The Crocodile Bird

by Ruth Rendell

  Liza suspected that he too didn’t like Shrove much. It was October now and this was only the second time he’d been down this year. His real life was elsewhere, doing things she and Eve knew nothing about. And he knew nothing about what they did. He never asked. It was as if Shrove was something to be packed up in a box when he was away from it and she and Eve puppets to be packed up with it.

  Next day he was back again at the gatehouse telling Eve his divorce decree had at last been made absolute and Victoria had “taken him to the cleaners.” He was free now. Liza heard him ask Eve if she ever heard from Bruno these days. She said she hadn’t and she never would, that was all over and she was free as air. She was as free as he was.

  Liza was listening outside the door and Eve and Jonathan were sitting in there in the dusk, the lamps unlit. She heard her mother say that about being free and then she heard the silence. Next morning Jonathan went off to London and thence to France, where his mother was dying.

  A postcard with a picture of a French cathedral on it came after about a week to say that Caroline Ellison was dead. Smiling rather unpleasantly, Eve said she supposed he thought a churchy card was suitable for announcing a death while one with mountains or trees on it wouldn’t be. Jonathan didn’t sound grief-stricken, though it was hard to tell from a postcard. Eve was sure he would come back now, but he didn’t and six months later they got a card from him in Penang.

  Before that, before the winter started, Liza found Mr. Frost lying dead on the grass beside his tractor.

  No one knew how old he was. Eve said very old because his daughter had been only a few years younger than her own mother, who would be seventy if she had lived. For the past few years he had done nothing beyond sitting on the tractor and driving it around the lawns. It was Eve who pulled out the weeds and put the mowings on the compost heap.

  It was in early November, an exceptionally dry, sunny November, when Liza found him. He had been giving the grass its last cut before the winter. She was walking up from the river, taking the short cut across the Shrove garden. The sound of the mower had stopped ten minutes before and she thought he must have finished for the day. But the tractor was still there, in the middle of the sunny lawn, yellow leaves of lime and chestnut falling onto the grass, onto the tractor’s black leather seat and scarlet bodywork, and onto the body of the old man lying beside it.

  At first she didn’t know he was dead. She was immensely curious. Her hand on his forehead encountered the coldness of marble. She could see that his veiny blue eyes were dead, they were quite lightless, and there was no breath from his slack mouth or movement of his chest. He no longer looked like a person but rather like one of the statues on the terrace, a prone figure in pale, cold stone.

  The strange thought came to her that Eve would bury him. At once, immediately, she knew this was nonsense but she had thought it. She ran to the cottage and Eve came back with her and they went into Shrove House and phoned for an ambulance. They couldn’t think what else to do even though they knew he was dead.

  Mr. Frost had died of old age. His heart had broken—it had literally broken—with age. And who, now, was to do the Shrove garden?

  No one, in the depths of winter. There was nothing to do when the snow came and the frost set hard. On the day Liza became fifteen, the snow fell so thickly and for so long they had to dig their way out of the front door.

  But snow seldom lasts for long in England. In February, where it had lain were clumps of snowdrops, and by March the grass was starting to grow, there were catkins on the hazels, and the blackthorn was in bloom. Liza had her lessons in the morning and after lunch Eve went out on the tractor to cut the Shrove grass. The wide stretches of lawn were easy to mow. It wasn’t much more than a matter of sitting on the seat and steering, but the edges had to be cut as well and the awkward bits between the new trees. Eve was on her knees pulling out the weeds after sunset, almost until dark.

  Liza had never asked her why. She stopped asking questions of her mother after Bruno disappeared. It wasn’t a conscious decision on her part not to ask but as if a voice inside her bade her be silent. Asking was dangerous, asking would only do damage, provoke lying, cause embarrassment. Don’t ask. So she had never asked, why go on pretending to Jonathan that Mrs. Cooper exists? What harm can it do to you or me if a woman comes here to clean? She had never asked, what did you do with Bruno’s car? And now she didn’t ask, why are you doing this work in the garden? Why don’t you find a successor to Mr. Frost?

