The Crocodile Bird by Ruth Rendell

and the signs of changes in the weather, and the oilman who came to fill Shrove’s heating tank in March, and Mr. Frost, the gardener who mowed the grass and trimmed the hedges and sometimes pulled out the weeds.
    Mr. Frost went on never speaking. They saw him ride past the gatehouse on his bicycle and if he saw them he waved. He waved from his mowing machine if he happened to be there when they walked up the drive to Shrove. The oilman only came twice a year, in September and again in March. Liza had never talked to him, though Mother did for about five minutes, or listened rather, and listened impatiently, while he told her about his flat in Spain and how he had found a cut-rate flight to Malaga that was so reasonable you wouldn’t believe. Liza didn’t know what that meant, so Mother explained how he went across the sea in one of those things that flew overhead sometimes and made a buzzing noise about it, unlike birds.
    The milkman said, “It feels like spring,” which was silly because it was spring, and “Here comes the train,” that he needn’t have bothered to say because anyone could see and hear it.
    They got very few letters. Liza never got any. Letters came for Mother sometimes, from someone called her aunt, though she never explained what an aunt was, from her friend Heather in London, and one regularly once a month from Mr. Tobias. This one had a piece of pink paper in it, which Mother said was a check. When next she went to the shops she took the pink paper with her and took it to a bank and they turned it into money. Like a good fairy waving a wand, suggested Liza, who was much into fairy tales at that time, but Mother said, no, not like that, and explained that this was money which she had earned for cleaning Mr. Tobias’s house and looking after it and seeing it came to no harm.
    In April the dogs came again to stay. Matt brought them and told Mother that Mr. Tobias had gone to somewhere called the Caribbean this time, not France. Liza hugged Heidi and Rudi, who knew her at once and were overjoyed to see her. Had they forgotten the man with the beard called Hugh? Had they forgotten how they attacked him? Liza wondered if they would attack Matt if she called out, “Kill!”
    “Why doesn’t Mr. Tobias ever come himself?” Liza asked Mother while they were out in the meadows with the dogs.
    “I don’t know, Lizzie,” Mother said and she sighed.
    “Doesn’t he like it here?”
    “He seems to like it better in the Dordogne and Moçambique and Montagu Square and the horrible old Lake District,” said Mother incomprehensibly. “But perhaps he will come one day. Of course he’ll come one day, you’ll see.”
    Instead of coming himself, he sent a postcard. It had a picture on it of silver sand and palm trees and a blue, blue sea. On the back Mr. Tobias had written: This is a wonderful place. It’s good to get away from cold, gray England in the cruelest month, though I hardly suppose you would agree. Say hallo to Heidi and Rudi for me and to your daughter, of course. Ever, J. T.
    Liza couldn’t read joined-up writing, even the beautiful curvy large kind like Mr. Tobias’s, so Mother read it to her. Mother made a face and said she didn’t like him putting his dogs before her daughter but Liza didn’t mind.
    “I know what T’s for,” she said, “but what’s his name that starts with J?”
    “Jonathan,” said Mother.
    By the time the summer came, Liza could read Beatrix Potter and the Andrew Lang fairy books if the print was large enough. She could write her name and address and simple sentences, printing of course, and she could tell the time and count to twenty and add up easy sums. Mother took her into the library at Shrove and said that when she was older she would be welcome to read all the books in there she wanted. Mr. Tobias had told her to help herself to any books she fancied reading, he knew she loved reading, and of course that invitation extended to her