The Crocodile Bird (31 page)

“Luck?” said Sean.

“Luck for Eve, wasn’t it? I think she’d been waiting to see what happened. As soon as she knew all was well up there, she got Jonathan to recharge the battery on Bruno’s car.”

“She did what?”

There hadn’t been any real risk. Jonathan hadn’t suspected Bruno was dead. In his eyes, Bruno was just a young healthy man who had been living with Eve, who got tired of her or of whom she got tired, and who moved away. True, he had left his car behind, but Eve had furnished Jonathan with all sorts of reasons for that: it had been his mother’s, it was old, where he would be living he had nowhere to park a car. Jonathan was no doubt pleased to be told the car was going at last, Bruno was coming for it, the Shrove stable would be vacated. Recharging the battery on jump leads from his own car engine was a small price to pay for that. Liza didn’t know if this was how it was, she told Sean, but it seemed a fair guess.

Eve didn’t say a word to Liza about Bruno. It was Liza who overheard her telling Jonathan that Bruno would come for the car tomorrow, the day incidentally that Jonathan himself was going back to London.

“I wondered what she’d do, how she was going to handle it. I even pretended to go out for a long walk in the afternoon to give her a chance to move the car. She did move it and she went off in it, but only to town. She came back an hour later with the boot full of groceries and left the car parked outside the cottage.”

“What did she say when you asked when Bruno was coming?”

“I never did ask,” said Liza. “She expected me to ask, but I didn’t. I knew where Bruno was. I knew he couldn’t be coming. I knew his body was up in the wood under the leaves I’d piled around it. We were absolutely silent with each other about it. There was Bruno’s car and she was using it—
we
were using it, she drove me to the village once and into town, I had a rash and had to see the doctor—but she never mentioned Bruno and neither did I. Then one day the car wasn’t there anymore.”

“What d’you mean?”

“She got rid of it. I don’t know how or where. But she must have done. She must have driven it somewhere in the night. I’ve no idea what happened to it, I don’t know about things like that, I don’t know how you’d get rid of a car.”

“Just leave it parked somewhere, I reckon. Hopefully someone’d nick it.” Sean considered. “If the police got it in the end they’d try to find the owner and they could, that’d be easy, they’d do it in seconds on the computer.”

Liza said thoughtfully, “The owner was dead. I don’t mean Bruno, I mean his mother. It was still in her name, he said so.”

“I don’t reckon they’d go to the trouble of tracing who the car’d been passed on to and if they tried they wouldn’t find him, would they? And they wouldn’t search either, not for a man of his age. They’d reason he’d gone off abroad somewhere. Your mum was clever.”

“Oh, yes, she was. If they searched for him they never came near us. We never saw a policeman since that one came about Hugh with the beard. When Mr. Frost died it was an ambulance that came, not the police.”

Mrs. Spurdell greeted Liza with the news that her daughter Jane had just been appointed Senior Adviser for Secondary Education to the County Council. She was bursting with pride. Since Liza had very little idea what this appointment signified she could only smile and nod. Mrs. Spurdell said it was a team leadership role and payment was on the Soulbury Scale, information that served only to confuse Liza further.

Though she had said nothing about an errand of mercy two days before—and Mrs. Spurdell spoke constantly of her advance plans—she announced that she was on her way out to visit a friend in the hospital. Liza guessed the visit was taking place only because there was exciting news to impart and wondered just how ill the friend was when she saw her employer take some weary-looking grapes from the refrigerator as a gift and transfer them to a clean plastic bag.

As soon as Mrs. Spurdell had gone, Liza had a bath. Then she went into Mr. Spurdell’s study to see if he had any new books and spent a happy half hour reading a short story by John Mortimer. It was about courts and barristers and judges and opened to her a whole unknown new world. It also made her think about Eve and wonder when there would be anything in the papers about her. How long must it be before she came to trial?

To save buying one, she always went quickly through Mr. Spurdell’s newspaper. As usual, there was nothing. Time to get down to the cleaning, but before she started she looked up Jane Spurdell in the telephone directory. It was the first time she had ever looked up anyone in a phone book but it wasn’t hard to do. She was listed twice, not as “Miss” but as Dr. J. A. Spurdell. Liza would never forget the address. By a curious coincidence that might be a good omen of something, the number was the year of her birth and the street name startlingly familiar: 76 Shrove Road.

