The New Sonia Wayward

by Michael Innes

  Copyright & Information

  The New Sonia Wayward

  First published in 1960

  © Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.; House of Stratus 1960-2011

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of Michael Innes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2011 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 0755121066 EAN: 9780755121069

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  Michael Innes is the pseudonym of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, who was born in Edinburgh in 1906. His father was Director of Education and as was fitting the young Stewart attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel, Oxford where he obtained a first class degree in English.

  After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays and also took up a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  By 1935 he was married, Professor of English at the University of Adelaide in Australia, and had completed his first detective novel, Death at the President’s Lodging. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on his character Inspector Appleby. A second novel, Hamlet Revenge, soon followed and overall he managed over fifty under the Innes banner during his career.

  After returning to the UK in 1946 he took up a post with Queen’s University, Belfast before finally settling as Tutor in English at Christ Church, Oxford. His writing continued and he published a series of novels under his own name, along with short stories and some major academic contributions, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature.

  Whilst not wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he managed to fit in to his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  His wife Margaret, whom he had met and married whilst at Leeds in 1932, had practised medicine in Australia and later in Oxford, died in 1979. They had five children, one of whom (Angus) is also a writer. Stewart himself died in November 1994 in a nursing home in Surrey.

  Part One

  Colonel Petticate at Sea

  1

  Colonel Petticate stared at his wife in stupefaction. He could scarcely believe the evidence of his eyes – or of the fingers which he had just lifted from her pulse. But it was true. The poor old girl was dead.

  Colonel Petticate gave a long whistle. It was the sort of whistle that indicates a consciousness, on the whistler’s part, that here is a facer or a rum go. So it couldn’t be regarded as a decorous – or at least adequate – comment on his discovery. But then, at the moment, Colonel Petticate was entirely alone.

  This had not been true five minutes earlier. Then, there had been Sonia, bustling energetically around the confined space that had, during this holiday, exacerbated their normal state of mild conjugal irritation. Now, there was no Sonia; there was only this slumped and inert object… Colonel Petticate looked again at the body. As he did so, he became conscious that he was feeling queasy. This, like the whistle, was surely a queer reaction to what had so suddenly happened. Could it be that he was merely seasick? Their little yacht – now his little yacht – was certainly pitching a bit at anchor. But of course he was a seasoned sailor, so there could be nothing in that. No – he was feeling queasy merely because he was very frightened. Sonia had let him down. She had so contrived matters that she herself was without a care in the world – in any world that Colonel Petticate was at all disposed to believe in. But what the devil was to become of him?

  Petticate pulled himself together and took further steps to assure himself that his wife was really dead. Since he was a retired army surgeon, he didn’t feel that there was any difficulty about that. Then he sat down by the tiller and stared at the waters of the English Channel, silvery in the evening light. But the waters had nothing to say to him. Their neutrality and indifference were absolute. The death of Mrs Ffolliot Petticate (as poor Sonia had occasionally condescended to be styled in private life) was no affair of theirs. If he had strangled her, or hit her on the head with the boat-hook, their disinterest would still have been as entire. But Sonia’s death had been wholly natural. If it seemed monstrously not natural, it was its very naturalness that gave it that effect. Murder is natural enough; in the jungle, which is more or less the state of nature, it keeps on happening. Suicide is natural – at least to the extent that nothing can be more sensible than suicide in this shattering world. But this was as unnatural as anything insolently inexplicable must always appear to the obstinately rational human mind.

  Petticate himself was eminently rational. He noticed that, although the shock of the thing had been terrific, he had no impulse to mourn for Sonia. For a moment this made him feel rather callous. But then he remembered having read that mourning for the dead takes its origin in suppressed impulses of hostility, and is in fact a sort of death wish. So his failure to feel grief was perhaps a tribute to the decent tolerance which he had managed for years to feel towards his wife.

  This reflection ought to have been a tranquillizing one. But, oddly enough, it made Petticate even more uneasy. He got up and moved shakily into the cabin. On the ingenious little stove were the sauté potatoes Sonia had already prepared, and beside them were four chops waiting to be grilled. He supposed that he could eat four chops, once his stomach had got over its bad turn. But it might be better to keep two for tomorrow. After all, tomorrow was the rub. Or if not tomorrow, then the day after – and all the days after that. For he and Sonia had always spent, quarter by quarter, whatever came in. Sonia had seen a fine artistic improvidence as part of her role. He hadn’t minded. It had never occurred to him that he would be the survivor.

