The Crocodile Bird (11 page)

Liza now wished she had told Mr. Tobias about the locked room on the several occasions he and she had been together in the house while Mother was cleaning upstairs or in the kitchen. But of course they had never been in the morning room, it wasn’t much used and there was no reason why it should be when there were a drawing room, a dining room, and a library as well. Liza was convinced that if she had asked Mr. Tobias he would have fetched the key and opened the door at once.

Next time he came she would ask him. When he came back to fetch the dogs. But the weeks went by and he didn’t come. He didn’t write, not even a postcard, and after nearly a month Matt came in the Range Rover and took the dogs away. Mother happened to see the Range Rover coming across the bridge. It was the right color, though she couldn’t see the number, she was sure it was Mr. Tobias himself coming and even more sure when she saw it in the lane. Mr. Tobias had never before sent Matt in the Range Rover but he had this time, and when Matt had gone and Heidi and Rudi with him, Mother went into her bedroom and cried.

Liza had never told anyone about that. Well, she had had no one to tell until now, but she didn’t tell Sean, she kept it locked up and secret inside her head. And when Sean said, this guy Tobias, the one that Shrove House belongs to, did he ever come, she said only, yes, he did, but he didn’t stay long.

“And didn’t you never go to school?”

“No, I never did. Mother taught me herself at home.”

“It’s against the law, that.”

“I expect it is. But you know where Shrove is, the back of beyond, far away from just about everywhere. Who would know? Eve told lies about it. She was very open with me. She said it was important not to tell lies unless you had to, but if you had to the important thing was to know they were lies. She told some of the people that asked that I went to the village school and the other people that I went to a private school. We met Diana Hayden in the lane and Eve told her we were in a hurry because she was taking me to catch the bus for school. You have to remember there weren’t many people. I mean, basically, there were just the milkman, the postman, the man who read the meter, Mr. Frost, and the oilman, and they weren’t going to ask. None of them was there for more than five minutes except for Mr. Frost and he never spoke.”

“Didn’t you want to go to school? I mean, you know, kids want friends.”

“I had Eve,” Liza said simply, and then, “I didn’t want anyone else. Well, I had Annabel, my doll. She was my imaginary friend and I used to talk to her and discuss things with her. I used to ask her advice and I don’t think I minded when she didn’t answer. I didn’t
know,
you see. I didn’t know life could be different.

“When I could read, I mean really read, Eve started teaching me French. I
think
I speak quite good French. We did history and geography on Mondays and Wednesdays and arithmetic on Tuesdays. She started me on Latin when I was nine and that was on Fridays, but before that we did poetry reading on Thursdays and Fridays and music appreciation.”

Sean was staring at her aghast. “What a life!”

“I really didn’t need to go to school. We talked all day long, Eve and me. We walked all over the countryside. In the evenings we played cards or did jigsaws or read.”

“You poor kid. Bloody awful childhood you had.”

Liza wasn’t having that. She said hotly, “I had a wonderful childhood. You mustn’t think anything else. I collected things, the gatehouse was full of my pressed flowers and pine cones and bowls with tadpoles in and caddises and water beetles. I never had to dress up. I never ate food that was bad for me. I never quarreled with other children or fought or got hurt.”

He interrupted her and said perspicaciously, “But you know about those things.”

“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

A
T
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 happy. 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.