The Crocodile Bird

by Ruth Rendell

  That evening they read Shakespeare together. Liza took Macbeth’s part and Eve Lady Macbeth. As Eve predicted, there was a lot of the scene where the wife urges the husband to murder the old king that Liza couldn’t understand, but Eve didn’t get cross when Liza spoke sentences wrong or put incorrect stresses on certain words. Afterward, they played a tape of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante and then had a French conversation, all things they hadn’t been able to do when Bruno was there.

  Liza was so happy that she should have slept soundly that night but she didn’t. She fancied she heard all sorts of sounds, creaking boards and thumps and something heavy being dragged down the stairs. It could all have been in dreams, it was impossible to know. For instance, she had no reason to believe Eve didn’t come to bed until four or five in the morning, only a feeling or intuition that she hadn’t. It wasn’t as if she had been into the other bedroom to look. The car she thought she heard at one point was probably farther away than she believed, not passing the gatehouse door but a hundred yards away in the lane.

  She said nothing about it in the morning, for she and Eve had never been in the habit of telling each other their dreams. Nothing could be more boring, Eve sometimes said, than other people’s dreams. But later, while her mother was up at Shrove, cleaning the house in her role as Mrs. Cooper, Liza went into the little castle that Bruno had used as a studio.

  His easel was there and his two boxes of paints as well as innumerable extra tubes of color, the names of which fascinated her, though she had never cared to show her interest in front of him. Rose madder tint, light viridian, Chinese white, burnt umber. How strange of him to have gone without his painting things. Even stranger that he hadn’t cleaned the brushes he always complained were so expensive, but left them dipped in an inch of turpentine in a jam jar. Pictures, finished, half-finished, blank canvases, rested against the wall. Her own portrait was there.

  It was not for a long time that she connected the paint rags in the little castle with Bruno’s departure. Then, during that morning visit, they were just rags, a rather larger than usual pile of them filling up nearly half the floor space. A much larger than usual pile, in fact. Old skirts of Eve’s torn into strips, a sheet that went on her own bed until she put her toe through a hole in it, a ragged towel.

  Another odd thing about the paint rags, which didn’t particularly register at the time but remained in her memory, was the color of the paint on them. One had a streak of sap green on the edge of it and another looked as if it had mopped up a spill of Prussian blue, but for the most part they were stained reddish-brown—and not just stained, coated in that color.

  Liza tried to decide what color it might be. Not crimson or scarlet lake or vermilion, it wasn’t bright enough for that. Too dark for rose madder tint and not dark or dull enough for Vandyke brown. Light sienna? Burnt sienna? Either was possible but that didn’t explain why Bruno had used so much of it.

  Did the mess in here and the stack of canvases mean he was coming back? She looked for his clothes in Eve’s wardrobe, the leather jacket, the check shirts, the sweatshirt with UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY mysteriously printed on it. Everything was gone. Sometimes he had left his gold earrings on Eve’s dressing table, but these too had gone with him. The awful possibility that, having gone, he might still tell tales of Eve to the Tobiases or to education authorities brought her down from euphoria into the depths again.

  She had to ask.

  “He won’t be telling anyone anything,” Eve said. “Believe me. I promise.”

  A letter came addressed to him and Eve opened it. He had asked her to do that, she said. Inside the envelope was a note from an estate agent who wrote that he would have phoned but it appeared that Mr. Drummond and Mrs. Beck were not in the directory. Was Mr. Drummond still interested in making an offer for The Conifers? The name, for some reason, made Eve laugh a lot.

  She wrote a letter to the estate agent but Liza didn’t see what she had said. They went out together to post it, up the lane to the main road where there was a little old post box with VR on it for Victoria Regina, which meant it had been there for a hundred years.

  The month was July and Liza was eleven and a half. The good weather lasted for only a short time, it rained and grew cold and Eve and Liza stayed in, doing more lessons than they had for months. Liza could write French composition now and recite from memory Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn.”

