The Crocodile Bird

by Ruth Rendell

  “Jonathan, will you marry me?”

  It was a worse silence this time. Anything would have been better than this silence. He was no longer looking at the moon but at Eve. She said with great bravery—how Liza admired her courage!—“I asked you to marry me. Women can do that, can’t they? We were going to be married once, when we were very young. It all went wrong, we both know why, but is it too late to make it right?”

  He sounded ashamed, Liza thought. “I’m afraid it is too late, Evie.”

  Eve made a little sound. She whispered, “Why is it?”

  “The time for that’s gone by, Evie. I’m sorry but it’s just too late.”

  “But why is it? We’re always happy when we’re together. Don’t I make you happy? Hasn’t it always been—good with me?”

  “I shan’t marry again. I’m better alone and maybe you are too. I’ll be frank, I don’t want to be married. I’ve tried it and it didn’t work. Victoria and I were all right until we got married. It was then that things started to fall apart. It would be the same with you and me.”

  “Then I have humiliated myself for nothing,” Eve said in a hard voice, but almost at once she had turned back to him and suddenly cast herself upon him, clutching him in her arms and crying, “Jonathan, Jonathan, you know I love you, why won’t you stay with me? Why have you kept me like this for all these years? I’ve waited for you for so long, I’ve waited forever and still I can’t have you. Jonathan, please, please …”

  Liza couldn’t bear any more of it. She jumped off the bed and ran away into Eve’s room, the way she had done when she was a child.

  “She should have known better than that,” said Sean.

  “It was ironical, wasn’t it? There was I being begged to go and live with you and not daring to and there was she begging Jonathan to marry her and being rejected.”

  She didn’t like his reply, though it was complimentary to herself. “No, well, you’re sixteen, aren’t you, love? And she’s a bit past her sell-by date.”

  “Jonathan was older than she.”

  “He’s a man. It’s different. I bet he didn’t stay that night.”

  She digested the first part of these remarks. This was a point of view she hadn’t previously come across and she found it deeply unsatisfactory. “He went back to Shrove about half an hour later, and he and Matt went off the next day. I thought he’d never come back but he did.”

  “Too right he did and that Matt with him. It was the end of August. Matt come up to me all smiles like he was going to give me a raise. It was ten minutes before I was due to leave and I was using that bit of time to thin out the plums. There was so many plums on that damn tree the branches was breaking. He said like he was my boss, Holford, we shan’t need your services after the weekend, thanks very much. It was a Wednesday and he said he wouldn’t need my services after the weekend. I said, is that what you call giving a person notice? He went on smiling. Take it or leave it, he says to me, you get paid up to Friday afternoon, and he just walked off.”

  Liza hadn’t seen Sean on that Wednesday evening, so the news of his dismissal reached her secondhand. She was nearly frantic when she heard. They weren’t in the lodge but at the house. It was such a rare thing for her and Eve to be asked up to the house when Jonathan was there that she had sensed something awful was going to happen.

  Jonathan came to the gatehouse at about four in the afternoon. She and Eve were indoors, it was rather a chilly day for late August, and Jonathan talked to them from the window. He didn’t come in. He just said, come up to the house for a drink about six, I’ve got something to tell you.

  Eve was sore. She seemed truculent and sulky. No one but Liza would have guessed that what she was suffering from was simple unhappiness. Tell us what? she asked. He didn’t answer. I’ll take you both out for a meal afterward, if you like, he said.

  Probably Eve was imagining all kinds of dreadful things—though nothing so dreadful as the truth. Jonathan received them in the drawing room, very grand. They sat in one of the groups of crimson-and-gold chairs and sofas that were arranged in each corner of the room around a marble or ormolu table. A good deal of the glory was lost when Matt came shambling in with bottles and glasses on a tray and peanuts in a packet. Matt’s hair was down on his shoulders now but it had gone gray and he had grown a big belly, so Liza couldn’t imagine what sort of a woman would think of marrying him. She had never seen a drunk person or heard the word Jonathan used and would have thought Matt ill if Eve hadn’t explained later.

