The Crocodile Bird (24 page)

Liza did go then. She walked until she was sure he could no longer see her and then she ran. She was shaking inside and something she called her heart felt as if it had swelled up until it was too big for her chest, until it must burst.

If she had met Eve at that moment, as she was running along the footpath by the maple hedge, if Eve had come out to look for her and they had met, she would have thrown herself into her mother’s arms and told her everything he had said. But she didn’t. Eve was at home making the dinner. And by the time Liza reached the gatehouse she had slowed her pace to catch her breath, she had collected her thoughts.

The awful knowledge had come to her that whatever she told Eve of the things Bruno had said, it would make no difference. Eve was somehow conquered by him, in ways beyond Liza’s understanding. It was as if she didn’t really like Bruno any more than Liza did herself, but still she wanted him there and she wanted him to like her. Rude to him she might be, but she wanted him to look at her in that way he had, as if she were an angel in the clouds.

She even dressed in a different way to please him, with her hair loose down her back, the jade beads around her neck, and sashes and scarves and chains decorating her, things he’d bought her on their outings. The two of them clattered around in beads and chains, their hair shaggy, barefoot or wearing boots. He talked his mid-Atlantic language, and sometimes Eve, precise, pedantic Eve, echoed his expressions. Why then did Liza have this rooted idea that though Eve would never tell him to go, she would be just as happy as Liza if he were gone?

Calling out to Eve in the kitchen that she was back, she went upstairs and looked hard at her own face in the mirror. She had never noticed it before but now she could see that what he had said was true in at least one respect, she did look like Eve, she was exactly a younger version of Eve, same features, same golden-brown flushed skin, clear water-brown eyes, and golden-gleaming dark brown hair, exactly as curly and exactly as long.

That day, when she remembered the weeds’ sun-shaped faces and the yellow paint on the brush tip, she thought of as the Day of the Dandelions but she was growing out of giving names to special days and she only ever named one more.

After a little while she heard Bruno come in. His arrival was followed by utter silence. She hoped for something, though she hardly knew what. Perhaps she hoped that Eve, without being told, would somehow guess her unhappiness and the reason for it. She would guess and make things right again, as she had used to do when Liza was miserable. Bruno being reprimanded over her, really reprimanded, was something she longed to see. She could bear Bruno if Bruno were changed, were made nicer.

As silent as they were themselves, she tiptoed down the stairs.

The two of them were on the sofa, embracing, wound around each other, devouring each other, so closely locked it looked as if it must hurt. At that sight, Liza’s sense of isolation, even of rejection, was so great as to amount to panic. A sound escaped her, she couldn’t help herself, a whimper of pain. They were too preoccupied with each other to hear her.

Or Mother was. Bruno’s blue angelic eye appeared above Mother’s curved cheek. It stared at Liza coldly, unblinking. The worst thing was that it went on staring while Bruno’s mouth kept sucking Mother’s mouth and Bruno’s hands clutched and pummeled her back.

Liza turned and ran. She remembered the Andrew Lang fairy stories from long ago and thought he had put Mother under an evil spell.

FOURTEEN

M
AGIC
spells,” Sean said indulgently, “they don’t happen in this day and age.”

“This one did.”

“What did you do, make a wax what-d’you-call-it and stick pins in him?”

She didn’t understand. “I didn’t have to do anything. He did it himself. I could have told him there were things meant more to her than he did. Well, two things.”

“Shrove and you.”

“Shrove, anyway. I mattered, but not as much.” She hesitated. “I can’t help wondering now how much I matter, Sean. I know she’s in prison but it’s as she said, it’s not a dungeon, it’s not the Tower of London. They’d let her try to get in touch, wouldn’t they? She doesn’t know where I am, she thinks I’m with Heather, but she can’t have checked or she’d know I’m not. And then wouldn’t they have the police look for me?”

“You can’t have it both ways, love. You can’t not want them to look for you and want them to.”

“No, you’re right. But still I think it’s that she loved me when I was a child and she could sort of remake me, shape me the way she wanted, but when I grew up she lost interest. I could
feel
her losing interest.”

“You’ve got me now.”

