The Crocodile Bird

by Ruth Rendell

  Life wasn’t easy in the caravan. If you wanted to be warm you also got wet. Sean got hold of a tarpaulin from a farmer who had used it to protect a haystack from heavy rain and they spread it right over the caravan. That helped, but it also made it dark. All their water had to be fetched from the stream and boiled. It was impossible to wash clothes and bed linen, which had to be taken to the one launderette still remaining within a ten-mile radius. They used two inches of water in a bowl and tried to wash themselves all over in that.

  Liza had got very good at sneaking baths at Mrs. Spurdell’s, quite often managing to have one while Mrs. Spurdell was actually in the house, waiting till she was on the phone—she spent hours on the phone talking to her daughter or her friends—and taking two minutes in the tub before giving the bathroom a thorough clean. Even so, Mrs. Spurdell had once or twice remarked on the quantity of water she had heard gurgling down the plughole.

  At the school half-term, when Mr. Spurdell had also been in the house, bathing was impossible, the risk was too great. His study was upstairs next door to the bathroom and he was usually in the study, or liable to go in there. On that late October day, a Monday, she arrived at Aspen Close determined on having a bath. Mrs. Spurdell would be out for an hour, having her hair done. Liza had overheard her making the appointment. She was therefore dismayed to find Mr. Spurdell at home, apparently recovering from the flu, which had struck him down on the previous Friday afternoon while he was reading, according to his wife, Spenser’s Faerie Queene with the A-Levels English form.

  He wasn’t up but she had no reason to believe he was asleep. Mrs. Spurdell said he would probably get up later and come down in his dressing gown. Then, if she was still at the hairdresser’s, Liza could make him a cup of tea. Mrs. Spurdell put on her new Burberry. She tied a plastic rain hood around her head, not because it was raining, it wasn’t, but to make sure she had it with her to protect her set on the way home.

  Liza thought she would have to do what she had advised Sean to do. Knowing nothing of hotels, she just the same understood that they must have a great many bathrooms. The Duke’s Head, which she passed on her way to Aspen Close, must have more bathrooms than any private house. If Sean didn’t want to pay for the swimming pool or the showers, why didn’t he just walk into the Duke’s Head, march upstairs as if he was a guest there, find a bathroom, and have a bath? Who would know? He’d have to make sure to take a towel with him, of course. He could put a folded towel inside his jacket and take a plastic bag to put it in after it got damp.

  It was stealing hot water, Sean said, it was dishonest. He was quite shocked. Stay dirty then, said Liza. She wouldn’t think twice about doing it, in fact she’d probably do it on her way to meet him after work. Realizing that she couldn’t because she had no towel made her feel cross and she thumped her way into the study, dragging the vacuum cleaner behind her.

  Mr. Spurdell had acquired two new books since she was last in there. Liza cared very little about Mrs. Spurdell having a new Burberry or her hair done or unlimited hot water or Mr. Spurdell driving a six-month-old BMW, but she did envy them the books. She resented them for the books, it made her hate Mr. Spurdell especially, though in many ways he seemed nicer than his wife. She sometimes saw him on Friday afternoons returning home just before she was due to leave. The new books he had got were a Life of Dickens and The Collected Short Stories of Saki.

  What wouldn’t she give to read that Life of Dickens! She could never afford it, she wouldn’t even be able to afford it when it came out in paperback. Quickly she forgot all about Mr. Spurdell. She ceased to listen for him. The Dickens in its brown-and-gold jacket was in her hands, she was sitting at the desk reading the introduction, when he came quietly into the room. It was only because of the little dry cough he gave that she knew he was there. She jumped up, clutching the book.

  He was a small man, as thin as Mrs. Spurdell was fat. Liza had sometimes thought they were like Jack Sprat and his wife, he able to eat no fat and she no lean. He looked old, an old man who should have retired by now, his jowls melting into a withered neck, his head bald but for a white fringe around the back. Over striped pajamas he wore a brown tweed dressing gown with a cord around the waist tied in a neat bow.