  “How dare you come in here pissed? Put the bloody nuts in a dish and then get out.”

  Jonathan had been drinking too, she could smell it on his breath when he leaned toward her and asked her if she was allowed a glass of wine.

  “I’ve just had Matt give that young man of yours the push,” he said to Eve.

  “What young man of mine?”

  “The gardener.”

  “You’ve sacked him? Why?”

  Liza could hear the relief in Eve’s voice. She was aghast, but Eve was relieved because she was expecting something worse. So that was all Jonathan had got them up there for, Eve was no doubt thinking, to tell me he’s got rid of Sean Holford to make room for Matt and Mrs. Matt, and now he’ll be wanting me to get rid of Mrs. Cooper.

  And what am I going to do? Liza thought feverishly. Suppose he’s gone, suppose he never comes back, suppose I never see him again?

  “I told you I’d got something to tell you, Eve. It’s not that I’ve fired the gardener. It’s not that Matt will be taking over. No one will be taking over. The fact is I’m going to have to sell the house. Shrove House will have to be sold.”

  Trembling for her mother, Liza turned slowly to look at her. Eve was stone-still. She had gone white and suddenly she looked tremendously old, not thirty-eight but sixty-eight, an old woman with a lined forehead and mouth that has fallen in.

  “Don’t look like that, Evie,” Jonathan said. “D’you think I want to do it? I’ve no choice. I told you about my financial difficulties. I’ve got to put more into Lloyd’s than I dreamed was possible. It’s been a frightful shock to me. But you must know what’s happened to the Names, it’s been all over the papers day after day—no, I forgot, you don’t read the papers. The fact is I’ve got to find close to a million and I can’t do it without selling Shrove. If I get fifty thousand for Mama’s house in France I’ll be doing well, it’s more than I can hope for, thirty’s more likely. I’ve been trying to sell it for two years. Again I was going to say you know what’s happened to the property market but, no, I don’t suppose you do know. I have to sell Shrove. When I do it will just cover me. I shall just keep my head above water.”

  Eve was staring at him. This was the first time Liza had ever drunk wine and she was making the most of it. It helped. She held out her glass for more and Jonathan filled it absently.

  “For God’s sake, Eve, say something.” He tried, incredibly, facetiousness. “Say something if it’s only goodbye.”

  Liza saw her make an effort. She saw her suck in her lips and raise her shoulders as if in pain. The voice, when it came, was breathless and thin. “You can sell Ullswater.”

  “The Ullswater house belongs to Victoria now—remember?”

  “Why were you ever such a fool as to marry her?”

  “D’you think I haven’t asked myself that over and over?”

  “Jonathan,” said Eve, holding her hands tightly clenched together, “Jonathan, you can’t sell Shrove, it’s unthinkable, there has to be an alternative.” She thought of one. “You can sell the London house.”

  “And where am I supposed to live?”

  Eve, who hadn’t taken her eyes off him, seemed to stare even more intently. Not liking the look in her mother’s face, the glazed, hardly sane look, Liza shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Eve said, “You can live here.”

  “No, I can’t.” Jonathan was growing irritable. “I don’t want to live here. Things are bad enough without my having
to live in a place I dislike.” He sounded like a petulant child. “All right, I know I’ve never told you I don’t like this place, but the fact is I don’t, I never have. It’s isolated, it’s miles from anywhere, and you mayn’t have noticed this, but it’s damp. Of course it is, stuck in a bloody river valley. Victoria got fibrositis through staying here.”

  “God damn Victoria to hell,” said Eve in a voice to make Liza jump out of her skin.

  Jonathan wasn’t put out. “All right. Willingly. I wish she was in hell. I’m sure I’ve suffered from her more than you have, more than you dream of. Never mind her, anyway. I have to sell this house, I have to have the million it’ll fetch.”

  “You won’t be able to sell it. Even I know that. I may live out of the world but I’ve got a radio, I know what goes on. The house market’s the worst it’s been in my lifetime. You won’t find a buyer. Not at the price you’re asking you won’t.”

