The Crocodile Bird (8 page)

For the next three hours they remained in Shrove House while Mother cleaned the carpets with the vacuum cleaner, dusted the surfaces and the ornaments, and polished the tables. She couldn’t get it all done today, she said, and she explained to Liza how she did a bit one day and another bit two days later and so on, but she hadn’t been in there for two weeks because, as she put it, of one thing and another. She had been afraid of Liza being a nuisance or of breaking something, but Liza had been as good as gold.

Remembering not to run, she had walked through all the rooms, looking at everything, at a table with a glass top and little oval pictures in frames inside, at a small green statue of a man on a horse, at a green jar with black birds and pink flowers on it that was taller than she was. One room was full of books, they were all over the walls where other rooms had paint or paneling. Another, instead of books, had those things hanging up like the one Mother had that made the explosion. She didn’t stay in there for long.

A cabinet in one room was full of dolls in different dresses and she would have loved to touch, to get them out, she
longed
to, but she did what Mother told her, or if she didn’t she made sure Mother couldn’t find out. But mostly she did as she was told because as well as loving Mother so much, she was afraid of her.

The door to a room opening out of that one was shut. Liza tried the handle and it turned, but the door wouldn’t open. It was locked, as her bedroom door used to be locked when Mother went out, and the key gone. Of course she very much wanted to get into that room, as much as anything because the door was locked. She rattled the handle, which did no good.

There were three staircases. By this time she had learned to count up to three—well, to six, in fact. She went up the biggest staircase and down the smallest, having been in every bedroom, and climbed onto one of the window seats—Mother wouldn’t find out, the vacuum cleaner could be heard howling downstairs—and looked across the flat green valley floor to watch a train go by.

If not, then, conscious of beauty, she was aware of light, of how radiantly light the house was everywhere inside. There wasn’t a dark corner or a dim passage. Even when the sun wasn’t shining, as it wasn’t that day, a clear pearly light lit every room and the things inside the rooms gleamed, the glass and the porcelain, the silver and brass and the gilt on the moldings and cornices. The biggest staircase had flowers and fruit carved on the wood on each side of it and the carving gleamed with a deep rich glow, but all she could think of then was how much she would like to slide down the polished banister.

They left at four o’clock, in time to get home for Liza’s reading lesson.

“Doesn’t Mr. Tobias ever live there?” she asked, taking Mother’s hand.

“He never has. His mother did for a while and his grandfather lived there all the time, it was his only home.” She gave Liza a thoughtful glance, as if she was pondering whether the time had come to tell her. “My mother, who was your grandmother, was his housekeeper. And then his nurse. We lived in the gatehouse ourselves, my mother, my father, and I.” Mother squeezed Liza’s hand. “You’re too young for this, Lizzie. Look up in the ash tree, see the green woodpecker? On the trunk, picking insects out with his beak?”

So if the day the man with the beard came was called the Day of the Kingfisher, this was the Day of the Woodpecker, the day of the first visit to Shrove.

After that Liza always went with Mother to Shrove and now, when Mother went to town on the bus, instead of locking Liza in her bedroom in the cottage, she put her in one of the Shrove bedrooms. Mostly it was the one called the Venetian Room because the four-poster bed had its posts made out of the poles used by gondoliers in Venice, Mother said. Liza could read quite well by the time she was five and had a real book in the room with her. She wasn’t in the least frightened of being shut up in the Venetian Room at Shrove, she wouldn’t have been frightened of being in her own room anymore, but she did ask Mother why Shrove and not at home.

“Because Shrove has central heating and we don’t. I can be sure you’re warm enough. They have to keep the heating on all winter because of the damp, even though no one lives there. If it was allowed to get damp the furniture might be spoiled.”

“Why is the little room next to the morning room always locked up?”

“Is it?” said Mother. “I seem to have mislaid the key.”

Shrove was to become her library and her picture gallery. More than that, for the paintings were a guide to her and a catalog of people’s faces. To them she ran when she needed to identify a new person or when confirmation was required. They were her standard of comparison and her secondhand portrait of the outside world. This was how other people looked, this what they wore, these the chairs they sat on, the other countries they lived in, the things their eyes saw.

