The Crocodile Bird (22 page)

That was nearly the end. Eve didn’t come into the story for a while and when she reappeared she had no degree, first or otherwise, but she did have a baby.

“Me,” said Liza.

“Is that all you know?”

“She said she’d tell me when I was older.”

Eve knew Jonathan was going to South America. He had already started going to places “just to see what it was like.” “Come too,” he said, but of course she couldn’t go to Brazil or Peru or wherever it was at the start of the university term. They quarreled a bit about that and didn’t see each other for a fortnight, but the day he went to catch his plane for Rio, Eve went to Heathrow with him to see him off.

He was expected back after three months, after six months, but he didn’t come back, he stayed and stayed. Eve had to leave Oxford because she was going to have a baby. In a Coventry hospital Gracie was dying. She hadn’t had the hysterectomy soon enough.

After she was dead, Eve and Liza stayed with Eve’s aunt. She made it plain she didn’t want a niece and a great-niece in her little house, she didn’t like babies, but she meant to do her duty. Eve had a hard time making ends meet. For one thing, she was in a bad psychological state. She’d never got over what happened before Liza was born, though she never wished she’d had an abortion. She’d never considered it, she wanted Liza to know that.

“Fine thing to tell a kid of ten,” said Sean.

“Okay, I know what you think of her. You don’t have to go on and on.”

Heather got in touch with her and said, come and live with me. Eve was so unhappy with her aunt that she accepted, though Heather’s flat in Birmingham was tiny with only one bedroom. They all three lived there as best they could. Heather found Eve a job teaching in a private school where they would take on staff who weren’t qualified. She put Liza with a baby-minder, but that wasn’t very satisfactory. When she went to pick her up in the afternoon she found the babies, all six of them, strapped into push-chairs that were stuck in front of the television.

“So I had seen television before, when I was one, but I couldn’t remember.”

It made Eve determined never to let her child watch television. And that started a train of other ideas about bringing up her child. If only she had somewhere to live, but there was only one place in the world she really wanted that to be.

Jonathan didn’t know where she was. She’d changed her job twice and the baby-minder three times before he found her.

Liza was three and Eve had had a job handing out freebie magazines in the street, another trying to be a secretary and learning to type at the same time, and Liza had fallen over at the baby-minder’s and cut her head. Jonathan had found a letter at Shrove with the aunt’s address on it and, thinking it worth a try, came to find her. One evening he rang the bell at Heather’s flat.

When he said he’d a proposal to put before her she thought for one mad moment he was going to ask her to marry him, even now, even after all that had happened. He was friendly but cool. Would she like to live in the gatehouse at Shrove in exchange for keeping an eye on the house? That was the expression he used, “keeping an eye on.” He would pay her a salary, a handsome one, as it turned out.

She accepted. She really had no choice.

“It got her back there, you see. It got her to the one place in the world she wanted to be, even though in the gatehouse she was like the Peri outside the gates of paradise.”

“The
what?
”

“Peris were superhuman beings in Persian mythology, sometimes called Pairikas. They were bad spirits, though they hid their badness under a charming appearance, but of course they couldn’t get into paradise.”

“Of course not,” Sean said sarcastically.

“And that was it, you see. That was how we came to live there and it all began.”

THIRTEEN

B
RUNO
was gone and life went back to what it had once been. Lessons resumed. It was just as well Liza liked learning, because she seldom had a chance in his absence to get up to Shrove and watch television. Mother taught her relentlessly. Sometimes the way she instructed and lectured was almost ferocious in its intensity.

Winter came and with it the sunless days and long nights. Every morning the two of them went walking, but they were gone for only an hour and the rest of the day was spent with Liza’s books. Occasionally Mother would insist that they spoke only French, so breakfast, lunch, and supper were eaten in French and their discussions of other subjects were in French. She set Liza an examination in English, history, and Latin. Liza learned whole pages of poetry by heart and in the evenings she and Mother read plays aloud, Mother taking all the male parts and she the female. They read
Peter Pan
and
Where the Rainbow Ends
and
The Blue Bird.