  Not only was she silent about these things, she also supported Eve in her subterfuges. It seemed natural to do so, it seemed right. For a long time now, when the rare people she saw asked her about school, how she was getting on, if she was on holiday, she had been saying, all right and yes, she was. Jonathan had once asked her, as he was leaving, if Mrs. Cooper was expected next day and Liza had said yes, knowing it would be Eve herself who would clear up at Shrove. She even told Eve he’d asked her. Wasn’t she the crocodile bird who warned its host of impending danger?

  It was now Eve who performed the tasks that had once been Mr. Frost’s. Liza wondered if Jonathan even knew Mr. Frost was dead. Perhaps Eve herself simply kept the checks for his pay that Jonathan sent her. She now had the entire care of Shrove House, its gardens and its grounds in her hands, with Liza helping. Liza hated gardening but she couldn’t be there and watch Eve do it all on her own, so she trimmed the edges with the long shears and pushed the little hand mower about, so bored she could have screamed.

  Then, around midsummer, Eve found a man to do it. It was a very hot summer, the hottest of Liza’s life except the one when she was a six-month-old baby. The grass stopped growing and the sun burned it brown, so there was watering to do instead of mowing. Sometimes Eve was so tired with carrying watering cans and pulling the hosepipe about that she fell asleep on their sofa and Liza had to get the supper. The weeds still grew too. Nothing stopped the nettles growing and the burdock.

  Eve said, “I have to keep it going. I have to look after the young trees. It’s so beautiful, I can’t let it get in a mess. There’s not a lovelier place in England. I can’t bear to think of it all going to ruin.”

  Her hands were stained and cracked, the fingers ingrained with dirt, the nails broken. The sun had burned her face dark brown but her nose was peeling. Liza saw threads of gray in her dark hair, which had nothing to do with the sun but perhaps something to do with her hard life. Now that Liza was older she was beginning to see that Eve had made her life hard of her own volition, had made all kinds of difficulties for herself where there might have been ease and pleasantness. But she never asked why.

  She did ask, why him? when the old man appeared at the gate saying he’d heard in the village they might be wanting someone to help out at Shrove. From whom had he heard? The postman perhaps, the milkman. Eve was to tell Jonathan he’d heard from Mrs. Cooper. He wasn’t quite as old as Mr. Frost, his hair wasn’t even gray, but his face was very lined and withered. A hump grew out of his back, which made Liza shrink a little when she saw it. She had always been accustomed to physical beauty or at least conformity. The old man’s back was curved as if his spine had been bent into a bow the way you could bend a willow twig. He had strong arms and very large hands.

  Eve said, yes, he could come twice a week. She sounded reluctant, grudging, and Liza understood that she had wanted to keep Shrove all to herself. It wasn’t just a matter of not having people who might gossip or tell tales about the place, or it wasn’t that anymore. She wanted exclusive possession of Shrove. If she was going to take Gib on—that was the only name they knew him by—it was because she was worn out, she had hurt her back and had to rest, she could no longer cope alone.

  “But why him?” said Liza.

  “He lives alone, he’s not very bright, he won’t try to take over. He can’t talk much, didn’t you notice?”

  Gib had an impediment in his speech that made him hard to understand. He liked riding the mower, he worked hard, and if
he couldn’t tell a cultivated plant from a weed, he did his best, trimming the edges and sometimes proudly leaving in the midst of smoothly hoed earth a fine specimen of dandelion Eve said he had lovingly nourished up. She went around after he had gone, pulling up the weeds he had nurtured.

  Jonathan came in August, while Gib was still with them, and talked a lot about the holiday he was about to take in British Columbia and the Rocky Mountains. He had no wife now and since his divorce he had brought no other woman to Shrove except his cousin’s wife, Frances Cosby. But he didn’t ask Eve to go with him to Canada. Once or twice Liza thought he came very near to doing this, but he didn’t ask her. Perhaps he remembered the rebuff he had received all those years ago when Liza was little, or else he thought she wouldn’t be able to leave Liza and they couldn’t take Liza because she, of course, was at school.