In the cold depths of winter, a very cold one when the river froze over and the water meadows disappeared under snow for a whole month, a black car with chains on its tires slid slowly down the lane and parked in the deep snow outside the gatehouse. There were two men inside. One stayed in the car and the other one came to the front door and rang the bell. He was a fat man with no hair at all but for a fairish fringe surrounding the great shiny pale egg that was his head.

By chance, Liza and Mother had been sitting side by side at Mother’s bedroom window, watching the birds feeding from the nut feeders they had hung on the branches of the balsam tree. They saw the car come and the man come to the door.

“If he talks to you you are not to say anything but ‘I don’t know,’” said Mother, “and you can cry a bit if you like. You might like that, it might amuse you.”

Liza never found out who the man was. Of course she guessed later on. He said he was looking for a missing person, a man called Hugh something. She had forgotten his other name but Hugh she remembered.

Hugh came from Swansea, was around these parts last July on a walking holiday, but left the B and B he was stopping at without paying for his two nights. The fat man talked a lot more about Hugh and why they were looking for him and what was making them look six months later, but Liza didn’t understand any of it. He described Hugh, which she did understand, she remembered his fair beard, she remembered tufts of it in Rudi’s mouth.

“We are very quiet down here, Inspector,” Mother said. “We see hardly anyone.”

“A lonely life.”

“It depends what suits you.”

“And you never saw this man?” He showed Mother something in the palm of his hand and Mother looked at it, shaking her head. “You didn’t see him in the lane or walking the footpath?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Mother lifted her face and looked deep into the fat man’s eyes when she said this. Although it meant nothing at the time, when she was older, thinking back and comparing her own personal experience, Liza understood how Mother’s look must have affected him. Her full red lips were slightly parted, her eyes large and lustrous, her skin creamy and her expression oh so winsome and trusting. About her shoulders her glorious hair, a rich, dark shining brown, hung like a silk cape. She had one small white finger pressed against her lower lip.

“It was just a possibility,” the fat man said, unable to take his eyes off her, but having to, having to drag his eyes away and speak to Liza. “I don’t suppose this young lady saw him.”

She was shown the photograph. Apart from prints on the fronts of Mother’s books, it was the first she had ever seen, but she didn’t say so. She looked at the face which had frightened her and which Heidi and Rudi had ruined with their teeth, looked at it and said, “I don’t know.”

This made him eager. “So you might have?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have another look, my love, look closely and try to remember.”

Liza was growing frightened. She was letting Mother down, she was obeying Mother but letting her down just the same. The man’s face was horrible, the bearded man called Hugh, cruel and sneering, and who knew what he would have done if Mother hadn’t …

She didn’t have to pretend to cry. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” she screamed and burst into tears.

The fat man went away, apologizing to Mother, shaking hands with her and holding her hand a long time, and when he had gone Mother roared with laughter. She said Liza had been excellent, quite excellent, and she hugged her, laughing into her hair. For all that she loved Liza and cared for her, she hadn’t understood that she had been really frightened, really shy of people, really bewildered.

It took the driver a long time to get the car started and an even longer time to pull it out of the snow without its wheels spinning. Liza calmed down and began to enjoy herself. She and Mother watched the driver’s struggles from the bedroom window with great interest.

The snow went away and the spring came. Most of the trees that were coniferous looked just the same, always the same greenish black or light smoky blue, but the larches and the swamp cypresses grew new leaves like clumps of fur of an exquisite pale and delicate green. Mother explained that larches too were deciduous conifers and the only ones native to the British Isles.

Primroses with sunny round faces appeared under the hedges and clusters of velvety purple violets close by the boles of trees. Wood anemones, that were also called windflowers and had petals like tissue paper, grew in the clearings of the wood. Mother told Liza to be careful never to pronounce them an-en-omies, as so many people did who ought to know better. Liza hardly talked to anyone but Mother, so was unlikely to hear the wrong pronunciation.

