The Crocodile Bird Page 5

Then, after a little while, she said, “All right, dogs, that’ll do. Quiet now. Still.”

  They obeyed her at once. It was clever the way they stopped the moment she spoke. Rudi had some of the man’s blood on his face and Heidi a mouthful of beard. The man rolled over again, his head on his arms, but he had stopped screaming, he didn’t make a sound. Mother bent over him, looking closely, she didn’t touch him with her hands but prodded him with one small, delicate foot.

  Liza made a little sound to herself up in her bedroom, a whimper like a dog whining behind a closed door.

  Sean said hoarsely, “Was he dead?”

  “Oh, no, he wasn’t dead. ”

  “What did she do?”

  “Nothing. She just looked at him.”

  “Didn’t she get help? There was a phone in Shrove House, you said.”

  “Of course she didn’t get help,” Liza said impatiently.

  Mother took hold of the dogs by their collars and put them in the little castle for the night. Liza saw her do that from the other window and heard her come into their own house and shut the front door after her. She went out onto the landing and listened. In the sitting room Mother was moving a chair about and it sounded as if she had climbed on the chair and jumped off it. Liza scrambled across the bed to have another look at the man on the grass. He was still there but not lying face-downward anymore.

  It was really dark now, too dark to see much but the shape of the man sitting there with his head on his knees and his arms up around his head. Soon he would get up and go away and leave them and they’d be safe. She peered out through the dark, hoping for that to happen.

  Suddenly she could see the man very clearly in a big oblong of light. The back door was open and light was coming from the kitchen. She wrinkled up her nose and made a face because the man’s face and beard were a mass of blood. Her knees had looked like that when she fell over and hurt herself on the gravel.

  Mother walked out into the light and pointed something she had in her arms and there was a tremendous explosion. The man tumbled over backward and jerked a bit and shuddered and lay still. In the little castle the dogs set up a wild barking. Mother came back into the house and shut the door and the light went out.

  FOUR

  IN the late afternoon, going by the lanes instead of the A road, Sean and Liza reached Vanner’s fruit farm. This was orchard country, acre after acre of close-pruned stubby apple trees in long lines and then acre after acre of Cornice pears and Louise Bonnes. The big wooden crates that would take the apples were stacked on top of one another in the corners of orchards. Liza saw women mounted on steps picking the big green Cornice. Very few of the pears had been left to fall, but the apple crop, Discovery and Jonagold, had been a heavy one, and under the trees the ground was scarlet with abandoned fruit.

  Sean took the left-hand turn into Vanner’s land. He had been there before and knew where to go. The long straight macadamized roadway was bounded on either side by lines of alders, neat quick-growing trees to make high hedges. He had to pull in to let a car with its soft top down go past in the other direction, coming from the farm shop. A woman was driving. She had shiny blond hair and red lipstick on, gold earrings and red varnish on her nails, and Liza stared at her, fascinated.

  “You’re not still thinking women are all dark and men are all fair, are you, love?”

  “Of course I’m not. I was only four. ”

  “Because there’s other ways of telling the difference.” He put his hand in her lap and moved the fingers into her crotch. “Bet you can’t talk while I’m doing that. Go on, try. I bet you can’t.”

  “I can do that too,” said Liza, reaching for him. “It’ll be worse for you, you won’t be able to drive.”

  He laughed and gasped and grabbed her hand. “Better leave off till we get there or I’ll have to stop the van and we’ll cause an obstruction.”

  The parking place for caravans was in a remote spot where the orchards ended and the strawberry fields began. The strawberries were long over, the people who came to pick their own departed, and the fields a desolate waste of brown tendrils and dying leaves. A line of extremely tall Lombardy poplars on a high bank divided these fields from the Discovery orchard, and under the shadow of the poplars, on a rutted area of dried mud and scrubby grass, stood a sign that said: PICKERS’ VANS PARK HERE. Beside the sign was a water tap, and an arrow spraypainted on cardboard pointed to the waste disposal.

