The Crocodile Bird (17 page)

“What do you mean, the killing machine?” said Mother.

“Society, slavery, conformity, the poor ox that treads out the corn, walking round and round all day long, and muzzled too, most likely. I’m an anarchist. Now you’ll say, what sort of an anarchist is it that marries and gets a civil service job to pay the mortgage? Not exactly a card-carrying one. My defense is that I got out of it after three years of hell.”

“Were you really a civil servant?”

“On a low rung. Of course I’d been to art school. As a matter of fact, I was at the Royal College. When I was married I worked in the DSS benefit office in Shrewsbury.”

“So how do you live now?”

“I paint, that’s what I always wanted to do, but it’s not lucrative. Then I paint houses too, rooms, that is. I’ll tell you how I got into that. Someone, a woman, asked me what I did and I said, I paint, so she said, would you come and paint my dining room? I’d like to have spat in her face, the fool. But then I thought, well, why not? Beggars can’t be choosers. And I’ve been doing it on a regular basis ever since—more or less, I’m opposed to regularity of any kind. I don’t pay tax, I don’t pay National Insurance. I suppose somewhere someone’s got a record of me and keeps sending me demands to my old address. But they don’t know where I am, no one does but my mother, even my ex-wife doesn’t. That’s freedom and the price I pay is relatively small.”

“What price is that?” said Mother.

“Never having any money.”

“Yes, that’s freedom,” said Mother. “Some would call it a very high price.”

“Not me. I’m different.”

Bruno played his guitar after that and sang the Johnny Cash song about finding freedom on the open road and men refusing to do what they were told. Liza could tell Mother liked him, she was looking at him the way she had sometimes looked at Mr. Tobias. Perhaps she liked his voice and the way he pronounced words, unlike the way anyone else did. Liza remembered Hugh with the beard, his fuzzy cheeks and upper lips. Bruno looked as if no hair had ever or could ever grow on his smooth girlish face.

In the summer the solanum plant that climbed over the back of the gatehouse showed its blue flowers at Liza’s window. Mother called it the flowering potato because it and potatoes and tomatoes all belonged to the same family. When she came up to bed that evening Liza knelt on the bed up at the window and saw, a few inches from her eyes, the death’s-head moth, immobile and with its wings spread flat, on one of the solanum leaves.

The moth book had told her
Acherontia atropos
likes to feed on potato leaves. It also told her how rare a visitor to the British Isles this moth is. But she was in no doubt about it, this was no Privet Hawk. No other moth had that clear picture of a skull on its back between its forewings, a pale yellowish death’s-head with black eyeholes and a domed forehead. This was the moth Drechsler had put into his painting, the one at Shrove on whose frame the key was kept.

She knew Mother would want to see it too. Mother might be quite cross, at the very least disappointed, if she didn’t tell her about
Acherontia
outside the window. She went down and opened the door. Bruno was softly twanging his guitar and they each had a glass of red wine. They didn’t look very busy, but Mother said she couldn’t come now, Liza ought to be in bed, and if it really was a death’s-head moth it would no doubt reappear the next day.

But the next morning it was gone, never to be seen again. Because she had found Mr. Tobias in Mother’s bed after just such an evening, with wine and food and enjoyment, she expected to see Bruno there in the morning. She was older now, she approached the door more tentatively and pushed it open with care. Mother was alone and when Liza went to the window she saw that the little orange car was gone.

The day gone by, the first time Mother had been indifferent to the things she cared for, she called the Day of the Death’s-head.

It was over a week before they saw Bruno again and that was the day Mother went into the town on the bus. She had a list with her, and most of the items on it were the kind of things you bought at a fruit and vegetable shop. Liza had seen pictures in a baby’s book when she was little. A greengrocer’s was the correct word, Mother said.

“Can I come?”

Mother shook her head.

“All right, but I don’t want to be left here in my bedroom. It’s boring.”

“You can go in the library or the morning room at Shrove if you prefer that. It’s up to you.”

“The morning room.”

Because it was much lighter and from the windows you could see the trains go by, Mother must have thought. Or because the famous people from history were there in their glass case. Perhaps, though, she was thinking about Bruno Drummond, and not about Liza at all.