  Would Eve have gone if he’d asked her? Would they somehow have managed about Liza, said she could take time off school? Seeing her mother’s sad, almost grim expression after Jonathan had gone, she thought that this time Eve would have said yes.

  He didn’t ask her but he did, at last, have the bathroom done. It was ten years since he had first promised to do it, but when Liza pointed this out Eve only shrugged and said they must be thankful for small mercies.

  Jonathan had gone to the bathroom to wash his hands, only there was no bathroom, there was just the kitchen sink. Perhaps it wasn’t pretense when he said he thought a bathroom had been put in years ago, he was sure of it, he thought Victoria had arranged it. Perhaps he really believed that. Eve only smiled and claimed she had forgotten his promises. But the builders came before he had left Shrove, built an annex onto the back of the gatehouse, and turned it into a bathroom.

  One of the builders was Matt. They had always wondered what he did, Eve and Liza, and now they knew. He was a bricklayer, like Rainer Beck. The other one was some relation of his, a young man with yellow hair dyed pink at the front. The weather was so hot that Liza lay out in the back garden in the sun after bathing in the river. She had a black swimming costume that had been Eve’s. The noise Matt made when he saw her was a whistle on two notes, the meaning of which was lost on Liza, who took no notice of it. She took almost no notice of either of them, for neither was handsome and she already knew that she preferred good-looking people.

  The whistle was repeated and Eve came out and told her to cover herself up or come indoors. She explained that Matt and his cousin found Liza attractive, now she was growing up, and that was their low and vulgar way of showing it.

  Liza digested this and pondered it for a long time. She wondered why there wasn’t anything low and vulgar about the way Jonathan had made a similar sound when he saw Eve all prepared for him and dressed up in a black-and-scarlet skirt and black jumper from the good-as-new shop in town. But perhaps his laughing afterward and kissing Eve made it all right.

  Gib was taken ill. The postman who brought Eve the message said he was often ill. He wasn’t strong and the jobs he took on never lasted, though he tried, he did his best. By this time it was autumn and the grass at least no longer needed attention. And the rain came at last, day after day of it, until the river rose above its banks and flooded the wetlands, so that the trees stood in water to halfway up their trunks.

  They were quite alone, Eve and Liza, in those last months of her sixteenth year. Gib didn’t come back and there wasn’t, anyway, much to be done in the garden. The oilman came and filled the tank while Eve and Liza were out walking, so they didn’t see him, and the postman took to delivering their few letters before either of them was up. As for the milkman, he disappeared and was replaced by a man with red hair who whistled all the time. He told Eve their milkman had gone into a home because the dairy had found out about his mental age and said he could no longer work for them.

  Jonathan was on the other side of the world, in Hawaii, as they knew from a not-at-all churchy card with a picture of a girl surfing on white waves. A card came from Heather on holiday in Cornwall and another one at Christmas with a note in it saying she’d moved to London and this was her new address.

  Once the spring had come, Eve began to fret about the garden. She seldom went to town anymore, but she had to make the occasional visit. She had to go to buy Liza’s jeans, her first pair, that Liza had been nagging her about for ages. When Eve came out of the jeans shop she saw an advertisement in the newsagent’s window next door.

  It said: “Strong man will do indoor and outdoor decorating, clearing sites, general laboring, gardening, and odd jobs.” There was a box number, which Eve said meant he came into the shop and collected the replies he’d had. Liza didn’t think much more about it because Eve hadn’t been able to put a phone number on her reply and had said it would come to nothing, no one wrote letters anymore.

  But he must have written and his letter come while Liza was still in bed in the morning because Eve announced one day that she thought she’d found a gardener and not, she hoped, a septuagenarian this time. She probably didn’t guess how young he was, either.

  “His name is Sean Holford,” she said, “and he’s coming for an interview on Tuesday.”

