The Crocodile Bird (26 page)

When she needed the steps but couldn’t find them it was for quite another purpose, their primary purpose.
The Confessions of an English Opium Eater
was on the top shelf, far out of reach. The book would have been out of Jonathan’s reach and he was six feet three. Although she knew that it was all of two years since she had put the steps back in the library, that she had several times used them in the library since then, she still went to look behind the long curtains in the morning room.

Returning to the library, she saw why they had been replaced. The new ones were up in the dark corner, farthest from the windows, wooden ones this time, perhaps of dark oak, and almost invisible against the dark oak floor where the carpet ended. They were not really steps at all but more like a piece of a staircase consisting of three stairs. Jonathan must have brought them with him when he came in August. Liza could see without attempting to move them that even when she stood on the top stair she wasn’t going to be high enough to reach that shelf.

She started to search the house for the missing steps. Eve said she wasn’t old enough yet for De Quincey, she wouldn’t understand the
Confessions,
there would be plenty of time for her to read it when she was older. And Liza hadn’t even wanted it that much when she first came into the library. The title had drawn her to it, for it seemed to have something to do with those drugs she heard about on television. But she wanted it now. She wanted it because she couldn’t have it, she couldn’t reach it, it was up there in its faded blue binding with the faded gilt flowers on its spine, smugly sitting where it had sat undisturbed for years, for perhaps a hundred years.

The steps wouldn’t be in any of the bedrooms but she searched them anyway. She found clothes that must be Victoria’s in the wardrobe of what she had always thought the nicest bedroom, a big, light room that looked across the water meadows to the river. A skirt hung there and a pair of jeans and the green silk shirt she had been wearing the first time Liza ever saw her. There were also an embroidered white cotton nightdress and a matching dressing gown. It looked as if Victoria had been sleeping in that room while Jonathan slept in the big room at the front. The steps weren’t in there either, or in any of the cupboards, or downstairs in any of the rooms that gathered around the kitchen, the boot room and the pantry, the washing room, the larder, and the storeroom.

Liza went outside to the stables. She could hear the drone of Mr. Frost’s mower from the bit of lawn behind the shrubberies. The stables were never locked. There were no locks on the doors, though the coach house had a padlock fastening together the handles on each of its double doors. For some reason, she left looking in the section where the mower had been till last, which was strange because it was the obvious place. Except for the one where the tools were kept, the stables were all quite empty. She couldn’t open the coach house doors, only peer through the cracks in them. They were old doors with quite a big split between two of the boards. She could just make out a car inside.

The steps were propped up against the wall between where the tractor had been and where the small mower stood. Liza took them into the house, carried them into the library, and climbed up to get
The Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
It was while she was coming down with the book in her hand that the significance of a car in the coach house where no car had been before fully struck her.

Mr. Frost was now in sight, wheeling around the big lawn on his tractor, wearing gloves and ear muffs. He didn’t see her. She replaced the steps, then thought better of it, carried them out again and propped them up in front of the locked doors. High up under the pediment were two small windows.

Liza climbed the steps to the top. That brought her just high enough to see over one of the windowsills. The car stood in the middle of the coach house floor with plenty of space around it. Even so, she couldn’t see the name of the make, but she could see the registration plates with the letter at the end of the number instead of the beginning. It wasn’t too dark to make out the color, a deep brown, the burnt sienna of Bruno’s paintbox. Bruno was gone, but this was Bruno’s car, the Lancia car Bruno’s mother had had for ten years and only driven seven thousand miles.

The sound of the mower approaching made her look around. Mr. Frost got off his tractor to open the stable. He never talked much, he wasn’t the kind of grown-up to ask what she was doing.

“Mind you don’t fall,” he said.

Going home, carrying the book, she had thought of that night after Bruno had left, how she had slept so uneasily and dreamed so much she couldn’t tell in the morning what had been dream and what real. The car she had heard—that had been Bruno’s car. She had heard Eve driving Bruno’s car up here to hide it in the coach house.

Sean was asleep.

