The Crocodile Bird (19 page)

Without saying a word as to her destination, she went up to Shrove and watched the television in the once-locked room. It was always in late mornings and early afternoons that she watched it. Old films were what she saw and nature programs, productions for schools and the Open University, chat shows and quiz games. Some of the programs came from America. They taught her that Bruno was an Englishman who for some reason put on a half-American voice.

When he was well again things got worse. It was late summer and fine weather and he took Mother out in the car every day. Liza could have gone with them, Mother was always suggesting it now as enthusiastically as she had once vetoed it, but Liza wouldn’t. She remembered the day in town with a kind of horror, as if the experience had been inextricably entangled with police sirens and scratching and chicken pox. So Mother and Bruno went and she stayed behind alone, often doing no more than sitting outside on the gatehouse wall or lying in the grass wondering what would happen to her if Bruno prevailed and she was sent away.

More than once he had mentioned sending her to something called boarding school. Mother said she had a lot of money when she bought his picture but now, she said, she had none and boarding schools cost a lot. Liza clung to this. Mother had no money and Bruno had no money and no prospect of getting any. Bruno himself would never go, she was sure of that with the pessimism of a ten-year-old who believes that good things never last and bad things go on forever. He was a bad thing that would never change, he was the hated third in their household, with as permanent a place in their lives as the balsam tree and the train.

Two things happened that autumn. Bruno’s mother fell ill, very ill, and Mother heard on her radio that British Rail intended to stop running the train through the valley.

The first time Mrs. Spurdell went out, Liza took the opportunity to have a bath. It was ten o’clock in the morning. The bath was a muddy beige color and the bathroom carpet grass-green and beige in little squares, but the water was hot. The soap smelled of sweet peas. When she had finished she cleaned the bathroom thoroughly, washing down and polishing all the tilework.

Mrs. Spurdell had been rather reluctant to leave the house. Liza hadn’t much experience of human behavior, but even she could tell Mrs. Spurdell thought she would come back and find her cleaner gone and the video, microwave, and silver with her. She nearly laughed out loud at Mrs. Spurdell’s face when her employer came in the back door to find her sitting at the kitchen table polishing that same silver. That was the first occasion on which Liza got a cup of coffee in the house in Aspen Close.

While they were together Mrs. Spurdell talked most of the time. Her conversation was primarily concerned with demonstrating her superiority and that of her husband and grown-up daughters to almost everyone else, but particularly to her employee. This was an ascendancy in the areas of social distinction, intellect, worldly success, and money, but principally of material possessions. Mrs. Spurdell’s possessions were more expensive and of better quality than those of other people, more had been paid for them initially, and they lasted longer. This applied to her engagement ring, a massive stack of diamonds, the allegedly Georgian silver, the Wilton carpets, the Colefax and Fowler curtains, and the Parker-Knoll armchairs, among many other things. Liza had to be taught these names, shown these objects, and instructed in how to examine them for evidence of their worth. She was adjured to be very careful of all of them, with the exception of the engagement ring, which never left Mrs. Spurdell’s finger. The finger was so grossly swollen above and below the ring that Liza doubted if it would come off.

The husband and the children couldn’t be demonstrated, but they could be talked about and photographs produced. After that first cup of coffee, reward for not decamping with the precious artifacts, a mid-morning refreshment session became the regular thing. Liza was told about Jane, who was an educationalist after having got several degrees, and about Philippa, a solicitor married to a solicitor, and erstwhile top law student of her year, now mother of twins so beautiful that she was constantly approached by companies making television commercials for the chance of using their faces in advertising, offers which she indignantly refused. Liza listened, memorizing the unfamiliar expressions.

Mr. Spurdell, said his wife, was a schoolmaster. Liza thought they were called teachers, that was what Bruno had called them and Sean called them, but Mrs. Spurdell said her husband was a schoolmaster and a head of department, whatever that was.

“At an independent school,” she explained, “not one of these comprehensives, I wouldn’t want you to think that.”

