The Embroidered Sunset Read online

  “Yes, that’s right,” the woman said, faintly surprised at having her own identity suddenly put before her.

  “Mrs. Truslove, don’t go back to that man. He’s unbalanced, you said so yourself. If you go and fuss and shout at him he’s liable to get violent. He’ll hit you with a h-hammer or something, he’s just waiting for an excuse—”

  “Well, really! What a very extraordinary thing to say!” For the first time the woman looked at Lucy full. “What an extraordinary way to talk! You want to watch your tongue, young woman, or you’re going to land yourself in trouble, you certainly are!”

  “I—was only—warning you,” Lucy said with difficulty. “When I have a migraine—like now—I sometimes have—a sort of insight into how people will act.”

  “Well you can keep your insights and your warnings to yourself!” Mrs. Truslove said, and marched off, exclaiming audibly to herself as she went, “Drunk, I suppose, or under the influence of drugs. Really these teen-agers are quite out of hand!”

  Lucy stood up carefully. Then she pushed her way behind a rhododendron bush abutting on the back wall of the garden and vomited; this relieved her, but not much. She sat down on the bench again, holding her head hard with both hands to prevent the top falling off. Dear Max, do you feel as terrible as this all the time? Did you feel like it when you played Chopin to me? I bet you did.

  Somebody else sat down on the bench. Please, not Mrs. Truslove again.

  No, not Mrs. Truslove. A gentle, threadlike voice said hesitantly,

  “Are you all right, my dear? You don’t look very well.”

  (Oh, do go away.) Without raising her head, Lucy managed to articulate, “Yes, I’m all right, thank you, I just have a migraine.”

  “Oh, you poor child. They are terrible afflictions. I know. I had a dear friend who suffered from them.”

  Well, then, leave me alone, can’t you.

  But the old lady was rummaging in her waterproof carrier-bag.

  “Let me see, what would I have . . . raspberry leaf tablets . . . You are not pregnant, are you, my dear?”

  “No,” Lucy said faintly.

  “Not raspberry, then. Ah! comfrey. Swallow one of these, love, it will do you a great deal of good.”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Lucy said. “I really don’t believe I can swallow right now.”

  The old lady reflected. Swivelling her eyes together, Lucy decided that she resembled an otter; no, a beaver. She had that oddly topless look; benevolent but topless; grey hair drawn back under a white linen hat; for some reason she wore a green eyeshade.

  “Streamlined ears,” Lucy muttered.

  “I beg your pardon, my dear?”

  “Nothing.” Trying to recall why the beaver-face was familiar, where she had seen the old lady before, Lucy thrust her fingers hard against her temples, then remembered: it had been earlier that afternoon at a drugstore where she was dazedly waiting to buy aspirin. The old girl had been collecting a prescription, or something of the kind, at the counter ahead of her. With clockwork accuracy the conversation came back:

  “It’s an old gentleman that usually comes in with this, isn’t it?”

  “He won’t be coming any more, he’s had a bad accident.”

  “Dear, oh dear, I’m sorry to hear that. Is he badly hurt?”

  “Very badly hurt.”

  When the old lady turned to leave, her face as it swam into Lucy’s field of vision seemed charged with tragic significance, but it was hard to decide if this had any objective reality or was merely in context with the words bad accident which reverberated like an iron clapper in Lucy’s skull. The effect of migraine was rather like alcohol: things overlapped and time often seemed to function retroactively.

  “Ah, I know! The very thing! How silly of me not to think of it at once. Here, my love, just sniff this.”

  Something tickled Lucy’s nose; a cool aromatic scent gradually crept up her nostrils to her brain and made a little pocket of peaceful emptiness there.

  “That is certain to do you good. Just hold it in your hand and keep sniffing. Now I shan’t bother you any more. Poor dear, I hope you’ll soon be better. Good-bye.”

  Her voice had been so soft, her departure so mouselike that it took Lucy a few minutes to realise she had gone. Solitude, thank heaven, silence, and this nostalgic scent which is finding its way into my frontal lobes and through my cortex . . .

  Rosemary.