Bruno was never mentioned. If letters came from him, Mother never said so. Now that Liza was older she didn’t get up so early, Mother was always up before her, so Liza wouldn’t have known if letters had come. She knew Heather sometimes wrote, her letters were left about. The Tobiases sent a Christmas card, as did Heather and the aunt. Did we send them cards? Liza wanted to know. Mother said no, certainly not. It was absurd celebrating Christmas if you didn’t believe in the Christian God, or indeed any god at all, but she gave Liza a lesson on the Christian religion just as she taught her about Judaism and Islam and Buddhism.

One day, shortly before Liza’s eleventh birthday, she was looking through Mother’s desk for a pad of lined paper Mother said was in the middle section, when she came upon a letter in Bruno’s writing. She recognized the writing at once. Without ever having been told, she somehow knew that reading other people’s private correspondence was wrong. It must have come from all the highly moral Victorian books she read from the Shrove library, the works among others of Charlotte M. Yonge and Frances Hodgson Burnett. She read it just the same.

Mother had gone upstairs. She could hear her moving about overhead. Liza read the address, which was somewhere called Cheadle, and the date, which was the previous week, and the first page of the letter. It started, “My darling lovely Eve.” Liza wrinkled up her nose but read on. “I miss you a lot. I wish I could call you, it’s crazy us not being able to call each other in this day and age.
Please
ring me. You can call me collect if you’re afraid of J.T. getting his knickers in a twist. Now my ma is dead I’m not poor anymore, do you realize that? It won’t be much longer now, I’ve just got all this stuff to see to, inevitable really, and I must grin and bear it. Just to hear your voice would—”

She had to stop there because she heard Mother’s footsteps on the stairs. She didn’t dare turn the page over. Much of what she had read about “calling” and “collect” was incomprehensible, but not “it won’t be much longer now.” He was coming back. For a moment she wondered why his mother’s dying stopped him being poor, but then she remembered the tale of Shrove and old Mr. Tobias and understood.

It was a hard winter. A little snow fell before Christmas, but the first heavy fall came in early January. It lay in deep drifts, masking the demarcations between the road surface and the grass verge, then piling up to hide the ditch and spreading a thick concealing cloak over the hedgerow. And when it melted a little it froze again, more fiercely than ever, so that the thawed snow, falling in drops and trickles, turned into icicles, pointed as needles and sharp as knives.

Icicles hung around the eaves of the gatehouse like fringe on a canopy. A crust of ice lay on top of the thick snow. It had been two days since a car had been able to get down the lane. The council, Mother said, hadn’t bothered to snowplow it because they were the only ones living there and they hadn’t a car.

The postman stopped coming, which pleased Liza because it meant no more letters from Bruno. While the lane was blocked like this, Bruno couldn’t come. The little orange car would never get through where the post van failed. And still the snow fell, day after day, adding more and more layers to the deep quilt of crisp whiteness that covered everything.

They fed the birds. They had a bird table for bread crumbs, two bird feeders made of wire mesh to fill with nuts, and they hung up pieces of fat on string. One morning Liza saw a woodpecker at one of the wire feeders and a tree creeper hanging on its tail, both pecking at the nuts. Remembering Jonathan taking photographs, she said she wished they had a camera, but Mother said, no, your own mind is the best recording instrument, let your memory photograph it.

And then she said the bird was like Trochilus, a kind of hummingbird. So Liza looked Trochilus up in the encyclopedia and she thought she saw what Mother meant, for its other name was the crocodile bird, so called because it is the only creature that can enter with impunity the mouth of a crocodile and pick its teeth. It also cries out to warn the crocodile of an impending foe.

Liza loved the snow. She was too old to make snowmen, but she made them. She made herself an igloo. When it was finished she sat inside her igloo, eating a picnic of Marmite sandwiches and Nice biscuits and rejoicing in the snow that would keep Bruno away, wishing as hard as she could that more and more snow would fall, that it would lie heavy and impenetrable in the lane until March, until April. Mother had told her about a very bad winter when she was a little girl, even before she and Gracie and Ray came to Shrove, when the snow started in January and lasted for seven weeks and all the water pipes froze. It was a bad winter, but to herself Liza called it a “good” winter.

