The Embroidered Sunset, Page 2

  Poor Rose peered, straining her beautiful short-sighted eyes. “Those funny old things? Why, they’re all flat—what’s the word?—two-dimensional? Everything kind of shoots uphill.”

  “Yes, that contributes to the sense of movement and humour. They’re really very complex.”

  “Why, Lucy! I never heard you talk so—”

  “No? Maybe you never heard me talk at all,” Lucy said not unkindly.

  “It seems so strange—! Why, they’re not even all paint; there’s bits of cloth, and bottle-tops, and wool, and embroidery stuck all over. Wilbie just laughed at them when she sent them. A regular old maid’s jumble, he called them.”

  “He would,” said Lucy. “But where did they come from? Why haven’t I seen them before?”

  “Oh, I guess they arrived some time when you were away at school or camp. Two or three years ago, it would have been. Wilbie thought people would laugh at them; he told me to write a letter of thanks—well, I would have done that anyway, of course—and put them up in the attic. She’d never know.”

  “Who would never know?”

  “Old Aunt Fennel.”

  “Aunt Fennel?”

  “Fennel Culpepper. Your great-aunt, I suppose she’d be. Your Uncle Wilbie’s aunt.”

  “Father’s aunt, then, too?”

  “Why, yes, I guess so. Mercy, look at the time!” Aunt Rose exclaimed, recollecting herself. “Lucy dear, don’t trouble any longer about this stuffy old attic. What I came to say was that the Bankses have invited me round there for lunch and bridge, so I’m afraid I can’t help you any more right now, if I’m to have my hair done first. In fact, I ought to be on my way this very minute. So let’s lock up and I’ll finish off in here another day. I’m sure you’ve done as much as you ought.”

  “No, honestly, Aunt Rose, I’m fine. I might just as well finish, now I’m started. It won’t take more than another hour or so.”

  “Well, but—the thing is—I don’t know if your uncle—”

  “Oh,” Lucy said with an unerring guess at the real reason for her aunt’s fluster, “I’ll be finished long before Uncle Wilbie gets home. He needn’t know I’ve been up here on my own.”

  “Why, Lucy, that wasn’t what I meant!”

  “Never mind,” said Lucy, not unsympathetically shooing her aunt out of the room. “You go play your nice bridge. You know how I am at always putting the worst constructions on things. Oh, what shall I do about all these old papers?”

  She indicated a pile of the Kirby Evening Advertiser and East Riding Gazette.

  “Oh, just leave them,” Aunt Rose said hastily. “Wilbie hates anything to be thrown out.”

  Lucy put them in a corner, wondering why her uncle bothered to subscribe to an English small-town paper. Then the name Culpepper caught her eye in a tiny paragraph: “. . . funeral of Miss Beatrice Howe, who for many years resided at Appleby with Miss Fennel Culpepper and was a well-known contributor to our columns on herbal and wild-flower lore . . .” Presumably that was the Miss Fennel Culpepper who had done the pictures? But there was nothing more about her in the news item.

  Contrary to his usual custom, Uncle Wilbie did in fact reappear in the house at noon. By that time, however, the attic was tidy, the door relocked, the key back in Aunt Rose’s bureau drawer.

  As was his wont, Uncle Wilbie stood just inside the front door and bawled:

  “Rosie! Where are you? Rosie!”

  There was no reply. Becoming irritated at once, he bustled off to the music room, where Lucy was sternly slicing her way through the slow movement of Beethoven’s Opus 109.

  “Hey, what goes on around here? Where’s your Aunt Rose?”

  Apart from an organ, unplayed and hopelessly out of tune, and the Knabe which he had acquired secondhand from a business colleague when he still had hopes of Corale’s turning out musical, Wilbie had never done anything much about furnishing the music room. It looked north on to a dustbin area at the side of the house, to conceal which Aunt Rose had provided net drapes. Corale and her friends occasionally overflowed in here when the TV room proved too small for their parties, otherwise Lucy had it to herself. The walls were white, the floor bare polished pine, the acoustics good. A plaster bust of Beethoven (thrown in along with the piano) made clear the room’s cultural function. Lucy kept the piano tuned but had made no attempt at embellishing the room until today.

