The Embroidered Sunset

by Joan Aiken

  Rather a selfish prayer, Lucy thought.

  “‘Ere,” said the man on the ground suddenly, “what t’flamin’ ‘ell’s goin’ on? What’s to do?”

  He struggled to move underneath the blanket; his eyes rolled frantically.

  “Lie still, poor fellow! Help is on the way.” Several of the old crows held him down vigorously; the scene was a macabre one. An incisive new voice broke into it.

  “For heaven’s sake! Will you have the goodness to move aside, please, so that I can see what is the matter?”

  Somewhat reluctantly the old priests moved back from their object, who now lay quiescent, blinking in a dazed manner.

  “What day is it?” he muttered to himself. “‘Ave I gone daft? It canna be Sunday?”

  The latest arrival, plainly a doctor, knelt down beside him and felt his pulse.

  “What is your name?” he asked authoritatively. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “Eh, booger me, ‘ere’s another on ‘em. Right lot o’ carrion crows.”

  “Answer me, please!” repeated the doctor briskly. He turned up the man’s eyelids, then opened a flat black bag and pulled out a stethoscope. The patient’s eyes moved past him indifferently; he made no direct reply. “ ’Appen I’m in bed an’ dreaming,” he muttered to himself.

  Impatiently the doctor peeled back the blanket, listened to his breathing, and started feeling him for broken bones. This made him writhe and giggle hysterically.

  “Eh! Leave off ticklin’ a chap, cansta!”

  His struggles revealed one reason for his previous lack of response: a hearing aid which had evidently been dislodged from his ear by the accident, rolled out from a fold of the blanket. Annoyed, the doctor stuck it back in his ear.

  “Now perhaps we shall get some sense out of this business. Well? Can you tell me your name?”

  “O’ course I can! It’s Sam Ebenezer Clough, as onybody could tell thee.”

  “What happened to you? Did you see who knocked you off your bike?”

  “Nay, I niver. Coom out o’ drive yonder, an’ next thing I knew, I was on my back in t’road.”

  “Well, Sam Clough, there’s not much the matter with you except for a bang on the head.”

  “Did I ever say there was owt the matter?” demanded Clough ungratefully, scrambling to his feet. “‘Stead o’ makin’ such a clapper, it’d be more to t’purpose if someone ‘ud help me wi’ my bike.”

  In guilty haste the old priests rushed to his assistance. Several of them pushed the cycle, which proved to be mobile, though bent, while others supported the impatient Clough.

  “Better come back to the Grange, poor fellow—cup of tea and a lie-down will be best—perhaps he should stay the night?—Yes, yes, Father Prendergast will certainly be able to arrange it—somebody can take a message to his family—doubtless you would not mind doing so, Dr. Adnan?”

  With unexpected despatch the black procession of priests, bicycle, and injured man vanished through the hedge and along a gravel track which led to a largish building, half visible among trees.

  Lucy and the doctor were left facing one another.

  “Well!” he said briskly. “That was a great piece of nonsense about nothing and a waste of my valuable time. It was lucky that I was in the neighbourhood in any case and had not to come far. Who covered him up?”

  “I did.”

  “Stupid of you not to check on the hearing aid first, wasn’t it? That would have saved me some trouble.”

  “Look here!” exploded Lucy, suddenly at the end of her temper. “Who the blazes do you think I am? Florence Nightingale? I’d never seen him before—didn’t know him from Adam. How was I to know the guy wore a hearing aid?”

  “Was it you who knocked him down? I shall have to make a report about this to the police, you know.”

  “No, it was not,” said Lucy furiously. “If you had any sense you would have noticed that my car is twenty yards off, facing this way. I was going to Appleby Old Hall when the priest flagged me down—”

  “All right, all right, there is no necessity to get so het up,” said the doctor calmly. “If it was not you who knocked him down, then you must have been passed by the vehicle that did.” He spoke with a slight, unidentifiable foreign accent.

  “Well, I’m afraid I wasn’t.”

