The Plain Old Man (12 page)

“I thought I’d better do my hair while I had the chance.” She kissed her aunt, who was already putting quince jam on a hot biscuit, and took her place. “Scrambled eggs and biscuits, please, Heatherstone. What’s on the agenda for today, Aunt Emma?”

“First, we must get all those baskets and the costumes over to the auditorium. That’s going to take us a few trips, I expect. Oh, and the makeup. You’ll be running that department.”

“Me? Aunt Emma, I can’t possibly. I don’t know the first thing about stage makeup.”

“Nonsense. If you can paint scenery, you can surely paint a face. Think how much less area you’ll have to cover. Anyway, some of us will want to do our own, I expect. I always do, myself. You’ll get mostly the chorus, and you don’t have to be quite so fussy with them. They’re always hopping around with their mouths open, so the audience never gets a good look at them anyway.”

Sarah gave up and ate her grapefruit. There was no earthly sense in arguing back once Aunt Emma had delivered a ukase. Oh well, she’d never painted scenery before, either, and that hadn’t gone so badly.

“How do you propose to cart all that stuff, Aunt Emma?” she asked with a thought to her and Max’s own lush upholstery. “You don’t want to mess up the Buick.”

“Heaven forfend! Heatherstone would resign on the spot. More coffee?” Without waiting for an answer, Emma Kelling refilled Sarah’s cup from the wantonly begarlanded Bavarian pot she liked to see on her breakfast table. “Guy Mannering’s supposed to be borrowing a station wagon. He has access to a wide variety of vehicles, it appears.”

“I hope he doesn’t steal them to fit the occasion,” Sarah remarked, grinding fresh pepper over her scrambled eggs. “When’s he due to arrive?”

“Any minute now, I should think.”

Emma chatted on about their, or more specifically her, program for the day while Sarah went on with her breakfast. The costumes were being verbally pressed when the doorbell rang.

“That will be Guy now,” said Emma. “Ask him if he’d care to join us for coffee, Heatherstone.”

But it was not Guy. The man came back with a long, white florist’s box.

“For you, Mrs. Kelling.”

What fun. I adore getting flowers. Oh, Sarah, I wonder if these could be from Charlie? He always used to, you know. He might have ordered them before he—”

Emma’s voice broke a little, and she became extremely busy opening the box. It turned out to be full of gaudy orange and yellow gladioli. She looked relieved.

“Not from Charlie, surely. He always sent roses. Pink ones, you know. Red wouldn’t have been proper, to a married woman. Now who can it be?”

She took the card out of its little envelope, glanced at the words written on it, and let it drop back among the flowers. “Heatherstone, take these things and toss them on the compost heap.”

“Aunt Emma, what’s the matter?” Sarah cried. “You’re white as a ghost.”

Mrs. Kelling picked up the note again and handed it over to Sarah. There again was the inexpert calligraphy. All it read was, “Have you got the money ready?”

“What money are they talking about?” she demanded.

Sarah had to tell. “Five thousand dollars. I found another note pinned to the screen on the library window yesterday afternoon. You were in the midst of rehearsing and I didn’t want to upset you.”

Her aunt’s lips tightened. “Sarah Kelling, if there is one thing on this earth I positively cannot stand, it’s having my feelings spared. Where is that note now?”

“They stole it back.”

Sarah had to explain her sorry little adventure in the potting shed. Emma was, as she might have expected, only mildly aghast.

“Well, you seem to have managed better than I should have. I’d never in the world have been able to squeeze myself through those stupid little windows, and one must feel unbearably ridiculous hanging halfway out, screaming like a banshee. On second thought, Heatherstone, there’s no sense in letting those perfectly good gladioli go to waste. Pop them in water till we’re ready to leave. We can use them for the baskets in the foyer, the ones people will be dropping their candy wrappers and cigarette butts into.”

She touched her napkin to her lips and laid it beside her empty plate. “I do hope we haven’t made the mistake of cutting those daffodils a day too early so they’ll be starting to wilt tomorrow. The problem is, we have the senior citizens and the children from Fred’s school coming to the dress rehearsal and I don’t see why they shouldn’t have the good of them as much as anybody else. Heatherstone, don’t forget to put in one of those big tin pitchers. We’ll want it to soak the Oasis after we finish the baskets. If you’re quite sure you don’t want another biscuit, Sarah, you may as well start carrying down those spectres’ shrouds from your bedroom.”

