The Crocodile Bird

by Ruth Rendell

  The cherry tree lay across the garden, its branches and dense foliage spread over the lawn, the flowerbeds, Eve’s kitchen garden, its roots pointing dark brown, thready fingers into the air. As she watched, the whistling wind, the invisible engine, struck the ash that marked the edge of the lane and the giant tree shuddered. It seemed to hold itself suspended before a quivering convulsed it and it toppled over out of Liza’s sight, leaving a sudden white space where all her life had stood this strong, stout, leaf-crowned barrier. She gasped, putting her hand up to her lips.

  “Come away,” said Eve. “Don’t look.”

  It wasn’t until the afternoon that the gale blew itself out. Eve had tried to go outside before that but the wind had beaten her back. Broken branches and twigs, dying leaves, covered the front garden and the lane. One of the Shrove gates had come loose from its fastenings and slammed shut, tendrils of solanum trapped between its iron curlicues.

  Liza had never seen her mother in such a tragic mood. She was unhappier than she had been when she heard of Jonathan Tobias’s marriage. She was worse than unhappy, she was distraught. The sight of the fallen cherry tree made her weep and she kept crying out that it wasn’t real, it couldn’t be true.

  “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it. What’s happening? What’s happened to our climate? This is madness.”

  From the gatehouse they couldn’t see much. The balsam still stood, though stripped of one of its limbs, but fallen trees blocked their view on all sides. It was as if the gatehouse had been surrounded by a barricade of broken tree trunks and branches, as if the wind, invested with purposefulness and malice, had built it up to hem them in. They were in the midst of a fortification of wind-hewn timber. Liza could see that they would have to climb over logs and scramble through leafy boughs to get out the front gate. Eventually they emerged together at three in the afternoon, clambering over the balsam’s huge bough, which blocked their way.

  Liza felt very small and alone but she would have considered herself too old to take Eve’s hand if Eve hadn’t taken hers first. Hand in hand, they stumbled toward the gateway of Shrove. Inside the park, devastation lay on both sides of them, ruined trees and shrubs in heaps where they had fallen, havoc as if man-made, Eve whispered, like pictures she had seen of countryside after battles. Tree stumps stood with shredded trunks pointing skyward. A bird’s nest, a huge structure of thick twigs and woven reeds, had been torn from some once-high treetop and lay in their path.

  “Paradise destroyed,” Eve said.

  Two of the great cedars had gone. The limes were down, most of the ancient trees, only the slender supple birches and the little pyramidal hornbeams remaining. Laying waste the park, the wind had spared the house, which stood staring calmly at them, its glazed eyes all intact, its roof unscathed. All that was changed was that a stone vase had tumbled off a pillar at the foot of the steps.

  A pale sun, weak and watery, though no rain had fallen, gleamed like a puddle of silver among the soft drifting clouds. Beyond the gardens, beyond the water meadows, a waste of felled willows and splintered poplars, beyond the shining ribbon of the river, the high hills showed hollow places in their woods, holes in the fabric of tree cover as if scissors had ripped rents in cloth.

  The air was scented with sap from the ripped leaves and salt from the distant sea. All was silent, the birds silent, but for a plover making its unearthly cry as it wheeled above them.

  “Eve was in an awful state,” Liza said to Sean. “She was like someone bereaved. Well, like I imagine someone bereaved would be. You know you read in books about people tearing out their hair. She almost did that. I found her sitting in our living room clutching handfuls of her hair. She moaned and cried and threw herself about as if she was in pain. I didn’t know what to do, I’d never seen her like that.

  “I wonder if she’d have been half as bad if it wasn’t trees that had been destroyed but me. That was when I began to get the feeling Shrove was more important to her than I was. It frightened me and I didn’t know what to do.

