The Crocodile Bird by Ruth Rendell

Author:Ruth Rendell [Rendell, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Suspense, cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
Publisher: Dell
Published: 1993-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

BRUNO was gone and life went back to what it had once been. Lessons resumed. It was just as well Liza liked learning, because she seldom had a chance in his absence to get up to Shrove and watch television. Mother taught her relentlessly. Sometimes the way she instructed and lectured was almost ferocious in its intensity.

Winter came and with it the sunless days and long nights. Every morning the two of them went walking, but they were gone for only an hour and the rest of the day was spent with Liza’s books. Occasionally Mother would insist that they spoke only French, so breakfast, lunch, and supper were eaten in French and their discussions of other subjects were in French. She set Liza an examination in English, history, and Latin. Liza learned whole pages of poetry by heart and in the evenings she and Mother read plays aloud, Mother taking all the male parts and she the female. They read Peter Pan and Where the Rainbow Ends and The Blue Bird.

Bruno was never mentioned. If letters came from him, Mother never said so. Now that Liza was older she didn’t get up so early, Mother was always up before her, so Liza wouldn’t have known if letters had come. She knew Heather sometimes wrote, her letters were left about. The Tobiases sent a Christmas card, as did Heather and the aunt. Did we send them cards? Liza wanted to know. Mother said no, certainly not. It was absurd celebrating Christmas if you didn’t believe in the Christian God, or indeed any god at all, but she gave Liza a lesson on the Christian religion just as she taught her about Judaism and Islam and Buddhism.

One day, shortly before Liza’s eleventh birthday, she was looking through Mother’s desk for a pad of lined paper Mother said was in the middle section, when she came upon a letter in Bruno’s writing. She recognized the writing at once. Without ever having been told, she somehow knew that reading other people’s private correspondence was wrong. It must have come from all the highly moral Victorian books she read from the Shrove library, the works among others of Charlotte M. Yonge and Frances Hodgson Burnett. She read it just the same.

Mother had gone upstairs. She could hear her moving about overhead. Liza read the address, which was somewhere called Cheadle, and the date, which was the previous week, and the first page of the letter. It started, “My darling lovely Eve.” Liza wrinkled up her nose but read on. “I miss you a lot. I wish I could call you, it’s crazy us not being able to call each other in this day and age. Please ring me. You can call me collect if you’re afraid of J.T. getting his knickers in a twist. Now my ma is dead I’m not poor anymore, do you realize that? It won’t be much longer now, I’ve just got all this stuff to see to, inevitable really, and I must grin and bear it.

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