Liza, who was incapable of thinking anything about schools, merely smiled. She never said much. She was learning.

“He could have been a headmaster many times over but he isn’t one for the limelight. Of course there is family money, otherwise he might have been forced to take a higher position.”

A fresh set of photographs came out, Jane in gown and mortarboard, Philippa with the twins. The impression was subtly conveyed that their mother was prouder—and fonder—of Philippa because she had a husband and children. Liza preferred Jane, who hadn’t any lipstick on and wasn’t simpering. She was longing for Mrs. Spurdell to get up and say she was going out so that she could have another bath. It wasn’t easy managing in the caravan, and the swimming pool was expensive besides leaving you smelling of chlorine.

At last Mrs. Spurdell put the photographs away and prepared to go out. The weather was colder today and it was a different coat she had put on, of a thick hairy stone-colored cloth with lapels and cuffs of glossy brown fur. Liza was told that this coat had been bought twenty years ago—“in the days when no one had these ridiculous ideas about not wearing fur”—and had cost the then-enormous sum of sixty pounds. She had to feel the quality of the cloth and stroke the fur. It simply refused to wear out, said Mrs. Spurdell with a little laugh, tying her white hair up in a scarf with “Hermès” written all over it. Liza wondered what a silk scarf had to do with the Messenger of the Gods.

She went without her bath. On her way to run it she paused at the doorway of Mr. Spurdell’s study. This was a room she wasn’t supposed to touch beyond vacuum cleaning the floor, for his books were sacred, never to be dusted, and the papers on his desk inviolate. But Liza was alone in the house now and Mrs. Spurdell would no more know she had been in there than she knew the purpose for which her hot water was often used.

Once or twice she had taken fleeting looks at the bookshelves while pushing the vacuum cleaner about, but she had never examined them thoroughly. Now she did. They were of a very different kind from those in the library at Shrove. Here were no eighteenth-century works on travel and exploration, no theology, philosophy, or history, no essays from the eighteen-hundreds, no poetry of a century before that, no tomes of Darwin and Lyell, and no Victorian literature. Mr. Spurdell’s fiction came in the form of paperbacks.

These shelves carried the kind of books Liza had never seen before. Accounts of people’s lives, they seemed to be, and she recognized the names of some of their subjects: Oscar Wilde, Tolstoy, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But who was Virginia Woolf and who was Orwell? Apart from these, there were books about how writers wrote what they wrote, or as far as she could gather they were about that, one called
The Common Pursuit
and another
The Unquiet Grave.
Liza sat down at Mr. Spurdell’s desk and leafed through his books, wondering how it was that she understood so little of what she read yet passionately wanted to understand.

Time passed quickly when she was occupied like this. It always went very fast while Mrs. Spurdell was out, but this time it seemed to fly by. Reluctantly, she had to stop reading because she needed at least ten minutes to look at the papers on the desk and there was no chance of Mrs. Spurdell being out for more than an hour and a half. It was lucky she could do the housework in half the time allowed for it.

The papers were essays. She could tell that much.

They had names written along the tops of the first pages, of their authors presumably. It took the minimum of detective work to infer that these were pupils of Mr. Spurdell’s. He had gone through the pages with a red pen, correcting the spelling and making acid comments. Some of these made Liza laugh. What interested her most, though, were the pieces of yellow paper he had stuck to the first page of each. These were small paper squares of a kind she had never seen before and which had a sticky area on them that you could nevertheless peel off. She tried this carefully and then to her satisfaction re-stuck it.

Each yellow square had something different written on it in Mr. Spurdell’s writing. One said, “Should get at least an A and a B,” another, “Doubtful university material,” and a third, “Oxbridge?” Liza had heard of Oxford and of Cambridge but not of that place. She had to stop at this point, it would be awful to jeopardize her future chances by letting Mrs. Spurdell catch her snooping. The papers replaced exactly as she had found them, she grabbed the vacuum cleaner and was removing white hairs from the master bedroom carpet when the front door opened and closed.