After Mother had gone and she had seen a train going south and had studied once more the wedding photograph of Mr. Tobias in a sleek dark suit and Mrs. Tobias in a large hat and spotted dress, she drew aside the curtain to reveal the stepladder. It was just as she had left it.

She carried it across the room and set it up close beside the picture of the flowers and the death’s-head moth. She took great care to press down the top step, which would lock the ladder and make it safe. It was possible, of course, that the key was no longer there. Mother had been in this room many times since Liza had seen her place it on top of the picture frame and it was a wonder she had never come upon the hidden steps. Climb up and find out.

The key was there. Liza jumped down, unlocked the door, and opened it. She stood in front of the box thing with the window on the front and studied it. There were knobs and switches underneath the window, rather like the knobs and switches on Mother’s electric stove. Liza pressed or turned them one after another but nothing happened.

She understood about electricity. Their old heater wouldn’t work unless it was plugged into the point and the switch pressed down. Here the plug was in but the point not switched on. She pressed the switch down. Still nothing. Try the routine of pressing or turning all those knobs and switches.

When she turned the largest knob nothing happened but when she pushed it in a buzzing sound came out of the box and, to her extreme astonishment, a point of light appeared in the window. The light expanded, shivering, and gradually a picture began to form, gray and white and dark gray, the colors of the etchings on the morning room walls, but recognizably a picture.

And not a still picture, as an etching was, but moving and happening, like life. There were people, of about her own age, not speaking but dancing to music. Liza had heard the music before, she could even have said what it was, something called
Swan Lake
by Tchaikovsky.

Briefly, she was afraid. The people moved, they danced, they threw their legs high in the air, they were manifestly real, yet not real. She had taken a step backward, then another, but now she came closer. The children continued to dance. One girl came to the center of the stage and danced alone, spinning around with one leg held out high behind her. Liza looked around the back of the box. It was just a box, black with ridges and holes and more switches.

A lot of print, white on black and gray, came up on the window, then a face, then—most alarming of all—a voice. The first words Liza ever heard come out of a television set she could never remember. She was too overawed by the very idea of a person being in there and speaking. She was very nearly stunned.

But that feeling gradually passed. She was afraid, she was shocked, she was filled with wonder, then she was pleased, gratified, she began to
enjoy
it. She sat down cross-legged on the floor and gazed, enraptured. An old man and a dog were going for a walk in a countryside very like the one she knew. Sometimes the old man stopped and talked and his face got very large so that she could see all the furrows in his face and his white whiskers. Next there was a woman teaching another woman to cook something. They mixed things up in a bowl, eggs and sugar and flour and butter, and no more than two minutes later, when the first woman opened the oven door, she lifted out the baked cake, all dark and shiny and risen high. It was magic. It was the magic Liza had read about in fairy stories.

She watched for an hour. After the cooking came a dog driving sheep about on a hillside, then a man with a lot of glass bottles and tubes and a chart on the wall, not one word of which she could understand. She went into the morning room to look at the clock. Mother couldn’t get back before five and it was ten past four now. Liza sat down on the floor again and watched a lot of drawings like book illustrations moving about, a cat and a mouse and a bear in the woods. She watched a man telling people the names of the stars in the sky and another one talking to a boy who had built a train engine. If it had been possible, she could have watched all night. But if Mother came back and caught her she would never be able to watch it again, for she had intuited that the door was kept locked because Mother didn’t want her to watch it at all.

At five minutes to five, most reluctantly, she turned off the set by pulling toward her the knob she had pushed in and switched off the plug at the point. She locked the door and climbed up the steps to put the key back on the top of the picture frame. It was just as well she started when she did. Carrying the steps back to hide them behind the curtains, she saw through the first window Mother coming up the drive toward the house and Bruno Drummond with her.

