’ house, she who had been spoiled for choice by Shrove?

The caravan and the car, a home and a means of transport. With those, life would be possible, some kind of future would be possible. She watched Sean speculatively. Spartan living wasn’t all that Eve had taught her.

No one had known where Bruno was and no one had cared except an easily fobbed-off estate agent. Trevor Hughes had had an estranged wife, glad to see the back of him. No one knew Sean wasn’t alone. Her existence, her presence in his life, all this he had kept secret. He had left Superway and at this branch they would think no more about him, no doubt he was already forgotten.

At the Glasgow end they would expect him to turn up for the course on Monday. If he didn’t come they wouldn’t set in motion a police alert but conclude that he had changed his mind. She knew little about life, but the experiences she had had were of a peculiar nature. Few could look back on a similar history. She knew from experience, from the disappearance of Trevor Hughes and Bruno Drummond, that the police do little about searching for missing men in their particular circumstances. In this case it was unlikely an absent man would even be reported missing.

Sean’s mother had long since lost interest in him. His brothers and sisters were scattered in distant places, long out of touch. The chain-smoking grandfather was too ancient to bother. The people he called his friends were pub acquaintances and caravansite neighbors like Kevin.

While Sean watched television, she looked at herself long in the glass, the cracked piece of mirror ten inches by six that was all she and Sean had to see their faces in. It had seemed to her that Eve had never changed. The woman she had run away from a hundred days and nights ago was in her eyes the same woman, looking just the same, as the mother who had brought her to Shrove when she was three, not older or heavier or less fresh. Yet now as she looked at her own face it was a youthful Eve that she saw, different from the Eve of the present, an Eve she had forgotten but who came back to her as herself. As Jonathan had once said, as Bruno had said, she was a clone of that Eve, fatherless, her mother’s double, her mother all over again.

With her mother’s methods, with her mother’s instincts. What would Eve have done? Not put up with it. Never yielded. Eve would have argued, remonstrated, reasoned—as she had—and when all that was to no avail, when they wouldn’t agree or see her point of view, appeared to give in and conciliate them.

Retreating to the kitchen where he couldn’t see her, she reread the instructions on the label of the sodium amytal carton. One would evidently send him to sleep. Two, surely, would put him into a deep sleep. And while he slept? He had often reproached her for not being squeamish enough, for an ability to confront violence and blood and death.

She had never been taught a horror of these things. If she was horrified by any of violent death’s aspects it was at her own weakness in vomiting when she found Bruno’s body. Eve had taught her to be a perfectionist, to be good at everything she did. She would do this well, cleanly, efficiently, and without remorse.

“What time do we start in the morning?” she asked him.

“First thing. Hopefully we can be on our way by eight.”

“At least it’s stopped raining.”

“The weather forecast says an area of high pressure’s coming. It’s going to get cold, cold and bright.”

“Shouldn’t you put the towing bar on tonight?”

“Christ,” he said. “I forgot.”

She doubted if she could do it herself. In the past, when he had done it, she hadn’t bothered to watch him. This evening, of course, she watched him all the time, studying what he did, assessing him in every possible situation, as she had done in those early days when she was in love with him.

Perhaps, at sixteen, you were never in love with the same person for long. It was violent, it was intense, but of short duration. Did teachers like Mr. Spurdell, or people like Eve, ever ask if Juliet would have gone on being in love with Romeo?

Sean worked by the light of a Tilley lamp and a rechargeable battery torch. Wrapped in the thick padded coat, she sat on the caravan steps in the quiet and the darkness, appreciating for the first time how silent it was here and how remote. Like Shrove. This place had the advantages of Shrove. Not a single light was visible, not an isolated pinpoint in any direction across the miles of hills and meadowland. The black land rolled away to meet the nearly black sky. If she strained her ears the gentle chatter of the stream was just audible.

Above her now the stars were coming out, Charles’s Wain pale and spread out and Orion bright and strong. The white planet, still and clear, was Venus. The air had that glittery feel to it, as of unseen frost in the atmosphere. Metal clinking against metal occasionally broke the silence as Sean worked, that and the soft ghostly cries of owls in the invisible trees.

She hooked her thumbs inside the money belt, feeling its thickness. How was it she knew that if she let Sean live and went up north with him he would sooner or later find out about that money and demand it himself? She did know. She could even create the scene in her mind with her telling him it was hers, hers by right of her mother, and Sean saying she wasn’t fit to have charge of money, he’d look after it and put it toward the home they’d buy.

He finished coupling the car to the caravan. They went back inside and he washed his hands. It was late, past eleven, and as he kept saying, they had to get up early.

“Don’t you worry, I’ll wake you,” he said. “You know what you are, sleep like the dead. I don’t reckon you’d ever wake up without me to give you a shake.”

She didn’t argue. Her dissenting role was past and now she was all acquiescence. Eve had given in to Bruno over the house and to Jonathan over the sale of Shrove. Perhaps she had murmured, “Yes, all right,” to Trevor Hughes before she bit his hand. You gave in, you smiled and said a sweet, “You win.” You lulled them into believing theirs was the victory.

“Wake me up at seven and I’ll make you tea.”

