The Embroidered Sunset Read online

  “Pontefract Castle, call they this at hand?” No, that’s wrong, it was Barkloughly Castle. Pomfret was where they finally did him in. Poor Richard II, but he was a drip; Lucy could not feel total sympathy for him. Acaster Malbis, Marston Moor, Thornton le Clay; it is impossible to drive through England without remembering how thoroughly it has been battled over by Romans, Normans, Yorkists, Lancastrians; time it was invaded again, maybe that is what is the matter with it. Uncle Wilbie would say so; he has no patience with England nowadays, a lot of idle playboys speaking in effete London accents. They don’t know how to work hard any more. Uncle Wilbie certainly works hard: obsessively, frenziedly hard, in his office from eight-thirty till seven-thirty, driving himself and everybody else, piling up more and more millions as if to prove—what? That it is so easy anyone can do it with a bit of application? Or that it is so difficult we should all admire him more than we do?

  She stayed at York, but the Minster was a disappointment; stuffed with scaffolding so that it was like a forest inside a church; impossible to admire the Seven Sisters, people kept wheeling barrows over her feet.

  She also visited the Lancashire and West Indies Cotton Bank, repository of the annuity paid to Great-aunt Fennel by Uncle Wilbie’s firm.

  “Miss Fennel Culpepper? Yes, I believe there is an account under that name.”

  The bank manager plainly was not impressed by Lucy’s threadbare duffel coat and jeans. She felt humble—a dusty field mouse that had somehow insinuated its way into an enormous polished mahogany coffin. She wished she had thought of asking Uncle Wilbie for a note.

  “May I ask what you wish to know?” the bank manager asked. He was soft and downy all over; if you prodded him, the hole would stay, instead of filling out, Lucy decided, peering at him through her fringe of hair. His voice was downy too.

  “Miss Culpepper’s my great-aunt,” she said. “I want to locate her.”

  After her cash without doubt, the bank manager’s pale eyes commented. Another of these students. Won’t work, refuse to learn, all they want is to grab a bit of money off someone who has worked hard all their life.

  “I’m afraid we can’t in any circumstances divulge our clients’ addresses,” he said smoothly.

  “Well, can you tell me if she is still alive?” Lucy asked bluntly.

  “Dear me!” He gave her another condemnatory glance. “The account still stands, let me put it that way. Does that satisfy you, young lady?”

  “You don’t think someone is forging her signature?”

  “Well really—good heavens!” He drew himself up. Lucy realised that she had shocked him deeply by calling the acuity of the Lancashire and West Indies Cotton Bank into question. “What—if I may say so—what a very improper suggestion!”

  “It would be even more improper if someone were doing it.”

  “I can assure you there is not the remotest chance of such a possibility.”

  “How can I get in touch with my great-aunt? Can you tell me if she is still at Appleby?”

  A totally negative expression closed over his face.

  “I’m afraid the only thing, Miss—”

  “Culpepper—”

  “—Miss Culpepper—” he pronounced the name with scepticism, “is to write to her in care of this branch and we will, of course, undertake to see that the letter is forwarded—”

  “But if she doesn’t answer?”

  “That, I am afraid, is not our responsibility. We can do no more than forward your communication.” He began to move papers about his desk in a dismissing manner.

  “You do have a real address for her, do you?” said Lucy. “I mean, not just a post office box?”

  “That, I am afraid, I am not at liberty to say.” He jabbed his gaze decisively into the Financial Times.

  Lucy stood up. “You’re a real red-tape addict, aren’t you,” she said. “Nothing matters to you so long as your gilt-edged double entry accounts balance, does it? For all you know that poor old girl is lying dead somewhere, stuffed inside a safe-deposit box, but that wouldn’t worry you! I sure am glad I don’t have your mentality.”

  She swung out of his office, the dignity of her departure marred by an unexpected marble step on which she stubbed her toe.

  After she had gone the manager sat in shocked silence for a couple of minutes. Then he called in the chief cashier.

  “Nugent, I wish you’d just check over an account—let’s see, what’s the name? Culpepper, Miss Fennel Elizabeth Culpepper—”

  “What’s the trouble, sir?”

