The Crocodile Bird (36 page)

“What was he saying to you that day?” she asked Sean five months later. “Matt. When you had to stop the tractor and take off your visor?”

“I don’t know. What does it matter? I reckon it was only to boss me about. Maybe it was to cut the tops off the lilacs, prune the lilacs. I never knew you was supposed to do that.”

“We didn’t know Jonathan was coming. He didn’t warn us, but he often didn’t. I told Eve I’d seen him. I knew she’d want me to do that so that she could get dressed up and wash her hair before he came. That was the evening he first started talking about the money he’d lost. He didn’t mind me being there, he talked about it in front of me. He was what they call a Name at Lloyd’s. D’you know what that means?”

“Sort of. I saw about it in the papers. They were a sort of insurance company, only very big and sort of important, and something happened so they had to fork out more than they’d got.”

“It was to do with that Alaskan oil spill, that was the start of it. And they had more claims that they could—I think ‘meet’ is the word. Instead of making money, all the people who were Names found they had to pay money. Jonathan was one. He said he didn’t know how much it would be yet but he thought a lot, and luckily he had the house in France to sell that had been Caroline’s. He looked very miserable. But, you know, we didn’t take it very seriously, Eve and I. Or Eve didn’t. I wasn’t interested. She was interested, she was interested in everything that concerned him, but even she didn’t believe he was having a job finding money. She was so used to the Tobiases and the Ellisons having so much of it. They were the kind of people, she said to me, who’d say they were poor when they were down to their last million.”

Sean shrugged. He put his arm around Liza. “Feeling a bit better, are you, love? About you-know-what?”

She knew what. The revelation in the paper. Eve’s past life. “I’m all right. Only I’d like to go and see her.”

“Your mum?”

“Not yet. Maybe after Christmas. I’ll find out where she is, where they’ve put her, and then I’ll go and see her.”

“You’re amazing, you really are. After what she done? After she murdered three blokes? After the way she brought you up? She’s bad news, love.”

“She never did me a bit of harm,” said Liza. “She’s my mother. You can understand why she killed those men. I can understand it. There was one place in the world she had a sanctuary, there was one kind of life she could live and stay, well, not mad, and they all wanted to take it away from her, one after the other.”

“Not Trevor Hughes.”

“Yes, he did. In a way. Jonathan had said she was there to see how she got on, but she knew he meant how it suited
him.
She was on
trial.
It wouldn’t have suited him if his dogs had had to be destroyed because she’d set them on someone.

“And Bruno was going to make her leave unless she sent
me
away. You can understand why she killed them, she didn’t have a choice. They’d got her in a corner and she acted like an animal would. And now I’ve read what happened to her before I was born, I know she was getting her revenge too, she was taking vengeance on three men for what three men had done to her.”

“Not the same men,” Sean objected.

“Oh, of
course
not. Don’t you understand anything?” Immediately, she was remorseful. “I’m sorry. I’ll tell you about the last one, shall I?”

He shrugged, then said a rather sullen, “Yes.”

“I’ll tell you about how she shot him.”

TWENTY

T
HIS
would be the last of Scheherazade’s stories, she said. Not a thousand and one nights but nearer a hundred. Three and a half months of nights to tell a life in.

“When did I run away, Sean?”

“It was August. No, it wasn’t, it was September the first.”

She began counting on her fingers. “That was something I never learned. I never learned much arithmetic. I make it a hundred and one nights tomorrow.”

“Is that right?”

They were coming home from work on the following day, the hundredth day. Liza had carried the money with her to Aspen Close, she dared not leave it in the caravan. Stopping work at lunchtime, she had walked around the town until she found a shop to sell her a money belt. In the public lavatory in the marketplace she packed all the notes into the belt and put it on over her jeans. She was so slim the belt looked smart, not cumbersome.

She still hadn’t said anything about the money to Sean and he believed that all she had fetched from the lodge were her clothes. Glad of the quilted coat, she rubbed her cold hands together. The heater in the car worked only fitfully.

“I’d got to June, hadn’t I?” she said. “It was when Jonathan first started going on about money. He’d brought Matt with him.”