  Beethoven and Lucy wore identical scowls as she raised her face from the keyboard to meet her uncle’s eyes.

  “Sorry, what did you say, Uncle Wilbie? Oh, Aunt Rose? She went off to lunch and bridge at the Bankses’.”

  “She shouldn’t have done that,” Uncle Wilbie said, annoyed. “Just taken a couple of contracts away from Banks’s firm. Their prices aren’t competitive any more.”

  “Shall I call up and tell her to come home?”

  “No, never mind,” he said, missing the sarcasm. “I just wondered—but if she’s at the Bankses’ it’s okay. I guess she went off quite a while ago. Didn’t have time for much else?”

  “Not much,” Lucy answered impassively.

  Uncle Wilbie suddenly became gay.

  “Here’s the poor old breadwinner, toiling away downtown, and what does his harem do? Tinkle all day long on the piano or gad off playing bridge! Oh well, back to the treadmill for us workers, hey, Russ?”

  For the first time Lucy noticed that Russell McLartney, one of the brighter young men from the office, had accompanied her uncle and was waiting in the hall. Russell, thickset, thick-haired, and self-confident, had been for several years now the favourite aide of Uncle Wilbie, who paid unusual attention to his opinion; Lucy suspected that Wilbie had him scheduled as a possible successor in the firm, and that Russ had himself scheduled as a possible mate for Corale; though when Lucy once suggested the latter possibility Wilbie flew into an unexpected rage; evidently he had more ambitious plans for his daughter. Meanwhile a formal escort relationship existed between Russ and Corale, and a strong hostility, tempered by unwilling mutual respect, between Russ and Lucy.

  “Hi there, Lucy,” he said, strolling in. “Still giving the classics a beating?”

  “Hello, Russ,” Lucy said coldly. She sat waiting for them to go. Sensing this, Uncle Wilbie chose to remain; he began to bounce a little on his thick rubber soles, expanding with the bonhomie that came out in him on such occasions.

  “We’ve been visiting the Tintax works,” he explained to Lucy, who remained impassive at this piece of information. “So on the way back into town I stopped off to pick up my watch. Left it at home this morning.” He walked over to the piano and inspected the album on the music rest.

  “What’s this, eh? Strauss? Friml?”

  “Beethoven.” Inexpressively, Lucy watched as he flipped over the pages.

  “Wonderful how she understands it all, ain’t it, Russ? Mysterious-looking stuff! Andante con moto—what language are those words in, Princess?”

  “Italian.”

  “Greek to me.” Uncle Wilbie laughed heartily. “Why can’t they put it in English? Beethoven wasn’t Italian, was he? What’s this one, vol—volti subito?”

  “Turn over quickly.”

  “As the actress said to the bishop! That’s a handy one, Russ! We must remember that if we ever make a business trip to Italy. More to this music than meets the eye, if you ask me . . . oh well, better be on our way. The Princess isn’t a bit pleased to have us interrupting her labours.” Bored with Lucy’s lack of response to his needling, he turned towards the door and stopped abruptly.

  “Why,” said Russ, “you’ve put those pictures up at last. Has the old lady passed over, then?”

  He moved forward to admire the three primitives which Lucy had hung on the wall facing the window. Against the bare white background they glowed like stones in ultra-violet light. “Amazing things, aren’t they?” he said
with satisfaction. “I told your uncle they’d be worth a fortune some day, and I bet I’m right. All they want is a bit of PR work, you wait and see.”

  “How did those get down here?”

  Lucy could tell that Uncle Wilbie was furious. He had gone very quiet and pale, never a good sign. The geniality dropped from him like ice from a defrosted freezer.

  “Aunt Rose said you didn’t care for them, so I thought you wouldn’t mind if I put them in here,” Lucy replied calmly. “I found them when we were tidying the attic.”

  “He didn’t care for them?” Russ said. “You’ve got to be kidding! Why, when I told him—”

  “Quiet, Russ! Aunt Rose made a mistake,” Wilbie said shortly. “I’d like them to go back in the attic, please.”

  “Very well.” Lucy stood up, but before she could touch the pictures, Uncle Wilbie, recollecting himself, added, “Russ will take them up.”