Liza wondered how long he had been asleep, at what point in her narrative he had ceased to listen. Scheherazade. Did the king or sultan or whatever he was fall asleep while she told her stories? Was that in fact the reason she never reached the end of each tale? Because her husband fell asleep first?

Sean was snoring lightly. She pushed him over onto his side so that his back was toward her. Another thing she wondered about was if the sultan and Scheherazade made love before she started on the story or in the middle or what? They must have done that, that was the point of his marrying all those women, wasn’t it? There was nothing about it in the book she had read. There wouldn’t be, she thought, people cut things out of versions meant for children. Even for children who’d seen what she had seen.

Invisible in the dark, she smiled to herself at Sean’s squeamishness. She hadn’t told him about the smell of those stained rags or, to spare him, about the red paint fingerprints on the stone floor of the little castle. Up in the vaulted ceiling among the beams a spider had caught the death’s-head moth in its dusty web. Sean wouldn’t have wanted to hear about that, either, the rare moth long dead among the dusty threads, but the skull pattern on its back still palely gleaming.

FIFTEEN

A
disused airfield near the place where the caravan was parked provided them with somewhere for Liza to have her driving lessons. With Sean in the suicide seat—his words—she drove up and down the old runways and learned how to do a three-point turn on the flat area outside a dilapidated hangar.

“You’ll pass your test first go,” Sean said.

As November began, Liza began to think more and more about Eve and about her trial, which was surely due. She regretted now that when she had the chance she hadn’t learned more about crimes and justice and courts. Eve would have known, Eve could have told her.

For instance, would they have it here in the city, which had once been the place the train started from? Or would it be far away in London at what she thought might be called Newgate? I must go to London sometime, she thought to herself. It’s absurd never having been to London, even Sean’s been to London. She ought to start buying newspapers, but she didn’t know which one would be best. Already she had seen enough of them to know that the little ones with the tall headlines would only print the most sensational or sexy parts of a trial while the big ones with pictures of politicians might not print it at all. Television might have it on only once and that maybe on the evening Sean was watching his football.

Life wasn’t easy in the caravan. If you wanted to be warm you also got wet. Sean got hold of a tarpaulin from a farmer who had used it to protect a haystack from heavy rain and they spread it right over the caravan. That helped, but it also made it dark. All their water had to be fetched from the stream and boiled. It was impossible to wash clothes and bed linen, which had to be taken to the one launderette still remaining within a ten-mile radius. They used two inches of water in a bowl and tried to wash themselves all over in that.

Liza had got very good at sneaking baths at Mrs. Spurdell’s, quite often managing to have one while Mrs. Spurdell was actually in the house, waiting till she was on the phone—she spent hours on the phone talking to her daughter or her friends—and taking two minutes in the tub before giving the bathroom a thorough clean. Even so, Mrs. Spurdell had once or twice remarked on the quantity of water she had heard gurgling down the plughole.

At the school half-term, when Mr. Spurdell had also been in the house, bathing was impossible, the risk was too great. His study was upstairs next door to the bathroom and he was usually in the study, or liable to go in there. On that late October day, a Monday, she arrived at Aspen Close determined on having a bath. Mrs. Spurdell would be out for an hour, having her hair done. Liza had overheard her making the appointment. She was therefore dismayed to find Mr. Spurdell at home, apparently recovering from the flu, which had struck him down on the previous Friday afternoon while he was reading, according to his wife, Spenser’s
Faerie Queene
with the A-Levels English form.

He wasn’t up but she had no reason to believe he was asleep. Mrs. Spurdell said he would probably get up later and come down in his dressing gown. Then, if she was still at the hairdresser’s, Liza could make him a cup of tea. Mrs. Spurdell put on her new Burberry. She tied a plastic rain hood around her head, not because it was raining, it wasn’t, but to make sure she had it with her to protect her set on the way home.