  Because it was so wet, the Tobiases didn’t come down as they had said they would, and in August Jonathan Tobias came alone. Liza noticed he had some gray in his hair. Perhaps because Victoria wasn’t with him, he spent more time at their house than he had done for years. Liza couldn’t help overhearing some of the things that were said, for Jonathan seemed to think that when a person was reading they were deaf to everything.

  Victoria, he said, was in Greece with friends. To Liza, Greece was a place full of gray stone temples with colonnades and marble statues and where gods lived in the rivers and trees. It hardly accorded with her ideas to hear that Victoria and her friends found beaches there to sunbathe on and big hotels to stay in, the kind of thing, Jonathan said, that they preferred over Shrove or Ullswater.

  Sometimes, aware that she had looked up from her book, he would lean closer to Eve and speak in a whisper. Wishy-wishy-wishy, the way she remembered Heather murmuring. And Eve nodded and looked sympathetic and whispered something back. It troubled Liza that Jonathan seemed to think Bruno was only temporarily away, for this made his departure seem less than permanent.

  “I can’t help being envious, Eve,” he said one sunny afternoon.

  The summer had come back and they were all having tea in the garden, under the cherry tree. The bird cherries were ripening to yellow and red and there was scarlet blossom on Eve’s runner beans. The courgette plants had flowers shaped like yellow lilies and the gooseberries were dark red beads, but beads that grew hair on their crimson skins.

  “Of me?” said Eve. “Envious of me?”

  “You’ve got someone you can be happy with. You’re in a good relationship.”

  Liza waited for Eve to deny it or even tell him not to say “relationship.” She didn’t. She gave Jonathan a mysterious sidelong glance, her eyes half-closed.

  “I don’t want you to envy me,” she said. “I’d rather you were jealous.”

  There was silence. At last Jonathan said, “Of him?”

  “Why not? How do you think I have felt about Victoria?”

  Eve got up then and carried the tea things into the house. Instead of following her, Jonathan sat there on the grass, looking glum. He pulled a daisy out of the lawn and picked the petals off. Liza thought he was getting to look old. The freshness had gone out of his face and there were lines across his forehead. His eyes had once been of the most piercing clear blue, but the color was muddied like a blue china bowl with dirty water in it.

  She expected him to stay to supper and perhaps for the night. Where Bruno had been, beside Eve in bed, he would be found in the morning. But he didn’t even stay to eat with them and was gone by seven. The next day Liza thought Eve seemed particularly pleased and happy and she connected this with the appearance of Jonathan at their door at nine in the morning, calling in to say good-bye on his way back to London.

  Sean said, “This is five years ago you’re talking about, right?”

  She nodded. They were in bed now, snuggled close together for warmth under the two quilts. Sean had bought a second one he’d seen in a closing-down sale. The caravan got bitterly cold at night, but if they kept a heater burning, the condensation was streaming down the walls by morning and their pillows felt damp. Liza, her head on his shoulder, his arms tightly around her, thought of those warm dry weeks, her bedroom with the windows wide open at night, lessons, lessons, lessons, every day in the garden, and Eve saying, “You see, if you went to a so-called proper school you’d be on holiday now, you wouldn’t be learning anything but just running wild.”

  “Wasn’t t
hat around about the time of the big storm? What they called the hurricane? I remember because it was when I’d just got to be sixteen. I’d got my first job and I had to get up at five. I was in our kitchen at home, making myself a cup of tea, and the oak tree next door blew over and came through the roof. It was only a lean-to, our kitchen, and the roof broke like an eggshell. Lucky I was quick off the mark, I got out just in time. It must have been like September.”

  “It was October. October the fifteenth.”

  “What a memory! I reckon you had a lot of trees come down at Shrove. Is that how you remember?”

  The Day of the Hurricane, the last day she ever gave a name to.