  “Really, you are a singularly unhelpful young lady. Why are you being so obstructive? In general I have found Americans to be most courteous and obliging.”

  “I am not an American.”

  “Ah, then perhaps that would account for it.”

  He began fitting the stethoscope back into his case, while Lucy struggled with about three different retorts which had bottle-necked in her mind.

  “No matter. As you are going to the Hall, you will not object to taking me back to my car, which is still up there? I was at the gardener’s cottage when the message came, so it seemed simpler to cut across the garden than to go all the way back and round.”

  “Certainly I’ll take you,” said Lucy stiffly, deciding that it would be more dignified to ignore his previous rudeness. When they were in her car she asked, “Do all those old clergymen come from the Hall?”

  “No, there is also a hostel for retired priests over there at Thrushcross Grange. The Hall is a residential home for elderly persons of both sexes. Not a bad place; understaffed, as all such are.”

  “Do you look after the inmates when they get sick?”

  “Why, yes,” he said, raising his brows as if he found her question inquisitive. “It is my privilege to do so.”

  “Sarcastic so-and-so,” thought Lucy, jamming down the accelerator in her irritation.

  “I would not drive so fast,” the doctor said calmly. “There is quite a severe bend coming shortly.”

  Gritting her teeth, Lucy braked.

  “Do you,” she asked, having carefully negotiated the bend, “do you happen to know if there is an old lady called Miss Fennel Culpepper resident at the Hall?”

  “Not among the patients I have attended,” he said without hesitation.

  “Are there many residents?”

  “Not a great many, no; fifteen, perhaps twenty; it has not been open for very long, only a few months.”

  “I see.” Aunt Fennel might have moved away, in that case, before the home was opened. “You don’t have a patient of that name anywhere else in the district?”

  “I do not, no. But I live, and have my main practice, in Kirby, which is a town of some ten thousand inhabitants; it is possible that I might not have come across her if she were there.”

  “I suppose it is just possible,” Lucy agreed coldly. She glanced sideways, hoping this shaft had struck home, and saw that he looked amused. He was a stocky individual not short but thickset and dark-eyed, with curly dark hair, rather dandyish sideburns, and a lavish Edwardian moustache that shaded off into gunmetal-blue unshaven haze round the jaw-line. He wore a plummy-dark suit, tailored very narrow, and a brocade waistcoat.

  “Through these gates here on the left,” he directed, and asked, when Lucy had made the turn on to a gravel drive which swung in a curve round a windbreak of pines, and a newly painted sign: WILDFELL HALL RESIDENTIAL HOME, “Why are you searching for this old lady?”

  “Family reasons,” Lucy replied shortly.

  “Ah, I see.” He added, after a moment, in a disparaging tone, “The Anglo-Saxons seem to lose track of their relations so very fast. It is a curious phenomenon. Now in Turkey (which is where I come from) it would be an almost unheard-of thing, to lose an old lady. She would be being cared for by her family. So much more civilised. No need for all these institutions, your so-called residential homes which abound over here.”

  Without making any reply, Lucy brought the car to a stop on the gravel sweep in front of Appleby Old Hall.

  Dr. Adnan j
umped out almost before the car had come to a stop, called a brief thanks over his shoulder, and made off at a rapid pace towards an Alfa-Romeo which was parked beyond the front door. On the point of getting into it he was intercepted by a woman in a dark-blue uniform who had evidently been waiting inside the door. The matron of the home, Lucy guessed, thirsty for information about the accident. While she plied the doctor with questions, Lucy got out of her car and stood somewhat detached from the pair, making it plain that she wished to speak to the matron presently. Meanwhile she gazed aloofly at the facade of Appleby Old Hall. Not so old as all that, in fact; the Hall was built of mustard-coloured stone faced with brick in a style that suggested the 1860s. A pillared portico protruded up to second-floor height in the middle of the front. The house was rather too high for its width, the chimneys too scrawny, the slate roof too flat. The third-floor windows were set in pairs and had round arches, which may have been intended to give a classical effect but succeeded instead, for some reason, in making the house look very like a station hotel. The balcony topping the portico was set about with large stone balls.