  She opened her eyes, focussed without difficulty, and looked at the sprig that she held clenched between her fingers. Greener and stiffer than lavender; needlelike aromatic leaves with silvery underlining.

  Going to church with mother and two old ladies. We had spent the night with them; they had a cow called Blossom, and a cat; I slept in a little room up a ladder. On Sunday we all walked to church and carried sprigs of rosemary in our handkerchiefs.

  Lucy got to her feet and began to run, stumblingly at first, then faster, for her headache was clearing.

  “Stop!” she called. “Oh, please stop! Just a minute!”

  Dusk was beginning to settle; one or two street lamps blossomed among the plane trees overhead. Which way had the old lady gone? Uphill, certainly, but here the path branched into three, winding off circuitously among bushes. Up, down, along. Impossible to guess which one she had taken.

  Lucy even called, “Aunt Fennel! Aunt Fennel!”

  But the old lady had quite disappeared.

  Lucy’s mind was not yet completely engaged; she stood for a moment emptily staring at the divergent tracks. Then her inductive faculties returned and she ran downhill, back towards the town centre. Which drugstore? It had been a small one, on a corner, opposite a bank. A sign in the window said Health Foods and Natural Remedies. But would it still be open? She looked at her watch as she ran: twenty past five. The town was changing over from daytime to evening activity; food and commodity shops were closing, cafés and amusement spots were filling up. The harbour was almost silent but St. Bernard Street, leading up from it, blazed with mineral-coloured lights and juke-box sound.

  A second street, a third: Woolworth’s, Marks and Spencers; no, it had been in a quieter part of the town, a narrower street with more vocational shops, a saddler’s, a shipwright’s, windows full of tools, ropes, shoes to be mended. Blue cobbles underfoot. Ah! There was the saddler, Thos. Oakroyd. And here was the drugstore, no, chemist, with his old-fashioned retorts, one full of red liquid, the other full of blue; surgical appliances, sunglasses, and sponge-bags. Still open, but a girl in a white coat was just coming to bolt the door.

  Lucy gulped air, slowed her pace, and walked in a split second before the girl got there.

  “Did you want something quick? We’re just closing really.”

  “It’s only—I wonder if you can help me.” Supporting herself on the door handle, Lucy took some more breaths. “I was in here earlier today, there was an old lady getting a prescription filled. She said somebody had been badly hurt.”

  The girl’s face took on the mulish, abused expression of somebody who has finished thinking for the day and does not intend to begin again; an elderly man who had been tidying the counter peered disapprovingly round a display cabinet full of cosmetics.

  “She was talking about an old gentleman who’d had an accident.”

  The chemist primmed his lips together.

  “I’m afraid I really can’t—”

  “No, no, it’s not that, it’s just that I want to find the old lady. Can you tell me where she lives? The thing is, I believe she’s my great-aunt.”

  The chemist and his assistant exchanged glances; their reluctance to be involved was obvious. The man was thin, dyspeptic-looking and suspicious, the girl a plump, cowlike blonde.

  “Well—I don’t know-”

  “Look,” Lucy said. She dug in her hold-all and found her passport. “My name�
��s Culpepper, see? I’ve come from America looking for my great-aunt. She used to live in Appleby but she moved away from there—can you tell me if by any chance she’s now living in this town? A Miss Culpepper?”

  The chemist eyed Lucy’s passport doubtfully as if he deplored such melodrama; however at sight of the name Culpepper his face did clear a fraction.

  “Well,” he said unwillingly, “we do have an old lady, a Miss Culpepper, who has dealt with us for many years. I believe she used to live in Appleby.”

  “And now she’s in this town? Was she in here this afternoon?”

  “I’m afraid I couldn’t say. We have a great many customers.”

  “Do you have her address?”

  They shook their heads; they seemed greatly relieved at being able to deny Lucy this information.

  “No address written on the prescription?”

  “It wasn’t a prescription,” the blonde said. “It was a cheque we cashed for her.”

  The chemist frowned; it was plain he did not approve of giving out this piece of information.

  “Does she come in often? Do you think she lives near here?”

  “I have no idea, I’m afraid.”

  The English love not being able to help, Lucy thought furiously; it was the first time she had consciously dissociated herself from the country of her birth.