In a little while Mrs. Spurdell came lumbering up the stairs and into the bedroom to hang up the precious coat. Liza moved along, back into the study, only to clean the carpet of course, but while she was there she wondered if she dared borrow a book. Would he know if one was missing? If one was missing for just two days? She would very much like to read the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. When she first met Sean she had read the “Sonnets from the Portuguese” and memorized several of them. (“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”) Putting herself into Mr. Spurdell’s shoes—a pair of them, slippers really, sat side by side under the desk—she decided that, yes, she would know if a book of hers was missing. If she had any books, if only she had.

Mrs. Spurdell paid her for her morning’s work. She always did this grudgingly and very slowly, choosing from the wad in her handbag the oldest and most crumpled five-pound notes, never handing over a ten. The rest of the sum she made up in small change, twenty-and ten-pence coins and even twos. This time she was worse than ever, giving Liza a whole seven pounds in fifty pees and tens and fives and keeping her waiting while she went off somewhere to hunt for a fiver. Eventually she came back with it, a worn and withered note that had been torn in half and stuck together with tape.

The secondhand bookshop took it. Liza had been worried they wouldn’t when she handed it over in payment for three shabby paperbacks she had found among a row of others on a trestle outside. The real bookshop, the proper one in which everything sold was new, was far beyond her means.

It was nearly five-thirty and Superway would be closing. She walked along the High Street and across the marketplace. Soon it would get dark, they would soon put the clocks back, and the chill of evening was already apparent. Was it cold in prison? She thought about Eve in the prison, she often did, she thought about her every day, but she never said any of this to Sean.

He was waiting for her outside the main entrance with a carrier bag full of food. Superway encouraged employees to buy the products that had reached their sell-by date and at a very reduced price. Liza and Sean walked together to the car. He told her what he’d got for their supper and then he wanted to know what was in her bag. She showed him
Middlemarch,
a
Life of Mary Wollstonecraft,
and Aubrey’s
Brief Lives,
and saw at once the displeasure in his face.

“We can’t afford to spend money on books.”

“It’s my money,” she said. “I earned it.”

“I wonder what you’d say, Liza, if I said that when you wanted me to get your food.”

She was silent. He had spoken reproachfully and like a middle-aged person. Mr. Spurdell would talk like that, she thought.

“You’ve got telly,” he said. “I don’t know why you need books as well.”

She got his supper and while he watched his favorite serial, she started reading
Middlemarch.
A good many Victorian girls must have lived very much as she had, being educated at home, knowing no one but the nearest neighbors, sheltered from everything. With Dorothea Brooke she could identify, though society wouldn’t have allowed Dorothea a Sean.

Now that his program was over, she was aware that he kept glancing uneasily at her. He would have to get used to it, she thought. He would have to get used to her being more and more preoccupied with books. It came back to her, as her concentration weakened under his gaze, that Bruno had never much liked her mother reading. He had done all kinds of things to capture her attention, walking about, pacing the room, even whistling. Sometimes he had sat down beside her and taken her hand or stroked the side of her face. Liza remembered her mother jumping up on one of these occasions, shaking him off, and shouting at him to leave her alone.

It was soon after this that Bruno had gone away to be with his sick mother. He had gone on the day the last train ran through the valley.

Liza hadn’t known it would be the last train. How could she? She never saw a newspaper and she could never watch television at the times the news was on. It was a fine warm day in October, just over six years ago and a year before the hurricane. The blackberries were over and the crab apples were ripe. Liza went down through the meadows and along the hedges looking for crab apples to make into jelly. You boiled the apples, then strained them through a cloth tied to the four legs of an upturned stool before adding the sugar. She had seen Mother do it many times and thought it was time she tried.

Before she had picked a single apple, before she had even found a tree, she saw the people lined up along the railway line. She thought she was dreaming, she closed her eyes and opened them again. Never in her life had she seen so many people all at once except on television and that didn’t count. There must have been hundreds. They stood along the railway embankment, on both sides of the line, between the boundary of the Shrove land and the little station that was called Ring Valley Halt, and each one of them was holding a big placard.