“He was always coming out in the garden telling me how to do my job,” Sean grumbled.

“Did he? I didn’t know that. Matt was a builder up in Cumbria but his business had failed. If it wasn’t for him, Eve wouldn’t be in prison. He hated us. I think it was because he’d once thought Eve beautiful but he disgusted
her.
”

Sean nodded. “That’d be it. She treated him like dirt.”

“If it wasn’t for him, the police wouldn’t have suspected anything and Eve would still be at the gatehouse and so would I.”

“I ought to thank him then, hadn’t I?”

She smiled. “Jonathan sort of took him under his wing. Matt was getting married or he wanted to get married and Jonathan had some idea of getting him a place to live near Shrove and having him manage the grounds. While he was there he went out every night shooting rabbits by the car headlights. There was all this banging of guns night after night and the lights blazing over the fields. I hated it, I never liked Matt.”

“Them little devils have to be kept down, love. I never seen so many rabbits as there was last summer. And pigeons, they tear the crops to bits.”

“When he stayed at Shrove he slept in a room over the coach house. There are seventeen bedrooms at Shrove, but he had to sleep out there. He had to use the outside lavatory behind the stables and wash under the tap that was there for watering the horses.”

Sean said seriously, “Tobias couldn’t have him in the house, not a servant. Matt wouldn’t have expected it.”

Liza gave him a look. She shook her head a little at him, but he had his eye on the road. “Jonathan told Eve you were just a temporary measure. Those were his words. He was going to give you the sack at the end of the summer, at Michaelmas—whenever that is—and have Matt and his wife live over the coach house. He said he’d have things done to it to make it possible to live there. Put in one of his famous bathrooms, I expect.”

“He did give me the sack. Well, he got Matt to do it.”

“I was in a panic when he first said it. I thought he’d get rid of you and you’d have to go and I’d never see you again.”

They had reached the place where the caravan was. Sean put his arms around Liza and hugged her.

“You didn’t trust me.”

“I don’t think I trusted anyone by then, not even Eve.”

Inside the caravan they lit the gas and the oil heater. The warmth came quickly, though it was a damp, smelly heat. Sean lit a cigarette, making the atmosphere worse, and opened the bottle of wine he had brought from Superway and began unwrapping the samosas and onion bhajis for their supper. Pulling off her coat, Liza hugged herself inside the comfort of the sweater Eve had made. She talked, drinking her wine.

Eve hadn’t liked that idea of Matt and his wife living at Shrove. Jonathan said it meant she could get rid of Mrs. Cooper, she wouldn’t have to handle the wages and the organization, she’d have nothing to do but
be
there and, of course, she’d be in authority over them, they’d have to do as she said. Why can’t we go on managing as we are? she wanted to know. It would be easier for her this way, Jonathan said, and besides, he had to find something for Matt, he had a duty to Matt.

Liza knew what her mother was really feeling. By this time she understood most of Eve’s deeply emotional attitude toward Shrove. Eve didn’t want anyone, anyone at all, coming between her and that house and that land, that domain. She even resented Sean’s being there. Mr. Frost had been there before she came, was there when her own mother was, she accepted him like she did the train and the inevitable weekend guests, but Sean was new. Of course, she said none of this to Jonathan, and that night Jonathan stayed at the gatehouse. Liza felt very strange about that because she was deep in a sexual relationship of her own and she understood what went on beyond the wall dividing their bedrooms.

The next day she found Eve standing in front of the mirror, peering closely at her face, plucking out a gray hair. She came up behind Eve, not meaning to do this, not meaning to make the contrast. It all happened by chance that her face was reflected behind Eve’s, a yard or so and twenty-two years between.

Eve turned around and said,
“Mater pulchra, filia pulchrior.”

Liza didn’t know what to say. She could hardly reply that it was true the mother was beautiful but the daughter more so, or pretend not to understand. A lame “I think you look lovely” was all she could manage. But she wondered what the hectic light in Eve’s eye portended and her wild behavior that day and her sudden bursts of too-loud laughter.

