The Crocodile Bird (7 page)

“It certainly does,” said Mother, not very pleasantly.

“You’d think he’d get himself a girl—well, he does, but nothing permanent.” Matt spoke as if Mother didn’t know it all already. “Of course he’s loaded, got his own place and this here and the London one and there’s girls falling over themselves to get him, but to be perfectly honest with you he’s just not interested.” He winked incomprehensibly at Liza. “Not in settling down, I mean.”

In spite of what had happened, Liza wasn’t afraid to put her arms around each dog’s neck and place a tender kiss on each glossy black skull. She cried a bit when they had gone. She asked Mother if they could have a dog of their own.

“No, absolutely not. Don’t ask me.”

“Why couldn’t we, Mother, why couldn’t we? I do want a dog, I love Heidi and Rudi, I do want one of my own.”

“Then you must want.” Mother smiled when she said it, she wasn’t angry, and she called Liza Lizzie, which she sometimes did when she was pleased with her or not too disappointed in her. “Listen, Lizzie, suppose Mr. Tobias came to live at Shrove? He might, it’s his house—one of his houses. Then Heidi and Rudi would come with him and what would happen to our dog?

They don’t like other dogs, they’d attack it. They’d hurt it.”

Like they hurt the man, Liza felt like saying but she didn’t say it. Instead, she said, “Is he going to come? I’d like him to come because then we’d have
his
dogs and we wouldn’t have to have our own. Is he going to come?”

Mother said nothing for a moment. Then she put her arm around Liza and pulled her close against her skirts and said, “I hope so, Lizzie, I hope he will,” but she wasn’t smiling and she gave a heavy sigh.

Next day was Mother’s day for going shopping. She went once a fortnight to get the things the milkman wouldn’t bring. He brought butter and eggs and porridge oats and orange juice and bread and yogurt as well as milk, but he never brought meat or fish. Until they grew their own, Mother had to buy vegetables. She had to buy fruit and cheese. The bus that went to the shops—to town, that is—ran four times a day and Mother had to walk down the lane and go over the river bridge and a hundred yards along the road to the bus stop. When Mother went to town she never took Liza with her. Liza was locked up in her bedroom.

She was used to it and she accepted, but not this time. At first she gave in, sat on the bed with the rag book and the pencils, sucked at her orange juice bottle. Mother had given her an apple as well for a treat, a Golden Delicious because there were no English ones in July. She knelt on the bed and watched Mother go along the lane toward the main road. Then she shifted her gaze from the distance to the foreground and saw where the man had been and the dogs and the explosion had happened. She began to scream.

Probably she couldn’t have screamed for the whole hour and a half Mother was away. Halfway through she may have fallen asleep. But she was screaming when Mother came back. Mother said, “I won’t leave you again,” and she didn’t for a long while but of course she did again one day.

It might have been that evening or an evening days or weeks later, at any rate it was after the dogs had gone, that Liza was playing her roving-between-the-bedrooms game after bedtime. She tried on Mother’s straw hats, the golden one with the white band and the brown one with the cream scarf tied around it, and she stroked Mother’s suede shoes, that had things inexplicably called trees thrust into them. When she was tired of that she looked inside the jewel case.

Mother was wearing one set of earrings and the mother-of-pearl brooch, so of course those things weren’t in there. Liza hung the jade beads around her own neck, put the comb with the shiny bits on it into her hair, and admired the result in the mirror. She picked up the wooden brooch and found lying underneath it a gold ring.

Whose could it be? She had never seen it before, she had never seen any ring on Mother’s hand. Examining it with great interest, she saw that there was some writing on the inside of the ring, but she was only four then and she couldn’t read very well. Nor did she at that time connect the ring with the man with the beard.

“It was his ring?” said Sean.

“It must have been. I looked at it again later, when I could read. The writing said: TMH AND EHH, MARCH 3, 1974. I didn’t know what it meant then, but now I think it was his wedding ring. Victoria had a wedding ring. Do men have them?”

“I reckon there’s some as do.”

“Those were his initials and his wife’s and that was the date they got married, don’t you think?”

“She must have took it off him, off his hand,” said Sean, making a face.

“I don’t know why she did unless she thought she might sell it one day. Or maybe she thought if she buried it with him someone might dig it up.”

