The Embroidered Sunset

by Joan Aiken

  “There is a Reviewing Committee for the Export of Works of Art.”

  “You seem to know a lot about it?” She glanced at him narrowly.

  “To be sure. I take an interest in all such matters. So you see it is to be hoped that Benovek acts with discretion.”

  “Oh, he will,” Lucy said with confidence.

  “You are in love with this Benovek,” Dr. Adnan said crossly. “It is a great piece of folly on top of all your other follies. How could you have embarked on such a short-term venture—”

  Lucy’s mouth dropped open; her face slowly went pink.

  “What utter nonsense!” she said.

  “Nonsense? Every time you speak of him your face, your voice, your whole personality changes. For the better, one can’t deny, love is a very humanising influence which there is no doubt you need, but what a waste! It makes one impatient.”

  “How can you be so silly? I only met him once for fifteen minutes. Anyway, I don’t see what concern it is of yours if I am in love with the whole Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra,” Lucy said with spirit. “And now I should like to go back to my aunt if you’ll be so kind as to drive me; Fawcett must have finished with her, or just about.”

  Adnan looked at his watch.

  “I doubt it; but very well. I was going to offer to take you back to my house and give you a choice of one of the aunt’s pictures that I have there,” he said. “Mind, it was against my own inclinations, but one must occasionally perform a disinterested action; and a single picture I think I might be able to part with. Two? No, I think not. One, however, you may have! In token of my friendly regard for you.”

  “That’s big of you; I appreciate it,” Lucy said drily. She glanced at him, half touched, half suspicious. “I’ll take you up on that, but not right now.” She looked at her own watch. “I really am anxious to get back to Fawcett’s surgery.”

  “If you must! What a stickler for punctuality. But how will you ever have a chance to come and select your picture when you are washing dishes at Wildfell Hall?”

  “I guess Mrs. Marsham will give me an evening off now and then in between the measles.”

  He paid the bill, and they crossed the promenade and descended the steps of the subterranean car park.

  “The Borough Surveyor,” Adnan told Lucy, leisurely selecting a key and opening the passenger door of his Alfa, “informs me that this place is highly dangerous. Never use it in stormy weather unless drowning is your preferred death.”

  “Oh really? Why?” asked Lucy, wishing he would hurry.

  “Inadequate drainage. If the sea were to break over the promenade—as occasionally happens in a northeast gale—in sufficient quantity to cover the cars—to prevent people driving them away—”

  “Yes; I see—” She gave a slight shudder, scanning the dark, cavernous place. “Nasty, wouldn’t it be? I don’t so much mind the thought of drowning, but to drown in a trap—”

  “Just so.” He started his engine, and paused at the barrier to pay. “So in stormy weather it is better to risk the chance of a parking ticket.”

  “Speaking of which,” Lucy said, “I do hope you were right when you said it was okay to leave little PHO outside Fawcett’s. I didn’t like the look of those double lines.”

  “Oh, the police never come up so far. I have left my car there for hours when playing chess with Bill Fawcett.”

  “Yes, but you and Bill Fawcett are probably on very pally terms with the local fuzz—he extracts their molars, you deliver their babies—”

  “No, no, there is no such corruption in this town I assure you!”

  “Except for inadequate draining in the car park and the indiscretions of the Borough Surveyor.”

  “As to that,” said Adnan cheerfully, whirling his steering wheel and turning up a steep incline off the promenade, “he has told me far worse things about the state of the reservoir on Appleby High Moor. The contractor (a brother-in-law of the mayor) cheated on the quantity of concrete required, skimped on the quality, the whole two thousand tons of water might break loose at any moment—”

  “Oh, charming! And you still say I did wrong to take Aunt Fennel out of Reservoir Street, down which I presume the whole two hundred thousand tons would come cascading?”

  “Oh, I daresay it is quite a remote contingency, after all. And now if you will excuse me—” He pulled up outside Fawcett’s and glanced at his watch. “I really am rather late for my family planning and cervical smear clinic; the charm of your company has seduced me, but duty calls—”

  He reached across and opened Lucy’s door, collected her hand neatly on the way back, pressed a rapid kiss on it, and levered her out of the car, all in one smooth sequence of movement. Then the door slammed and the Alfa spurted away.