  “No, on second thoughts, don’t bother.” The manager, embarrassed and irritable, was already regretting his impulse. That girl’s suggestion was too impossible to take seriously.

  “Students! I’m glad my Maureen is going straight into the bank.”

  Lucy passed the night as cheaply as possible in a bed-and-breakfast place populated by students and commercial travellers; the students all disappeared to work, the travellers sat in a fumed-oak lounge where television roared non-stop, so Lucy went early to bed, longing for her car radio.

  Dear Max Benovek, how can I ever possibly thank you? To be given a car is astonishing enough, but to have a radio specified as well raises generosity to the most rare pinnacle of consideration.

  “Ah yes, from Max Benovek, how is he? He rang me up, but he will never talk about himself; look out for a girl like a chipmunk, he tells me, see you don’t sell her a pup, Simon, she is the coming pianist of the next generation. But don’t give her anything too fast, mind, I don’t want her speeding and breaking her neck, none of your souped-up minis; a decent little car with good brakes and it must have a radio so she can listen to the music programme, they are doing my Forty-Eight recitals every day next week, those she must certainly hear. So, very well, how much are you prepared to give, I say, decent little cars with good brakes are not to be found lying about under every bush on Hampstead Heath? Simon, you are my friend, he says, we were boys at school together in Brno and I trust you; I have sent her with a blank cheque. So what can you do with a man like that? It is enough to break your heart.”

  Mr. Goldblossom himself was not unlike some lovable inmate of a Disney zoo; he had large rolling black eyes under pouched lids, the aristocratic nose of a guinea pig, and a heart-shaped smile of immense charm; in repose his face was sombre, but when he smiled it lit up like the beacon on a breakdown wagon.

  “So here I have just the thing for you; take no notice of the colour, it has belonged to one of those Third Programme poets who suddenly wrote a play; he turned this in for a Jag, but there’s nothing wrong with this little job, does forty to the gallon and she’d take you across the Sahara. For his poetry I say nothing, but that man really did know how to look after a car; kept the engine tuned like one of Max’s Bechsteins. Radio, heater, seatbelts, windscreen washer; in her, you need not be ashamed to drive round Buckingham Palace.”

  “Inside or outside?” inquired Lucy.

  “Mazeltov! You are too young to have such a sharp tongue.”

  “How much is this miracle going to cost Mr. Benovek?” Lucy asked, studying the little Austin, which was painted a feverish plum colour. She often wished later, after hearing the BBC Third Programme, that she knew which poet had been her car’s previous owner.

  “You think I would do down my friend Max?”

  “I don’t know,” said Lucy truthfully. For the second time in her wary life she found herself utterly unable to make head or tail of a character. She handed over the blank cheque and added rather doubtfully, “I suppose I shall simply have to trust you.”

  “I should be so trusting!”

  “I don’t want to use Mr. Benovek’s money badly.”

  “Don’t worry your precious head about that,” said Mr. Gold-blossom, suddenly dead serious. “Anything I can do for Max, I am proud to do. You just jump in this lovely little
job and buzz up to Harrogate to visit your Granny.”

  He gave her his heart-melting smile again and slipped away to the small, oily office at the back of the showroom; Lucy, glancing through the window a moment later, could hardly believe her eyes. She was almost sure she had seen him tear Max Benovek’s cheque in half and make as if to throw it in the fire; then, arrested apparently by a second impulse, he tucked the two halves together and slipped them tenderly into his wallet. Lucy hastily climbed into her plum-coloured auto and with considerable caution manoeuvred it out into the London traffic.

  Dear Max Benovek, I guess I liked your friend Goldblossom, though he seems an unexpected schoolmate for you. And the little car I love with all my heart, dear little PHO 898A; even if it doesn’t quite do his forty to the gallon it chugs reliably on its way, mile after mile, hill after hill. How can I ever pay you back? That is a stupid one-sided view of the matter, you do not need to be paid back. But I need to pay. No one ever gave me a present before.

  In her mind’s ear she heard Benovek:

  “What, never? No birthday, no Christmas? The whole family are as wicked as the wicked uncle?”