  What had carried her off, of course, was some circulatory catastrophe. Probably it was an embolism; indeed there was no other explanation. A hale and hearty woman, perfectly fit to haul up an anchor. But it was while hauling up the anchor that she had dropped. Yes, embolism was what the p-m would show. Or was aneurysm the word he wanted? He had gone
rusty on these things since the early retirement that had followed his marriage.

  The yacht pitched, and a slipper with an absurd fluffy pompom slid across the door. He almost called out to Sonia some jaded pleasantry about tidiness on shipboard. She wasn’t a tidy woman. The little table forrard was littered with typescript, and there was a further silt of the stuff on the floor. From the portable typewriter a final sheet protruded. He walked over to it and looked at the last word. It was ‘inchoate’ – which meant that the next word, the word she would never type, ought to be ‘eyes’. ‘He looked at her out of fathomless inchoate eyes.’ The sentence would be something like that. As a young woman she had picked up a vocabulary from D H Lawrence, and she had applied it to her own somewhat different literary purposes ever since. Colonel Petticate stirred some of the littered sheets contemptuously with a toe. Opera interrupta he said to himself, quoting a writer for whom he had rather more esteem.

  It was undeniable that Ffolliot Petticate, although so rational a man, had allowed his settled attitude to his wife to be largely determined by a purely emotional occasion. At first he had been rather pleased with her. It was amusing to be married to a celebrity. And she was certainly a celebrity of sorts. The name of Sonia Wayward was a household word. If the households of which this held true scarcely included those of the most intellectual bent or ripest literary cultivation, it was at least a fact that Sonia’s romances had earned the regard of gratifyingly large sections of the public alike in England and America. This meant that she earned a lot of money. And these were circumstances which Petticate found entirely agreeable. Sonia’s wasn’t a sort of reputation that need make an intelligent and sophisticated husband feel himself cast into the shade; and when he did grow a little tired of it he had the resource of a small society of cronies with whom he could share an attitude of civilized irony towards the whole affair. Moreover Sonia was really very amusing. She was genuinely the possessor of temperament – which in certain moods she would fling about in the interest of a jollity that was, somehow, catching. If Petticate himself never quite caught it, he didn’t for a long time – surprisingly enough – at all resent it whizzing round his ears. He had formed his own picture of his position in their circle: a man inevitably, because of his intellectual attainments, a little aloof, but nevertheless courteous and even cordial in his quiet well-bred way. When Sonia described one of her male characters as spare and distinguished, and endowed him with impressive if vague aristocratic associations, Colonel Petticate always supposed that she was taking the wifely liberty of exploiting him for the purposes of a little ‘copy’. This made the actual disillusioning incident all the more disconcerting.

  It was a matter of overhearing something she said on the telephone. There was nothing out of the way in his doing this. Sonia talked so loudly, whether on the telephone or off it, that it was inevitable he should hear a great deal that was not directly addressed to him. It had come about, indeed, that he was thus often unaware whether he was overhearing her or not. A particular remark would catch his attention, and then he might consciously listen until he grew tired of it. This was what happened on the fatal occasion.

  ‘But, darling, you simply must meet my husband!’

  She was talking, he had vaguely registered, to someone she hadn’t seen for twenty years – a circumstance which naturally made her all the more breathlessly ardent in tone. So he had listened, amused and rather gratified.

  ‘But you must, you must. Come to luncheon, come to dinner. I can guarantee that Ffolliot will be there. He never, never misses a meal. And he’s the quaintest little creature in the world!’

  It was quite clear to Colonel Petticate afterwards that what had shocked him about this performance was its sheer bad form. It was that which he had never quite managed to forgive. He hadn’t – he found as he sat in the little cabin, with Sonia’s body in the open stern behind him – forgiven it yet.

  Nevertheless he was only halfway through his first chop when he found that he was weeping. It was his brief tribute to his honest consciousness that she hadn’t been a bad sort. But it was connected, too, with the fact that he didn’t now feel less frightened than he had done when the thing happened. And being thus instinctively frightened induced in him, at another level of his mind, a sort of wary and reasonable alarm. It was clear to him that he had become pretty dependent on Sonia – and perhaps not merely on account of her being the bread-and-butter, as well as the caviar and champagne. He must get rid of his dependence. In fact, he must get rid of her.

