The Crocodile Bird (15 page)

Mother wrote to Mr. (not Mrs.) Tobias and said she’d found a cleaning woman called Dorothy Cooper who would come once a week and if he sent the money to her she would pay her. In the week before Easter, Mother gave Shrove House a tremendous spring clean while Liza sat in the library reading
Jane Eyre.
That is, for most of the time she read
Jane Eyre.
She also carried the steps out of the library and into the morning room.

At the morning room windows hung long heavy curtains of slate-gray velvet. Even when you pulled the cords that drew them across the windows they still covered about two feet of the gray-and-white wall on either side. Liza put the steps up against the wall on the right-hand side of the right-hand window. The curtains covered them, you couldn’t see they were there.

It was just as well she hadn’t used them to get the key down and open the door because, when she had finished upstairs, Mother came into the morning room, climbed onto a chair and then onto the sideboard, and reached up for the key on top of the picture frame. Liza crept out of the library and watched her from the morning room doorway. Mother unlocked the door and went into the secret room, pulling the vacuum cleaner behind her.

She was in there for half an hour. Liza kept dodging from the library to the morning room door to check on her. When she heard the howl of the vacuum cleaner from the morning room she went to the door and said she was hungry and could they go home and have lunch?

The key was in the lock of the door to the secret room. It had to be, of course it did, because Mr. and Mrs. Tobias and their friends were coming. Liza and Mother had their lunch in the Shrove kitchen and all the time Liza was thinking, perhaps the key will still be in that lock after they have gone away again.

It wasn’t. Liza thought Mother had probably gone over there and put it back on the picture before she was even up. She had seen very little of Mr. and Mrs. Tobias and their friends, just the Mercedes going by once or twice with the other car following behind and once caught a glimpse of Claire and a tall old woman in a tweed skirt down on the Shrove lawn with golf clubs. Could it be Caroline? Could
that
be the Caroline of the plump white shoulders and the lipstick-colored dress? But one evening, after she had gone to bed, she heard someone come to their front door. There was a low murmur of voices, a man’s and Mother’s.

She was almost but not quite sure the other voice was Mr. Tobias’s. They were downstairs in the living room, talking, and she crept out of bed to listen at the top of the stairs. But Mother must have heard her because she came out and called up to Liza to go back to bed at once.

The murmur went on and on, then she heard the front door close and Mother come up to bed. If Mother had been crying it wouldn’t have surprised her, she didn’t know why, but instead Mother was talking out loud to herself. It was uncanny and rather frightening.

“It’s all over,” Mother was saying. “You have to get it into your head that it’s all over. You have to start again. Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”

Did that mean they were going away?

“Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new,” Mother murmured and closed her bedroom door.

“No, of course we’re not leaving,” Mother said in the morning. “What on earth gave you that idea? Mr. and Mrs. Tobias are leaving and goodness knows when they’ll come back again.”

Liza saw the cars come down the drive from Shrove House, the Mercedes with Mr. Tobias driving and Mrs. Tobias beside him and Claire in the back. A minute later along came the other car with the man driving and Caroline Ellison beside him. It stopped outside the gatehouse and the man sounded his horn. Liza didn’t know what he meant by it but Mother did. Mother was furious. I’m not going out there, I’m not being summoned in that way, she was fuming, it’s like the Royal Family stopping outside some keeper’s house. But she did go out and talked to Lady Ellison.

This enabled Liza to get a good look at Mr. Tobias’s mother, who had actually got out of the car. She was so tall she made Mother look child-sized. And Mother made her look like a giantess as well as uglier than ever. Liza thought her hands were like a hawk’s claws that had been dipped in some poor small animal’s blood.

Mother came back into the house making terrible faces of rage and disgust, which the people in the cars couldn’t see because her back was to them. The cars were hardly out of sight before she and Liza were up at Shrove House, where there was an awful mess to be cleared up. No doubt, Mrs. Tobias thought Dorothy Cooper would be clearing it up. That was when Liza found the secret room door locked and the key, so far as she knew, back on top of the picture.

