The Plain Old Man Read online

  “Give me that love that loves for love alone,” Sarah caroled, reaching for a different bucket of paint.

  “Why love for love alone?” her aunt wondered.

  “I was thinking of Cousin Mabel,” Sarah explained.

  “How noble of you, dear. I always try not to. Oh glory be, here comes Charlie. And Gillian’s nowhere in sight, after she’d promised faithfully to be here on the dot of four. I can’t for the life of me see why people come panting after parts and then won’t ever bother to be on time for rehearsals. Give her a buzz, will you, and see if she’s on her way? I’ll take Charlie through his stage business in the meantime so he won’t feel abused and neglected.”

  Charlie—Charles Daventer, to give him his due—didn’t have a great deal to do in his role as the Notary, except to get Aline and Alexis duly signed and sealed and to be fallen in love with temporarily by Constance Partlett. Charlie would much rather have been fallen in love with by Emma Kelling, for whom he’d nursed a hopeless but on the whole agreeable passion since the spring of 1937. However, he was willing enough to submit to Constance’s unflattering blandishments, since Emma wanted him to.

  The Notary didn’t have to sing well. A croak would suffice, but the croakings had to come in the right places, and therein lay the rub. Shortly after rehearsals began, Charles Daventer had been laid up with a bad go of gout in his left big toe. Emma’s man, Heatherstone, had been conscripted to understudy the Notary’s role, which he’d read from the book in a careful monotone, pending Charlie’s recovery. That was all right for the other players, but of no earthly use to Charlie. He’d kept insisting he’d be well in time to do his part, so Emma hadn’t dared replace him with one of the men from the chorus; and in fact there was none of them dry and snuffy, dim and slow, ill-tempered, weak, and poorly enough to have handled the role convincingly. Now here he was, back in trim and raring to go and where was their Constance? Really, it was annoying of Gillian.

  Sarah let the phone ring, but Gillian/Constance didn’t answer, so they had to suppose she must be on her way. Emma gave Charlie a sisterly kiss and a weak whiskey and water and started running him through his lines for the betrothal scene, of which he had precisely four. Sarah, painting her bushes amid a sea of tarpaulins in the vast, glassed-in room that Emma called her sun parlor, could hear them pegging away. Now they’d gone on to the chorus that followed, Emma singing most of the parts while Charlie made frog noises half a beat behind. At last, when her own voice began to wind down from the strain of doing soprano, alto, tenor, and bass all at the same time, Emma called, “Sarah, come in here.”

  Sarah stuck the brushes she’d been using into a can of water so the acrylic paint wouldn’t dry in the bristles and break Henry Hoist’s heart, and obeyed. “What is it, Aunt Emma?”

  “Charlie wants to do ‘Dear friends, take pity on my lot.’ I’ll be the orchestra, you sing Constance’s part.”

  “Me? I’m no singer.”

  “Nonsense. You’ve been warbling it to yourself all afternoon. You know the lyrics better than Gillian does. Here.” She thrust the score into Sarah’s reluctant hands and fought her way between the harp and the tuba to the Bechstein. “And a one and a two.”

  The duet between Constance and the Notary was one Sarah particularly liked. The melody made no unreasonable demands on her modest vocal endowment, and the words appealed to her sense of the absurd. She gave it her best shot. Charlie came in right on the button, with due lugubriosity. Emma was impressed.

  “Capital, both. You’ve caught it nicely. Shall we try it again?”

  “Why not?” said Charlie. “I was pretty good, wasn’t I?”

  Sarah was reminded of Tartarin de Tarascon singing the role of Robert le Diable. Oh well. Her arms were tired from painting, anyway.

  “Dear friends, take pity on my lot. My cup is not of nectar. I long have loved, as who would not, our kind and reverend rector.”

  “Why, Sarah, what a delightful surprise.” The voice was a well-modulated baritone. “I never knew you cared.”

  Emma banged her hands down on a C-major chord. “Sebastian, sit down and shut up. We were going along nicely till you barged in. Let’s start again, Sarah.”

  Sarah didn’t much relish having to perform in front of Sebastian Frostedd. She couldn’t think of much about him she did relish, for that matter, even though he was easily the best voice in the company. He might well be the best actor, too. If even a few of the scurrilities Dolph and Uncle Jem had told her about him were true, Sebastian was grossly miscast as the Vicar. Still, he carried off the role as if he’d been in churchly orders all his life.