  “You’re not to hurry me, Sean. I’ll get to that soon. We got the hurricane very badly at Shrove. We were one of the worst-hit places, and you’ll see why I remember it, the precise date and everything. But there was something else happened first.”

  The outbuildings at Shrove House were seldom used. They had been stables once and there was a coach house. The stables were built in the same architectural style as the house, of small red bricks with white facings, a pediment over the central building, and above it a clock tower on which the clock face was blue and the clock hands gold. The weathervane on the tower was a running fox with brush extended.

  Mr. Frost kept his lawn mowers, the big one he rode on and the small one with which he did around the flowerbeds, in the section of stable to the left of the coach house. Other garden tools were kept in there as well as a ladder and an industrial vacuum cleaner. As far as Liza knew, no one had ever kept cars in the stables. Perhaps they might have done so when old Mr. Tobias was alive, but Jonathan always left his car standing out in the courtyard in front of the stables, and visitors left their cars there too. The stables were really useless, no one went into them, and they remained standing, Liza had heard Jonathan say, only because they were pretty and also a listed building. That meant they were of historic value and must never be pulled down.

  She had never been inside them, though she had once seen Mr. Frost come riding out of the section by the coach house on the little tractor that pulled the mower. She came to search them as a last resort.

  It was years since she had needed the library steps to climb up to the picture frame for the key to the television room. At nearly twelve she was almost as tall as Eve, would be much taller by the time she was grownup. Eve, in any case, had long ceased to bother to hide the key or even take it out of the lock. She must have decided Liza was too old now to be seduced by the charms of television, too mature to be intrigued by locked rooms, or thoroughly conditioned in the discipline of a sequestered life. These days she even pushed the vacuum cleaner about in that room in Liza’s presence and seemed to take it as quite natural her daughter never asked what the box with the screen on it was.

  When she needed the steps but couldn’t find them it was for quite another purpose, their primary purpose. The Confessions of an English Opium Eater was on the top shelf, far out of reach. The book would have been out of Jonathan’s reach and he was six feet three. Although she knew that it was all of two years since she had put the steps back in the library, that she had several times used them in the library since then, she still went to look behind the long curtains in the morning room.

  Returning to the library, she saw why they had been replaced. The new ones were up in the dark corner, farthest from the windows, wooden ones this time, perhaps of dark oak, and almost invisible against the dark oak floor where the carpet ended. They were not really steps at all but more like a piece of a staircase consisting of three stairs. Jonathan must have brought them with him when he came in August. Liza could see without attempting to move them that even when she stood on the top stair she wasn’t going to be high enough to reach that shelf.

  She started to search the house for the missing steps. Eve said she wasn’t old enough yet for De Quincey, she wouldn’t understand the Confessions, there would be plenty of time for her to read it when she was older. And Liza hadn’t even wanted it that much when she first came into the library. The title had drawn her to it, for it seemed to have something to do with those drugs she heard about on television. But she wanted it now. She wanted it because she couldn’t have it, she couldn’t reach it, it was up there in its faded blue binding with the faded gilt flowers on its spine, smugly sitting where it had sat undisturbed for years, for perhaps a hundred years.

  The steps wouldn’t be in any of the bedrooms but she searched them anyway. She found clothes that must be Victoria’s in the wardrobe of what she had always thought the nicest bedroom, a big, light room that looked across the water meadows to the river. A skirt hung there and a pair of jeans and the green silk shirt she had been wearing the first time Liza ever saw her. There were also an embroidered white cotton nightdress and a matching dressing gown. It looked as if Victoria had been sleeping in that room while Jonathan slept in the big room at the front. The steps weren’t in there either, or in any of the cupboards, or downstairs in any of the rooms that gathered around the kitchen, the boot room and the pantry, the washing room, the larder, and the storeroom.

