The Crocodile Bird (16 page)

“But she wouldn’t because of me. She was determined to bring me up without—well, the contamination of the world. I wasn’t to be allowed to suffer as she’d suffered. If she’d gone to London with Mr. Tobias she’d have had to send me to school there and I’d have met other children and seen all sorts of things, I suppose. You could say she put me first or perhaps she just put Shrove first. The irony was that she lost Mr. Tobias because she put his house first. As for me, I’d have loved to live at Shrove House and have Jonathan Tobias for my father. You’ll laugh but I used to think that if I lived there and it was mine I could get into that room.”

Sean did laugh. “But he married someone else and that was the end of her love life.”

“Oh, no, you could say it was the beginning of it. That was when Bruno came. Now that I’m grown up, I think I know what went through her mind. She thought, I’ve lost Jonathan, I can’t waste my whole life mooning over him, so I might as well cut my losses and have a new lover. She was only a bit over thirty, Sean, she was young. She couldn’t give up everything.”

“How about that bathroom? Did he have it done?”

“In the end. Not for years. He forgot about it the minute Shrove was out of sight. He meant to do it but he just forgot, he was very thoughtless. When I think about it all now I really believe that when Shrove was out of sight he forgot about Eve too. She’d come into his mind once or twice a year and then he’d send her a postcard.”

The place they found to park the caravan was a piece of waste ground at the point where a bridle path turned off a lane. No one used it much. People on horseback might notice they were there, but it could be weeks before whoever owned the land did. Law-abiding Sean had tried to find out who that was but had failed. The difficulty was that there was no water supply apart from the stream that tumbled over rocks under the stone bridge a little way up the lane. That was all right to drink, Liza told the dubious Sean. Mostly they’d boil it, anyway. They could get washed in the public swimming pool next to the supermarket he’d be working at. She was full of plans. Of much of the world she might be ignorant, but she knew how to
manage.

The day he started she was left alone. Winter was coming and it had started to get cold. They heated the caravan with bottled gas and an oil heater, so that was all right, but for the first time in her life she had nothing to do.

It was rainy and cold out there, but she went out and walked along the public footpath down to the stream and over the bridge close by the ford. The leaves were falling now, gently and sadly dropping from the boughs because there was no wind. They floated down to make another layer on the wet slippery mass underfoot. Leaves coated the surface of the sluggish stream. The sky was gray and of a uniform unbroken cloudiness. She walked for miles along woodland paths and meadow edges, keeping the church tower always in sight so that she would know how to find her way back.

Once or twice she crossed a road, but she saw no one and no traffic passed her. A muntjac stag appeared under the trees, showed her his top-heavy antlers, and fled through the bracken. Jays called to one another to warn of her approach. She gathered all kinds of fungus but, in spite of her knowledge, feared to cook them and shed a trail of agarics and lepiotas as she walked. When it was about noon, according to her haphazard but usually accurate calculations, she made for home.

There, with no prospect of Sean coming home for four hours, she was at a loss. Never before had she been without something to read. There was no paper in the caravan and nothing to write with, no means of playing music, no collections to pore over, no needles or thread to sew with. At last she turned on the television. An old Powell and Pressburger film with Wendy Hiller in it mystified her as such films had when the Shrove House set was available to her. Had such people ever existed, talked like that, dressed in those clothes? Or was it as much a fairy tale as Scheherazade?

When Sean came back she had fallen asleep. The television was still on and he got cross, saying she was wasting power. Next day she went with him into the town and applied for the job with Mrs. Spurdell.

Liza said she was eighteen. She had no references because she had never worked for anyone before, but she knew all about housework. She had watched Eve and later on helped Eve.

The house in Aspen Close was a little like the house Bruno had wanted them all to live in. But inside was different. She had never before seen anything like this large, dull, ugly room carpeted and curtained in beige, with no pictures on the walls and no mirrors and, as far as she could see, no books. Flowers that could not be real, artificial white peonies and blue delphiniums and pink chrysanthemums filled beige pottery bowls. Across the middle of a table and along the top of a cabinet lay pale green lace runners.