  His role seemed not to be the first thing he’d carried off. According to Dolph, some of Sebastian’s so-called business deals ought to have landed him in jail ages ago, if his relatives hadn’t kept bailing him out. There was the Frostedd name to think of. Besides, as Dolph pointed out, no matter how black his other crimes, Sebastian could always be counted on to vote the straight Republican ticket.

  Perhaps it was part of Sebastian’s stock in trade to look more like a clergyman than a crook. He was a smallish, roundish man with a little mouse-fine grayish hair surrounding a shiny pink pate and a blandly agreeable face. He wore thin beige or gray cashmere vests under his discreet sports jacket at rehearsals and could have passed himself off, if not as a man of the cloth, at least as the assistant headmaster from one of the better girls’ boarding schools. Maybe he had, for all Sarah knew. She personally would never trust any daughter of hers, assuming she were to have one, with a man like Sebastian Frostedd. She turned her back on him, making sure she’d got the concert harp between them, and went back to bar one.

  By the time she and Charlie Daventer got through their number, they’d accumulated quite an audience. Alexis the brave and the lovely Aline, also known respectively as Parker Pence, son of the second flute and the kettledrums, and Jenicot Tippleton, daughter of Sir Marmaduke and Dame Partlett, had arrived. Parker was a nice boy, Sarah thought. He was following in the parental as well as the aval footsteps by playing glockenspiel in the Harvard Band. He also sang tenor with the Glee Club and was seriously considering a career with the Handel and Haydn Society plus a bit of investment brokerage on the side. The side that liked to eat, presumably, the rewards for choral singers being more aesthetic than financial as a rule.

  Sarah thought Jenicot something of a brat, perhaps out of jealousy, as Sarah herself had never been given the chance to be bratty. Jenicot was a natural redhead, though she’d be playing Aline in a marvelous blond wig that was even now perched on a block in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Not Sarah’s this time. Her costume was there, too: a birthday cake of mauve ruffles, pink rosebuds, and baby-blue satin ribbons. Jenicot had the willowy height to carry it off. She hadn’t had the requisite candy-box prettiness to start with, but she would have by the time Emma Kelling got through with her. Already she’d acquired enough decorum to sit still on the sofa and applaud with the tips of her fingers as they left the piano.

  “I didn’t know you were doing Constance, Sarah. What’s happened to Gillian?”

  “Nothing, I hope. She’s supposed to be on her way here. I was just filling in.”

  “You didn’t do too badly for your first try,” young Alexis condescended to tell Sarah. “Who’s your voice teacher?”

  “I never had one. It’s just that my father used to sing in Cousin Percy’s madrigal group and I had to fill in sometimes when one of the trebles didn’t show up.”

  “You mean hey nonny nonny and all that garbage?” said Jenicot, reverting to type.

  “I like doing madrigals,” her swain told her with no little severity. “They’re fun. How’s the scenery coming, Sarah?”

  “Messily.” She held up the paint-stained hands she hadn’t been given time to wash, and Emma took the hint.

  “Go get cleaned up, Sarah. It’s teatime anyway. Charlie, you’ll stay of course.”

  “Might as well, now that I’m here.”

  He
really was a plain old man, Sarah thought. Cousin Brooks had some photographs he’d taken of a California condor in molt. Once Charlie Daventer got on his stage makeup and claw-hammer coat, he was going to look a great deal like that condor. She wondered whether Gillian’s missing the rehearsal might be one of those Freudian slips Cousin Lionel and his ghastly wife, Vare, were always going on about: things you forget because you never wanted to do them anyway.

  Gillian was a better soprano than Jenicot, in Sarah’s opinion. It might well gall her to be paired with ugly old Charlie instead of the dashing though dim-witted hero. However, it was Emma who’d done the casting and there’d been no question in her mind as to which of them would be given the soprano lead, considering that Jenicot was a Tippleton well on her way to becoming a Pence, and Gillian Bruges was quite something else again.