  Wilbie himself was extremely strong; like some dreadful little ant, he could carry about four times his own weight, but it was a matter of protocol never to do so.

  “Sure, I’ll take them.” With obliging rapidity, Russ scooped the pictures off the wall and bore them upstairs. Lucy heard their voices faintly, then the slam of the attic door, presently steps descending again.

  “So long!” Russ called politely. The front door slammed in its turn, and Wilbie’s Cadillac started up in front of the house. Lucy recovered her place in the music but did not immediately recommence playing; with her elbows propped on the keyboard lid she rested her chin on her fists and brooded.

  At supper Uncle Wilbie was his gay self again.

  “Such a project I’ve got for our Princess!” he announced jubilantly, when he had divested himself of the striped blue and white butcher’s apron which he wore tied round his plump body during the preparation of his famous rice dish while Aunt Rose, who had put in a couple of hours beforehand chopping and assembling the ingredients, hovered anxiously nearby in case of last-minute requests. “Bridge all afternoon and then she gets her dinner cooked for her into the bargain!” he chided her fondly. “And there’s Corabella tired out and yawning from reading the comic strips all day; little Lucinda and I are the only guys who do any work around here, hey, Princess?” He directed a loving look at his daughter and one full of malice at Lucy. “Bella, quit slouching and take your hair out of the horseradish! Look how nice and straight Lucy sits to eat her supper!”

  “Project for Lucy? What do you mean, dear?” Aunt Rose inquired nervously.

  Lucy’s pale eyes met her uncle’s little twinkling ones. “Thank you for the kind thought, Uncle Wilbie,” she said, “but don’t trouble to find any jobs for me. I’m going to work my passage to England as a stewardess, and then try to get to see Max Benovek; if I could talk to him I’d know where I stood.”

  “Well, and isn’t that just what I was going to suggest?” Wilbie cried triumphantly.

  “A stewardess? Lucy, dearie, the work would be far too much for you!”

  Lucy waited, looking at her uncle, her expression one of total suspicion.

  “You see, Princess, I’ve been worried for quite some time about old Aunt Fennel Culpepper—the one who did those pictures you’re so sold on.” The pictures, Lucy thought; I knew there was something odd going on. It really threw him off balance for a moment this afternoon to find I liked them. But why should that suddenly make him agree to my going to England? Or is it that he just wants to get me away from here? It was certainly true, she thought, catching her uncle’s eye for a flickering instant, that their mutual antipathy had intensified of late.

  Aunt Rose looked as if she wished to speak, but one glance from her husband was enough to abort the impulse.

  “I thought Russ said Aunt Fennel died?”

  “That’s just what we don’t know.” Uncle Wilbie carefully loaded a fork with rice, prawn, chicken, pimento, and pine kernel, transferred the load dexterously to his mouth, and chewed with relish. “Used to write every so often,” he presently said. “Village news, you know. Sent pictures, few years ago. Then—no more letters.”

  “How old is she? Where does she live?”

  “Oh well on; in her late eighties, isn’t she, Wilbie?” Aunt Rose put in. He nodded.

  “Lives in England—little village in northeast Yorkshire. Appleby-under-Scar—pronounce it Appley. Whole family came from round there once. Thing is, she doesn’t write any more, but she goes on getting her annuity from the firm. Paid into bank account in York.”

  Lucy began to guess the cause of Uncle Wilbie’s discontent. To a man so mean that he urged his family to have cold showers rather than hot, and went around switching lights off behind them, the thought of this perpetual trickle from the firm’s resources must be a constant annoyance.

  “She invested in your firm, then?”

  “Oh, years back,” he said, as if all obligation had long ago been cancelled. “What I’m beginning to wonder is, if she’s dead, who’s getting the dough? Should cease at death.”

  “I don’t see why she’s got to be dead,” Corale said, yawning. “There’s other reasons why she could have stopped writing letters. Maybe no one answered them.”

  “Or her eyesight may be failing,” said Lucy. “Think of all that fine embroidery and close work on the pictures.”

  “That’s so.” Wilbie nodded again thoughtfully, as if the idea had not occurred to him before. “Yep, that might be the reason. On the other hand, there might be a bit of skulduggery going on somewhere.”