She’d never forget it but why should she want it? Perhaps it was only that she’d liked her, she liked her better than any woman she’d ever known except Eve. Of course that wasn’t difficult, seeing that the other women she’d known were Heather and Victoria and Frances Cosby and Mrs. Spurdell. When you liked people, Liza decided, you wanted to know everything you could about them.

Mrs. Spurdell kept her waiting while she rummaged about in one handbag after another for fifty pee. This made her late and Sean was already there, out on the pavement, when she got to Superway. He had news for her, he was quite excited, but insisted on saving it up until they were in the car on the way home.

“They want me to go on a training course.”

“Who’s they?”

“Superway. It’s a management training course. They’re pleased with me, the way I do my work and the way I always get in on time and all that. It’s in Scotland, it’s a six-month course, and hopefully at the end of it if I’m any good I’d go on to what they call Phase Two.”

Liza didn’t know what to say. She didn’t really understand, so she listened.

“I’ve never said any of this to you, love. I’ve never talked about myself much. But I’ve always reckoned to not being much, if you know what I mean—well, rubbish, to be perfectly honest with you. I was useless at school and I left the day after I was sixteen. I’d been skiving off for months before that. No one ever suggested CSEs to me, I mean it’d have been a laugh. I never even saw myself doing nothing but unskilled laboring work, and that’s what I did do. Then Mum got her new fella and they didn’t want me, so I moved out. Well, I reckon I’ve told you all that. I got the car and the van and I took to the road and if I thought about it at all I reckoned I’d be living from one odd job to another until the time come to draw my pension. And now this has come up. It’s sort of shook me. It’s given me something to think about, I can tell you.”

She was moved by him because she hadn’t known he could be so articulate. He was so beautiful. It would mean something to her if he could speak and think as handsomely as he looked.

“What will you be?” she said slowly.

“I don’t know about ‘will.’ I said it’s given me something to think about. As for what I’d
be
—well, hopefully I’d
be
a manager one day. I’d sort of have my own store, maybe one of them big new ones on an estate.”

“We went to one of those, Eve and Bruno and me.”

He made a movement as if to brush this aside impatiently. “Yes, you said. I’d have a lot to learn. I’d be an assistant manager first. It’d take a while. But I’m young, love, and I’m keen.”

She wouldn’t mind going to Scotland. Now she had begun, she liked traveling about and imagined moving from place to place during the next few years. “Are you going to, then?”

“I told them I’d like to think about it. I said to give me a couple of days.”

The caravan was cold and damp. It usually was these evenings when they got home. Liza lit the burners on the oven, the oven itself, opening the door, and started the oil heater. Very soon the condensation began, the water running down the windows and lying in pools. She didn’t much mind, as she said to Sean, you didn’t have to look at it. So long as she had fish and chips or takeaway, books to read, and a warm bed with Sean to make love with, she didn’t care much. Now that she had television and knew she could have it whenever she wanted, she seldom watched it. There was something to be said for being brought up without luxury, without many material possessions. Unlike Eve, she had never wanted Shrove or thought it might be hers.

One gloomy evening rather like this one when Jonathan was in a gloomy mood, she heard him tell her mother he had made his will and was leaving Shrove to David Cosby.

“It should remain in our family,” he said like a character in a Victorian novel.

“He’s ten years older than you,” said Eve.

“His son can have it, then. They’re all fond of the place. There’s one thing, Victoria won’t want it, she won’t ask for this place in settlement, she hates it.”

Aged fourteen, taller than Eve, looking like a young woman, Liza was developing a woman’s understanding. She had begun to ask herself how it could be that Jonathan, who had known Eve since he was a boy, who had been close to her, her lover off and on (and now very probably on again), could have so little comprehension of how she felt about Shrove. He could talk with casual indifference about it to Eve, who loved it better than any person, better, perhaps, Liza sometimes thought, than her own child. He could talk about it to her as if it were just a piece of property, a parcel of land, even a nuisance. And he could talk about leaving it to a cousin whom, until this year, he hadn’t seen for twelve years, without its apparently crossing his mind that he might leave it to Eve, as his grandfather had promised to leave it to Eve’s mother.