They were early because he had brought Mother back in his car. Liza wasn’t much interested in him that evening. Her head was full of what she had seen on, or through or by means of, the window on that box. She wondered what it was, how it did what it did, and if there was only one like it in the world, the one at Shrove, or if there were others. For instance, did Mr. and Mrs. Tobias have one in London? Did Caroline have one in France and Claire have one wherever it was she lived? Did Matt and Heidi, Mr. Frost and the builders? Did
everyone?

There was nobody to ask. Why was it bad for her to see? Would it hurt her? Her eyes, her ears? They felt all right. It was strange to think of Mother knowing all about this magic and never saying, to think of Bruno Drummond knowing too, very probably having one of his own at home over the greengrocer’s shop.

Why didn’t they have one in the gatehouse? There was no one she could ask. She was so quiet that evening, hardly saying a word throughout the meal—which Bruno stayed for—that Mother asked her if she was feeling all right.

After she had gone to bed, she heard them go out of the front door. She got up and looked out of the window she used only to be able to reach by standing on a chair. She didn’t need the chair now. They were going into the little castle. Mother unlocked the front door and they went inside. It reminded her of the dogs and when they used to live in there and she was suddenly sad. She would much rather have had Heidi and Rudi in there than Bruno Drummond. Without knowing why, she didn’t like him much.

They didn’t stay long in the little castle and soon she heard Bruno’s car depart, but he was back next day with paints and canvas and brushes and a thing he called an easel. The easel he set up on the edge of the water meadow and began painting a picture of the bridge. Liza stood watching him while Mother did her cleaning at Shrove.

He disliked her being there, she could sense that, she could sense waves of coldness coming at her. Bruno looked sweet and gentle, he looked kind, but she guessed he wasn’t really like that. People might not always be the way their faces proclaimed them to be.

Mother was watching her from the window, “keeping an eye on you,” and she smiled and waved, so Liza didn’t see why she shouldn’t watch
him
as he mixed up his colors from those interesting tubes of paint and then laid thick white and blue all over the canvas. She came quite close till she was nearly touching his arm. The cold waves got very strong. Bruno stirred his brush round and round in swirls through the whitish-blue mixture and said, “Don’t you have anything to play with?”

“I’m too old to play,” said Liza.

“That’s a matter of opinion. You can’t be more than nine. Don’t you have a doll?” His voice was like the voices that came out of the box in the locked room.

“If you don’t want me looking at you I’ll go and read my French book.”

She went into Shrove House but, instead of reading her book, made her way upstairs to the Venetian Room, where there was a picture she thought might look like Bruno. Or he look like it. And she had been right. It was a pious saint in the painting, kneeling in some rocky desert place, his hands clasped in prayer, a gold halo around his head. Liza sat on the gondolier’s bed and stared at the picture. Bruno was just like that saint, even to his long silky brown hair, his eyelashes, and his folded lips that had a holy look. The saint’s rapt eyes were fixed on something invisible in the clouds above his head.

Bruno wore two gold earrings in one ear and the saint none. That was the only difference between them as far as appearance went. Liza took her book of fairy tales onto the terrace on the garden front and sat reading it in the sunshine.

He was much nicer to her when Mother was there. She soon noticed that. They all had lunch together and he said it was amazing, seeing her reading French fairy tales. “Like a native,” he said. “You’ve got a bright one there, Mother. What do they say about her at school?”

Mother passed over that one and said nothing about Bruno calling her “Mother.” They talked about the possibility of Bruno having his studio in the little castle and Mother explained what a studio was. Liza wasn’t sure she liked the idea of Bruno being next door all day long.

“It belongs to Mr. Tobias,” she said.

“I shall write to Mr. Tobias,” Mother said, “and ask if Bruno can become his tenant.”

But whether Mr. Tobias said yes or no, Liza never discovered, for it was into their house, the gatehouse, that Bruno moved. It happened no more than a fortnight later. He moved into the gatehouse and went to sleep in Mother’s bedroom.

Unlike Heather, he never complained about the lack of a bathroom. Washing, he said, was bourgeois. Liza looked up the word in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary, which was the only dictionary in the Shrove library, but there was nothing between “bounce” and “to bouse,” which meant to drink too much. Guesswork told her that “bourgeois” was probably the opposite of “anarchist.”