The Crocodile Bird Page 9

  “Yes, I know about them. I’ll tell you how, but not now, not this minute. Now I just want you to know my childhood was all right, it was fine. She’s not to blame for anything that happened to me, she was a wonderful mother to me.”

  Again his face wore that incredulous expression and he shook his head faintly. She was silent and gently she took his hand. She wasn’t going to tell him—or not yet—that things had changed, that the happiness was not perpetual.

  Eve told her the myth of Adam and Eve, insisting as she did so that it was only that, a myth. They read the passage on the creation in Genesis, and then the expulsion from the Garden in Milton, so she knew about the serpent in paradise and later imagined it was Eve and herself who hand in hand through Eden took their solitary way.

  But all she told Sean of the months before her seventh birthday was that Mr. Tobias came back once, for a day and a night, a night he didn’t spend at the gatehouse with Eve but in his own bed at Shrove. Then he went away, if not forever, for a very long time.

  SEVEN

  AT first Sean was better at picking pears than she was. He knew how to lift each fruit from the twig on which it grew and bend it gently backward until it came away in his hand. Liza just pulled. The pears got bruised and sometimes her fingernail went through the mottled green skin, wounding the white flesh beneath. Mr. Vanner would dock her pay, Sean said, if she damaged his fruit, so she tried to be more careful. She was used to being told, it wasn’t something she had learned to resent.

  They picked the pears before they were ripe, before the outside turned yellow with a red blush and while the inside was still firm and waxy. Since they came to Vanner’s, the sun was always shining. Each morning they woke to a pale blue sky, a stillness and a white mist lying on the fields. Over the farm buildings the Russian vine spread snowy clouds of blossom and Mrs. Vanner’s garden was overgrown with yellow and orange nasturtiums. They began picking before it grew hot and took a couple of hours off from noon till two. At that time they had lunch, packets of crisps and a pork pie, cans of Coke and Mars bars, sticky from being kept in a hot pocket.

  The pear fields were a long way from the caravan, so mostly they didn’t bother to go back but ate their food sitting on the bank under the quickthorn hedge. At first they were nervous about being seen by the other pickers, but no one was interested in them, no one came their way, and on the second day they slipped into the little sheltered place where the elders made a tent of branches and made love on the warm dry grass. Both knew they would make love that evening and when they went to bed but it seemed too long to wait.

  Afterward Sean fell asleep, stretched out full-length, his head buried in his arms. Liza lay awake beside him, her cheek resting on his shoulder and her arm around his waist. She liked looking at the way his dark hair grew on the nape of his neck, in two points like the legs of an M, and she thought for the first time that it was also the way Mr. Tobias’s hair grew.

  Mother hadn’t told her the history of her mother and the Tobiases until she was older. She must have been about ten when she learned about her grandmother Gracie Beck and old Mr. Tobias, also called Jonathan, and the will; old Mr. Tobias’s daughter, Caroline, who was Mr. Tobias’s (that is, Jonathan’s) mother, and her enormously rich husband, who left her because she was so awful. When she was seven all Liza knew was that Mother and Mr. Tobias had known each other since he was a big child and she a small one and that somehow or other Shrove House ought to have belonged to Mother and not been Mr. Tobias’s at all.

  Oh, and that Mother loved Mr. Tobias and he loved her. Mother told her that one evening in the winter when they were sitting by the big log fire and Liza had the doll called Annabel on her lap. Liza had noticed that Annabel often brought Mr. Tobias into Mother’s mind.

  “The difficulty is,” Mother said, “that Mr. Tobias is a restless man and wants to see the world, while I intend to remain here for the whole of my life and never go away.” She said that last bit quite fiercely, looking into Liza’s eyes. “Because there is nowhere in the world like this place. This place is the nearest thing to heaven there is. If you have found heaven, why should you want to see anywhere else?”

  “Have you seen everywhere in the world?” Liza asked, carefully combing Annabel’s hair.