  Other pickers there might be, but there was only one caravan. It was parked at the far end up against the bank and looked as if no one was living in it or had lived in it for a long time. Its door and windows were shut and its blinds down. Just the same, Sean parked his car and van as far away from it as he could.

  He didn’t uncouple the van from the car or get the generator going or fill the water tanks. He and Liza, without a word, with scarcely an exchanged glance, got out of the car, went into the van, and made love. They delayed for just the time it took to pull the bed down.

  “I tell you what,” said Sean, when it was finished and she was lying in his arms, warm and damp and sighing with pleasure. “Now we’re here and got a base, you can get yourself to the family planning or whatever and go on the Pill. Then I won’t have to keep on using these things, I hate them.”

  She looked up at him, uncomprehending. When he had explained she said, “You’ll have to come with me, then. I won’t know what to do.”

  “Haven’t you never been to the doctor’s?”

  He would be hurt if she said, “Haven’t you ever been,” so she didn’t say it. “Eve took me a couple of times. It’s lucky I’m healthy. She said I had my injections when I was a baby.”

  “Yeah, okay, but injections won’t stop you getting yourself pregnant.”

  “You getting me pregnant,” she said.

  He laughed. He liked her being a bit sharp with him. Hugging her tight, he said, “D’you mind talking about it or is this the wrong time? I mean, you know, what happened after your mum shot the guy with the beard.”

  “Why would I mind?”

  She couldn’t see why she would. Eve said people liked talking about themselves better than anything and now, savoring the pleasure of it for the first time, she understood this was right. Thinking about it, going over it all, picking the bits to tell him and the bits not to, she enjoyed very much. It was her life and she was beginning to see what an extraordinary one it had so far been.

  “I started crying, I couldn’t help it. I lay on the bed sobbing and screaming.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “No, well, Eve came up and hugged me. She got me a drink of water and told me not to cry, not to worry, everything was going to be all right. The man had gone away, she’d blown him away.”

  “Christ.”

  “She didn’t mean me to think she’d killed him. She didn’t know I’d been watching. I didn’t tell her. I was only four but somehow I knew not to tell her. All she knew was that I’d seen the man come and heard the shot. She got into bed with me and I liked that. I was always wanting to sleep in the same bed with her but she’d never let me. She was so nice and warm and young. D’you know how old she is now?”

  “About thirty-five?”

  “She’s thirty-eight. But that’s young, isn’t it? I mean, it’s not young to us but people would call it young, wouldn’t they?”

  “I reckon,” said Sean, who was twenty-one. “How did she come to have a funny name like Eve?”

  “It’s Eva, really. It’s German. Her father was German. I didn’t know what her name was till I heard Mr. Tobias call her Eve. She was just Mother. And then when Bruno was always calling her Eve I started doing it too and she didn’t mind.”

  “Who’s Bruno?”

  “Just a man. He doesn’t come into it for years and years. I’ll tell you about him when we get there. We’d got this other man lying dead on our grass, or Eve had, it wasn’t really much to do with me. The thing was no one ever came near us then, no one at all
but the milkman and the oilman and the man who read the electric meter at the cottage and at Shrove. And they didn’t go in the back garden or ask any questions.

  “The milkman was strange. I noticed more when I was older. I never knew any children so I don’t know if he talked like a child but Eve said he had a mental age of eight. He used to say things about the weather and the trains and that was all he ever said. ‘Here comes the train,’ he’d say and, ‘We’re in for a cloudburst.’ He never noticed things. That man’s dead body could have been lying on our doorstep and he’d have just stepped over it.”

  “What about it, then?” said Sean. “The dead body.”

  She didn’t know exactly. Real events got mixed up with dreams at this point. She’d had awful dreams that night, had woken screaming and found Eve gone, back to her own bed. But she had come and comforted her and stayed, as far as Liza knew, for the rest of the night.

  But she couldn’t have, Liza realized that later, for in the morning when she looked out of the window, the man was gone. What does death mean to a child of four? It hadn’t really registered with her the night before, that the man wouldn’t ever get up again, wouldn’t ever speak again or laugh or walk about. She had just been terribly frightened. When he was gone she thought he had gone of his own volition. He had mended and got well and walked away.