Mrs. Spurdell was the same color, except that her hair was white. Her fat body was squeezed into a pale green wool dress and underneath that, Liza thought, must be some kind of controlling rubber garment that made her shape so smooth, yet segmented and undulant. Like a plump caterpillar shortly to become a chrysalis. The shoes she wore, shiny beige with high heels, looked as if they hurt her ankles, which bulged over the sides of them.

Liza was shy at first. If Mrs. Spurdell had been kind and friendly she might have found things easier, but this fat old woman with the surly expression made her speak abruptly and perhaps too precisely.

“You don’t sound the sort of person I was looking for,” Mrs. Spurdell was moved to say. “Frankly, you sound more as if you’d be off to university than looking for a daily’s job.”

Liza thought about that one. It gave her ideas but of course she didn’t voice them. She said, “If I can work for you I’d do it properly.”

Mrs. Spurdell sighed. “You’d better see the rest of the house. It might be too much for you.”

“No, it wouldn’t.”

But Liza went upstairs with Mrs. Spurdell, walking behind her. The caterpillar waist and hips and the wobbly fat legs threatened to make her giggle, so she made herself think about sad things. The saddest thing she could contemplate was Eve in prison. Her thoughts flew to Eve and she experienced a moment or two of sharp fear.

Mrs. Spurdell’s bedroom was all in pink. A white fluffy rabbit sat in the middle of the pink satin bed. Another bedroom was blue and a third a kind of peach color. Liza began to hope and hope she would get the job because there were so many things here she longed to look at more closely, to study and speculate about. Then Mrs. Spurdell took her into a room she said was Mr. Spurdell’s study and Liza saw the books. There was a whole bookcase full of them. There was a box full of white paper on the desk and pens and pencils in a jar made of some kind of green-veined stone.

She saw a few more books in the gloomy chamber Mrs. Spurdell called the dining room, about twenty of them on a shelf. At once Liza began to feel differently about the house. It was no longer simply grotesque and ridiculous. It was a place with books in it and paper and pencils.

“I can keep this clean,” she said. “It won’t be too much for me.”

“I’ll start you on a trial basis. You look very young.”

But not so young as I am, Liza thought. The amount Mrs. Spurdell offered her seemed very low indeed. Even to her, ignorant as she was, it seemed low. She would have to be strong and speak up. To her surprise she heard herself say very firmly to Mrs. Spurdell that two pounds fifty an hour wouldn’t be enough, she wanted three pounds. Mrs. Spurdell said certainly not, she wouldn’t consider it, and that left Liza at a loss. There seemed nothing for it except to go, but when she got up, having no idea that this was bargaining or even what bargaining was, Mrs. Spurdell said to wait a minute and all right, but to remember it was on a trial basis. Two mornings a week and one afternoon and she could start next week. Tomorrow, please, said Liza.

“Goodness me,” said Mrs. Spurdell in a voice that implied Liza would fail in her undertaking, “you are keen.”

For the rest of the day she wandered about the town, doing all sorts of adventurous things, going into a pub and then a cinema. Some of them made her heart beat faster, but she did them. They served her in the pub, though somewhat suspiciously. It seemed she could just pass for eighteen. The film she saw shocked her deeply. She was also electrified by it. Were there such places? Were there huge cities of stone buildings taller than any tall tree, where the streets were gleaming loops on stilts, where a million cars went to and fro and chased each other and men made violent assaults on women? But she took it calmly when a man screamed and died, his blood spraying onto the wall behind him. After all, she had seen the real thing.

The rest of it she found hard to believe. Reluctantly, she decided it must belong in a genre of entertainment Eve had mentioned in their English literature lessons: science fiction. H. G. Wells, she thought vaguely, and John Wyndham, whose names she had heard but whose works she had never read.

If she had access to Eve she could have asked. She asked Sean instead while they were going home in the car.

“That’s Miami.”

“What do you mean, that’s Miami? What’s Miami?”

He was never much good at explaining. “It’s a place, isn’t it? In America. You seen it on TV.”

“No.” One day she’d tell him why she hadn’t. “Have you been there?”

“Me? Come on, love, you know I never been there.”