  Liza went outside to the stables. She could hear the drone of Mr. Frost’s mower from the bit of lawn behind the shrubberies. The stables were never locked. There were no locks on the doors, though the coach house had a padlock fastening together the handles on each of its double doors. For some reason, she left looking in the section where the mower had been till last, which was strange because it was the obvious place. Except for the one where the tools were kept, the stables were all quite empty. She couldn’t open the coach house doors, only peer through the cracks in them. They were old doors with quite a big split between two of the boards. She could just make out a car inside.

  The steps were propped up against the wall between where the tractor had been and where the small mower stood. Liza took them into the house, carried them into the library, and climbed up to get The Confessions of an English Opium Eater. It was while she was coming down with the book in her hand that the significance of a car in the coach house where no car had been before fully struck her.

  Mr. Frost was now in sight, wheeling around the big lawn on his tractor, wearing gloves and ear muffs. He didn’t see her. She replaced the steps, then thought better of it, carried them out again and propped them up in front of the locked doors. High up under the pediment were two small windows.

  Liza climbed the steps to the top. That brought her just high enough to see over one of the windowsills. The car stood in the middle of the coach house floor with plenty of space around it. Even so, she couldn’t see the name of the make, but she could see the registration plates with the letter at the end of the number instead of the beginning. It wasn’t too dark to make out the color, a deep brown, the burnt sienna of Bruno’s paintbox. Bruno was gone, but this was Bruno’s car, the Lancia car Bruno’s mother had had for ten years and only driven seven thousand miles.

  The sound of the mower approaching made her look around. Mr. Frost got off his tractor to open the stable. He never talked much, he wasn’t the kind of grown-up to ask what she was doing.

  “Mind you don’t fall,” he said.

  Going home, carrying the book, she had thought of that night after Bruno had left, how she had slept so uneasily and dreamed so much she couldn’t tell in the morning what had been dream and what real. The car she had heard—that had been Bruno’s car. She had heard Eve driving Bruno’s car up here to hide it in the coach house.

  Sean was asleep.

  Liza wondered how long he had been asleep, at what point in her narrative he had ceased to listen. Scheherazade. Did the king or sultan or whatever he was fall asleep while she told her stories? Was that in fact the reason she never reached the end of each tale? Because her husband fell asleep first?

  Sean was snoring lightly. She pushed him over onto his side so that his back was toward her. Another thing she wondered about was if the sultan and Scheherazade made love before she started on the story o
r in the middle or what? They must have done that, that was the point of his marrying all those women, wasn’t it? There was nothing about it in the book she had read. There wouldn’t be, she thought, people cut things out of versions meant for children. Even for children who’d seen what she had seen.

  Invisible in the dark, she smiled to herself at Sean’s squeamishness. She hadn’t told him about the smell of those stained rags or, to spare him, about the red paint fingerprints on the stone floor of the little castle. Up in the vaulted ceiling among the beams a spider had caught the death’s-head moth in its dusty web. Sean wouldn’t have wanted to hear about that, either, the rare moth long dead among the dusty threads, but the skull pattern on its back still palely gleaming.

  FIFTEEN

  A disused airfield near the place where the caravan was parked provided them with somewhere for Liza to have her driving lessons. With Sean in the suicide seat—his words—she drove up and down the old runways and learned how to do a three-point turn on the flat area outside a dilapidated hangar.

  “You’ll pass your test first go,” Sean said.

  As November began, Liza began to think more and more about Eve and about her trial, which was surely due. She regretted now that when she had the chance she hadn’t learned more about crimes and justice and courts. Eve would have known, Eve could have told her.

  For instance, would they have it here in the city, which had once been the place the train started from? Or would it be far away in London at what she thought might be called Newgate? I must go to London sometime, she thought to herself. It’s absurd never having been to London, even Sean’s been to London. She ought to start buying newspapers, but she didn’t know which one would be best. Already she had seen enough of them to know that the little ones with the tall headlines would only print the most sensational or sexy parts of a trial while the big ones with pictures of politicians might not print it at all. Television might have it on only once and that maybe on the evening Sean was watching his football.