  “Oh well, of course they went through the motions; duty presents, probably bought with my money: scarves, stockings, book-tokens, record-tokens, because everybody knew I liked reading and music, but nobody knew what, nobody gave a damn.”

  “Did you give a damn about them?”

  “No, and why should I? All they cared about was money and their deadly social round.”

  “Maybe you could have showed them something better?”

  “Now look here, Benovek, you’re supposed to be teaching me piano, not morality.”

  She switched on the car radio.

  “. . . Andrew Haskin with the nine A.M. news summary,” said the announcer. “An Iraqi tanker is on fire in the English Channel; tugboats are standing by. In the South Molton by-election the Conservative candidate has been returned with an increased majority. A report on a new anti-measles vaccine suggests that it may have serious effects on heart sufferers; supplies are being withdrawn. A long-term prisoner has escaped from Durham jail. A painting thought to be by Hieronymous Bosch has been discovered in a crypt at Norwich. The dry, windy weather will give way to local thunder showers . . . That was the news and weather, it is now four minutes past nine. Each day this week the pianist Max Benovek will be playing Bach’s Forty-Eight preludes and fugues . . .”

  Music spurted from the radio like a series of audible equations. Lucy’s heart rose, the accelerator went down under her foot, and the car sprang forward on to the first slopes of the Yorkshire wolds.

  The dry windy weather had not yet given way. A buffeting gale pushed the little car from side to side on the exposed road; heavy dark summer trees thrashed in the river valleys, endless ripples moved sweepingly over silvery dry grass on the chalk uplands. Birds in dissatisfied flocks kept circling across the inexpressive grey sky; here and there big stone farmhouses hunched snugly among their trees and barns, like cats tucking in tails and paws against a draught. And the road climbed and climbed; down across a valley but always up again, more and more steeply.

  This must be ancestral country now. On her map she saw the name Wilberfoss, origin, presumably, of the forebear after whom Uncle Wilbie had been named. Strange to think of grandparents and great-grandparents buried in these dry, blond hillsides. Dear Max Benovek, thank you for giving me a chance to see this country at my own pace, instead of from a hitchhiker’s perch. Are you fond of England yourself, or do you regard it as merely a refuge?

  Moors loomed ahead, disappointingly grey, not purple in the deadpan light, but empty and wild; the wind here, she thought, smelt of roots and herbs, aromatic and teasing. At regular spaces along the roadside were little stone constructions like sentry-boxes for midgets: what could they be? Snow shelters? Individual sheep pens? Shrugging, she abandoned the puzzle and consulted her map again. Over to the right the moor reared up sharply; beyond the ridge it must drop even more sharply to cliffs and the North Sea. To her left, twenty miles of empty land was threaded by no more than a scanty parallel system of cart-tracks and streams, cutting north and south; ahead, the little single-track road ran steadily on for another twenty miles, but somewhere, halfway across the moor, she might expect to find a crossroads: Grydale Moor Cross. And from that an even smaller road diverged northeast over bits of land called Scroop Moss and Black Gill until it reached a tiny bunch of dots labelled, in barely legible script, Appleby-under-Scar. A symbol like a moustache on the map was presumably the scar in question. Northeast again lay Appleby High Moor and beyond that the coast curved round: more cliffs and more North Sea. Also, ten miles farther north, what looked like a fishing-port, jammed uncomfortably in a millimetre of green between cliff and shore: Kirby-on-Sea. Kirby would represent civilisation for the village; presumably the nearest hospital, supermarket, fire-station, library—but there seemed to be no connecting road. However, perhaps the map was out of date; very likely a road had been made since its publication, though this would plainly necessitate quite a steep hill down from Appleby High Moor.

  Having halted to map-read, Lucy decided that she might as well eat her lunch before entering Appleby. She had bought at a cooked-meat shop in York an anonymous-looking article the size and colour of a much-used baseball, called a Claxton Pudding; eating it brought no greater enlightenment as to its contents but a stuffed sensation as if she had indeed swallowed a baseball. She took some deep breaths, started the car, and drove on.