  “Well!” said Lucy gazing after him in astonishment. “If that’s oriental politeness! He’s late—the rude rat!”

  She ran indignantly up Fawcett’s three immaculately white front steps and pressed the brass bell.

  “Miss Culpepper? The very old lady?” Fawcett’s nice little receptionist-nurse—a velvet-skinned, kittenish child of surely no more than sixteen—was nevertheless at least five months pregnant; ought to have attended Adnan’s family planning clinic, Lucy thought uncharitably. “The old lady in the white hat? Oh, yais, she left ages ago.”

  “She left? But I thought Mr. Fawcett said he was going to be at least two hours with her?”

  “Oh yais, he got through ever so much quicker than he thought he would.”

  “But I told her to wait here till I came to pick her up!”

  “Did you?” The receptionist was not really interested. “Yais, she went off; remembered some shopping she wanted to do, I expect. Yais, ever such a long time ago, that would be.”

  She had an extraordinary accent; a hopeful attempt at cockney overlying her native Yorkshire.

  “You didn’t notice which way she went?”

  “Aoh, naoh!”

  I suppose she might have gone back to Mrs. Tilney’s to finish her packing, Lucy thought with a pang of guilt. She herself had meant to go and do a final tidy-up while the dentistry was in process, if she had not been beguiled away by Dr. Adnan’s offer of coffee and entertainment.

  “Well, okay; thanks,” she said crossly, and turned uphill to where she had left little PHO parked. But little PHO was there no longer; it seemed that Lucy had lost both her aunt and her car.

  “Your Lucy’s sent you a parcel now,” sniffed Dee Lawrence, stomping in with the large corrugated-and-paper-wrapped square. “Want me to undo it?”

  She set it down on the piano with an off-hand thump.

  Max Benovek raised his eyes from the Guardian foreign news page. His face today had the bluish pallor of a lightless bulb; his movements were heavy and slow as if he had to plan each one beforehand in kinesiological terms of direction and muscle-power; this inertia was not relaxation but the wary avoidance of pain. Just the same, when Dee laid down the parcel a light came on in his eyes. He half lifted a hand and then let it fall.

  “Not just at the moment, thanks, Dee,” he said mildly. “Rees-Evans is due round quite soon; no need to have a lot of string and clutter lying round when he arrives.”

  “He won’t be along for hours yet,” sniffed Dee. “I noticed him having coffee with the matron as I came by; she was training all her magnetism on him; bet she’d do it with him in a wheelbarrow if only he’d drop the handkerchief.”

  “Really, Dee!” His tone was weary, not affronted; her flights of malice were more than he could be bothered to follow.

  “Oh, sorry, sorry!” Dee was edgy these days; her large, hearty personality had become a focus of tension. She looked at the parcel with exasperation, longing to get it unpacked, disposed of, and tidied away, yet she could not help being secretly pleased that Max seemed in no hurry to undo it.

 
“Oh well, if you don’t want to look at it I’ll wrap up those tapes for the B.B.C. and take them down for the messenger. Had your pills? Drink of lemon barley? Right, I’ll be back in half an hour or so.”

  As soon as her firm tread had died completely away down the corridor Max, who had listened with care, got up out of his armchair and moved slowly over to the piano. He had become weaker since Lucy’s visit, and also thinner; his shoulder-blades, elbow-knobs, and hip-bones protruded angularly from the dark silk robe he wore. But his expression was calm, intent, and purposeful.

  The knots in the string defeated him, however. After two or three minutes’ struggle he gave up, sweating, and looked round. A pair of nail-scissors lay on the dressing-table; he made his way across the room and then carefully back with them; he haggled through the tough string. The parcel was secured as well with lavish quantities of gummed brown-paper tape, one layer on top of another. This had stiffened to the solidity of wood; Benovek scratched and stabbed at it unavailingly with the puny scissors.