  “Near enough,” Mother said mysteriously. “I have seen more than enough of people. Most people are bad. The world would be a better place if half the population were to perish in a huge earthquake. I have seen more than enough places. Most places are horrible, I can tell you. You have no idea how horrible and I’m glad you haven’t. That is the way I want it to be. One day, when you have grown up the way I want you to, you can go out and have a peep at the world. I guarantee you’ll come running back here, thankful to be restored to heaven.”

  Liza was uninterested in any of that, she didn’t know what it meant. “Mr. Tobias doesn’t think other places are horrible.”

  “He’ll learn. It’s only a matter of time, you’ll see. When he has traveled about for long enough and seen enough, he’ll come back here. It just takes him longer than it took me.”

  “Why does it?”

  “Perhaps because I have seen more dreadful things than he has or just that I’m wiser.”

  In the spring of that year Heather came to stay. Mother said nothing about it until the day before she arrived, and then all she said was, “You’ll be sleeping in my room with me for the next week, Liza. Miss Sawyer is coming and will have your room.”

  Liza knew who Miss Sawyer was from the letters Mother got. She was the same person as Heather.

  “For heaven’s sake don’t call me that, child,” said Heather five minutes after she got there. “My name is Heather. ‘Miss Sawyer’ sounds like a headmistress. What’s your headmistress called?”

  Liza, who had understood almost nothing of what was said, simply gazed at her, her extreme thinness, her height, her small head and sleek red hair.

  “Head teacher, then? I can’t keep pace with all these new terms.”

  Mother changed the subject. She explained to Liza that she and Heather had met while they were at college and Heather knew Mr. Tobias.

  “Is he still around?”

  “Shrove is his house, Heather. Surely you remember that?”

  That was when Heather first began whispering to Mother behind her hand. She gave Liza a glance, then quickly turned, put up her hand, and began the whispering. “Wishy, wishy, wishy,” was how it sounded to Liza.

  After she had been upstairs and seen her room, Heather said she had never before stayed in a house without a bathroom. She didn’t know houses without bathrooms existed anymore. But no, of course she wasn’t going to allow Mother to carry hot water upstairs for her, which Mother had offered to do. She would use the bath in the kitchen like they did, only it was going to be very awkward.

  Another awkwardness was what she called “lack of TV.” Liza didn’t understand that either and wasn’t very interested. The weather was fine, so they went out for many long walks and Heather went for a ride in the train from Ring Valley Halt. She had to go alone. Mother said she had been too many times to want to go again, so Liza couldn’t go either.

  There was no car to go out in—Heather had come by taxi from some distant station—no record player, hardly any books published later than 1890, no phone, and no restaurants nearer than eight miles away. The village where Mr. Frost came from had something called a pub, Mother said, but they couldn’t go there because pubs didn’t like children and wouldn’t let them in.

  “Wishy, wishy, wishy,” whispered Heather behind her hand.

  “Oh, do speak out, Heather,” said Mother. “You are creating mysteries where none need exist.”

  So Heather stopped whispering and said boldly, the night before she was due to go, “You’ll go mad here, Eve.”

  “No, I shall go sane,” said Mother.

  “Oh, dear, how epigrammatic!”

  “All right. I mean I shall become normal again. I might even be h
appy. I shall recapture the old-fashioned values and bring up a daughter who has been kept clean of the hideous pressures of our world.”

  “It all sounds very high-flown and unnatural to me. Anyway, you won’t be able to. Her contemporaries will see to that. When you get tired of being a noble savage, remember I’ve always got a couple of spare rooms.”

  Eve must have remembered those words when she was finding somewhere for Liza to seek sanctuary. Or else Heather wrote it in a letter, for she never came back and that was the only time Liza ever saw her.

  Mother left Liza to her own devices while she swept the bedroom carpets at Shrove with the vacuum cleaner (“You must never say ‘hoovered,’ Lizzie”) and at those times Liza explored the library. One of the books she found was of fairy stories and the tale of Bluebeard was in it. After she had read it she began to associate the locked room with Bluebeard and wondered fearfully if it might contain dead brides. She thought perhaps old Mr. Tobias had married several women, killed them all, and left them to molder behind that locked door.