  It was years afterward when she was much older, piecing memories together and comparing them with similar contemporary events, that she understood he was dead and Eve had killed him with Mr. Tobias’s shotgun. Not only had Eve killed him but had taken his body away.

  Eve was a small woman with a tiny waist and slender elegant legs. She had small hands with long tapering fingers. Her face was wide at the cheekbones and narrow at the chin, her forehead high, her upper lip short, and her mouth full and lovely. Slightly tilted, her pretty nose was a little too small for her face. She had large hazel-green eyes and black eyebrows like Chinese brush-strokes, not unlike Sean’s, and her thick, shiny dark hair reached to the middle of her back. But she was very small, no more than five feet or five feet one at best. Liza didn’t know her weight, they had no scales, but when she was sixteen Eve estimated seven and a half stone for herself and eight stone and a bit for Liza and that was probably right. Yet this tiny woman had somehow moved a man one and a half times her weight and nearly six feet tall.

  And put him where? Somewhere in the wood, Liza decided when she thought about it around that sixteenth birthday. She put the body in the wheelbarrow and took it through the gap in the fence and buried it in the wood. During the night while Liza slept and before she woke up screaming. Or after she had held her and soothed her and she had slept again, Mother had gone down and worked silently in the dark.

  The first thing she saw from the window that morning—even before she saw the man was gone—was Matt opening the door of the little castle and letting the dogs out. He wasn’t due till mid-morning, Mother said, running into the room. She sounded cross and upset. Liza went to the other window. The dogs had made straight for the place where the man had lain and ran about sniffing the grass in a frenzied way and pushing their noses into the earth.

  “There’s something fascinating them,” Matt said when Liza and Mother went outside. “They been burying bones?”

  “Do you know what time it is?” Mother said. “It’s six-thirty in the morning.”

  “So it is. Dear, oh, dear. I’d some business down this way yesterday, so I stopped the night and come over here first thing. Not got you girls out of bed, I hope.”

  Mother ignored this. “Has Mr. Tobias come back from France?”

  “Coming back tonight. He wants his dogs there when he gets home. They’re all the company he’s got, I reckon. It wouldn’t suit me, I like a bit of action myself, but it takes all sorts to make a world.”

  “It certainly does,” said Mother, not very pleasantly.

  “You’d think he’d get himself a girl—well, he does, but nothing permanent.” Matt spoke as if Mother didn’t know it all already. “Of course he’s loaded, got his own place and this here and the London one and there’s girls falling over themselves to get him, but to be perfectly honest with you he’s just not interested.” He winked incomprehensibly at Liza. “Not in settling down, I mean.”

  In spite of what had happened, Liza wasn’t afraid to put her arms around each dog’s neck and place a tender kiss on each glossy black skull. She cried a bit when they had gone. She asked Mother if they could have a dog of their own.

  “No, absolutely not. Don’t ask me.”

  “Why couldn’t we, Mother, why couldn’t we? I do want a dog, I love Heidi and Rudi, I do want one of my own.”

  “Then you must want.” Mother smiled when she said it, she wasn’t angry, and she called Liza Lizzie, which she sometimes did when she was pleased with her or not too disappointed in her. “Listen, Lizzie, suppose Mr. Tobias came to live at Shrove? He might, it’s his house—one of his houses. Then Heidi and Rudi would come with him and what would happen to our dog?

  They don’t like other dogs, they’d attack it. They’d hurt it.”

  Like they hurt the man, Liza felt like saying but she didn’t say it. Instead, she said, “Is he going to come? I’d like him to come because then we’d have his dogs and we wouldn’t have to have our own. Is he going to come?”

  Mother said nothing for a moment. Then she put her arm around Liza and pulled her close against her skirts and said, “I hope so, Lizzie, I hope he will,” but she wasn’t smiling and she gave a heavy sigh.