  A retired wool magnate’s residence, Lucy guessed; the proud achievement of some nineteenth-century Uncle Wilbie.

  Tiring of the Hall, not an attractive structure, she turned for a dispassionate survey of the doctor, who was fidgeting and glancing impatiently at his watch. He did not, to Lucy’s eyes, look like a Turk, but she had no preconceived notions of what a Turk should look like. Were they all so self-satisfied and impervious? As if sensing her criticisms, he looked up, met her eyes, and gave her a sudden smile, showing very white teeth. The matron glanced sharply over her shoulder.

  “So that is all there was to it,” said Dr. Adnan, briskly rounding off his report. “And now I really must be off.”

  “Just a moment, Doctor! The crutches you promised to take back!”

  She vanished into the porch while the doctor shrugged expressively, casting up his eyes. Lucy remained unresponsive.

  “Here they are! Mrs. Bantock has quite finished with them. Will they go in your boot?”

  “I daresay.” Looking put out, he opened the boot, rapidly fitted in the crutches, slammed the lid, and made his getaway.

  “Yes . . . ?” the matron said, turning to Lucy. “Can I help you?”

  Her tone was not exactly impatient, but not far off it; nicely gauged between summary despatch of Lucy’s errand—probably in the highest degree unimportant, her expression indicated—and awareness that there might be, after all, a fee-paying elderly relative somewhere in Lucy’s background.

  Calmly sustaining the matron’s assessment of her puce auto and shabby duffel coat, “I shan’t need to keep you long,” Lucy said. “You’re in charge here?”

  “Yes. I am . . . ?”

  Lucy had a profound scorn for the autocracy of matrons, but there was no point in offending this one. And indeed, apart from a slight air of self-consequence, she seemed innocuous enough: a slight, pale-faced, thin-featured woman with fine brown hair drawn plainly back under an elaborate white-frilled muslin cap. Her pale grey eyes had the slightly opaque look that is sometimes caused by contact lenses.

  “I wondered if by any chance you had an old lady called Miss Fennel Culpepper living here?”

  The element of sharpness overcame the reservations in the matron’s expression.

  “No, I’m afraid I can’t help you,” she said briefly and began turning on her heel. “We have nobody of that name here.”

  “She used to live at Appleby but moved away last year,” Lucy went on, undeterred. “There’s no chance that you’d have any information as to her whereabouts?”

  “My dear girl, I’m afraid I’ve never even heard of her! I only came here myself quite recently, I know very little about the neighbourhood.”

  Doesn’t quite match what the old boy with the bucket said, Lucy reflected.

  “Is that so?” she answered politely. “Well, so long as I’m here, I wonder if you’d mind telling me what your terms are? Miss Culpepper is my great-aunt, you see; I’m anxious to make sure she is being properly cared for. And do you have any vacancies?”

  “Our terms are fifteen guineas a week.” And that almost certainly disposes of you, young woman, the expression said. “As to vacancies, well, we do have a couple of beds, but our main difficulty is staff; we don’t really have the help to cope with any more residents at the moment. So I’m afraid I must say no.”

  “However, I suppose your residents do occasionally move away or die?” Lucy said calmly. “Do you have a waiting list? Maybe I could see over the place, just on the chance?”

  “It would be rather a waste of time.” The matron gave her an acid smile.

  “Still, I’d like to! And perhaps you’d give me your brochure?”

  “Oh, very well!”

  Lucy followed the matron’s annoyed back through the eight pillars of the portico and into a highly-polished hall.

  “Here is our leaflet.” The matron reappeared from a small office just inside the front door and gave Lucy a shiny folder. It was headed Wildfell Hall Residential and Convalescent Home. Matron: Mrs. Daisy Marsham. Doctor in Attendance: Dr. Adnan Mustapha, M.B. etc. etc.

  “Now: I’m afraid I can’t give you more than five minutes; it’s nearly the residents’ tea-time.”