“I know. I’ll go on about Bruno and breaking the spell, shall I? He must have been very stupid to threaten her and not see it wouldn’t work. I see that now but I didn’t then, I was too young. I thought she’d send me away and leave the place and if that happened I thought I’d die.”

Bruno kept on and on at Eve to come and live with him in this house he wanted to buy. He’d found somewhere he liked but he wouldn’t make the vendor an offer until he got a promise out of Eve. His mother’s house was sold by then and he’d got far more for it than it was worth, as often happened in the late eighties. The place he’d found was a big house built fifty years before on the edge of the village where Eve went to catch the bus for town.

Even Liza had been to see it. They took her with them in the car. She thought it very ugly with the dark wooden strips on the yellow plaster, done to look like houses she’d seen in pictures of when Elizabeth I was on the throne of England, the red roof and the windows made of hundreds of tiny diamond-shaped panes.

The garden was very big, which Bruno kept saying Eve would like, and surrounded on three sides by enormously tall hedges of the cypress Liza knew was called leylandii. The ugliest tree in the world, Eve had once said. They drove through the village and Eve pointed out the place where Rainer Beck had fallen down dead while building the wall of bricks. Someone else must have finished building the house between the row of cottages and the village hall, for there it stood, looking quite old, as if it had been there for a hundred years.

Almost into town, on the outskirts, they called at a supermarket that looked a bit like Bruno’s new house, but fifteen times as big and only on one floor. It was another first time for Liza, going in there, and she enjoyed it tremendously. She walked slowly past the shelves, counting how many kinds of fruit juice there were, how many sorts of canned vegetables. The different varieties of biscuits numbered over a hundred. There were dozens of types of food she didn’t recognize, that she wouldn’t have known were food at all. The soaps and sprays and cleansers fascinated her. She could happily have spent the rest of the day there but Eve got fidgety and made her leave as soon as they had bought their fruit and cornflakes. Liza was being exposed to just the kind of thing Eve most dreaded.

It was that evening, when they were quarreling again about the house, when Liza was curled up in an armchair reading
Kim
in the crimson and gold Shrove library edition, that Bruno suddenly said, “Does Mr. Jonathan Tobias, your liege lord and master, by any chance know that kid doesn’t go to school? That she’s never been to school?”

The question distracted Liza from Kim Rishti Ke and the Eye of Beauty and she looked up. The truth was that Jonathan Tobias didn’t know. Even she knew that, or guessed it. Of course she was always at home when the Tobiases came to Shrove, but they didn’t come often and always came on the school holidays or at half-term. If Jonathan Tobias had ever asked Eve how she was getting on at school she no doubt lied to him. Liza hadn’t actually heard her do so but she wouldn’t have been surprised.

“He doesn’t know, does he?”

“It’s no business of his,” Eve said.

“It’s everyone’s business in the community. If he knew, I doubt if he’d let you stay here. It’s not just the not going to school, it’s all the rest of it. Keeping her isolated here, not employing a woman to clean because you don’t want any more prying eyes, keeping the money yourself you’re supposed to pay to this nonexistent woman, not to mention letting the kid run wild at Shrove, taking what she wants out of the library. Look at her now. That’s probably a first edition she’s got there. A first edition in the hands of an eleven-year-old who’s never even been to school!”

“I didn’t keep her isolated enough,” Eve said quietly. “I didn’t keep myself isolated the way I promised myself I would. I’ve been weak, I’ve been a fool. The biggest mistake I made was letting you in.”

He said to Liza, “Go to bed. It’s nearly nine o’clock at night and you’ve no business down here.”

“Don’t you dare speak to her like that!” Eve stood up, facing him. “This is Liza’s home, she can do as she likes. Do you really think threatening me is likely to make me come and live with you in that mock-Tudor monstrosity? Don’t you know anything about human beings?”

He flinched from the flash of her eyes. “I thought you liked the house,” he said sulkily. “I thought you did. You didn’t say anything about it being a monstrosity.”

“And you who called property-owners bourgeois! Truly money is the root of all evil if it changes people the way it’s changed you.”