  His genial smile brought her immense relief. She wouldn’t have to go back to Sean now and tell him she’d got the sack. Relief became indignation when he said, still smiling, apologizing as if to an ignorant child, that it was a pity there were so few pictures in that book.

  “I don’t want pictures,” Liza said and she knew her tone was surly.

  Up went his white tufts of eyebrows. “How old are you?” he said.

  After she had spoken the truth she remembered too late the lie she had told his wife. “I’m nearly seventeen.”

  “Yes, I would have guessed about that. Some of my pupils are your age, only they prefer to be called students.” He held out his hand for the book and she gave it to him. “Thank you. I haven’t read it yet.” Without knowing in the least how she could tell, she fancied this was the way teachers behaved. Bossy. Commanding. Imparting information. As she thought this, he imparted some. “Dickens was a great English writer, some would say the greatest. Have you read any of his books at school?”

  “I don’t go to school,” she said, and added, “anymore. I don’t go anymore.” What did he think, that she took days off school to come and work for his wife? “But I’ve read Dickens. I’ve read Bleak House and David Copperfield and Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby and A Tale of Two Cities. ”

  His evident astonishment gave her a lot of pleasure. She thought he’d ask her why she left school so young, she was prepared for almost anything, but not for him to point to the several volumes of Dickens he had in paperback and ask her if she had read Our Mutual Friend.

  “I told you the ones I’ve read,” she said but not this time in the surly voice.

  “Well, you’re a surprising young lady. Not quite what you seem, is that right?”

  Liza thought this was truer than he knew. She changed the subject, asked him if he would like her to make him tea, and when he said he would, preceded him downstairs.

  Mrs. Spurdell was back before the kettle had boiled, recounting to her husband some long tale of how the hairdresser had read their daughter’s name in a magazine, as the author of a letter to the editor about family law. The hairdresser—“who was really quite an intelligent girl, considering”—had cut out the letter but forgotten to bring it. She would bring it next time. Philippa was so modest she hadn’t said a word about it. She hadn’t mentioned it to her father, had she?

  While this was going on, Liza went back upstairs. She finished the study, she made the bed Mr. Spurdell had recently vacated, and ran the vacuum cleaner across the carpet. By then it was time to leave. Mrs. Spurdell was paying her, fishing about in a jar on the windowsill for a five-pound note and claiming to have mistaken a ten-pee piece for a fifty-pee, when her husband came back into the kitchen and handed Liza Our Mutual Friend and The Old Curiosity Shop.

  “I should like them back sometime but there’s no hurry.”

  “You’d better write your name on the flyleaf, dear,” said Mrs. Spurdell. She laughed reminiscently. “Do you remember how Jane used to write inside her books: ‘This book was stolen from Jane Spurdell’?”

  It was extremely rude but Liza didn’t care. Having something new to read was wonderful. She’d been spinning out the Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, making it last, which was an irritating way to have to read something. Mr. Spurdell giving her Our Mutual Friend was rather interesting, a sort of coincidence, because that was the book she’d tried to read when she gave up on The Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Eve had been right about that, she wasn’t old enough for it, and she hadn’t been old enough for Our Mutual Friend, either, but she would be now.

  She’d started to read it that same evening, when she got back from finding Bruno’s car in the Shrove coach house. It was a strange thing but she’d never really
considered telling Eve what she’d found or asking her why the car was there. She thought she knew why and then she wasn’t sure if she did or not. It might only mean that Bruno was coming back, that for some reason he had gone without his car and Eve was storing it for him, he hadn’t gone for good. Eve had said he had, but Liza no longer entirely trusted her to tell the truth.

  After concentrating on it for all of an hour, she had abandoned the De Quincey and attempted Our Mutual Friend. Perhaps she was tired because she hadn’t been able to cope with more than the first page. She still lay awake a long time, wondering about the car and what might have happened to Bruno. Nobody had ever known where Bruno was except his mother and now she was dead. His wife hadn’t known and neither had his wife’s friend the dentist. The estate agent had but Eve had written to him.