  Emma Kelling must have known she was asking for trouble when she took on an attractive unknown who’d shown up at the tryouts with the vaguest of introductions from some neighbor or other. Jack Tippleton had never yet got through a production without making a play for one of the actresses. He’d almost been forced to pick Gillian this time, simply because the only other featured performers in the cast were his daughter, his wife, and Emma herself. Jack wasn’t inclined to bother much with members of the chorus, though he was quite willing to settle for a Pitti Sing or a Fleeta, and often had.

  Maybe that had been another factor in Emma’s apportionment of the roles. If the affair got around to the point of throwing scenes and flouncing off in a huff, Emma wanted to make sure it was not one of her lead singers who flounced. She’d lost her Angelina that way, onetime when they were doing Trial by Jury with Jack as the Judge. It had happened the night of the dress rehearsal, as Sarah recalled. Aunt Emma, trouper that she was, had taken up another notch in her corsets, crammed herself into the wedding dress, and burlesqued the role to its ultimate limit. She’d brought down the house, but it had taken a lot out of her. Not even Emma Kelling would care to repeat such an experience as that one. Sarah hoped to goodness she wasn’t faced with it now.

  Chapter 2

  FOR THE PRESENT, THOUGH, it appeared they had no crisis. Gillian showed up shortly after Heatherstone had brought in the tea, apologizing all over the place and telling some horrendous tale of a blocked gas line in her car. She was set to rehearse and the tiniest bit miffed when she found out they’d been able to manage without her. Charlie—magnanimously, considering the state of his big toe—said he wouldn’t mind running through their number again. Then Jack Tippleton arrived, ostensibly to pick up Jenicot. Gillian decided Charlie ought not to strain his gout any further today and started feeding cucumber sandwiches to Jack.

  Jenicot took a dim view, as daughters will. “Daddy, don’t eat that. You know what cucumber does to your gall bladder.”

  Brattishness pure and simple, yet Sarah found herself warming toward Jenicot. “Here, Jack,” she said, “have a ladyfinger and tell us about your gall bladder.”

  That had not been a clever move; Sarah had forgotten what a strange effect she was having on men now that she was happily married and decently dressed. If Jack had a mustache, he’d be twirling it. Gillian Bruges was noticing and resenting. Oh dear, surely she hadn’t been taking this posturing old goat seriously.

  It was possible, Sarah supposed, that Gillian didn’t see Jack as a posturing old goat. He was still handsome in an elder statesmanish sort of way and his technique, if one were susceptible to that sort of thing, must have acquired a high polish after so many years of practice. Maybe Gillian was into father figures, as Max’s nephew Mike would say. In any event Sarah decided she’d better keep a respectable distance from now on between herself and Jack Tippleton’s gall bladder. She could rather easily picture Gillian throwing up a second-best part, and there was no way Aunt Emma could sing Constance as well as Lady Sangazure.

  Luckily a diversion presented itself in the person of Guy Mannering, son of the English horn. Guy was an art student at Worcester. Lately he’d taken to rushing back to Pleasaunce after classes so he could paint scenery with Mrs. Bittersohn, she being a glamorous and sophisticated older woman who might reasonably be expected to sympathize with a young aesthete’s higher yearnings. Sarah was not at all sure she did, but she assuredly valued Guy’s height and muscles for juggling the flats around. She’d nail him for that later; right now he wanted to talk art.

  “What do you really think of the Romney?” he was asking her in a low, confiding tone meant to be suave but somewhat blurred by a bite of scone he hadn’t quite finished swallowing.

  Sarah looked up at the life-sized portrait over her aunt’s fireplace. Complete with birdbath and white dove, it depicted a strong-featured woman in her middle years costumed as Venus, albeit in a far more covered-up style than Venus is usually shown wearing. Roses being appropriate to the goddess and flattering to full-figured ladies, the artist had painted in a great many of them, some twining around the birdbath, some wreathed in her hair and pinned to her bosom, one apparently being fed to the dove. Her first thought was that she hoped to goodness Aunt Emma wasn’t intending to will the portrait to her. With its wide, gilded baroque frame, the thing must measure at least six feet by eight, and where on earth would she ever find room to hang it in the kind of house she and Max were planning? Her second was that she’d hate to have the responsibility for anything that valuable. Her third was that Romney must have had either a highly developed sense of humor or none whatsoever. Her fourth was that she adored it. It was the fourth that she offered to Guy.

  He looked at her in ill-disguised horror. “You do?”