Liza thought she would have to do what she had advised Sean to do. Knowing nothing of hotels, she just the same understood that they must have a great many bathrooms. The Duke’s Head, which she passed on her way to Aspen Close, must have more bathrooms than any private house. If Sean didn’t want to pay for the swimming pool or the showers, why didn’t he just walk into the Duke’s Head, march upstairs as if he was a guest there, find a bathroom, and have a bath? Who would know? He’d have to make sure to take a towel with him, of course. He could put a folded towel inside his jacket and take a plastic bag to put it in after it got damp.

It was stealing hot water, Sean said, it was dishonest. He was quite shocked. Stay dirty then, said Liza. She wouldn’t think twice about doing it, in fact she’d probably do it on her way to meet him after work. Realizing that she couldn’t because she had no towel made her feel cross and she thumped her way into the study, dragging the vacuum cleaner behind her.

Mr. Spurdell had acquired two new books since she was last in there. Liza cared very little about Mrs. Spurdell having a new Burberry or her hair done or unlimited hot water or Mr. Spurdell driving a six-month-old BMW, but she did envy them the books. She resented them for the books, it made her hate Mr. Spurdell especially, though in many ways he seemed nicer than his wife. She sometimes saw him on Friday afternoons returning home just before she was due to leave. The new books he had got were a
Life of Dickens
and
The Collected Short Stories of Saki.

What wouldn’t she give to read that
Life of Dickens
! She could never afford it, she wouldn’t even be able to afford it when it came out in paperback. Quickly she forgot all about Mr. Spurdell. She ceased to listen for him. The Dickens in its brown-and-gold jacket was in her hands, she was sitting at the desk reading the introduction, when he came quietly into the room. It was only because of the little dry cough he gave that she knew he was there. She jumped up, clutching the book.

He was a small man, as thin as Mrs. Spurdell was fat. Liza had sometimes thought they were like Jack Sprat and his wife, he able to eat no fat and she no lean. He looked old, an old man who should have retired by now, his jowls melting into a withered neck, his head bald but for a white fringe around the back. Over striped pajamas he wore a brown tweed dressing gown with a cord around the waist tied in a neat bow.

His genial smile brought her immense relief. She wouldn’t have to go back to Sean now and tell him she’d got the sack. Relief became indignation when he said, still smiling, apologizing as if to an ignorant child, that it was a pity there were so few pictures in that book.

“I don’t want pictures,” Liza said and she knew her tone was surly.

Up went his white tufts of eyebrows. “How old are you?” he said.

After she had spoken the truth she remembered too late the lie she had told his wife. “I’m nearly seventeen.”

“Yes, I would have guessed about that. Some of my pupils are your age, only they prefer to be called students.” He held out his hand for the book and she gave it to him. “Thank you. I haven’t read it yet.” Without knowing in the least how she could tell, she fancied this was the way teachers behaved. Bossy. Commanding. Imparting information. As she thought this, he imparted some. “Dickens was a great English writer, some would say the greatest. Have you read any of his books at school?”

“I don’t go to school,” she said, and added, “anymore. I don’t go anymore.” What did he think, that she took days off school to come and work for his wife? “But I’ve read Dickens. I’ve read
Bleak House
and
David Copperfield
and
Oliver Twist
and
Nicholas Nickleby
and
A Tale of Two Cities.
”

His evident astonishment gave her a lot of pleasure. She thought he’d ask her why she left school so young, she was prepared for almost anything, but not for him to point to the several volumes of Dickens he had in paperback and ask her if she had read
Our Mutual
Friend.

“I told you the ones I’ve read,” she said but not this time in the surly voice.

“Well, you’re a surprising young lady. Not quite what you seem, is that right?”

Liza thought this was truer than he knew. She changed the subject, asked him if he would like her to make him tea, and when he said he would, preceded him downstairs.

Mrs. Spurdell was back before the kettle had boiled, recounting to her husband some long tale of how the hairdresser had read their daughter’s name in a magazine, as the author of a letter to the editor about family law. The hairdresser—“who was really quite an intelligent girl, considering”—had cut out the letter but forgotten to bring it. She would bring it next time. Philippa was so modest she hadn’t said a word about it. She hadn’t mentioned it to her father, had she?