  That was the night she dreamed Bruno was with them still but about to leave. His silky brown hair was tied back with a piece of ribbon so that you could clearly see the two gold rings in his ear. And his face had even more than usual that angelic look, like a saint in a painting, that so belied the rough speech that sometimes came from that cherubic mouth. She didn’t see him leave in the dream. Eve told her he had gone, and later she heard a gun being fired. She was walking in the wood and she heard shots behind her. But this was all in the dream, not in life. On the actual night after Eve said Bruno had gone she had heard no shots, she had heard nothing but a heavy object dragged downstairs and a car being driven away.

  Where had the car been all day? Bruno couldn’t have gone away in it or it wouldn’t have been there for Eve to drive up to Shrove in the nighttime. But it wasn’t there, it hadn’t been outside when Liza came home. So had Eve hidden it somewhere? Liza realized she could have hidden it almost anywhere, behind the birch tree copse or under the overhanging branches of a hedge, she could have hidden it a few yards from the gatehouse and Liza wouldn’t have seen.

  Watching a football match that was coming from somewhere in Germany, Sean didn’t for a while try to stop her reading. He no more expected her to watch football than she expected him to read Dickens. They had a bottle of wine the supermarket had on sale, the week’s special offer.

  Rain lashed the tarpaulin that covered the caravan. A howling gale blew the rain in savage spurts against the uncovered parts of the windows so hard it sounded as if they must break. The caravan rocked and shivered.

  Liza and Sean sat close together with one of their quilts wrapped around their legs. While Liza read about Eugene Wrayburn, Sean watched the German team soundly beat the English one. He switched off with a sigh and, having first put his arm around her, began to comb her hair. It was a cunning move on his part, he knew the sensuous pleasure she took in it, stretching like a cat and extending her neck as the comb passed slowly through the curtain of smooth dark hair.

  He said softly, “What had happened to him, Bruno, I mean?”

  Liza closed her book. “I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t know then. I found out later.” She considered. “You’ll have to wait till I come to the hurricane.”

  “Okay, then what about those Tobiases? They split up, didn’t they?”

  “Not until the following year. But I never saw Victoria again. Jonathan wrote to Eve and told her he was living at Ullswater and Victoria was living in the London house, and soon after that Victoria left altogether. I think she went off with someone.”

  “So your mum started hoping again?”

  “Yes. But that was a way off. I don’t know what she felt about the divorce—they got divorced two years later—she never showed me her feelings about that. Somehow I think she understood she’d played it all wrong before.”

  “She should have made herself harder to get,” said Sean.

  “Or easier. If she’d gone with him to all those places he wanted her to go to, even to London sometimes, if she’d done that I don’t think he’d have ever taken up with Victoria. Eve was prettier than Victoria and cleverer and he’d known her since forever. She had all the advantages. Except that she’d never go away from Shrove, not even for a weekend.” She looked up at him. “Should I have made myself harder to get, Sean? I was easy, wasn’t I? I just jumped into your arms.”

  “Oh, you.” He laughed and, putting the comb down, hugged her in his arms. “You was a real little innocent, you didn’t know no better.”

  “Was I? Shall I tell you about the hurricane?”

  “Wait a minute, I’ll fill up your glass. There’s one thing I want to know first. Didn’t no one come looking for Bruno?”

  “Who was there to look? If his mother had still been alive it might have been different. If he’d said he wanted to buy that house. If he’d been to a lawyer or whatever it is you have to do when you buy a house. If the sale of his mother’s house hadn’t gone through and he’d still been waiting for the money. If he’d still been living in those rooms over the greengrocer’s. But as it was, nobody knew where he’d lived and no one needed to get in touch with him.”

  “It gives you the creeps when you come to think of it.”

  “I went back into the little castle and everything of his was gone, the paintings, the canvases, the paints, and that pile of rags. It was all gone and the place had been scrubbed out. Even the ceiling, she’d cleaned the ceiling and got rid of the spider’s web with the moth in it.”

  “Those rags, what was it you thought was on them?” Sean spoke in a low voice, tentatively. “You never thought that was paint, did you?”

  “I did then. Now I think it was blood.”

  Sean was silent, his face grim. After a moment or two he said, “Tell about the hurricane, then.”

  “There’s one other thing first. That picture Bruno painted of me, it turned up on our living room wall. One morning I came downstairs and there it was. Eve had taken away the Shrove at sunset picture and put the one of me there instead.”