  Jonathan refilled Eve’s glass from the dry sherry bottle. She lifted the glass, watching him. For a moment Liza thought she was going to throw the contents of the glass at him but she didn’t. Nor did she drink from it.

  Jonathan said calmly, “I have. I have found a buyer.”

  Eve made a little pained sound.

  “A hotel chain. They’re embarking on a project called Country Heritage Hotels. Shrove will be their flagship, as they call it.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Come off it, Evie, of course you believe me. Why would I say it if it wasn’t true?”

  “The deal,” said Eve, “the contract, whatever, I don’t know about these things—is it settled?”

  “Not yet. They’ve made an approach and I’ve told my solicitor to tell them a tentative yes. That’s as far as we’ve got. You’re the first person I’ve told.”

  “I should think so,” Eve said scornfully.

  “Of course I’d tell you first, Evie.”

  “What will become of me, of us? Have you thought of that?”

  Jonathan began saying he would find her a house. Matt and his wife would stay at Shrove until it was bought by Country Heritage and then they would have to have a home found for them. His idea was perhaps to find a pair of semidetached cottages. On the other side of the valley possibly, and he named the village where Bruno had nearly bought a house. Property was for sale all over the place and much of it going for a song.

  There was no question of abandoning Eve. He hoped she knew his responsibility toward her. Unfortunately for her, the hotel chain wanted the gatehouse for use as their reception. They had specifically stated this in their offer.

  Eve said flatly, “I will never leave here.”

  “That’s all very well. I’m afraid you must. Do you think it’s pleasant for me having to tell you this? Come to that, d’you think I like selling half my property? My grandfather would turn in his grave, I know that.”

  “He wouldn’t,” said Eve. “Not where he is, rotting in hell.”

  “I don’t see the use of talking like that. It doesn’t help.”

  “I will never leave here. They will have to take me away by force if they want me to leave here.”

  It was a prophecy soon to be fulfilled.

  The next day, after a sleepless night, a night when she didn’t go to bed at all, Eve went up to Shrove to plead with Jonathan. By that time Liza was already telling the news to Sean, and Sean was urging her to come to him, to leave her mother and Shrove and come and live with him. She was old enough, the law couldn’t stop her.

  Coming back, she encountered Matt in the stable yard with a fat middle-aged woman in an apron. The presence of his wife didn’t stop him eyeing Liza up and down in a lecherous way—just as he had eyed Eve all those years ago—and telling her she’d grown up into a lovely girl who’d soon have all the boys after her.

  Jonathan came back with Eve and they spent the day arguing, Eve alternately pleading and shouting, occasionally weeping. As far as Liza knew, they spent the day like this. At four she went out to meet Sean and didn’t get home till nearly ten. Eve didn’t say anything, she uttered no word of reproach. Liza could hardly believe her eyes when Jonathan put his arm around Eve, lifted her off the sofa, and led her upstairs to her bedroom, where he closed the door on the pair of them for the rest of the night.

  Outside, the usual banging started and the flaring lights as Matt went rabbit-hunting. Liza drew her curtains. She sat on the bed thinking about Sean. He would never come back to Shrove to work. Apple-picking had already begun in the Discovery orchards to the north of here. In less than a week he’d be moving on to earn as much as he could picking apples from dawn till dusk through September. How did two people communicate when neither had a phone? Sean didn’t even have a postal address.

  He said he’d drive over on Monday and they’d meet in the little wood. Why the little wood? she’d asked and he’d said because it was romantic. He’d also said she’d got to tell him if she was coming. Didn’t she love him enough to come?

  Secure in her love and companionship now, Sean said, interrupting the story, “I still don’t know why you had to keep me on the hook so long.”

  “I’ve told you often enough. I was scared. I’d never been away. As far as I could remember, I’d never even slept in any bed but mine at the gatehouse.”

  He patted the bed they were sitting on. “We never slept much, did we, love?”

  “Jonathan was practically living at the gatehouse that weekend,” said Liza. “They were all over each other, more than I’d ever seen them. Eve’d never been demonstrative in public. Perhaps I wasn’t public, perhaps she didn’t care, I don’t know. They were hugging and kissing in my presence but for all that, Jonathan could never be got to say he wouldn’t sell Shrove. She’d plead and cajole and kiss him and at the end of it he’d just say, ‘I’ve got to sell.’”