  Next day was Mother’s day for going shopping. She went once a fortnight to get the things the milkman wouldn’t bring. He brought butter and eggs and porridge oats and orange juice and bread and yogurt as well as milk, but he never brought meat or fish. Until they grew their own, Mother had to buy vegetables. She had to buy fruit and cheese. The bus that went to the shops—to town, that is—ran four times a day and Mother had to walk down the lane and go over the river bridge and a hundred yards along the road to the bus stop. When Mother went to town she never took Liza with her. Liza was locked up in her bedroom.

  She was used to it and she accepted, but not this time. At first she gave in, sat on the bed with the rag book and the pencils, sucked at her orange juice bottle. Mother had given her an apple as well for a treat, a Golden Delicious because there were no English ones in July. She knelt on the bed and watched Mother go along the lane toward the main road. Then she shifted her gaze from the distance to the foreground and saw where the man had been and the dogs and the explosion had happened. She began to scream.

  Probably she couldn’t have screamed for the whole hour and a half Mother was away. Halfway through she may have fallen asleep. But she was screaming when Mother came back. Mother said, “I won’t leave you again,” and she didn’t for a long while but of course she did again one day.

  It might have been that evening or an evening days or weeks later, at any rate it was after the dogs had gone, that Liza was playing her roving-between-the-bedrooms game after bedtime. She tried on Mother’s straw hats, the golden one with the white band and the brown one with the cream scarf tied around it, and she stroked Mother’s suede shoes, that had things inexplicably called trees thrust into them. When she was tired of that she looked inside the jewel case.

  Mother was wearing one set of earrings and the mother-of-pearl brooch, so of course those things weren’t in there. Liza hung the jade beads around her own neck, put the comb with the shiny bits on it into her hair, and admired the result in the mirror. She picked up the wooden brooch and found lying underneath it a gold ring.

  Whose could it be? She had never seen it before, she had never seen any ring on Mother’s hand. Examining it with great interest, she saw that there was some writing on the inside of the ring, but she was only four then and she couldn’t read very well. Nor did she at that time connect the ring with the man with the beard.

  “It was his ring?” said Sean.

  “It must have been. I
looked at it again later, when I could read. The writing said: TMH AND EHH, MARCH 3, 1974. I didn’t know what it meant then, but now I think it was his wedding ring. Victoria had a wedding ring. Do men have them?”

  “I reckon there’s some as do.”

  “Those were his initials and his wife’s and that was the date they got married, don’t you think?”

  “She must have took it off him, off his hand,” said Sean, making a face.

  “I don’t know why she did unless she thought she might sell it one day. Or maybe she thought if she buried it with him someone might dig it up.”

  “Why did she do it?”

  “Do what? Shoot that man?”

  “Why didn’t she get an ambulance, have him taken to the hospital? You said he could sit up, he’d have got all right. It wasn’t her fault, no one’d have put the blame on her, not if she said he’d been going to rape her.”

  “I never knew quite why,” Liza said, “but it might have been something like this. Later on someone told me a story about a child being attacked by dogs and I put two and two together. It was Bruno, as a matter of fact, he told me. You see, the man would have told them at the hospital and they’d have told the police. About the dogs, I mean. And the dogs would have been killed.”

  “Destroyed.”

  “Yes, I expect that’s the word. The dogs would have been destroyed like the ones in Bruno’s story. Mr. Tobias loved his dogs and he’d have blamed Eve and given her the sack and turned us out of the gatehouse. Or that’s what she thought. Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t, but she thought he would and that was the important thing. She couldn’t leave Shrove, you see, she couldn’t, that was the most important thing in the world to her, Shrove, more important even than me. Well, Mr. Tobias was important to her too but only in a special sort of way.”

  Sean was looking bewildered. “You’ve lost me.”

  “Never mind. That’s really all there was to it. If the dogs had killed the man she wouldn’t have had to kill him. I expect that’s the way she thought. But they hadn’t killed him, so she had to, or else he’d have told the police. She shut the dogs up and went into the house and got the gun and shot him.”