“Why did she do it?”

“Do what? Shoot that man?”

“Why didn’t she get an ambulance, have him taken to the hospital? You said he could sit up, he’d have got all right. It wasn’t her fault, no one’d have put the blame on her, not if she said he’d been going to rape her.”

“I never knew quite why,” Liza said, “but it might have been something like this. Later on someone told me a story about a child being attacked by dogs and I put two and two together. It was Bruno, as a matter of fact, he told me. You see, the man would have told them at the hospital and they’d have told the police. About the dogs, I mean. And the dogs would have been killed.”

“Destroyed.”

“Yes, I expect that’s the word. The dogs would have been destroyed like the ones in Bruno’s story. Mr. Tobias loved his dogs and he’d have blamed Eve and given her the sack and turned us out of the gatehouse. Or that’s what she thought. Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t, but she thought he would and that was the important thing. She couldn’t leave Shrove, you see, she couldn’t, that was the most important thing in the world to her, Shrove, more important even than me. Well, Mr. Tobias was important to her too but only in a special sort of way.”

Sean was looking bewildered. “You’ve lost me.”

“Never mind. That’s really all there was to it. If the dogs had killed the man she wouldn’t have had to kill him. I expect that’s the way she thought. But they hadn’t killed him, so she had to, or else he’d have told the police. She shut the dogs up and went into the house and got the gun and shot him.”

“Just for that? Just so Tobias wouldn’t get mad at her?”

Liza looked at him doubtfully. “I don’t know. Now you put it like that, I really don’t know. Perhaps there was more to it. Perhaps she had some other reason, something to make her hate him, but we’re never going to know that, are we?”

She watched Sean as he got up and washed at the sink. He put his jeans back on again and found himself a clean T-shirt. It occurred to her that she hadn’t any clothes except the ones lying in a heap on the floor. She’d have to wear his, or those of his that would fit her, and when she’d made some money picking apples … The hundred pounds, she had forgotten the hundred pounds.

“I want to drive into town, wherever that is,” she said, “and go and eat in a real restaurant. Can we?”

“’Course we can. Why not? We can go and have a Chinese.”

Liza washed her knickers and her socks at the sink. She had to put her jeans on over nothing but that didn’t much matter. Her jeans were a cause of great pride, not least because it had been such a struggle getting Eve to let her have them. She’d managed to get two pairs, these and a pair she’d left behind. Eve hated trousers and had never worn jeans in all her life. Liza borrowed a long-sleeved check shirt with a collar from Sean and thought a little about Eve, wondering where she was now and what was happening to her.

Sean had been thinking the same thing. “We ought to get a paper tomorrow. You haven’t never seen a paper, I suppose? A newspaper, I mean.”

“Oh, yes, I have.” She was a bit huffy. Once, in a magazine rack at Shrove, she had found a newspaper called
The Times
and the date on it was the year before she was born. Eve had taken it away before she could read much of it. “What we ought to get is television.”

“Now there’s something you’ve never seen, telly, I bet.”

She answered him in quite a lofty way. “I used to watch it at Shrove every single day. Eve never knew, she’d have stopped it but I didn’t tell her. It was a secret thing I did.”

“Like me,” said Sean.

“Not really like you. You’re much better. But I didn’t know you then. I watched it for
years
till the set broke and Jonathan wouldn’t have it mended.” The expression on his face made her laugh. “Could we have one in here? Would your generator work it?”

“Hopefully,” he said. “’Course it would.”

“Then I’m going to buy one.” A thought struck her. “Only, I don’t know—is a hundred pounds a lot of money, Sean?”

He said rather bitterly, “It’s a lot for us, love,” and then, “Hopefully it’d buy a little portable telly but I don’t know about color.”

Her eyes grew wide. “Does it come in color? Does it really?”

When they went outside to the car they saw that the other van, the camper, wasn’t unoccupied as they had at first thought. A light was on inside it and the blind was raised in the window nearest to the roadway. They had to pass it to get out. Inside, a fiercer, bluer glow than the overhead lamp indicated the presence of a television screen, and as they passed within a few feet Liza saw the little rectangle filled with dazzling color, emerald-green grass, yellow-spotted leaves, and an orange-and-black tiger prowling.