By the time Sarah was back downstairs with her first ghostly armload, Guy Mannering had arrived with a station wagon belonging, he said, to his father, the English horn. Sarah took careful note of his expression as she handed him the pail of gladioli to be put in the back with the baskets. He didn’t look anything but pleased to be of service. If she ever found the time, she’d have to get him aside and pump him about what he’d been doing last night, and with whom. Right now, according to Emma’s blue notebook, she must load her own car with as many costumes as she could pack in without squashing and follow Guy over to the auditorium. Then she was to come back and get some more.

And forth she went and back she came, feeling like Noah’s dove, and forth and back and forth again, sometimes passing Guy and exchanging honks en route. This was not the ideal way to conduct an interrogation. As the morning wore on, Sarah pretty much forgot what she’d been going to ask him, anyway. By the time she’d got her last and final load to the auditorium, an astonishing number of helpers had manifested themselves. Sarah couldn’t tell whether so many hands were making light work or merely creating a state of worse confusion, but Aunt Emma was looking pleased in a frazzled sort of way, so she supposed it must be all right.

And things were visibly getting done. The programs were delivered and unpacked, the costumes shaken out and hung up in the dressing rooms. Lady Sangazure’s bustle was parked in a safe corner where nobody could trip over it and squash it, a lopsided
derrière
being no part of Emma Kelling’s game plan.

The makeup table was set up backstage with its pots and tubes and jars and brushes and sticks of greasepaint and a whole snowstorm of cotton balls, plus a wastebasket to chuck them into when they’d served their manifold purposes. Sarah herself thought of the wastebasket, and received loud accolades for her sagacity as an organizer. She forgot her stage fright over the makeup and found herself handling the sticks of greasepaint with cocky anticipation. She’d finished Sir Marmaduke’s mansion; surely she’d have no trouble with Cousin Frederick’s face, especially since she didn’t have to do anything except make him look more like what he already was.

Oh dear, why did she have to think of Cousin Frederick? Now she remembered she’d intended to get Guy Mannering off by himself and grill him. No chance of that now. Guy was up to his ears and a good way beyond in scenery, and Aunt Emma was at her elbow, reminding her it was high time they started putting the flowers into the baskets.

So it was. Somehow or other, lunchtime had passed and the afternoon was half shot. After a flurry of strained politeness over whether they should fix all the baskets together then lug them to their assigned places, or lug first and fix later, Sarah and a few others set to work amicably enough, hauling wet stems out of clammy buckets and poking them in among the prickly foliage she’d got so sick and tired of yesterday.

The varicolored flowers, even the extortionists’ gladioli, did make a tremendous difference. By the time they were down to empty buckets and scraps of leftover vegetable matter, the house was looking as festive as the stage. All was prepared for sealing and for signing, for the rollicking bun and the gay Sally Lunn, and for the Sorcerer’s too-potent potion.

“T
HANK YOU, EVERYONE. THAT’S
it for now.” Emma Kelling picked up her handbag and began switching off lights. “Come along, Sarah. We’ve just time enough for a quick bite and a short nap. Seven o’clock sharp, everybody.”

Sarah moved to join her aunt, but Guy Mannering was beside her. “Sarah, the crew and I are going out for hamburgers. We were sort of hoping you might like to join us.”

All things considered, Sarah would have been happy to settle for a quiet hour in her now shroudless bedroom. Max never would, though; he’d grab at the chance to put in a spot of work on Guy Mannering. She made a quick switch from a sigh to a smile.

“Would you mind, Aunt Emma? I can run you back home first.”

“No, go along with the boys and have some fun. I’ll beg a lift with Jack and Martha.” Emma brushed Sarah’s cheek with her own, which felt like a baby’s pillow, and went off in the familiar whiff of Parma Violet.

Sarah turned to Guy. “I’ll be right with you. Give me two seconds to wash my hands.”

Sarah didn’t offer to drive, partly because she didn’t want to deflate Guy’s ego and partly because she didn’t much care for the idea of all those painty jeans on her upholstery. She almost reconsidered, though, when she found the English horn’s station wagon had somehow or other got traded back for the piccolo’s truck.