It wasn’t unusual for her to say that, she often said and did it. He never had a hot drink at night, always had one in the morning. She put the pill container behind the sugar basin, opened the drawer where they kept cutlery, their blunt knives and forks with bent tines, and checked that the one sharp knife was there, the carver. It was good to be the kind of person who didn’t flinch from weapons or the consequences of using them.

He was already in bed. Her throat felt dry and her stomach muscles tightened as they had on the previous night and the night before. On neither of those nights had he touched her. Last evening he hadn’t even kissed her. But she was afraid just the same, of his strength and her own weakness, knowing now something she’d never realized and would once have refused to believe: that a woman, however young and vigorous, is powerless against a determined man.

When she came to bed and switched off the light she fancied she could feel his eyes on her in the darkness. Gradually, as always happened, she became accustomed to the absence of light, and the darkness ceased to be absolute, became gray rather than black. The moon had risen out there, or half a moon to give so pale a light. It trickled thinly around the window blinds.

His eyes were on her and his lips tentatively touched her cheek. He must have felt her immediate tension for he sighed softly. An enormous relief relaxed her body as he rolled over on his side away from her. She withdrew to the side of the bed, to put as many inches as she could between herself and him.

She would sleep now and in the morning she would kill him.

TWENTY-THREE

D
REAMING
, she was herself and not herself. She was Eve, too. She looked down at her hands and they were Eve’s hands, smaller than hers, the nails longer. A shrinking had reduced her to Eve’s height.

Yet she was in the caravan where Eve had never been. She knew she was dreaming and that somehow, by taking thought, by a process of concentration, she could be herself again. It was dark. She could just make out the shape of Sean lying in bed and a hump in the bedclothes beside him as if another body lay there,
her
body. She had come out of her body the way the ancient Egyptians believed the Ka did. But it felt solid, her hand tingled when she drew a nail across the palm. It was no longer Eve, for Eve had come in and was standing at the foot of the bed.

They looked at each other in silence. Eve’s hands were chained, she had come out of prison, and Liza knew—though not how she knew—that she must go back there. In spite of the chains, painfully, with a great effort, Eve reached up and took the gun down from the caravan wall. There was no gun there but she reached up and took it down. A little moonlight gleamed on the metal. Long ago, years and years ago, Liza had known that her mother took the gun down from the wall but she had never seen her do it.

Eve came up to her, holding the gun in her manacled hands. She did not speak, yet her message communicated itself to Liza. It would be easy. Only the first time was hard. Sleep would still be possible and peace of mind and contentment. Long days of forgetfulness would pass. Eve smiled. She began to whisper confidingly how she had wrapped herself in a sheet, taken a kitchen knife, and crept upstairs to the sleeping Bruno.

Liza cried out then. She reached for Sean, for the bed, for the body of herself and entered it again, her body growing around her, waking as she woke. And then she was up, huddled and crouching in a far corner. The moon still shone and its greenish light still infiltrated the caravan, seeping between window frames and blinds. It was icy cold.

Gradually full wakefulness returned. The cold brought it back. Strangely, the dream had been quite warm. She fumbled around in the half dark, first for Mrs. Spurdell’s pill container, then for the sweater Eve had knitted. As she pulled it over her head, the dreadful feeling came to her that once her eyes were uncovered again she would see Eve standing there, chained, smiling, advising.

She opened her eyes. They were alone, she and Sean. It struck her as very strange, almost unbelievable, that she had meant to kill him.

More cold would come in but still she opened the caravan door. The steps glittered with frost. She prized the top off the pill carton and threw the pills into the long wet grass in the ditch. The frost burned her bare feet and when she was back inside again sharp pains shot through them.

Despair seemed to have been waiting for her in the caravan. It was there in the cold darkness and the smell of bodies and stale food. The world hadn’t fallen apart when Eve told her to go. It was falling apart now, one staunch rock after another tumbling and landsliding, Eve, Sean, herself. Soon the ground beneath her feet would founder and split and swallow her up. She gave a little cry and in an agony of grief and loneliness, flung herself face-downward on the bed, breaking into sobs.

Sean woke up and put the light on. He didn’t ask what was the matter but lifted her up in his arms, held his arms tightly around her, and pulled her close to him, burrowing them both under the covers. Murmuring that her hands were frozen, he squeezed them between their bodies, against his warm body.

“Don’t cry, sweetheart.”

“I can’t help it, I can’t stop.”

“Yes, you can. You will in a minute. I know why you’re crying.”

“You don’t, you can’t.” Because I can’t kill you, because I’ll never kill anyone, because I’m not Eve.

“I do know, Liza. It’s because of what I done the other night, isn’t it? It seemed funny at the time, like a joke, and then I got to remembering what you’d said to me when we first done it, back in the summer, like I’d never make you if you didn’t want to, and I’d said I never would. I’ve been ashamed of myself. I’ve hated myself.”

“Have you?” she whispered. “Have you really?”

“I didn’t know how to say it. I was like embarrassed. In the light, in the daytime, I don’t know, I couldn’t say it. I’m not like you, I can’t express myself like you. I’ve felt that too, maybe you never knew it but I have, you being like superior to me in everything.”

“I’m not, I’m really not.”

“It’s so bloody cold in here I’m going to light the gas. I don’t reckon we’ll sleep no more. It’s nearly six.”