It was May now but not very warm, though beautiful to look at, as Mother kept saying. The new leaves were a sharp fresh green and the cream and red flowers on the broom were out, sweet smelling and covered with bees. Last autumn Mr. Frost had planted hundreds of wallflowers. Like folds of multicolored velvet they were, red and amber and gold and chestnut brown, spread across a whole sweep of land with not a blade of green to be seen between them. Liza picked speedwell for her wildflower collection and Mother said she could take one, but just one, cowslip.

They had lunch at home. The afternoon was for Latin, arithmetic, and geography. Liza was doing long division when the doorbell rang. Because the doorbell hardly ever rang it was always a shock when it did.

“That will be Mr. Frost wanting something,” Mother said, though he hardly ever did want anything.

She opened the door. A man was standing there. His car, which was the orange color of a satsuma and looked as if made of painted cardboard, was parked outside their gate. He was quite a young man with curly brown hair long enough to reach his shoulders and very big blue eyes with long lashes like a girl’s. Well, like hers or Mother’s. There were little brown dots, which Mother later explained were freckles, sprinkled on his small straight nose. His lips were red and his small teeth very white. He wore blue jeans and a denim jacket over a check shirt and a gold ornament hanging from a chain around his neck. Liza stared fascinated at the earrings he wore, two gold rings both in the same ear. He was carrying a bag made out of a carpet. It looked as if it was made from one of the Persian rugs at Shrove.

“Oh, hi,” he said. “This really is the end of the world, isn’t it? I’m amazed that I’ve found you. Let me introduce myself. My name is Bruno Drummond.”

NINE

L
IZA
said she was like Scheherazade, telling her man stories every night. Only Sean wouldn’t chop her head off in the morning, would he, if one night she was so worn out she couldn’t collect her thoughts? Sean said, who was that then, that She-whatever, but Liza was too tired to explain.

They were both exhausted, picking Coxes. The crop was a particularly big one this year. They picked from first thing in the morning until sunset, which was as long as Mr. Vanner would let them. He said he’d have to take on extra labor to cope with the crop and they wanted to stop him, they wanted to earn all the money that was going, but it was a losing battle. On the third morning a troop of women moved in to help, housewives from the village that was a mile away.

Sean wanted to hear more about Bruno, but Liza was too tired to tell him, too tired to watch the little colored television set she’d finally bought with the hundred pounds and some apple money, too tired for everything but making love, and they only managed that because it happened in bed and they fell asleep straight afterward.

The news was something Liza had seldom been able to watch on television even if she had wanted to. It is rarely transmitted between two and five in the afternoon. Now she learned it was for mornings and evenings, so she watched it at breakfast time and, once the women had come and there was no point in working so hard, at six o’clock and nine. She was looking for something about Eve. But there never was anything.

“That’s because they’ve had her in court,” Sean said, “and now she’s on what-d’you-call-it, remand, that’s it, remand, and the papers and the telly can’t have anything on about her until she comes up in court again.”

This was very much what Eve herself had told her. She admired him for knowing it. Feeling very pleased that he knew about this legal matter, she realized she had begun accepting that she knew much more than he did about almost everything but the absolutely practical things. Of course he
thought
he knew more than she, but she could tell that mostly he didn’t. When it was books and music and nature and art and history, she knew it all and he knew nothing, so she was pleasantly surprised.

“When will that happen, Eve coming up in court?” she asked him.

“Not for weeks, maybe months.”

She was disappointed. “Where do they do it, this remand?”

“In prison.”

Her knowledge of that had its base on her reading of fiction,
A Tale of Two Cities
and
The Count of Monte Cristo.
She saw Victorian hellholes, she saw dungeons with a tiny barred window up in the wall.

“What do you care?” he said. “You ran away, you got out of that and quite right too.”

“I’m tired, Sean. I’ve got to go to sleep.”

She crept into his arms, her naked body close up against his. The nights were starting to get cold. He slid his mouth over hers and entered her smoothly as if it were the natural next step. They were like that, locked together, when she woke up in the deep night and moved her body gently to arouse him again. He said sleepily that he loved her and she said, I love you too, Sean.