  What he had already got rid of – and all within the hour – was the better part of a bottle of whisky. There was nothing much to that. He was accustomed to knowing just where he stood – or at least just how he lay – when in liquor. It therefore never got him into situations unbecoming a gentleman, as he conceived that becomingness. Which made it strange that the whisky betrayed him now. He was aware that he had a good deal to think about, but less clear that what was now going on in his head was ceasing to be thinking in any very strict sense. The element of rational apprehensiveness in his dismay progressively sank beneath something merely muddled. Presently he was telling himself that he was confronted with a terrible nuisance, a really intolerable bother. What happened when you sailed into port with a dead body? He didn’t at all know – but he was quite sure that the formalities would be extremely vexatious. And just when he had so unmistakably had enough of Sonia! With a flicker of sanity he pushed away the whisky bottle. But it wasn’t before he had had his brilliant idea. Why not just lose Sonia overboard?

  He went aft again and stood beside the body. It was dusk and he must do something about his riding-light. But there wasn’t a sail in sight. Any action he was minded to take, he could take in utter secrecy. He bent over the body. It was still quite flexible. He had forgotten how heavy they were – dead bodies. Or was the difficulty something to do with that whisky? He struggled, and something ripped in his hand. It was only the linen shirt beneath her jersey. But it gave him a new idea. Or rather it stirred in him an obscure consciousness that somewhere in his mind there lurked an idea he hadn’t yet managed to haul up and look at. Surely it would be better…

  He prowled about the little craft, trying to think what it was that he knew would be better – better than tipping Sonia over the side just as she was. He was unsteady now on his feet, and when right forward he stumbled and was aware of something flapping round his head. He reached up blindly, and found that he had grabbed her bathing-costume, where it hung up to dry. That was it – if only he could manage it. If he could get the clothes off her, and her body into this. He took down the costume and then hesitated, confusedly aware of an obstacle that wasn’t just the physical difficulty. A vast horror rose for a moment in his mind and then blew away as if the chill evening wind had taken it. He went aft and knelt down beside the body. It wasn’t hard to strip. He knew where the zips and fasteners were. But the next stage was more laborious. The bathing-costume was damp still. That didn’t help. Halfway through, he stopped and tried to close the eyes. Perhaps, he thought, it was old professional instinct. Or perhaps he didn’t like them. Perhaps they were still looking at the quaintest little creature in the world.

  But she went in and down with hardly a ripple. Once he had got her over the side – which was a struggle – she just sank, lost form, vanished. He had been intent on the job, secure in his solitude. He had been so secure, indeed, that he had failed to notice that it was no longer solitude, after all. He had got her over the port gunwale; he turned to starboard – and there was another little yacht, no distance away. He was gripped by horrible fear – fear that took him and unmanned him, so that he could hardly stumble into the cabin before his knees gave way and he was on the floor. He lay for a long time shivering, expecting to hear a hail, or even the sound of another craft coming alongside. But there was no sound but the faint lapping of the water against the shell of his own yacht. Even that terrified him. It sounded like somebody tapping. It sounded like her…r />
  Nothing happened. He got up and peered out – first warily through the little porthole, and then from out in the open. The other yacht had grown small in the distance. Of course he hadn’t been discovered. But it had been a near thing. Lucky he had chosen the port side. He had been careless, of course – not to take a good look round. And one can’t afford to be careless.

  Petticate paused, frowning. Why had he said that to himself? It was the sort of thing a fellow said when engaged in a piece of wrong-doing, even in a crime. He himself wasn’t in the least involved in anything of that sort. He had simply been taking a modern, strictly rational view of the sensible way of disposing of a dead body. It might offend old-fashioned sensibilities. There were still people who were shocked if you didn’t wear mourning. And no doubt if the undertakers got hold of the matter, they might feel done out of a job. But of course he had acted entirely within his rights. He was more than three miles out at sea – decidedly in international waters. And he was captain or master or whatever it was called of this particular craft. It was entirely for him to decide for or against burial at sea. It would have been a shade more regular, perhaps, if he had read the appropriate parson’s piece. But that wasn’t among such literature as the yacht carried.

  It was almost dark, and he busied himself with his light. He had no fancy for being run down by a liner. If he was to drown, he would, somehow, like it to be in another part of the ocean. And something was puzzling him. He tried to remember what it was. Yes – of course. Why had he put Sonia into that bathing-costume? It didn’t seem to hitch on to burial at sea. He must have had something else in mind. And if he could only recall what it was, then things would be more comfortable.