Mother had a cold that she must have caught in town the last time she went there before the snow came. Coughing kept her awake at night so she lay down to rest in the afternoons, and when she did Liza made her way up to Shrove for an hour or two of television. She had missed the old films and school programs and quiz shows. She was beginning to understand too, in a vague, puzzled way, that the small square screen was her window to a world of which she otherwise knew very little.

The second time she went up there she saw the snowplow as she came out of the cottage gate. It was clearing the lane. The big shovel on the front of it was heaving up piles of snow, spotted like currant pudding by the gravel lodged in it, and casting it up on the verges. Liza felt sure this would somehow open the way for Bruno. It was as if he had been waiting on the other side of the bridge in his orange car for the snowplow to come and make a smooth, clean road for him.

But when she returned there was no car and no Bruno. She should have asked Mother, she knew that, she should have said to Mother, “Is Bruno coming back?” but she couldn’t bring herself to do this. She was afraid of being told yes and of being given a definite time. Doubt was better than knowing for sure.

The snow thawed and he hadn’t come. All that was left of the snow were small piles of it lying in the coldest shady places, map-shaped patches of snow on the green grass. Mother’s cold went when the snow did, so there was no more television but plenty of lessons. In February, on a freak warm day, Liza went up into the wood to see if the aconites were out, and when she got back a car was parked outside the cottage, a dark brown car of a shape and make she had never seen before. Instead of a letter of the alphabet at the start of the registration number there was one at the end. She had never seen that before either. The car was called a Lancia.

The Tobiases, she thought, having long dropped the respectful Mr. and Mrs. They were always getting new cars. She went warily into the house, preparing to say a cool hallo before going upstairs. The memory of the partridges remained with her and now the story of Gracie and the grandfather too.

She saw Bruno before he saw her, she moved so quietly. He was sitting on the sofa beside Mother, holding both her hands in his and looking into her eyes. Liza stood quite still. He was unchanged, except that his long, soft wavy hair was longer and his freckles had faded. He still wore denim jeans and a leather jacket and the two gold earrings in the lobe of one ear.

Perhaps there was some truth in the theory she had read that you can sense when someone is staring very intently at you, for although she hadn’t moved or made a sound Bruno suddenly raised his head and met her eyes. For a moment, a very brief instant of time, there came into his face a look of such deep hatred and loathing that she felt a shiver run straight down her back. She had never seen such a look before, but she knew it at once for what it was. Bruno hated her.

Almost immediately the terrible expression had passed and a look of bland resignation replaced it. Mother also looked around, dropping Bruno’s hands. Mother said, “Goodness, Lizzie, you’re as quiet as a little mouse.”

Bruno said, “Hi, Liza, how’ve you been?”

That was the way he talked. Not like an English person and not like an American person—she had heard plenty of them on television—but as if he lived midway between the two countries, which was impossible because it would have been the Atlantic Ocean. She noticed a red blush on Mother’s face. Mother hadn’t told her he was coming. She must have known. Why hadn’t she told her?

“What d’you reckon to my new jalopy, then?”

“He means his car,” said Mother.

“It’s okay,” Liza said, a television expression that made Mother frown. “I liked the orange one.”

“The orange one, as you call it, has gone to where all bad old cars go when they die, the breakers’ yard.”

“Where do the good ones go, Bruno?” said Mother.

“They go to people like me, my sweet. The one outside’s what I mean by a good one. It was my ma’s, still is, as a matter of fact, I’ve never transferred it. She had it for ten years and only did seven thousand miles on it.”

Mother was laughing. Liza thought, she didn’t tell me because she knows I hate him. I wonder if she knows he hates me? In that moment she lost some of her respect for Mother, though not her love. That was the evening when, as soon as she could get Mother alone, she asked if she could start calling her Eve.

“Why do you want to?”

“Everyone else does.”