  “There wasn’t anyone I could turn to, you see. There wasn’t anyone. Well, the milkman came and he was useless. Now the trains didn’t run anymore he could only talk about the weather and I’d had enough of weather for a lifetime. Mr. Frost came to see if there was anything he could do. I said, you could get her a doctor and I think he thought I was crazy. What’s she got wrong with her, then, he said, and I couldn’t answer him, I knew he’d think Eve was mad or I was. No one’s phone was working, he said, and it might be a week before we got our electricity back. I was left alone with her and I felt helpless. I was only eleven.

  “She calmed down a bit next day. She lay on the sofa. We couldn’t cook anything but we’d got bread and cheese and fruit. I went up to Shrove and found a packet of a dozen candles. I found a Calor gas burner we could boil a kettle and an egg on, though it took hours. She fell asleep in the afternoon and I went up into the wood, the bit we called our wood.

  “I don’t know why I went really. It didn’t upset me the way it had her, but I’d seen enough fallen trees and destruction to last me forever. But I still went up there. Maybe I thought that if somehow the wind hadn’t done much damage there, if for some reason it had escaped, that would be something to tell her and cheer her up.

  “Afterward I wished I hadn’t gone. I wished I’d stayed at home with her. It caused me such a lot of worry.”

  “What d’you mean?” Sean asked.

  “You’ll see. It was what I found there,” she said. “Of course it didn’t matter in the end.”

  As soon as she came close to the wood, to what had been the wood, she knew her hope had been forlorn. From a distance you couldn’t see what lay beyond the outer circle of trees, she and Eve hadn’t been able to see when they walked up the lane on the previous day, for the oaks and chestnuts on the perimeter remained standing. Like a whirlwind the gale had bored its way in through the outer ring and once inside behaved like a maddened animal, spinning in circles and destroying every vulnerable thing in its orbit.

  Not quite everything, she saw as she came carefully between the standing oaks. A few young trees still stood. Here and there a giant had resisted the onslaught while one or two mature trees leaned at an angle, their final collapse delayed. But between them lay devastation.

  The leaves on the tumbled limbs and branches were still fresh. They were still as if growing from twigs that proceeded from branches that grew from a living, rooted trunk. A sea of leaves lay before her. There was no wind now, only a little breeze, a joke of nature playing with destruction, that fluttered all the leaves, scalloped oak and pointed cherry, five-fingered chestnut and oval beech. The leaf sea was a dark quivering green from which protruded here and there an upturned root like a fin, or a broken trunk like the funnel of a wrecked ship. It reminded her of the sea after a storm in a picture in the library at Shrove, for the real sea she had never seen.

  For a while she stood there, just looking. Then she waded into the sea of green. Once she began, the image ceased to hold, the comparison was wrong. This was not a matter of striding through water, but of clambering across a rough terrain. Where once had been paths and clearings were broken wood and torn brambles, concealed stumps to trip her up and shattered logs to block her way.

  Yesterday she would have been incredulous if anyone had told her she might not find her way through the wood. But so it was. Everything was different. The wind had laid it waste and made a nearly impenetrable wilderness where yesterday morning had stood the ranks of trees and between them, in the depths, had stretched aisles of mysterious green shade. All was havoc now and all was curiously the same. Was it here, for instance, that the great isolated beech had stood, spreading its branches in an arc so huge as to form a circle of deep shade with a radius of fifty yards in which no grass or plant could grow? Or was it here that the larches had been, conifers leafless in the winter but green with new needles in the spring? She couldn’t tell, but when she found the beech, felled and p
rone, its vast trunk gray as a wet seal, its wrenched-out roots clotted with earth and stones, when she saw that she could have cried like Eve.

  Struggling onward, climbing over fallen trunks and pushing aside sheaths of thick foliage, she made her way aimlessly, hardly knowing what she was seeking. Somewhere it hadn’t happened? A region of the wood miraculously untouched?

  There was just one place. But this only because no trees had stood in the clearing she came to. She had an idea where she was now, in the very heart of the ruined wood, its center, where once a ring of cherry trees and field maples had encircled a grassy space. On the tree stump in the middle of that grass she had sometimes picnicked.