Liza got up, took her book, and said she was going to bed. She got halfway up the stairs and stopped, listening. They were off again. Did she want to hear what was said or didn’t she? She couldn’t be sure. If he made Eve believe he’d tell the Tobiases, wouldn’t she have to give in? Wouldn’t she have to send Liza to school and go and live with him, whatever she said about not being forced by threats? Would school be like the school in
Jane Eyre
?

She crept down again and listened.

“I don’t have to tell Tobias, Eve.” Bruno had stopped calling Eve “Mother.” “I only have to contact the County Education Authority. No, it’s not spite, it’s not revenge, it’s my duty. It would be anyone’s duty.”

Eve said in a wheedling voice, the kind of tone Liza had never heard her use, “And if I agree, that is if I go and live in that house with you, you’ll keep silent about this?”

“More or less. Hopefully, I’d persuade you that what you’re doing is wrong, but I wouldn’t take any direct action. Not for a while, anyway.”

“I think you’re right when you say they would take her into care. I also think it probable I should lose this house and my job. Without this place I really don’t know what would become of us.”

Liza came closer to the door.

“There’s no point in being so goddamned sarcastic.”

“I’m not being sarcastic. I mean it. I’m simply being frank about the facts. Without this place I don’t know what would become of us. There’s nowhere I could go and keep Liza.”

“There is a place you can go. A real home. A far better home than this antiquated little dump. A hovel without a bathroom!”

Liza heard Eve’s little laugh. “And you called yourself an anarchist. You were a free spirit.”

“All right. I can be frank too. Have you ever heard of an anarchist with money or a free spirit with a hefty bank balance? Can’t you see it’s for the best, Eve? Can’t you face up to it and go the whole hog, come and live with me and give up this whole crazy project? Let the kid go to school and lead a normal life like other kids. I could afford fees for boarding school, you know, a good
co-ed
private school. She could come home at weekends.”

There was silence. Liza held her breath. The door was suddenly flung open and Liza saw the wild face Bruno wasn’t allowed to see, the dilated eyes and curled lip, the nostrils narrowed like a cat’s.

“Go to bed at once! How dare you listen at doors! Perhaps you
should
go away to school, perhaps I’ve been wrong all these years. I haven’t just sheltered you, I’ve spoiled you. Go to bed now.”

Liza seldom cried but she did that night. She wept until she slept, woke again at the sound of Eve and Bruno coming up to bed together, whispering tenderly, no longer angry, reconciled, content with each other.

Years later, three or four years, she went back to look at the house Bruno had wanted to buy.

It was on the other side of the valley, about two miles away by road or one as the crow flies and as she walked, wading through the river where the water was low, and crossing the disused railway line. By this time the rails and sleepers had been taken away and the line was a grassy track between embankments overgrown with gorse and wildflowers. Climbing the slope, she looked back at the station house where on the frightening occasion she had encountered Bruno painting. The painting he had done Eve had liked and had hung it up in the cottage living room. Every time Liza looked at the dandelion faces in the foreground she remembered the gamboge on his raised brush as he spat out those harsh words to her.

She climbed the hillside, took the footpath, then went across the fields that were private land yet where no one ever came but the sheep that grazed there. It was scarcely a village, just a church, a meeting hall and a green with a few old houses and the four newer ones built around a half-moon-shaped road. The people who had bought the house she called Bruno’s, though it never had been his, though he had never even made that offer for it, had cut down all the Leyland cypresses and painted the walls pink. A child’s climbing frame stood in the middle of the lawn. Lying down asleep inside a wire enclosure was a big yellow dog with a feathery tail and long ears.

She might have lived there herself. But perhaps not, perhaps there had never really been a chance of that. She sat on the green for a while, then lay face-downward in the sun, the prickly scented grass pressing into her skin. When she got up she could feel with her fingertips the ridges the grass had made on her cheek, like wrinkles.

This time, for a change, she went back through the woods, though it was a longer way around. There were still great spaces in there where giant trees had fallen and no new ones yet been planted. Rocky outcrop appeared all over this hillside, among the trees as well as on the open heathland. It was very pale gray rock that sometimes looked white, like bones lying among the brown beech leaves and the gnarled dark tree roots. You might fancy you saw a skull, but when you approached more closely you could see it was only a bowl-shaped lump of rock, just as the bone-white strips among the brambles were limestone, not a weathered femur or humerus.