  Then Eve gave up. On Sunday evening Liza heard her say, “If it must be, it must be.”

  She reached for Jonathan’s hand and held it. Jonathan gave her a look that to Liza, who now knew about such things, seemed full of love.

  “We’ll find a nice house for you and Liza, you’ll still have the countryside, the place itself …”

  Jonathan stayed the night but left early in the morning before Liza was up. She came downstairs to find Eve seated at the breakfast table, glittery-eyed and galvanic with barely suppressed energy, her hands clasping and unclasping.

  “He’s going to sell Shrove, he’s absolutely determined.”

  “I know,” Liza said.

  The tone of Eve’s voice changed and became dreamy, reminiscing. “He’s asked me to marry him.”

  “He hasn’t!”

  “The irony of it, Lizzie, the irony! Of course I said no. No, thanks, I said, you’re too late. What’s the good of him to me without Shrove?”

  It was for Shrove she had wanted him. If he had married her a year ago he could have put Shrove in her name and kept it safe from his creditors. She laughed a little, not hysterically but madder than that, a manic laugh. Still, Liza couldn’t believe she had been as abrupt with Jonathan as she implied, for he was back at the lodge in the late morning.

  When she heard Eve say she’d go pigeon-shooting with him later, Liza thought the world was turning upside-down faster than she could cope with. Eve never killed birds or animals. Now she was saying the pigeons destroyed the vegetables she grew and would have to be kept down. Jonathan sounded quite happy to teach her to shoot with the four-ten, the gun, Liza thought, she had used to shoot the man with the beard. Only Jonathan, of course, had no idea of that.

  Neither of them seemed deflected from their purpose by the fact that in a month or two Shrove would be sold, Eve would have left the gatehouse, and it would hardly matter to her whether the vegetables survived or not.

  In the afternoon Liza went up into the little wood to meet Sean. In arranging where to meet she had been careful to arrange this trysting place a good distance from where Bruno’s body lay. They made love on a bed of so
ft dry grass, walled-in by hawthorn bushes. But afterward, holding her in his arms, Sean grew grave. He had to work for his living. He wasn’t going on benefit if he could help it. For the next two days he could take a job clearing a house of furniture for a dealer in town, but after that he’d have to move on to where the apples were. He wanted her. Would she come?

  He couldn’t wait forever, he couldn’t really wait beyond Thursday. And after that how would they get in touch with each other?

  She hadn’t liked that, the fact that he wouldn’t wait. In the romantic plays and books she had read, the true lover had been prepared to wait indefinitely, not make conditions and threats. She got him to say that he’d come back here next Saturday, same time, same place. By then she promised she’d have made up her mind. She would have separated herself from her mother and come to him or else she’d be staying. Was it her imagination that he had seemed reluctant? Instead of ardor, her request to him had been met with doubts about whether he could make it, much depended on where he was, he would do his best.

  When he had gone and she had watched him go, heading for the place where he had parked the car, far up the lane, when she had seen the last of him as the trees absorbed him, the tears came into her eyes and she started to cry. They were tears of frustration, of impotence and self-pity at her own indecisiveness. Wiping her eyes on the backs of her hands, then rubbing them with her fists like a child, she walked slowly back the way she had come.

  It was nearly six, she calculated, the sun still high in the sky but some of its heat departed. Sean and she had been together for three hours but it had seemed no more than three minutes. She was thinking about her dilemma once more, wondering if some middle way could be found, some compromise, whereby she could continue to be here with Eve and keep Sean nearby, when she heard the first shot.

  Liza’s instinct, whenever there was shooting on the grounds, was to take herself as far away from the neighborhood of those reports as possible, even to cover her ears. Her dread was of actually seeing a bird fall to the ground, bloody and with feathers flying, or a rabbit brought down as it fled for cover. But this time she was not exactly sure where the shot had come from, it was often hard to tell. At any rate, it wasn’t in this wood and wouldn’t be in their back garden.