  “Oh yes, it’s so much like Aunt Emma.”

  “Oh.” Guy chewed that over for a moment, along with the last of his scone. Then he gave her a kind, paternal nod. “Yes, I can see the resemblance. Was it her mother or somebody?”

  Art history evidently wasn’t one of Guy’s current subjects. It was as well Emma Kelling hadn’t heard his question.

  “Actually, no,” Sarah replied. “Romney died in 1802. This was Ernestina, the wife of an Alexander Kelling who was some kind of attaché to the Court of St. James’s shortly after the Revolution, when John Adams was minister. I believe they didn’t last long. She and Abigail didn’t get along very well.”

  “Abigail Adams always felt she was slighted in London,” Sebastian Frostedd, who was sitting next to them, put in. “But I can’t imagine anybody had the gall to slight Ernestina. Then of course the Kellings were rich and the Adamses weren’t. That’s bound to create ill feeling.”

  “Surely not with Abigail Adams,” Sarah protested. “I thought she’d have been above that sort of thing.”

  “Nobody is.”

  Sebastian stretched out a hand to the muffin stand Heatherstone was passing around. A cabochon ruby in the massive gold ring he was wearing caught a deep crimson spark from the candles the servant had lighted, for the sun was beginning its downward slide and the sky had grown overcast. April showers again tonight, Sarah thought. She hoped it would be fine tomorrow. Guy and a couple of his friends were coming early in the morning with a truck to move Sir Marmaduke’s mansion from the sun parlor over to the auditorium. She and Guy ought to be out there right now finishing those bushes instead of dawdling over the teacups.

  Still it was pleasant to dawdle and actually there wasn’t all that much left to do. In a way Sarah was sorry they’d had only the one set to paint. That didn’t mean her work was over. As decorations for the auditorium Emma wanted great massed arrangements in osier baskets, for which complicated foundations would have to be constructed out of plastic dishpans, chicken wire, tape, and that spongy green stuff which takes up water and keeps cut flowers fresh.

  Emma’s plan was to have Sarah cut and arrange the greens during the day tomorrow, then go out toward sunset and pick vast numbers of tulips and daffodils from the garden. These would be immersed up to their necks in water overnight for some esoteric reason Emma had learned at the garden club. The following da
y they’d be taken out of the water all fresh and turgid, another garden-club word, and popped in among the greenery. Getting the baskets ready sounded like a day’s work in itself.

  Two days. One to pick and one to pop. Sarah was dreamily trying to remember how many for the foyer, how many for the refreshment area, how many for the orchestra when she realized Ridpath Wale had joined them, coming on little cat feet as was his wont.

  Ridpath was their John Wellington Wells, another exemplar of Emma Kelling’s flair for casting. He projected to a dot the image of brisk businessman-cum-sorcerer. The first time Sarah had watched him rehearsing his potion-brewing scene with Alexis and Aline, she’d got a flash of sudden terror that he was going to pull off a workable spell. At the moment he’d joined Sebastian and Guy in front of the Romney, and was gazing up at the late Ernestina as if he wouldn’t mind trying to put a spell on her.

  “Gad, that’s a beautiful thing,” he sighed. “I’d give my eyeteeth to own it.”

  “Well, offer Emma a few hundred thousand and see what she says,” Sebastian told him. “What’s the going rate on Romneys these days, Sarah?”

  “My husband could tell you better than I. I do know Madam Wilkins paid forty thousand pounds for the painting exactly like this which she bought for her palazzo back in 1907. Unfortunately, hers turned out to be a fake.”

  “Emma’s is authentic, of course.” Ridpath managed to turn a declarative sentence into a mocking question.

  “Absolutely,” Sarah informed him, turning a simple adverb into a pretty crisp rebuke. “In the first place, this portrait has never been out of the family since the original Ernestina brought it home. In the second, we’ve had it authenticated up, down, and sideways by about twenty different experts over the years, mainly because of that copy at the Madam’s. Mrs. Wilkins tried to claim Romney painted more than one portrait of Ernestina, the way he did of Lady Hamilton, but that’s absurd. Romney was a strange sort of man, but he wasn’t eccentric enough to keep on immortalizing the Kelling jaw. Anyway, Ernestina wasn’t in London long enough. Abigail Adams saw to that, I expect.”