Next day wasn’t the last one for picking the Coxes but Friday would be. Kevin said he was moving on before the end of the week and why didn’t they follow him. They were advertising for unskilled hands at the Styrofoam packings works on an industrial estate ten miles away. Kevin thought he’d give it a go.

But Sean wasn’t interested. He knocked off early, spruced himself up, put on a clean shirt and jeans, and went into town to apply for the supermarket job. Liza wasn’t a bit surprised to hear he’d got it. They asked Kevin in to share a couple of bottles of wine. Kevin said his telly wasn’t a patch on hers, it was wonderful, really, the way the colors came up so bright and the picture so sharp on a screen that size.

Liza said good-bye to the dog. She put her arms around it and its cold nose nuzzled her neck. It was a gentle mild creature. The feel of the fine skull and sleek black pelt under her lips reminded her once more of Heidi. It still made her indignant, thinking of how Mr. Tobias had simply ditched Heidi when he married Victoria, handed her over to Matt as if she were a piece of furniture he didn’t need anymore.

She had still liked Mr. Tobias, but her affection for him had been shaken by his treatment of Heidi. To handle that she had blamed the changes in him on Victoria, as she guessed her mother did. It was Victoria who made him shoot things and Victoria who kept him away from Shrove.

Perhaps Victoria would die. Dogs died, so why not people? It was about this time that she began fantasizing how life would be if Mr. Tobias married Eve and they both went to live at Shrove House. Like children in books, she would have a father as well as a mother.

Sean was to start his job on Monday. They’d have to find somewhere else to put the caravan but before that he was going to take advantage of being on Vanner’s land.

He often called her Teacher when she imparted information. This time, he said, he was going to teach her something. He’d teach her to drive.

She wouldn’t be old enough to get a license till she was seventeen, which would be in January, but she could drive on the tracks around the orchards, that was private land. They picked the last row of trees on Friday morning and collected the last pay they would get. Then Sean got her up in the driving seat of the Dolomite and taught her how to start it and use the gears. It wasn’t difficult.

“Like a duck to water,” Sean said, very pleased.

She wanted to drive out onto the road and take them to wherever the new place they were going to park would be, but Sean said no. It wasn’t worth the risk. They couldn’t afford to pay fines. Reluctantly, Liza agreed.

“I suppose I can’t risk the police getting hold of me.”

“Anyway, it’s against the law,” Sean said very seriously.

She sat in the passenger seat next to him, eating Coxes. She’d filled a cardboard box with apples she’d picked up. Vanner was so mean he didn’t even like the pickers taking home windfalls.

“You mind he don’t put the fuzz on you,” Sean said, but he laughed and she knew he was joking. Then he said, out of the blue, “Your mum, she ever try to get this Tobias away from his wife?”

“What made you suddenly ask that?”

“I reckon I was thinking about the cops and about them catching her and remembering you never said if he come back again after he had all them people there for the weekend.”

“Well, she never did, no. At least, so far as I know she didn’t. She didn’t get a chance, did she, with him so far away and then we hadn’t a phone or a car, we were trapped down there in a way.”

“But wasn’t that what she wanted?”

“Oh, yes, it was what she wanted. She wanted to be at Shrove and be undisturbed and isolated, but what she’d wanted most was to
own
Shrove. I think she gave up that idea when he got married. I mean, she gave it up for a while. It was very hard for her, she’d counted on it for so long, but she had to give it up. Of course, I don’t know what went on in her mind, I was only a child, but I think she regretted a lot of things, she had bitter recriminations.”

“Come again?”

“I mean she was sorry she hadn’t behaved differently. You see, maybe if we’d gone to London with him when he first asked or gone traveling with him, he’d have got so close to her he’d have thought he couldn’t live without her. It might only have been for a year or two and then we could have all come back to Shrove together. He and she were mad about each other then, I’m sure they were, like you and I are.”

“That’s true anyway,” said Sean with a smile, looking pleased that she’d said it.