The Crocodile Bird (27 page)

While this was going on, Liza went back upstairs. She finished the study, she made the bed Mr. Spurdell had recently vacated, and ran the vacuum cleaner across the carpet. By then it was time to leave. Mrs. Spurdell was paying her, fishing about in a jar on the windowsill for a five-pound note and claiming to have mistaken a ten-pee piece for a fifty-pee, when her husband came back into the kitchen and handed Liza
Our Mutual Friend
and
The Old Curiosity Shop.

“I should like them back sometime but there’s no hurry.”

“You’d better write your name on the flyleaf, dear,” said Mrs. Spurdell. She laughed reminiscently. “Do you remember how Jane used to write inside
her
books: ‘This book was stolen from Jane Spurdell’?”

It was extremely rude but Liza didn’t care. Having something new to read was wonderful. She’d been spinning out the
Life of Mary Wollstonecraft,
making it last, which was an irritating way to have to read something. Mr. Spurdell giving her
Our Mutual Friend
was rather interesting, a sort of coincidence, because that was the book she’d tried to read when she gave up on
The Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
Eve had been right about that, she wasn’t old enough for it, and she hadn’t been old enough for
Our Mutual Friend,
either, but she would be now.

She’d started to read it that same evening, when she got back from finding Bruno’s car in the Shrove coach house. It was a strange thing but she’d never really considered telling Eve what she’d found or asking her why the car was there. She thought she knew why and then she wasn’t sure if she did or not. It might only mean that Bruno was coming back, that for some reason he had gone without his car and Eve was storing it for him, he hadn’t gone for good. Eve had said he had, but Liza no longer entirely trusted her to tell the truth.

After concentrating on it for all of an hour, she had abandoned the De Quincey and attempted
Our Mutual Friend.
Perhaps she was tired because she hadn’t been able to cope with more than the first page. She still lay awake a long time, wondering about the car and what might have happened to Bruno. Nobody had ever known where Bruno was except his mother and now she was dead. His wife hadn’t known and neither had his wife’s friend the dentist. The estate agent had but Eve had written to him.

That was the night she dreamed Bruno was with them still but about to leave. His silky brown hair was tied back with a piece of ribbon so that you could clearly see the two gold rings in his ear. And his face had even more than usual that angelic look, like a saint in a painting, that so belied the rough speech that sometimes came from that cherubic mouth. She didn’t see him leave in the dream. Eve told her he had gone, and later she heard a gun being fired. She was walking in the wood and she heard shots behind her. But this was all in the dream, not in life. On the actual night after Eve said Bruno had gone she had heard no shots, she had heard nothing but a heavy object dragged downstairs and a car being driven away.

Where had the car been all day? Bruno couldn’t have gone away in it or it wouldn’t have been there for Eve to drive up to Shrove in the nighttime. But it wasn’t there, it hadn’t been outside when Liza came home. So had Eve hidden it somewhere? Liza realized she could have hidden it almost anywhere, behind the birch tree copse or under the overhanging branches of a hedge, she could have hidden it a few yards from the gatehouse and Liza wouldn’t have seen.

Watching a football match that was coming from somewhere in Germany, Sean didn’t for a while try to stop her reading. He no more expected her to watch football than she expected him to read Dickens. They had a bottle of wine the supermarket had on sale, the week’s special offer.

Rain lashed the tarpaulin that covered the caravan. A howling gale blew the rain in savage spurts against the uncovered parts of the windows so hard it sounded as if they must break. The caravan rocked and shivered.

Liza and Sean sat close together with one of their quilts wrapped around their legs. While Liza read about Eugene Wrayburn, Sean watched the German team soundly beat the English one. He switched off with a sigh and, having first put his arm around her, began to comb her hair. It was a cunning move on his part, he knew the sensuous pleasure she took in it, stretching like a cat and extending her neck as the comb passed slowly through the curtain of smooth dark hair.

He said softly, “What had happened to him, Bruno, I mean?”

Liza closed her book. “I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t know then. I found out later.” She considered. “You’ll have to wait till I come to the hurricane.”

“Okay, then what about those Tobiases? They split up, didn’t they?”