Actually they managed well enough. Skip, the smallest and skinniest, climbed up on the ledge behind the seat and curled himself up like a caterpillar in a cocoon. Sarah squashed in under the gearshift between Guy and Chill, who had the build of a football tackle but informed her his real game was chess.

Back when she was sixteen or so, she’d probably have found this the greatest fun in the world, Sarah thought as they jounced over the well-kept road. What must it be like on a rough surface?

“How is it that your piccolo player friend owns a truck?” she asked, trying not to bite off her tongue in the process.

“It’s his brother’s, really,” Guy explained. “He has a lawn service. You know, mowing lawns and that kind of stuff. Only in the summer.”

“When else would you mow a lawn?” Skip jeered from his perch.

“You needn’t get smart just because you go to Amherst,” Chill told him.

It was banter of the lowest grade, but Sarah found it amusing enough. She egged them on with a question or a comment when they showed signs of running down, and tried to think of a way to steer the conversation around to hijacking paintings without scaring them off if they were guilty or giving anything away if they weren’t.

The ride was longer than Sarah cared for. Eventually, though, they unpacked themselves at one of those eateries preferred by the young and the blunt of palate, and went in. Its
spécialité de la maison
appeared to be double megaburgers and ultrathick shakes. Sarah pleaded feebly for a mere cheeseburger and a cup of black coffee.

The noise was just short of unendurable, the cuisine could most charitably be described as edible. For all that, the place was rather fun. Among his peers, Guy forgot to be the blasé aesthete who’d nibbled fastidiously at Emma Kelling’s watercress sandwiches while he discussed Vasari and Vivaldi without being quite clear as to which was who. He revealed a silly sense of humor and a gargantuan capacity for junk food. Sarah watched in stunned incredulity as he polished off his megaburger with french fries, a side order of onion rings, two thick shakes, and then ordered something called a Whooperdooper.

This proved to be three large scoops of varicolored ice creams with butterscotch, strawberry, and chocolate syrups, topped off with whipped cream, cherries, and a crumbled-up peanut candy bar. Skip had a Whizzerdizzer, at which Sarah tried not to look too closely, and Chill a Bananawanna. Sarah was toying with her own modest portion of peppermint ice cream, which she hadn’t much wanted but felt she must order in the face of all this rampant gourmandizing, when another young man wearing a sweatshirt and a Peter Pan hat with a turkey feather in it stopped at their table.

“Hi, guys.”

“Hi, Ed,” the three male members of the party replied through respective mouthfuls of Whooperdooper, Whizzerdizzer, and Bananawanna. Guy struggled for a moment with his butterscotch, then managed to articulate, “Sarah, that’s Eddie.”

“Hi, Eddie.” Sarah hoped this was the accepted etiquette.

Apparently it was. Eddie replied, “Hi, Sarah,” hauled a chair up to the end of their table, sat on it backward without taking his hat off, and reached over to scoop up a bite of Chill’s Bananawanna without being invited. “So what’s new? Hey, how did you guys make out last night?”

“About what?” Skip replied.

“Hey, come on. You know what.”

“Oh, that. Look, we can talk about it later, huh?”

“Huh? Oh, sure.”

Eddie took another scoop of the Bananawanna, stood up, and spun the chair back to where he’d got it from. “Hey, I’ll see you around. Nice to meet you, Sarah,” and was gone before she could do more than smile and wave her spoon at him.

“I hope I didn’t scare your friend away,” she told Guy. “If there was something you people wanted to talk about, I could have made myself scarce for a few minutes.”

“No, no, it wasn’t anything, honestly. Just a—well, kind of a joke we were playing on somebody. Kid stuff, I’m afraid.”

Guy was trying to recapture his
mondaine
image, and making a poor fist of it. He also appeared, at last, to have lost his appetite. He pushed the melting remnants of his Whooperdooper away as if he couldn’t stand the sight of it any longer, and began waving at the waitress to bring their check.

“Come on, you two. We can’t spend the night here.”

“Why not?” demanded Chill, chasing the end of a banana through a sea of marshmallow sauce. “We’re finished with the scenery, aren’t we?”

“Yes you are,” Sarah took it upon herself to reply. “You’ve done a marvelous job and I know my aunt will want to thank you personally. It’s just that I have to get back to do the makeups. I’ve never tried it before, I don’t know the first thing about it, and I’ve got to get all those different kinds of goop sorted out before I paint everybody the wrong color.”