“Then you don’t know, do you? They might have made it up. They might have built it in a—in a studio. Like toys.”

“Them guys firing guns, they wasn’t toys.”

“No, they were actors. They didn’t really die, it wasn’t real blood, it couldn’t be, so how d’you know the rest wasn’t made up too?”

He had no answer for that. He could only keep saying, “’Course it’s real, everyone knows it’s real.”

As they were going up into the caravan, she said, “If it’s real I’d like to go there, I’d like to see.”

“Chance’d be a fine thing,” said Sean.

Because life is like that—you see or hear something new to you early in the day and then later the same information comes up again in quite another context—Miami was on the television that evening. Not Miami, L.A., said Sean, but it looked the same to her. Probably, then, such places existed just as, in another program, the great castle called Caernarvon and the place called Oxford.

“Eve was there,” she said, answering the bell that rang in her head.

“What was she doing there?”

“She was at a school. It’s called a university. Mrs. Spurdell thought I was going to one, she said so.”

“Your mum was at Oxford University?”

She was genuinely puzzled. “Why not?”

“Come on, love, she was having you on.”

“No, I don’t think so. She had to leave it, I don’t know why, something to do with me being born.”

Sean didn’t say anymore, but she had the impression he wanted to, that he was struggling to say something but didn’t know how to put it. At last he said, “I don’t want to upset you.”

“You won’t.”

“Well, then, d’you know who your dad was?”

Liza shook her head.

“Okay, sorry I asked.”

“No, it’s all right. It’s just that she doesn’t know, Eve doesn’t know.”

She could see that she had shocked him. The spraying bullets on the screen and the spurting blood didn’t affect him, nor did the violated women or the bombs that flattened a city, but that Eve was ignorant of the identity of her child’s father, that shook him to the core. He was bereft of speech. She put her arm around him and held him close.

“That’s what she said, anyway.” She tried to reassure him. “I’ve got my own ideas, though. I think I know who it was, whatever she said.”

“Not that Bruno?”

“Oh, Sean. She didn’t know Bruno till I was nine. Shall I go on telling you about him?”

“If you want.” He said it gruffly.

“Well, then. He stayed and varnished the picture. He’d brought all the stuff with him in his bag. I didn’t think Eve would let him do it but she did. I didn’t think she’d speak to him but I was wrong there too. She asked him how he’d ever come to paint Shrove House and he said he’d seen it from the train.

“Not with the sun setting behind it you didn’t, she said, you must have been looking eastward. Ah, but I could tell how wonderful it would be from the other side, he said, so I came down here one summer evening and made a start. I was here a good many summer evenings. I didn’t see you, Eve said, and he said, I didn’t see
you.
If I had I’d have been back sooner.”

It was as if Sean hadn’t heard a word since she said that about not knowing who her father was. “She must have had one bloke after another,” he said, “one one night and another the next or even the same day. That’s really disgusting. That’s a terrible what-d’you-call-it to bring a child up in, especially a girl.”

“Environment,” she said. “Why especially a girl?”

“Oh, come on, Liza, it’s obvious.”

“Not to me,” she said, and then, “Don’t you want to hear about Bruno Drummond?”

TEN

T
HE
second time he came, the important time, was the day Liza saw the death’s-head moth. It was June.

He was thirty-one and lived in the town, in rooms over Mullins the greengrocer’s. His father was dead but his mother was still alive up in Cheshire. Once he had had a wife but she had left him and was living in somewhere called Gateshead with a dentist.

Liza, who was listening to this, said, “What’s a dentist?”

Bruno Drummond gave her the sort of look that meant he thought she was teasing him and said something about expecting she’d been to one of those a few times. But Mother said, “A kind of doctor who looks after your teeth.”

The reason for his visit, he said, was to paint the valley with the train, and perhaps he had done some painting earlier, but he called at the gatehouse soon after ten in the morning, stayed to lunch, and was still there in the evening. Instead of a chair he sat on the floor. He related the story of his life.

“I should never have married,” he said. “I don’t believe in marriage but I allowed myself to be persuaded. Marriage is really the first step in getting swallowed up in the killing machine.”