“What a lot I’ve got to catch up with,” she said.

Life at the gatehouse had been of the simplest. Much of it would seem dull to Sean, incredible. There was a good deal she wouldn’t tell him but keep locked in her memory. For instance, how, because Eve wouldn’t leave her alone in the cottage anymore even with the doors locked, couldn’t bring herself to do that when she screamed so piteously, she had been obliged to take Liza with her.

And that was how she came to enter Shrove House for the first time. The palace, the house of pictures and secrets, dolls and keys, books and shadows. Sean would never see it quite like that, no one would but herself and Eve. Most of all Eve.

FIVE

T
HEY
walked up the drive between the trees, the hornbeams that were nearly round in shape and the larches that were pointed, the silver birches whose leaves trembled in the breeze and the swamp cypresses that came from Louisiana but grew happily here because it was damp by the river. There were giant cedars and even taller Douglas firs and Wellingtonias taller than that, black trees you saw as dark green only when you were close up underneath them. The trees parted and she saw the house for the first time and to her then it was no more than a big house with an enormous lot of windows.

A man was mowing the grass, sitting up in a high chair on wheels. She had seen him once or twice before and was often to see him again. His name was Mr. Frost, he wasn’t a young man, but had wrinkles and white hair, and he came on his bicycle from the village on the other side of the river. White hair was only another kind of fair hair and his confirmed Liza’s belief. He raised one hand to Mother and Mother nodded but they didn’t speak.

Steps went up one side to the front door of Shrove and then there was a kind of platform before the stairs ran down the other side. The stairs had railings like theirs at the gatehouse but the rails here were made of stone with a broad stone shelf running along the tops of them. On the shelf were stone vases from which ivy hung and between the vases stone people stood looking toward the trees.

Liza and Mother went up the flight on the left and Liza held on to the stone railings. Everything was very large and this made her feel smaller than usual. She looked up, as Mother told her, to see the coat of arms, the sword, the shield, the lions. The house towered, its windows shiny sheets, its roof lost in the sky. Mother unlocked the front door and they went in.

“You will not rush about, Liza,” Mother said, “and you will not climb on the furniture. Do you understand? Let me see your hands.”

Liza held them out. They were very clean because Mother had made her wash them before they came out and she had held Mother’s hand all the way.

“All right. You can’t get them dirty in here. Now, remember,
walk,
don’t run.”

The carpets were soft and thick underfoot and the ceilings were very high. None of the ceilings was white but done in gold and black squares or painted like a blue sky with white clouds and people with wings flying across it, trailing scarves and ribbons and bunches of flowers. The lamps were like raindrops when it is raining very hard and some of the walls had things like thin carpets hanging on them. A huge painting covered one entire wall. Mother called it
The Birthday of Achilles
and it showed a lot of men in helmets and women in white robes all rushing to pick up a golden apple while a woman in green with flowers stood by holding a fat naked baby.

Mother took her through the drawing room and showed her the fireplace with the lady’s face on it, the screen painted with flowers, and the tables that were of shiny wood with shiny metal bits on it and some with mother-of-pearl like mother’s brooch. The tall glass doors were framed in mahogany, Mother said, and they were more than two hundred years old but as good as new. Liza and Mother went through the doorway out onto the terrace at the back, and when Liza ran down the steps and stood on the lawn and looked up at Mother, she was frightened for a moment because the back of the house was the same as the front, the same coat of arms, sword, shield, and lion, the same railing around the roof and up the stairs, the same windows and the same statues standing in the alcoves.

Mother called out to her that it was all right, it was supposed to be that way, but that if she looked closely she would see it wasn’t quite the same. The statues were women, not men, there was no front door, and instead of ivy, small dark pointed trees grew in the stone urns on the terrace.

So Liza ran up again and she and Mother made their way to the kitchen. Mother unhooked an apron from behind a cupboard door, a big ugly brown apron, and wrapped it around herself, covering up her white cotton blouse and long, full green-and-blue skirt. She took a clean yellow duster from a pile and tied her head up so that you couldn’t see her hair, she trundled out a vacuum cleaner and found a large, deep tin of mauve polish that smelled of lavender.