  Even when Mother showed her old Mr. Tobias’s portrait, a big painting that hung in the upstairs hall of a man with a proud expression and gray hair but no beard, blue or otherwise, she still wondered. She wanted to know what that thing was sticking out of his mouth, a stick with a little pot on the end of it. Mother said it was called a pipe, something you put ground-up leaves in and lit with a match, but Liza, remembering that Mother claimed to be a good liar, for the first time disbelieved her.

  In a much more prideful place, where the light was bright and no eye could fail to be drawn to it, hung a portrait of the lady called Caroline. She wore the kind of dress Liza had never seen on an actual woman, ankle-length, flowing, low-cut, and of silk the same red as her mouth. Her hair was chestnut-colored, her skin like the petals of the magnolia even now blooming in the Shrove gardens, and her eyes fierce. Liza spent a long time looking at all the pictures in the house that were of real people, alive or long dead. There was no portrait of Mr. Tobias and none of the rich man who had run away from Caroline.

  Heather wrote Mother a thank-you letter and after that weeks went by without the postman ever coming to their door. The milkman came and said, “The ten-thirty is late” and “This sunshine is a real treat,” but they never saw the postman until one day he brought an envelope with a little paper book in it. Liza managed to get a fascinated look at this book, which was full of pictures of irons and hair dryers and towels and sheets and dresses and shoes, before Mother came and took it away from her. A log fire was burning in the grate and Mother got rid of the book by tearing it into pieces and putting the pieces on the fire.

  After that there was no post for weeks, nothing from Mr. Tobias until a postcard came, a plain one, not even a picture, with just a few lines on the back asking them to have the dogs.

  “Not if it’s a nuisance,” he wrote. “Matt will willingly have them. It is only for two weeks while I go to France to see my mother.”

  “Caroline,” Liza said.

  Mother said nothing.

  “Does she live in the house in the place called Dordogne?” Liza had spent a long time studying the large maps of France in the library atlas. “Does she live there by herself? Is she called Mrs. Tobias?” She remembered the fierce eyes and the red, mouth-colored dress.

  “She is now. She is called Caroline Tobias. When she was married she was called Lady Ellison, but our Mr. Tobias was always called Jonathan Tobias because that was his grandfather’s wish. She lives in a house in the Dordogne her husband gave her when they were divorced.” Mother gave Liza a speculative look as if she was considering explaining something, but she must have thought better of it. “Mostly, she lives by herself. Mr. Tobias goes to see her.”

  “We can have the dogs, can’t we?” said Liza. “Even if Matt really wants them, we can have them, can’t we?”

  “Of course we shall have the dogs.”

  So that Mr. Tobias would be sure to come. Liza knew that only in retrospect, not at the time.

  It was the day of her first French lesson (“Voici la table, les livres, la plume, le cahier”) that Matt came with the dogs. She was pursing her lips, trying to make that funny sound which is halfway between an E and a U, when they heard the van coming and then the knock at the door. It was rather a cold day even for April, she remembered, and the old electric heater was switched on.

  The dogs were pleased to see her, as they always were, jumping up and licking her face and wagging the bit at the end of their backs where their tails had been chopped off. But Rudi was less violent in his affections than in the past, his breath smelled, and his muzzle was going gray. Dogs had seven years to every year of ours, Matt said, and that made Rudi over seventy. Heidi, of course, was only six, or forty-two.

  “Will he die?” Liza said.

  Matt’s hair was much longer than last time, hanging down in greasy hanks. “Don’t you worry yourself about that,” he said. “That’s a long way off.”

  But Mother said, “Yes, he’ll die this year or next. Dobermans don’t live much past eleven.”

  Liza knew her tables. “Or seventy-seven.”

  It had the effect of making Matt ask her why she wasn’t at school. Before she could reply Mother said coldly, “It’s Easter. The schools have broken up for Easter.”

  Some years went by before Liza realized a vital fact about that statement, though she knew there was something odd about it at the time. Mother hadn’t told a lie, it was the Easter holidays, but just the same the impression she had given Matt was a false one. Later on she observed other instances of Mother doing this and learned how to do it herself.