Except the postman, though they didn’t discuss botany. And the milkman, who noticed nothing but the trains and the signs of changes in the weather, and the oilman who came to fill Shrove’s heating tank in March, and Mr. Frost, the gardener who mowed the grass and trimmed the hedges and sometimes pulled out the weeds.

Mr. Frost went on never speaking. They saw him ride past the gatehouse on his bicycle and if he saw them he waved. He waved from his mowing machine if he happened to be there when they walked up the drive to Shrove. The oilman only came twice a year, in September and again in March. Liza had never talked to him, though Mother did for about five minutes, or listened rather, and listened impatiently, while he told her about his flat in Spain and how he had found a cut-rate flight to Malaga that was so reasonable you wouldn’t believe. Liza didn’t know what that meant, so Mother explained how he went across the sea in one of those things that flew overhead sometimes and made a buzzing noise about it, unlike birds.

The milkman said, “It feels like spring,” which was silly because it
was
spring, and “Here comes the train,” that he needn’t have bothered to say because anyone could see and hear it.

They got very few letters. Liza never got any. Letters came for Mother sometimes, from someone called her aunt, though she never explained what an aunt was, from her friend Heather in London, and one regularly once a month from Mr. Tobias. This one had a piece of pink paper in it, which Mother said was a check. When next she went to the shops she took the pink paper with her and took it to a bank and they turned it into money. Like a good fairy waving a wand, suggested Liza, who was much into fairy tales at that time, but Mother said, no, not like that, and explained that this was money which she had earned for cleaning Mr. Tobias’s house and looking after it and seeing it came to no harm.

In April the dogs came again to stay. Matt brought them and told Mother that Mr. Tobias had gone to somewhere called the Caribbean this time, not France. Liza hugged Heidi and Rudi, who knew her at once and were overjoyed to see her. Had they forgotten the man with the beard called Hugh? Had they forgotten how they attacked him? Liza wondered if they would attack Matt if she called out, “Kill!”

“Why doesn’t Mr. Tobias ever come himself?” Liza asked Mother while they were out in the meadows with the dogs.

“I don’t know, Lizzie,” Mother said and she sighed.

“Doesn’t he like it here?”

“He seems to like it better in the Dordogne and Moçambique and Montagu Square and the horrible old Lake District,” said Mother incomprehensibly. “But perhaps he will come one day. Of course he’ll come one day, you’ll see.”

Instead of coming himself, he sent a postcard. It had a picture on it of silver sand and palm trees and a blue, blue sea. On the back Mr. Tobias had written:
This is a wonderful place. It’s good to get away from cold, gray England in the cruelest month, though I hardly suppose you would agree. Say hallo to Heidi and Rudi for me and to your daughter, of course. Ever, J. T.

Liza couldn’t read joined-up writing, even the beautiful curvy large kind like Mr. Tobias’s, so Mother read it to her. Mother made a face and said she didn’t like him putting his dogs before her daughter but Liza didn’t mind.

“I know what T’s for,” she said, “but what’s his name that starts with J?”

“Jonathan,” said Mother.

By the time the summer came, Liza could read Beatrix Potter and the Andrew Lang fairy books if the print was large enough. She could write her name and address and simple sentences, printing of course, and she could tell the time and count to twenty and add up easy sums. Mother took her into the library at Shrove and said that when she was older she would be welcome to read all the books in there she wanted. Mr. Tobias had told
her
to help herself to any books she fancied reading, he knew she loved reading, and of course that invitation extended to her daughter.

“Jonathan,” said Liza.

“Yes, Jonathan, but you must call him Mr. Tobias.”

There were history books and geography books and books about languages and philosophy and religion. Liza noted the words without understanding their meaning. Mother said there were also a great many books that were stories, which meant made-up things, not things that had really happened, they were novels. Most of them had been written a long time ago, more than a hundred years ago, which wasn’t surprising since they had belonged to Mr. Tobias’s grandfather’s father, who had bought the house when he got rich in 1862. The books were rather old-fashioned now, Mother said, but perhaps that was no bad thing, and she looked at Liza with her head to one side.