  Trust you to think that, Lucy reflected. A mind as devious as yours would naturally look for double-dealing in others.

  “But surely,” she said aloud, “it’s not so easy to draw someone else’s annuity? There’d have to be signatures, and proof of identity, and so forth?”

  “Sharp as a little needle, our Princess, eh? But it’s not all so plain and simple as you might fancy. Old Aunt Fennel never married—lived with another old lady for the last God knows how many years—name’ll come to me in a minute—so what’s to stop the other old dame claiming the cash? Easy to forge signature of someone you’ve lived with for last forty years.”

  “But, good heavens—” To Lucy the idea seemed wildly far-fetched. “There’d be no end of complications—death certificates, insurance policies—people would know at once, surely?” Old ladies are just not likely to embark on a course of wholesale fraud, she would have said, particularly immediately following the death of a dear friend. But in Uncle Wilbie’s book this was evidently just the sort of behaviour to be expected from old ladies.

  “Who’s to tell one wrinkled-up old girl from another?” he demanded. “I bet even their doctor didn’t know them apart! Never had the doctor, anyway—all these herbal remedies. No, if you’ve decided to go over to England, Princess, that couldn’t be handier. Minute you get there, you nip up to Yorkshire—I’ll pay your train fare, hey?—and spy out the land a bit, will you?”

  “But how would I be able to tell?” Lucy was not at all enthusiastic about doing this private-eye job for her uncle. “I’ve never even met Aunt Fennel, so far as I know. Have you a photograph of her?”

  “Might have one somewhere, have we, Rosie?” Rose looked doubtful. “Anyway, if there’s anything going on that’s not strictly on the up-and-up, the arrival of a bona-fide great-niece would be enough to scare whoever’s doing it and put a stop to the business, don’t you see?”

  “I don’t like it,” said Lucy.

  “Oh, come on, Princess, what’s the harm? And if it’s the real Aunt Fennel, you’d like to meet her, wouldn’t you? Sweet old lady, just your dish, I’d have thought, brewing up her herbal remedies and doing her embroidery; why, if you were so crazy about those ones up in the attic, think of all the other pictures you’d have a chance to see.”

  “Has she done such a lot?” In spite of herself, Lucy’s curiosity was pricked by the thought.


  “Hundreds, by all accounts. Whole house full of ‘em, I guess, by now. Come to think, that’s another thing you could do while you’re there.” Lucy shot a narrow glance at her uncle. The increased airiness of his manner warned her that now they were approaching the nub of the whole business.

  “Well, you know how young Russ thinks those pictures might prove quite a hot selling property. Daresay the boy’s dreaming, but he says there’s a fashion right now for primitives and stuff—naïve art, he calls it. We’re all plain folks round here, we wouldn’t know about that, eh?” For once, the look he directed at his daughter was less proud than impatient, but she merely yawned again. “Seems wild to me,” Wilbie went on, “but we still don’t want to pass up a thing like that if there is a chance of realising a bit on them, do we?”

  “I see,” said Lucy coldly. “You want me to collar all the pictures before somebody else does?”

  “Well, damn it, they’re family property, ain’t they? I’m her next of kin. No sense in letting some stranger cash in. She’s probably given them away all round the village, that’s what worries me—”

  “Why don’t you go, if you’re so anxious to buy them back from all these unsuspecting strangers?”

  “Now, Lucy! You know how busy your uncle always is!”

  “Sure. Much too busy to go to England right now. I wish I’d had time to nip over when I was in Stuttgart last summer, but there wasn’t a minute.”

  “It would only take a week-end, if you flew.”

  “Uncle Wilbie hates planes—you know that,” Aunt Rose said reproachfully. “They upset his digestion for days.”

  “Anyway,” Wilbie said, “if an old businessman like me was to go snooping round collecting pictures—supposing Aunt Fennel’s dead, that’s to say—people would get wise to what was going on in no time. But if you were to do it, Princess—innocent young chick like you—you could give any old reason, memorial exhibition, sentimental wish to get hold of as many as possible—heck, you’re crazy about them, you said so yourself! It would be as easy as winning the kids’ crossword!”