As it happened, she overheard what Eve said to Jonathan. She’d got in the habit of listening at doors. It was a way of trying to save her life. Sometimes, these days, she felt her whole life was in jeopardy. If Matt came, would Eve stay? If she and Eve went, where could they go? If Sean went, what would she do? She would die. As soon as she sensed Eve or Jonathan or both of them wanted her out of the way, she knew they were going to talk secrets she should have been privy to, because it was she most of all that they threatened.

That evening she had been at the caravan with Sean. Well, more than the evening. She had been with him from the time he stopped work at four until nine, when he drove her back to Shrove. Home again at the gatehouse, she thought at first that they had gone out somewhere or to Shrove House.

Jonathan’s jacket was hanging over the back of a chair but that meant nothing. She went to her bedroom and looked out of the open window toward the house, expecting to see them walking in the pale red light of the sunset afterglow. But they were much nearer at hand. They were sitting on a rug spread out on the grass in the garden just below her window. Or Eve was sitting, her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them, while Jonathan lay on his back, looking up at the thin moon that had appeared in the still-light sky.

They weren’t speaking but Liza knew that once they did speak she would be able to hear every word. She crouched on the bed with her chin on the windowsill, thinking about Sean, how he had said to her that evening to come and live with him in the caravan. He had asked her, he had said he missed her too much when she wasn’t with him, and what was there to keep her here? She couldn’t answer that. She couldn’t say, I’m frightened to go.

In a way she wanted to terribly and in another way she didn’t want to at all. Yet it was only a couple of years before that she’d been always asking herself what would become of her and how would she ever get away? The silence down there was oppressive. When she was beginning to think she might as well go down there and join them, Eve spoke.

“Jonathan, will you marry me?”

It was a worse silence this time. Anything would have been better than this silence. He was no longer looking at the moon but at Eve. She said with great bravery—how Liza admired her courage!—“I asked you to marry me. Women can do that, can’t they? We were going to be married once, when we were very young. It all went wrong, we both know why, but is it too late to make it right?”

He sounded ashamed, Liza thought. “I’m afraid it is too late, Evie.”

Eve made a little sound. She whispered, “Why is it?”

“The time for that’s gone by, Evie. I’m sorry but it’s just too late.”

“But why is it? We’re always happy when we’re together. Don’t I make you happy? Hasn’t it always been—good with me?”

“I shan’t marry again. I’m better alone and maybe you are too. I’ll be frank, I don’t want to be married. I’ve tried it and it didn’t work. Victoria and I were all right until we got married. It was then that things started to fall apart. It would be the same with you and me.”

“Then I have humiliated myself for nothing,” Eve said in a hard voice, but almost at once she had turned back to him and suddenly cast herself upon him, clutching him in her arms and crying, “Jonathan, Jonathan, you know I love you, why won’t you stay with me? Why have you kept me like this for all these years? I’ve waited for you for so long, I’ve waited forever and still I can’t have you. Jonathan, please, please …”

Liza couldn’t bear any more of it. She jumped off the bed and ran away into Eve’s room, the way she had done when she was a child.

“She should have known better than that,” said Sean.

“It was ironical, wasn’t it? There was I being begged to go and live with you and not daring to and there was she begging Jonathan to marry her and being rejected.”

She didn’t like his reply, though it was complimentary to herself. “No, well, you’re sixteen, aren’t you, love? And she’s a bit past her sell-by date.”

“Jonathan was older than she.”

“He’s a man. It’s different. I bet he didn’t stay that night.”

She digested the first part of these remarks. This was a point of view she hadn’t previously come across and she found it deeply unsatisfactory. “He went back to Shrove about half an hour later, and he and Matt went off the next day. I thought he’d never come back but he did.”

“Too right he did and that Matt with him. It was the end of August. Matt come up to me all smiles like he was going to give me a raise. It was ten minutes before I was due to leave and I was using that bit of time to thin out the plums. There was so many plums on that damn tree the branches was breaking. He said like he was my boss, Holford, we shan’t need your services after the weekend, thanks very much. It was a Wednesday and he said he wouldn’t need my services after the weekend. I said, is that what you call giving a person notice? He went on smiling. Take it or leave it, he says to me, you get paid up to Friday afternoon, and he just walked off.”