Liza suspected that he too didn’t like Shrove much. It was October now and this was only the second time he’d been down this year. His real life was elsewhere, doing things she and Eve knew nothing about. And he knew nothing about what they did. He never asked. It was as if Shrove was something to be packed up in a box when he was away from it and she and Eve puppets to be packed up with it.

Next day he was back again at the gatehouse telling Eve his divorce decree had at last been made absolute and Victoria had “taken him to the cleaners.” He was free now. Liza heard him ask Eve if she ever heard from Bruno these days. She said she hadn’t and she never would, that was all over and she was free as air. She was as free as he was.

Liza was listening outside the door and Eve and Jonathan were sitting in there in the dusk, the lamps unlit. She heard her mother say that about being free and then she heard the silence. Next morning Jonathan went off to London and thence to France, where his mother was dying.

A postcard with a picture of a French cathedral on it came after about a week to say that Caroline Ellison was dead. Smiling rather unpleasantly, Eve said she supposed he thought a churchy card was suitable for announcing a death while one with mountains or trees on it wouldn’t be. Jonathan didn’t sound grief-stricken, though it was hard to tell from a postcard. Eve was sure he would come back now, but he didn’t and six months later they got a card from him in Penang.

Before that, before the winter started, Liza found Mr. Frost lying dead on the grass beside his tractor.

No one knew how old he was. Eve said very old because his daughter had been only a few years younger than her own mother, who would be seventy if she had lived. For the past few years he had done nothing beyond sitting on the tractor and driving it around the lawns. It was Eve who pulled out the weeds and put the mowings on the compost heap.

It was in early November, an exceptionally dry, sunny November, when Liza found him. He had been giving the grass its last cut before the winter. She was walking up from the river, taking the short cut across the Shrove garden. The sound of the mower had stopped ten minutes before and she thought he must have finished for the day. But the tractor was still there, in the middle of the sunny lawn, yellow leaves of lime and chestnut falling onto the grass, onto the tractor’s black leather seat and scarlet bodywork, and onto the body of the old man lying beside it.

At first she didn’t know he was dead. She was immensely curious. Her hand on his forehead encountered the coldness of marble. She could see that his veiny blue eyes were dead, they were quite lightless, and there was no breath from his slack mouth or movement of his chest. He no longer looked like a person but rather like one of the statues on the terrace, a prone figure in pale, cold stone.

The strange thought came to her that Eve would bury him. At once, immediately, she knew this was nonsense but she had thought it. She ran to the cottage and Eve came back with her and they went into Shrove House and phoned for an ambulance. They couldn’t think what else to do even though they knew he was dead.

Mr. Frost had died of old age. His heart had broken—it had literally broken—with age. And who, now, was to do the Shrove garden?

No one, in the depths of winter. There was nothing to do when the snow came and the frost set hard. On the day Liza became fifteen, the snow fell so thickly and for so long they had to dig their way out of the front door.

But snow seldom lasts for long in England. In February, where it had lain were clumps of snowdrops, and by March the grass was starting to grow, there were catkins on the hazels, and the blackthorn was in bloom. Liza had her lessons in the morning and after lunch Eve went out on the tractor to cut the Shrove grass. The wide stretches of lawn were easy to mow. It wasn’t much more than a matter of sitting on the seat and steering, but the edges had to be cut as well and the awkward bits between the new trees. Eve was on her knees pulling out the weeds after sunset, almost until dark.

Liza had never asked her why. She stopped asking questions of her mother after Bruno disappeared. It wasn’t a conscious decision on her part not to ask but as if a voice inside her bade her be silent. Asking was dangerous, asking would only do damage, provoke lying, cause embarrassment. Don’t ask. So she had never asked, why go on pretending to Jonathan that Mrs. Cooper exists? What harm can it do to you or me if a woman comes here to clean? She had never asked, what did you do with Bruno’s car? And now she didn’t ask, why are you doing this work in the garden? Why don’t you find a successor to Mr. Frost?