  Mother asked Matt how long they were to have the dogs this time and he said two or three weeks, he couldn’t be more precise. But they’d let her know.

  “Still haven’t got no phone, I see.”

  “And never shall have.”

  “It’ll have to be a postcard, then.”

  “I think we can leave that to Mr. Tobias,” Mother said in the very cold way she sometimes had, and then, less coldly, almost as if she was asking for something she didn’t want to have to ask for, “Will he come for them himself?”

  Liza didn’t like the look Matt gave Mother. He wasn’t smiling but it was as if he was laughing inside. “Like you said, we’ll have to leave that to him.” With one of his winks, he added, “It’ll depend on what Miss Fastley has to say.”

  Liza had never heard of Miss Fastley, but Mother looked as if she had, though she said nothing.

  “When him and her get back from France,” Matt said.

  As soon as he had gone, Liza thought they would return to the French lesson but Mother said that was enough for today and to take the dogs down to the river. They wrapped up warmly and went down through the Shrove garden. A couple of trains had very likely passed by, Liza couldn’t remember details like that, but it was probable at that hour. Likely too that she had waved to the train and one or two passengers waved back. There were never more than a few to wave back.

  Mother stood looking across the valley and up to the high hills where the white road ran around among the greening trees. The woods were white with cherry blossom and primroses grew under the hedges.

  “It’s so beautiful, it’s so beautiful!” she cried, spreading out her arms. “Isn’t it beautiful, Lizzie?”

  Liza nodded, she never knew what to say. There was something about the way Mother looked and the breathy edge to her voice that made her feel awkward.

  “I don’t mind the trains, I think in a way the trains make it better, it’s something to do with all the people being able to sit inside and see how beautiful it is.”

  And she told Liza a story about a man called George Borrow who sold Bibles, wrote books, and lived in Norfolk, and who moved away and lived away for years because he couldn’t bear it when they built a railway through the countryside he loved.

  “Who’s Miss Fastley?” Liza said on the way back.

  Mother can’t h
ave heard her that first time because she had to say it again.

  “She is one of the ladies who came to stay at Shrove for the weekend last year. She is the one called Victoria.”

  “Annabel had the sweater with flowers on,” said Liza, “and Claire had the jacket like your shoes, so Victoria must have been the one in the green silk shirt.”

  “Yes, I believe she was.”

  They didn’t put the dogs straight into the little castle but had them in with them for the evening. Rudi lay in front of the electric heater and slept. He was tired after his walk, Mother said they had taken him too far. Liza sat on one side of the fireplace and Mother on the other side. Liza was reading Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne and Mother was reading Eothen by A. W. Kinglake. They sometimes read bits aloud to each other and

  Winnie the Pooh was so funny there were a lot of bits Liza would have liked to read aloud but when she looked up she saw that Mother wasn’t reading but gazing sadly at the hearth rug and she had tears on her face.

  Liza didn’t offer to read aloud but went silently back to her book. She thought Mother was crying because Rudi was old and would soon die.

  The money they earned Liza wanted to save up. Eve had set her an example of thrift. There had been the bank account and the tin in the kitchen. And, of course, the secret box in the little castle. Strict accounts had been kept of what Eve earned and what they spent and these were consulted and referred back to before a length of material was bought to make a dress for Liza or a new skirt for Eve. The biggest expenditure Liza remembered was on the tape player Eve bought so that Liza could learn about music and get used to hearing the works of the great composers. She was nearly eight when that happened.

  Sean appreciated her economies. He said that being sensible about money was one thing she could teach him. They might have Cornish pasties or pork pies and crisps for lunch with chocolate bars afterward, but it would be wiser not to go into town so much in the evenings for a meal at the Burger King or even Mr. Gupta’s Tandoori. One evening Sean saw a notice in the window of the new supermarket that they wanted assistants. It would be only for sticking labels on packets and putting cans on shelves, but he said he was going to apply for it. The money would be at least twice what he earned at Vanner’s, maybe three times as much.