  “Hellish stuff!” He was breathless, half with effort, half with rage at his own inadequacy. “If that gnat-like creature could do it up, I ought to be able to undo it. She certainly is an efficient girl, blast her.” He looked with a curious sense of comfort at the address, written large and black in felt-tip: MAX BENOVEK, Queen Alexandra Sanatorium, Coulsham, Surrey, and the return address, equally firm: LUCY CULPEPPER, Poste Restante, Kirby. “I must get her playing Beethoven; why didn’t I make her while she was here?”

  “Hey!” Rees-Evans had come in behind him. “What goes on here? Undoing parcels? Where’s your guard-dog? She ought to be doing that.”

  “Oh, she’s away on some errand or other.”

  “Well, let me do it. You sit down.”

  “Thanks, Hugh.”

  “What is it, a framed certificate to say you passed your R.C.M. Intermediate? Oh no, Kirby, I see; your north-country admirer. It’ll be Yorkshire pudding, a frozen slab; all you do is heat and serve.”

  “I’ve never yet had genuine Yorkshire pudding,” Max remarked absently. “Every time this delicacy has appeared in whatever form—and they have been numerous—somebody at the table has said, ‘Ah, this isn’t Yorkshire pudding as it should be,’ but none of the descriptions as to what it should be have ever tallied.” His tone was vague, but his eyes never moved from the lengths of paper tape that Rees-Evans was stripping, with casual strength, from the parcel.

  “Yorkshire pudding ought to crunch, like toast. What shall I do with this garbage?” Rees-Evans dropped a handful on the floor and stepped on it.

  “Leave it there. Dee can tidy it when she comes back,” Max said indifferently. “Can you undo the corrugated stuff?”

  “Easily.” He tore it apart with one rending tug. “There you are, then; something to hang over your bed, would it be?” He removed a last layer of Kirby Advertiser.

  “Good heavens.”

  “Good heavens, as you say.” Rees-Evans stared blankly at the canvas he had unwrapped, and then crossed the room and stood it upright on the piano, leaning against the wall. “A Yorkshire primitive,” he said with awe. “Eden as seen by a Rochdale Pioneer.”

  Max Benovek said nothing but, as he sat looking at the picture, he began to smile. It was a smile of such pleasure that Rees-Evans, turning to glance at him, was visited by the insane thought:

  “He could recover. There have been cases of spontaneous remission. Even now, even in his condition, I believe he could recover! I’ve never seen him look like that before. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen him smile before.”

  “Adam and Eve and the serpent,” Max said dreamily, “I never saw a longer serpent, did you, Hugh? ‘Some flow’rets of Eden ye still inherit, But the trail of the serpent is over them all.’ She’s got the greenness of Eden, hasn’t she? That’s the thing we’ve lost. Green never lasts at its greenest. But in Eden it did.”

  “Lot of character about the participants, too,” Rees-Evans said, grinning. “You can see Adam’s an indecisive dreamer and Eve obstinate as they come.”

  “And the serpent is a species of Hamlet, blaming them both for the rôle he has to play; he has tied a knot in his tail from sheer tension.”

  “I always did have a soft spot for the serpent. After all, it wasn’t even as if he wanted the apple for himself; it was a rotten part to be assigned.”

  “Nobody is ever assigned the part they would have chosen for themselves.” Benovek looked down at his hands, thin and transparent as bunches of quills.

  “And that’s the truth! Oh well, let’s have a look at you, shall we?”

  While the examination was proceeding, Dee bounced back into the room.

  “Well!” she said. “Whatever has been going on here? I never in all my born days saw such a mess. Didn’t want the room untidied for Dr. Rees-Evans, huh!”

  “Tidy it up, will you, Dee, there’s a good girl,” Max said calmly. She did so, lips pressed together, with ostentatious thoroughness. A sheet of writing-paper drifted out from the wrappings, and she picked it up.

  “Here, don’t you want to read your billet-doux? This is becoming a real Daddy-Long-Legs affair,” she said to Rees-Evans, who smiled politely and said nothing.

  Max took the paper without comment and held it while Rees-Evans completed his check. Then he read the first line.

  Dear Max, I wish I could be there when you opened this. I do wish I could have seen your face when you first looked at it.