  “I believe she keeps moving,” the girl volunteered. “I’ve an idea she never stays long at one address.” This earned her another condemning glance from her employer.

  “I’m sorry we can’t help you any more,” he said in a final manner.

  “Oh, but you can!” Lucy flashed a smile up at him through her fringe. “You can give her this, next time she comes in.”

  Dear Aunt Fennel, Do please get in touch with your great-niece Lucy, she scribbled on a leaf from her notebook, and put the Redcar Street address and that of Max Benovek.

  “There.” She handed it to the proprietor. “I’m not the Mafia, honest! Don’t look so scared, I haven’t the least intention of coshing her.”

  The man’s face froze again, so Lucy quickly left before he could refuse to take the paper.

  Little does he know I’m going to haunt his shop from now on.

  But meantime, what was the best thing to do? Abruptly, Lucy realised that she had two ravenous needs: music and food. She was now back under the yellow sodium lights of St. Bernard Street; she had been automatically making her way back towards the harbour.

  She looked into the window of the shop she was passing. It was packed from top to bottom with sugar confectionery: pebbles made of icing-sugar coloured pink, blue, and green: immense thick sticks and circular slabs of nougat with great candied cherries in it, the slabs cut open like Swiss roll to reveal pink and white stripes; fantastic varieties of seaside rock: rock shaped and coloured like fruits, like clocks, like kippers, like fried eggs, like fish, like horribly realistic false teeth; rock made into life-size pink legs wearing frilly garters. Gross chocolate-covered bars of coconut candy, mounds of chocolate drops, of peppermint cushions, of coloured fruit-drops.

  The sight of so much sugar made Lucy gulp. She moved on to the next shop, full of little blown-glass animals and sea shells with painted mottoes. On again, to an open-fronted booth giving out a blast of hot, oniony air. Try our fried bacon rolls! it offered. A belt of teen-agers, three deep, lined the counter; calmly and purposefully, Lucy bored her way to the front, bought a bacon roll, burrowed back and made her way to a street barrow where she bought a bag of apples, then went in search of her car, dear little PHO.

  During the day it was almost impossible to leave a car anywhere in the streets of Kirby. They were far too narrow, congested, and steep; local professional traffic edged slowly and riskily round sharp-angled bends and angrily through heedless crowds of pedestrian trippers; busy traffic wardens piled up fines to swell the municipal funds. Lucy had discovered at once that unless she wanted a two-mile walk uphill to her car, it was necessary to spend almost as much in parking fees as she paid for board and lodging. This morning she had left little PHO in the most accessible car park, a large subterranean one opening straight on to the harbour front. She hurried back there now, ignoring calls of “Hello, darling,” from sailors lining the harbour wall, ran down the approach-ramp and plunged into the huge, echoing cavern. By day cars were jammed bumper to bumper like greenfly on an unsprayed rose; after six P.M. the place gradually cleared. Little PHO was now in a deserted section and showed up as a bubble of rakish colour in the gloom. Lucy drove to the pay-booth, handed over the huge fee, accelerated up the ramp, and turned left immediately along the deserted promenade. She went on for half a mile below the cliff gardens, then turned, parked facing the beach, and switched on her radio.

  “. . . news headlines,” said the voice. “No settlement in prospect for the strike of postal workers due to start next Monday. More warnings have been issued regarding the anti-measles vaccine. Police have moved in on rioting students and teachers at Salisbury University; there has been a breakdown in the Paris peace talks; still no news of the long-term prisoner who escaped from Durham jail last week; rain and gales are expected from the west . . . Now, a recital of eighteenth-century Italian music by the Colchester Chamber Orchestra . . .”

  Music poured joyfully into the car while Lucy sat listening and thinking and eating apples. Outside, for once, the evening was calm; the distant grey sea crept slowly, muttering, up the empty shore.

  Why would an old lady who had lived all her life in one spot suddenly move away, keep moving from one address to another, cash her cheques at the drugstore instead of opening a drawing account at a branch of her bank?