  Grydale Moor Cross was no more than a heather-tufted mound supporting a signpost, one arm of which did, rather to Lucy’s surprise, say Appleby. She drove on, feeling like Shackleton, like Nansen, like Livingstone. Was it possible that in half an hour she might be sitting in front of Aunt Fennel Culpepper’s fire drinking tea? Herbal tea, no doubt; even so, the idea seemed too improbable to entertain seriously. She passed a stone ruin and realised with dismay that it was probably the inn marked with such confidence on the map; still, no doubt Appleby would offer some kind of accommodation.

  Ahead now she began to see trees and houses: square grey granite cottages and leaning wind-shredded beeches. A black-and-white sign presently announced that here began Appleby-under-Scar.

  Lucy had been so preoccupied with map-studying and sense of achievement that she had ignored the darkening sky; a splatter of rain on her windscreen and a rumble of thunder awakened her to the fact that one of the promised local storms had caught up with her. Entering Appleby the road took a right-angled bend round a farm with an enclosing wall, and then came abruptly into a wide open space where it divided to encircle a village green. As Lucy drove round this corner the sky opened and solid water descended; a sudden swash of lightning baptised all the little stone houses in silvery light. Then they were veiled behind sheets of rain. Lucy, finding that she could not see more than a yard ahead, pulled up.

  In five minutes the downpour diminished to a moody patter which might go on for hours. Not a soul was to be seen; hardly surprising in view of the climatic conditions; Lucy decided that her first impression of a village that was only half populated had probably been misleading; smoke trickled from at least four chimneys and in a couple of windows a dim gleam was visible.

  Deciding to reconnoitre on foot, she pulled on the navy duffel coat she had bought secondhand in London, left the car on a wide grass verge, and started along the green to where a telephone box made a cheerful splash of scarlet against the prevailing grey-green. A telephone probably meant a post office, and a post office would be able to tell her where High Beck cottage was located. “Old Miss Culpepper’s?” Her imagination ran ahead. “Nay, you can’t miss it, luv, past t’houses, up yon hill . . .”

  Uncle Wilbie had been vague on the subject of the cottage’s location, and yet Lucy gathered, or thought she had, that he had been here. Surely he must have? On some return visit to relations, though she knew his youth, lik
e her own, had been spent in Liverpool. But there had been some remark—“Quaint little old village green, Princess, whole graveyard full of Quaker ancestors, don’t tell me you’re not wild to see it?”

  Quaint, Lucy thought, looking round her, was not precisely the adjective she would have applied to Appleby-under-Scar; the stone houses were too impassive and flat-faced; slap on the sidewalk except in a few cases where they were enclosed by stone walls; far from welcoming, they kept their own counsel. A school and a chapel, built in the heyday of nineteenth-century gothic, faced each other inscrutably. No children? No congregation? Midweek, of course, holiday time; perhaps the children were away at the sea. Perhaps there were no children. This might have been inferred from a wayside pulpit notice outside the chapel which observed gloomily,

  “Rid and deliver me from strange children—Ps. 144. 7.”

  Another, by the telephone kiosk, retorted,

  “Woe to him that saith to the wood, awake; woe to women that sew pillows to all armholes; woe to them that join house to house.”

  Why? Lucy wondered. What harm? Some of the houses in Appleby main street were joined together; others brooded apart among their cabbages and runner-beans.

  The telephone box bore a sign: OUT OF ORDER. The post office was shut, implacably shut and locked. Searching among a wealth of written and printed notices in its windows Lucy presently located one that told her today was early closing. Another announced that the thirtieth of last month had been the final date for the registration of village greens by those interested. Had somebody registered Appleby Green, she wondered. Or did nobody care? And if nobody cared, what happened now? It seemed hard to imagine some rapacious real-estate firm acquiring the land for speculative building. Several of the houses were plainly derelict.

  Where now? A brook in a deep gully bisected the village green and was bridged on either side; remembering the name High Beck, Lucy looked upstream and saw the church, above and to one side of the village on a steep knoll. Beyond the church a tree-hung cliff led up to what was presumably Appleby High Moor. A church meant a rectory or vicarage; the vicar, surely, would know the whereabouts of all his parishioners. Taking a footpath which followed the bank of the stream and led past a red-brick municipal convenience, Lucy climbed up to the church. In front of it a war memorial commemorated the deaths of four men from Appleby in World War II.