  “Good Lord,” said Dee, for the first time deigning to notice the canvas on the piano. “Is that what Lucy Culpepper sent? What a weird production. Looks more like the effort of a six-year-old to me. Is that how this famous great-aunt spends her time?”

  “Miss Lawrence,” said Rees-Evans, glancing at his watch, “I wonder if you could spare a moment to come down to my office with me and collect a couple of books I promised to lend Mr. Benovek? You will? That’s so kind of you—I must really get on, I’m an hour behind schedule as it is.”

  Pausing after he had ushered Dee out of the door, he said, “Didn’t you tell me that Writtstein was coming to see you one day this week?”

  “Wednesday.” Max raised his eyes briefly from the letter.

  “I wonder what he’ll make of the Rochdale Eden,” Rees-Evans said, and gently closed the door behind him.

  I do wish I could have seen your face when you first looked at it.

  Max raised his eyes to the blank wall opposite.

  He had no need to make such a wish. He saw her face continually: pale, freckled, alert, looking up through a fine spray of hair like some friendly sea-urchin. He knew its contours by heart; he enveloped her with thought all day long, quarrying out her outline from the cliff of his ignorance, brooding, speculating, probing, discarding. Each letter from her directed his exploration to a new quarter.

  No, but Max, don’t you think it is a beautiful picture? And it is just like Aunt Fennel herself. When you meet her (you must meet her, Max, you’ll love her) you feel that she is completely innocent and good, and also slightly mad, or at least off-centre; her values are quite individual, not formed at all from anybody else’s. Do you suppose this is genius? Or a kind of genius, anyway? You have genius too, I know, but I didn’t get this feeling about you, that you hardly realised the rest of the world existed—on the contrary, your separation from the world seemed to cause you distress. (I hope I don’t distress you more by saying this?) I’d like to think that Aunt Fennel’s picture will give you back a little bit of the world.

  I must stop now—I bought some paper and string at a stationer’s and I’m parcelling up the picture at Kirby post office. Tomorrow, after the dentist, I take Aunt Fennel up to Wildfell Hall, where I’m going to help look after her and all the old things with measles for a couple of weeks. I hate to waste even this much time from our lessons, Max. But I do feel an extraordinary bond with Aunt Fennel�
�I simply can’t leave her till I’m sure she’s okay. And it’s good to feel useful and needed. I’m sure you’ll understand—I feel this bond with you, too! But the minute I have Aunt F. comfortably settled I’m coming south. Love from Lucy.

  P.S. Remember the Carados girl I mentioned in an earlier letter? I found out a funny thing. Tell you in my next. But I may not be able to write for a while—bother this postal strike!

  “Useful and needed!” Max said bitterly.

  “Who’s useful and needed?” Rees-Evans had come back. “Left my stethoscope behind,” he explained blandly, strolling over to take another look at Aunt Fennel’s green Eden.

  “I thought you were an hour behind schedule? What have you done with Dee?”

  “Set her to arranging my books; I thought she seemed to be getting you down a bit. Who’s useful and needed?”

  “I don’t seem to be, for one. That girl’s becoming more and more involved with getting the great-aunt settled—I’m beginning to have a premonition about her lessons.”

  “What sort of premonition?” Rees-Evans asked uneasily.

  “Oh, I suppose, that too many things will conspire to delay her and that she’ll come south just too late. That I’ll never teach her.”

  When you have lost both a car and an aunt, which do you seek first? And how do you set about your search?

  Lucy stood on the pavement in a state, for once, of total indecision, empty-handed, empty-minded, bereft. She could not even, as yet, feel rage at the receptionist for her stupidity, at Adnan for his delaying tactics, at herself for letting Adnan delay her. Rage would come later. All she experienced at present was shock and loss.

  A sea-mist had descended, with the unpredictable suddenness of coastal weather. Kirby, in its cuplike hollow, was muffled and ghostly; the little pantiled houses climbed the hill into obscurity, the masts in the harbour dwindled away, insubstantial as pencil scribbles against a white blankness. Traffic seemed to have come to a halt; the only sound was the regular, melancholy cry of the lighthouse, warning ships to beware of the narrow tricky harbour approach and the flanking merciless cliffs.