  EIGHTEEN

  SEEING her mother’s picture in the paper was a shock, worse than seeing what the dogs did, much worse than finding Bruno. She was sitting in Mrs. Spurdell’s kitchen waiting for her money and enjoying her own clean scented-soap smell. She had managed a bath and was screwing up her courage to ask Mr. Spurdell if she could borrow his Morte d’Arthur, which wasn’t a paperback, when he came into the room carrying a newspaper.

  He didn’t say anything, he looked at her and, when his wife appeared, rummaging for change in two handbags, made her look at the paper too. They both stared at Liza. Then Mr. Spurdell said, “Isn’t that an almost uncanny resemblance?”

  Mrs. Spurdell said nothing. She was looking rather cross, the way she always did if Liza appeared to be briefly the focus of attention. Shaking his head as if in incredulity, Mr. Spurdell handed Liza the paper, pointing with one finger at a photograph.

  Liza’s heart began to beat very fast. The picture was of Eve. She stared at it. It showed a much younger Eve and had apparently been taken some years before and as she looked she remembered. Jonathan had taken it. Eve and she had taken the dogs back to Shrove one summer evening and Jonathan had come down the steps and taken a photograph. She should have been in it but she’d been shy and had hidden behind a tree.

  The day that picture was taken was the Day of the Nightingale. How it came to be in a newspaper she had no idea.

  “You’re the spitting image of her, my dear,” said Mr. Spurdell. “It struck me as soon as I saw it. Quite amusing, eh? I thought to myself, I’ll run downstairs and show this to Liza before she goes. Not that I imagine she’ll be overjoyed to find she looks like a murderess, eh?”

  They didn’t know then, they hadn’t guessed. Liza forced herself to smile as she looked up and met his eyes.

  “I don’t see the likeness myself,” Mrs. Spurdell was saying. “That creature, the one in the paper, is quite spectacularly good-looking, criminal or not. If you didn’t know you’d take her for a film star.”

  Liza wanted to scream with laughter, though she knew it was hysteria, it hadn’t much to do with amusement. She tried to read what the paper said, but the print swam and bobbed about. The headline she could make out: ALLEGED KILLER BURIED MAN’S BODY. She must get hold of this paper.

  Mr. Spurdell was already holding out his hand for it. “I suppose, strictly speaking, we shouldn’t call her a murderess or a criminal. She is still on trial, she hasn’t been found guilty yet. Can I have my paper, please, my dear?”

  Even if he thought it odd, she must have that paper. Knowing her voice must sound hoarse, she said, “Could I—do you think I could keep it?”

  He gave his indulgent humoring laugh, a laugh she sometimes thought, seeking words for it, heavy with patronage and patriarchy. “And how am I to do my crossword puzzle?”

  The
problem was solved by Mrs. Spurdell’s snatching the paper out of her hand and thrusting into it—for once in the form of one note and two coins—the twelve pounds for her four hours’ work. Liza got up and left without another word, without even a good-bye. She had forgotten all about the Morte d’Arthur.

  The nearest newsagent had no morning papers left. The next one was closed. On some previous occasion in Aspen Close she had heard Mr. Spurdell talking about the evening paper that used to be on sale but which had ceased to exist some months before. By the time she met Sean she was nearly distraught, pouring it all out to him in an incoherent stream.

  Sean was always good in a crisis. He liked comforting her, keeping calm, showing his manly strength. He liked her weak and vulnerable. Tomorrow they would buy the newspapers, they would buy all the newspapers. Hadn’t Mr. Spurdell said the trial wasn’t over? It would have been going on again today. They would watch the television, every news there was.

  When they got home he made tea for her. He hugged her and said not to worry, she had him, he would do all the worrying for her, leave it to him, and he began kissing her and stroking her. That led of course to making love and they were in bed for an hour, consequently missing the six o’clock news.

  At nine there was nothing about Eve and nothing at ten. Sean, who had seen hundreds of television programs and videos about murders and police investigations, said this might be because it wasn’t a sensational enough case. It wasn’t a child or a young girl who had been murdered or something that had attracted a lot of public attention when it happened.

  “I just wish I knew more about it,” said Liza, who was a lot calmer by now. “I wish I knew about the law.”