  The thought of banks made Lucy count her money; there was perilously little left. Any minute now it would be necessary to earn some if she wanted to stay on in Kirby. Not that she did want to; the thought of Max Benovek waiting to teach her was like an ache; but still, there began to be something mysterious and engrossing about this puzzle of Great-aunt Fennel. An old lady who had spent all her long life peacefully embroidering pictures and picking herbs. . .

  While Lucy munched and brooded she had been absently following with her eye the erratic movements of a solitary figure far away on the twilit beach. The figure was too distant for its sex to be apparent; it progressed slowly and uncertainly along the sand with bent head, seeming to search—for shells, perhaps? Or some lost article?—The time and light seemed ill-chosen for such a quest, but of course the tide had been in earlier.

  The figure had a stick and a largish bag; it appeared—though at such a distance one could not be certain—to have on its head something like a nun’s coif tipped with green—

  With an oath at her own stupidity, Lucy leapt from the car. The promenade was bounded by a concrete sea-wall; she climbed this and dropped on to the stones below.

  It is not possible to run quietly over a shingle bank. Long before Lucy was anywhere near her quarry the distant figure had turned, let out a faint, anxious cry, and was flitting hastily away over the wet sand, going almost to the sea’s edge in a desperate effort to escape. As Lucy broke into a run she could hear the fugitive giving piteous little panting whimpers.

  “Please don’t run away!” Lucy gulped, almost equally distressed. “Please stop! I only want to ask you—I only want to find out—”

  But there is no reasoning with absolute terror. The old lady—for Lucy had now come close enough to be sure that it was the same one who had spoken to her earlier—fairly took to her heels. Next moment she tripped over her long skirt and fell headlong on the sand. After that she made no further movement at all but lay exactly as she had fallen.

  “Oh God, suppose I’ve killed her?”

  Girl student hounds old lady to death on beach.

  With her heart thumping and fluttering like a tambourine, Lucy knelt down.

  “Miss Culpepper! It is Miss Culpepper,
isn’t it? Please say something. Please don’t just lie there! I didn’t mean to frighten you—I promise I don’t mean you any harm! I’m your great-niece—I’m Lucy. Do you remember, years and years ago, taking me to church with a sprig of rosemary in my handkerchief?”

  The old lady still lay with her face on her arm, motionless, but the rhythm of her breathing slowed, as if she listened. But could she, in fact, hear? Lucy was reminded of that other ludicrous episode in front of the old priests’ home. Gently she removed Miss Culpepper’s white linen hat and eyeshade, cautiously turned her and propped her into a reclining position.

  Now—if only one regularly carried a flask of brandy—

  But there was the old lady’s carrier bag. Leaning forward, Lucy stretched out an arm and just managed to reach it. Old ladies’ bags are notoriously crammed with restoratives and the essentials for every crisis from childbirth to shipwreck.

  A faint protesting moan came from the apparent corpse leaning on her arm.

  “It’s all right, Miss Culpepper, honestly I’m not a highway robber. Look, I’ll put your stick in your hand so you can clout me with it if you feel nervous. Would you like to sniff some of your rosemary, it did my head an awful lot of good? And what’ll you take, comfrey tablets or raspberry leaf—what the hell’s this, seaweed?” She pulled out a dank, odorous polythene bag. “Cuttlefish bone—humph. Aha, what’s in this tin—gosh, ninety per cent proof peppermints, by the smell. Here, Aunt Fennel, do, do have a peppermint. May I have one too, to show we’re friends? And now, if I help you up, do you think you can walk as far as my car? This beach is awfully wet.”

  Conveying Miss Culpepper across the sandy part of the beach was hard enough, but scaling the shingle bank was a nightmare. The old lady’s flight seemed to have been a terminal spurt of energy; she was now completely passive, obedient up to a point but disastrously prone to collapse at any moment. Lucy thought her state was not caused by weakness or injury, but simply due to the fact that she was still at her wits’ end with fright.

  “Look, that’s my car up there, you can just see it against the cliff. There are some steps along here—thank heaven—d’you think you can make it as far as that gap in the wall? Just keep putting one foot in front of the other—grand! Try not to keep slipping down. Now I’m going to put my arm round your waist and kind of hoist—okay? When I say up, you go up a step . . . Now do you suppose you can lean on the bonnet while I open the car door—?”