  Lucy glanced round at the mustard-emulsion walls and smiled her cross-toothed smile.

  “Five minutes will be just fine,” she said.

  V

  Mrs. Marsham watched the girl’s shabby pink car until it had vanished round the corner of the drive. Even then she went on staring with a kind of unfocussed hostility as if she expected to see the car shoot impertinently backwards into sight once more and stop in front of her.

  What with one thing and another it had been a tiresome day. One of the old ladies had cut herself quite badly on a cough pastille tin, so that the doctor had had to be summoned; two more had almost come to blows over whether their bedroom window should be open or shut. And the television had gone wrong, which always gave rise to a stream of complaint, as none of them could believe that anyone else had adequately reported the matter. Particularly tiresome when there were new arrivals. And then this fuss about the man getting knocked over . . .

  A large, grossly fat, and rather dirty ginger cat emerged from the laurestinus by the front door and rubbed against her legs. She fondled it absently. “Who’s Mother’s boy? Who’s Mother’s lovely boy, then?” The cat pushed its great head violently against her ankle, almost turning upside down to do so. It was a repulsive beast, with a thick coarse coat, short stubby tail, and a disproportionately large, almost human-looking pink mouth from which protruded a triangle of pink tongue giving it a witless air enhanced by its large, pale, wild eyes.

  After a while Mrs. Marsham went back into the house. By now several elderly persons were slowly moving about the hall, some of them feeling their way by means of a rail set along the wall at hand-height.

  “When will it be supper-time?” demanded a small wrinkled man hopefully.

  “Not for another hour, Mr. Parsons,” the matron said, looking at her watch. She shut and locked the door of the office, and walked through to the dining-room where the cook, Nora, was laying a dozen small red-plastic-topped tables for high tea. Nora was forty, plump, suffered from varicose veins, and was little better than simple-minded. However, as she lived in the village and needed the money to support her twelve-year-old illegitimate daughter, she could be relied on to keep turning up, which was more than you could say of some of the flighty girls who came and went. Furthermore she had persuaded her elder illegitimate daughter to come and help.

  “You’re putting too much butter on the plates,” Mrs. Marsham said. “They’ll eat all you put out. They’re as greedy as children.”

  Nora made no reply except to stick out her lower lip. Mrs. Marsham took no notice. “There’ll
be two more for tea,” she said. “Upstairs. I’ll take the trays up.”

  “Oh? First I’ve heard of it,” grunted Nora. “No one tells me anything.”

  “I’m telling you now,” Mrs. Marsham said controlledly. “I’ve made their beds. They’ll be on the top floor in number nine. Bed cases. One of them won’t be able to eat anything solid for a few days. Now I’m going over to the annex to see what Dr. Adnan said to Clarkson about his arm. If there are any phone messages, write them on the pad.”

  Nora grunted again. Mrs. Marsham compressed her thin lips and went on, through the kitchen, out of a back door, and along a path that crossed a stretch of rough grass. The path led through an untended shrubbery of rhododendrons and araucarias. Beyond the shrubbery, in the hungry 1840s, a sort of earthwork had been thrown up to employ idle hands in the village, and the path ran under this in a tunnel set about with ornamental stonework to give it the air of a grotto. The tunnel led to a cobbled yard with a stable and sheds on one side, a large glasshouse on the second, a walled kitchen garden on the third, and three small cottages on the fourth. Beyond the kitchen garden was a back entrance to the road where Clough’s accident had occurred. Smoke issued from one cottage chimney, and an aproned man was just closing the door behind him. He was too short-sighted to see Mrs. Marsham until she was directly in front of him.

  “That you, missus?” he said then, peering. “I was just going to bring t’beans up to t’house and see you. Doctor said my arm’s to be fomented three times daily; an’ he’s given me some stuff to take.”

  “All right, I’ll foment it now as I’m here,” the matron said. “I daresay you’ve got a kettle boiling in your cottage? You can take the beans to Nora afterwards.”