“Not until the following year. But I never saw Victoria again. Jonathan wrote to Eve and told her he was living at Ullswater and Victoria was living in the London house, and soon after that Victoria left altogether. I think she went off with someone.”

“So your mum started hoping again?”

“Yes. But that was a way off. I don’t know what she felt about the divorce—they got divorced two years later—she never showed me her feelings about that. Somehow I think she understood she’d played it all wrong before.”

“She should have made herself harder to get,” said Sean.

“Or easier. If she’d gone with him to all those places he wanted her to go to, even to London sometimes, if she’d done that I don’t think he’d have ever taken up with Victoria. Eve was prettier than Victoria and cleverer and he’d known her since forever. She had all the advantages. Except that she’d never go away from Shrove, not even for a weekend.” She looked up at him. “Should I have made myself harder to get, Sean? I was easy, wasn’t I? I just jumped into your arms.”

“Oh, you.” He laughed and, putting the comb down, hugged her in his arms. “You was a real little innocent, you didn’t know no better.”

“Was I? Shall I tell you about the hurricane?”

“Wait a minute, I’ll fill up your glass. There’s one thing I want to know first. Didn’t no one come looking for Bruno?”

“Who was there to look? If his mother had still been alive it might have been different. If he’d said he wanted to buy that house. If he’d been to a lawyer or whatever it is you have to do when you buy a house. If the sale of his mother’s house hadn’t gone through and he’d still been waiting for the money. If he’d still been living in those rooms over the greengrocer’s. But as it was, nobody knew where he’d lived and no one needed to get in touch with him.”

“It gives you the creeps when you come to think of it.”

“I went back into the little castle and everything of his was gone, the paintings, the canvases, the paints, and that pile of rags. It was all gone and the place had been scrubbed out. Even the ceiling, she’d cleaned the ceiling and got rid of the spider’s web with the moth in it.”

“Those rags, what was it you thought was on them?” Sean spoke in a low voice, tentatively. “You never thought that was paint, did you?”

“I did then. Now I think it was blood.”

Sean was silent, his face grim. After a moment or two he said, “Tell about the hurricane, then.”

“There’s one other thing first. That picture Bruno painted of me, it turned up on our living room wall. One morning I came downstairs and there it was. Eve had taken away the Shrove at sunset picture and put the one of me there instead.”

“What did she do that for?”

“I don’t know. It didn’t look like me, but I suppose she liked it. I’ll come to the hurricane now.”

As if to encourage her, the wind slapped another burst of rain against the window behind them. The caravan rattled. It hadn’t rained that night, the Night of the Storm, the Hurricane, the Great Gale. The storm had been dry, an arid tempest that came up out of the Atlantic, bearing salt on its back. Salt lay in drifts on the windows of Shrove the next day, white as frost, dry crystals the wind had sucked off the sea.

“All the leaves were still on the trees,” she said, “that was the worst of it. If the branches had been bare the gale wouldn’t have been able to pull the trees over, but they were still in full leaf, leaves don’t really fall till November, and they made the treetops like great sails.”

“Was you at the gatehouse, you and your mum?”

“When weren’t we there? We never went anywhere.”

She would have slept through it, enormous though the noise of it was. A heavy sleeper, at the age of eleven she would have slept through bombs falling. Eve woke her up. Eve, who was frightened of nothing, was frightened of this. She woke her up for companionship, for someone to be with, not to be alone while the world was torn to pieces around her.

It was just after four in the morning. Pitch dark and the wind roaring up the valley like an invisible train, a ghost train. The real train that had once run along the valley had never sounded as loud as this. They still had electricity when she came downstairs, rubbing her eyes, peering about her, but the lights went out as she entered the living room. Somewhere out there the wind had brought the power lines down.

“What is it? What’s happening?”

Eve said she didn’t know, she’d never heard wind like this. Not in this country. We didn’t have hurricanes.

“Perhaps it’s not a hurricane,” Liza said. “Perhaps it’s the end of the world. The Apocalypse. Or a nuclear bomb. Someone’s dropped a nuclear bomb.”

Eve, putting candles into jam jars, said how did she know about things like that? How did she know about the Apocalypse? Who had told her about nuclear bombs?
The television,
thought Liza. She didn’t answer.

“Of course it’s not a bomb,” said Eve.