  She moved toward it now and sat down on the broad, flat, smooth stump. She looked about her, aware for the first time of the silence. No birds sang. There had always been birds in the wood but at the hurricane’s assault they had departed.

  The maples and cherries were mostly fallen but some still stood, the biggest and oldest leaning at a steep angle. She wondered if it would be possible to save those half-fallen trees, if there was some way of hauling them up and holding them. Who would do it? Who was there to care? She got up and made her way to the half-toppled cherry, put her hands on its trunk. It felt firm, as steady as an upright, growing tree.

  There was nothing to do now but go back, to try to find her way back through the welter of broken branches. She ducked under an overhanging limb of maple, looked down and recoiled, jumping backward and hitting her head. She scarcely felt the pain. Her breath indrawn sharply, she put her hand up over her mouth, though she had no inclination to cry out.

  Almost at her feet, at her feet until she had retreated that step or two, lay a long bundle of sacking. She could see it was a sack, of the kind Eve said they used to put potatoes in and of which there was a pile in the stable at Shrove, though it was stiff with earth and gravel. And it wasn’t just a sack, it was a bundle with something inside it. A length of string, now quite black, had been tied around the top and another length around the bottom.

  No, not the top and the bottom, Liza found herself saying, not that but the head and the feet. She came a little closer, not frightened but awed. It had made her flinch and jump back at first; now she was curious. Whatever this was, the storm had unearthed it, tearing up a tree root and heaving it out of its burying place.

  Its burying place … She was conscious of the smell now. It was a smell she had never smelled before. Strange, then, that she knew it was of something rotten, something that decayed, reminding her—yes, she knew what it was—of long ago, when Heidi and Rudi used to come. One of them had buried a meaty bone and later, perhaps weeks later, Eve while gardening had dug it up, stinking, maggoty, as green as jade, a beautiful color really….

  She knelt down. She held her breath, somehow knowing she must hold her breath. There was a tear in the sacking at the top of the bundle just above the string. She picked at it, making the hole bigger. It split open quite suddenly and a flood of soft brown, silky hair spilled out. It spilled into her hands, thick and slippery. The hair came off in her hands and she was holding it. She stumbled away and was sick among the broken branches.

  SIXTEEN

  IT was Bruno?” Sean said.

  She nodded.

  “You poor kid. A kid might never get over something like that.”

  She wished he wouldn’t say “somefink” but there was nothing to be done about it.

  “Well, I did. I got over it. I didn’t even dream about it. It’s a funny thing, you know, but you can’t help being sick. It’s not what your mind does, it’s your body. I was curious, I really wanted to know, I suppose you could say I was interested. I knew it was Bruno’s hair, I knew it was Bruno dead in there, and I hadn’t liked Bruno, I’d hated him, I was glad he was dead, but I threw up just the same. Weird, isn’t it?”

  He didn’t understand. “You must have been shattered to bits. You didn’t know what you was doing.”

  Useless to persist. She gave up trying. “I didn’t know what to do next. There wasn’t anything I could do but go back home and leave that thing lying there for anyone to find.”

  “Let’s get this straight,” said Sean. “She’d killed him, right? She’s real bad news, your mum, isn’t she? She’d killed him like she killed the man the dogs went for?”

  “Oh, yes, she’d killed him. I don’t know how. I never said anything about it to her. I was only eleven but I knew she’d killed him and—well, there didn’t seem anything to say, if you know what I mean.”

  He didn’t know. She could tell that. “She was in a state, anyway. She was depressed, in a real black depression, for quite a long time. I wasn’t going to tell her a thing like that, not something that would worry her as well.”

  “There must have been someone you could tell. Tobias, like, or the old chap—Frost was his name? No one’d have expected you to get the police, not at your age, but hopefully they’d have done that for you. Didn’t you never think of that?”

