Free The Crocodile Bird by Ruth Rendell

thin carpets hanging on them. A huge painting covered one entire wall. Mother called it The Birthday of Achilles and it showed a lot of men in helmets and women in white robes all rushing to pick up a golden apple while a woman in green with flowers stood by holding a fat naked baby.
    Mother took her through the drawing room and showed her the fireplace with the lady’s face on it, the screen painted with flowers, and the tables that were of shiny wood with shiny metal bits on it and some with mother-of-pearl like mother’s brooch. The tall glass doors were framed in mahogany, Mother said, and they were more than two hundred years old but as good as new. Liza and Mother went through the doorway out onto the terrace at the back, and when Liza ran down the steps and stood on the lawn and looked up at Mother, she was frightened for a moment because the back of the house was the same as the front, the same coat of arms, sword, shield, and lion, the same railing around the roof and up the stairs, the same windows and the same statues standing in the alcoves.
    Mother called out to her that it was all right, it was supposed to be that way, but that if she looked closely she would see it wasn’t quite the same. The statues were women, not men, there was no front door, and instead of ivy, small dark pointed trees grew in the stone urns on the terrace.
    So Liza ran up again and she and Mother made their way to the kitchen. Mother unhooked an apron from behind a cupboard door, a big ugly brown apron, and wrapped it around herself, covering up her white cotton blouse and long, full green-and-blue skirt. She took a clean yellow duster from a pile and tied her head up so that you couldn’t see her hair, she trundled out a vacuum cleaner and found a large, deep tin of mauve polish that smelled of lavender.
    For the next three hours they remained in Shrove House while Mother cleaned the carpets with the vacuum cleaner, dusted the surfaces and the ornaments, and polished the tables. She couldn’t get it all done today, she said, and she explained to Liza how she did a bit one day and another bit two days later and so on, but she hadn’t been in there for two weeks because, as she put it, of one thing and another. She had been afraid of Liza being a nuisance or of breaking something, but Liza had been as good as gold.
    Remembering not to run, she had walked through all the rooms, looking at everything, at a table with a glass top and little oval pictures in frames inside, at a small green statue of a man on a horse, at a green jar with black birds and pink flowers on it that was taller than she was. One room was full of books, they were all over the walls where other rooms had paint or paneling. Another, instead of books, had those things hanging up like the one Mother had that made the explosion. She didn’t stay in there for long.
    A cabinet in one room was full of dolls in different dresses and she would have loved to touch, to get them out, she longed to, but she did what Mother told her, or if she didn’t she made sure Mother couldn’t find out. But mostly she did as she was told because as well as loving Mother so much, she was afraid of her.
    The door to a room opening out of that one was shut. Liza tried the handle and it turned, but the door wouldn’t open. It was locked, as her bedroom door used to be locked when Mother went out, and the key gone. Of course she very much wanted to get into that room, as much as anything because the door was locked. She rattled the handle, which did no good.
    There were three staircases. By this time she had learned to count up to three—well, to six, in fact. She went up the biggest staircase and down the smallest, having been in every bedroom, and climbed onto one of the window seats—Mother wouldn’t find out, the vacuum cleaner could be heard howling downstairs—and looked across the flat green valley floor to watch a train go by.
    If not, then, conscious of beauty, she was aware of