  “What did she do that for?”

  “I don’t know. It didn’t look like me, but I suppose she liked it. I’ll come to the hurricane now.”

  As if to encourage her, the wind slapped another burst of rain against the window behind them. The caravan rattled. It hadn’t rained that night, the Night of the Storm, the Hurricane, the Great Gale. The storm had been dry, an arid tempest that came up out of the Atlantic, bearing salt on its back. Salt lay in drifts on the windows of Shrove the next day, white as frost, dry crystals the wind had sucked off the sea.

  “All the leaves were still on the trees,” she said, “that was the worst of it. If the branches had been bare the gale wouldn’t have been able to pull the trees over, but they were still in full leaf, leaves don’t really fall till November, and they made the treetops like great sails.”

  “Was you at the gatehouse, you and your mum?”

  “When weren’t we there? We never went anywhere.”

  She would have slept through it, enormous though the noise of it was. A heavy sleeper, at the age of eleven she would have slept through bombs falling. Eve woke her up. Eve, who was frightened of nothing, was frightened of this. She woke her up for companionship, for someone to be with, not to be alone while the world was torn to pieces around her.

  It was just after four in the morning. Pitch dark and the wind roaring up the valley like an invisible train, a ghost train. The real train that had once run along the valley had never sounded as loud as this. They still had electricity when she came downstairs, rubbing her eyes, peering about her, but the lights went out as she entered the living room. Somewhere out there the wind had brought the power lines down.

  “What is it? What’s happening?”

  Eve said she didn’t know, she’d never heard wind like this. Not in this country. We didn’t have hurricanes.

  “Perhaps it’s not a hurricane,” Liza said. “Perhaps it’s the end of the world. The Apocalypse. Or a nuclear bomb. Someone’s dropped a nuclear bomb.”

  Eve, putting candles into jam jars, said how did she know about things like that? How did she know about the Apocalypse? Who
had told her about nuclear bombs? The television, thought Liza. She didn’t answer.

  “Of course it’s not a bomb,” said Eve.

  The candle flames guttered as the windows rattled. Something of the wind penetrated even in here. The curtains bellied out and flattened again against the glass. Eve tried the radio before she remembered that electricity worked that too. For the same reason she couldn’t make tea. The nearest gas was five miles away. Liza thought how isolated they were, the nearest house in that village where Bruno had nearly bought a house two miles distant. It was like being marooned on an island in the midst of a rough sea.

  She looked out of the window, the glass shuddering against her face. It was still too dark to see much beyond the tendrils of creeper that cloaked the gatehouse till the leaves fell. These streamed out in the wind like blown hair, pulling a black curtain across the window. An enormous crash from somewhere not too far distant drove her back into the middle of the room.

  “Come away,” said Eve.

  Roof tiles clattered off one by one, three of them, each making a sharp crack as it fell and smashed on the stones. The wind was both constant and sporadic. All the time it blew at a steady rate, but it came in gusts too, each one thunderous, tearing through trees and leafy branches, between tree trunks, among bushes, each gust blowing itself out on a howl and a final crash. The earth shook and the ground heaved.

  “The trees,” said Eve, and then, “the trees.”

  Her face was white. She put her hands over her ears, then brought them down and clasped them, wringing them. Dismayed, Liza watched her pace the room. This was Shrove where it was happening, Shrove which meant more to her than anything in this world or out of it. These were Shrove trees and at each nearby or distant crash Eve winced. Once she put her hand over her mouth as if to stop herself crying out.

  At about six it started to get light. Dawn had been a yellow bar across the eastern horizon. Liza crept out into the kitchen to look at it, for Eve wouldn’t let her go upstairs. The wind abated not at all with the pale spreading of light but seemed to take new life from it, roaring and tossing and circling with a shrill whistling sound. A single leafy branch spun in the air and crashed to the ground. The walls of the gatehouse shuddered. The windows rattled. Liza watched the darkness recede from the sky, the livid streak fade, the gray color whiten, and a mass of high, clotted, scurrying cloud reveal itself.