  It was dark in the caravan. She looked at him in the dark and made out his puzzled expression. “She’s my mother,” she said quietly. He didn’t respond, and when she said how it had worked out for the best, how the body was concealed once more, he hardly reacted. “She killed him because he threatened everything,” Liza said. “He was going to part her and me and make us leave Shrove.”

  “Okay. No need to get excited.” Sean hesitated. “How did she do it?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t hear any shots that day he disappeared, but I wouldn’t have so far away. You remember that blood on the rags in the little castle? I think she may have used a knife.”

  He had gone a little pale. “Wasn’t you scared of being with her? I mean, she could have turned on you.”

  “Oh, no.” Liza laughed. “I was like the bird that lived inside the crocodile’s mouth, I was safe whoever else wasn’t.”

  “I wish you hadn’t told me, not that about the sack and the hair. I shan’t get no sleep.”

  “I shall,” said Liza, and she was asleep very quickly, her arm around his waist and her forehead pressed between his shoulder blades. If he lay awake, haunted by what she’d told him, she was oblivious of it.

  Cautiousness made her rather quiet next morning. She boiled the water for their tea and her perfunctory face-washing in silence. It was perhaps unwise to go into too many details with him. She had told him rather too much on the previous night but now she would be more careful. That remark of his about the police she hadn’t liked. Eve had been arrested, had no doubt appeared in one court, was somewhere in a prison, but still there must be many things they didn’t know and need not know.

  It wasn’t one of her days at Mrs. Spurdell’s, but still, “I’ll come into town with you,” she said. It was almost the first thing she’d said that morning. She took the spare set of car keys with her.

  For the first time she went all the way into the Superway car park with him, noting where he put the car. He went off into the store and she, having bought a pair of bath towels at Marks and Spencer, wandered casually into the Duke’s Head, where she encountered no one in the front hall or on the stairs.

  There was no soap in the bathroom. She should have thought of that but how was she to know? She took a bath just the same, enjoying a prolonged soak in the hot water, free from any anxiety about Mrs. Spurdell returning unexpectedly, and dried herself on both of the thick fleecy towels. On her way out a man in a suit and tie asked her if she needed help. Liza said she was looking for Mrs. Cooper. She didn’t know many names, having come across so few people, and had to fall back on those from fiction or, as in this case, the name of Eve’s invented cleaner.

  “Is she staying in the hotel?”

  Liza said she was expected today or tomorrow. The man looked in his book and said she’d made a mistake but cast no suspicious glances at the Marks and Spencer’s carrier full of wet towels. He didn’t seem at all cross or anxious for her to go and as he talked to her about the fictitiou
s Mrs. Cooper, speculating as to where this woman might be staying or how a member of his staff could have made an error, Liza was aware that the way he looked at her and the way he spoke were full of admiration. As Sean would put it, he fancied her.

  From Sean alone had she experienced this, had accepted it without thinking others might share his feelings. Now she was beginning to understand desiring her wasn’t some idiosyncracy of his but might even be common. She felt her power.

  “Don’t hesitate to come back if we can help you at all,” the man said as she left.

  At the rear of Superway she got into the car and started the engine. She drove around the town, teaching herself things Sean hadn’t been able to teach her on the airfield. How to start on a hill, for instance, and how to stop in a hurry. He would have been cross because she hadn’t got a license or insurance, but that didn’t matter because she wasn’t going to tell him.

  After returning the car, she had to wait nearly an hour for the bus to get her back and then there was a mile-long walk from the bus stop in the rain.

  The days that followed her discovery of Bruno’s body remained very fresh in her mind. They were dark days, there was no electricity and they lit log fires to keep themselves warm. Because Eve did almost nothing, sat staring at the wall or hid herself in bed, Liza did her best to clear up the front garden, moving all but the biggest and heaviest branches. She went up to Shrove every day on her own, fetching back useful things from the kitchens, firelighters and nightlights, stone hot-water bottles, tinned food, coffee and sugar. It was stealing, she now supposed, though she hadn’t thought of that at the time.