The candle flames guttered as the windows rattled. Something of the wind penetrated even in here. The curtains bellied out and flattened again against the glass. Eve tried the radio before she remembered that electricity worked that too. For the same reason she couldn’t make tea. The nearest gas was five miles away. Liza thought how isolated they were, the nearest house in that village where Bruno had nearly bought a house two miles distant. It was like being marooned on an island in the midst of a rough sea.

She looked out of the window, the glass shuddering against her face. It was still too dark to see much beyond the tendrils of creeper that cloaked the gatehouse till the leaves fell. These streamed out in the wind like blown hair, pulling a black curtain across the window. An enormous crash from somewhere not too far distant drove her back into the middle of the room.

“Come away,” said Eve.

Roof tiles clattered off one by one, three of them, each making a sharp crack as it fell and smashed on the stones. The wind was both constant and sporadic. All the time it blew at a steady rate, but it came in gusts too, each one thunderous, tearing through trees and leafy branches, between tree trunks, among bushes, each gust blowing itself out on a howl and a final crash. The earth shook and the ground heaved.

“The trees,” said Eve, and then, “the trees.”

Her face was white. She put her hands over her ears, then brought them down and clasped them, wringing them. Dismayed, Liza watched her pace the room. This was Shrove where it was happening, Shrove which meant more to her than anything in this world or out of it. These were Shrove trees and at each nearby or distant crash Eve winced. Once she put her hand over her mouth as if to stop herself crying out.

At about six it started to get light. Dawn had been a yellow bar across the eastern horizon. Liza crept out into the kitchen to look at it, for Eve wouldn’t let her go upstairs. The wind abated not at all with the pale spreading of light but seemed to take new life from it, roaring and tossing and circling with a shrill whistling sound. A single leafy branch spun in the air and crashed to the ground. The walls of the gatehouse shuddered. The windows rattled. Liza watched the darkness recede from the sky, the livid streak fade, the gray color whiten, and a mass of high, clotted, scurrying cloud reveal itself.

The cherry tree lay across the garden, its branches and dense foliage spread over the lawn, the flowerbeds, Eve’s kitchen garden, its roots pointing dark brown, thready fingers into the air. As she watched, the whistling wind, the invisible engine, struck the ash that marked the edge of the lane and the giant tree shuddered. It seemed to hold itself suspended before a quivering convulsed it and it toppled over out of Liza’s sight, leaving a sudden white space where all her life had stood this strong, stout, leaf-crowned barrier. She gasped, putting her hand up to her lips.

“Come away,” said Eve. “Don’t look.”

It wasn’t until the afternoon that the gale blew itself out. Eve had tried to go outside before that but the wind had beaten her back. Broken branches and twigs, dying leaves, covered the front garden and the lane. One of the Shrove gates had come loose from its fastenings and slammed shut, tendrils of solanum trapped between its iron curlicues.

Liza had never seen her mother in such a tragic mood. She was unhappier than she had been when she heard of Jonathan Tobias’s marriage. She was worse than unhappy, she was distraught. The sight of the fallen cherry tree made her weep and she kept crying out that it wasn’t real, it couldn’t be true.

“I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it. What’s happening? What’s happened to our climate? This is madness.”

From the gatehouse they couldn’t see much. The balsam still stood, though stripped of one of its limbs, but fallen trees blocked their view on all sides. It was as if the gatehouse had been surrounded by a barricade of broken tree trunks and branches, as if the wind, invested with purposefulness and malice, had built it up to hem them in. They were in the midst of a fortification of wind-hewn timber. Liza could see that they would have to climb over logs and scramble through leafy boughs to get out the front gate. Eventually they emerged together at three in the afternoon, clambering over the balsam’s huge bough, which blocked their way.

Liza felt very small and alone but she would have considered herself too old to take Eve’s hand if Eve hadn’t taken hers first. Hand in hand, they stumbled toward the gateway of Shrove. Inside the park, devastation lay on both sides of them, ruined trees and shrubs in heaps where they had fallen, havoc as if man-made, Eve whispered, like pictures she had seen of countryside after battles. Tree stumps stood with shredded trunks pointing skyward. A bird’s nest, a huge structure of thick twigs and woven reeds, had been torn from some once-high treetop and lay in their path.