The New Sonia Wayward

by Michael Innes

  Petticate felt a strong impulse to lean forward and smack the woman’s face. Instead, he got to his feet and bowed. This quite literal rising to the occasion probably disconcerted her a good deal more than low violence would have done. She turned and hurried away.

  A few minutes later he saw her on the platform of Oxford station. Yes – she was clutching the shabby suitcase which he had endeavoured to investigate a short time ago. She was, in fact, Miss Smith. Or Mrs Smith. And she lived at 116 Eastmoor Road – somewhere amid the dreaming spires that now began to wheel and recede as Colonel Petticate’s train resumed its course westward.

  It was deplorable, he reflected, that the exquisite city of Arnold and Pater should harbour so disagreeable a person.

  He now found that he had an appetite. The toast was by this time cold and unpalatable, but he ate everything else. There were still a few people in the restaurant car, and he wondered a shade uneasily to what extent any of them had been aware of the contretemps in which he had been involved. But he didn’t think that much could have been overheard – and of course it was extremely fortunate that the instinctive good breeding of which he was possessed had enabled him to terminate it on that superbly dignified note. Henry Higgins, forsooth! Colonel Petticate was now able to smile at the absurdity of the whole incident.

  But he pulled himself up. It was time, after all, for serious thoughts. He must get clear the outline of his position – of his restored position. For that was the crux of the matter: that he had got back precisely to where he was before he boarded this train and was lured into so false and dangerous a supposition by the Smith woman’s preposterous resemblance to Sonia. Old Dr Gregory had started the trouble; and to Gregory in his compartment farther down the train he must presently return.

  He had allowed Gregory to see that he was upset. But Gregory had been willing to put this down to purely physiological causes, and Petticate couldn’t remember that he had done or said anything to upset the idea. So far, so good. But Mrs Gotlop was a different matter.

  Yes, he had definitely put a foot wrong there. He had asked the tiresome woman, bellowing her offensive nonsense about ruddy Blimp and rural Blimp, whether she had come across Sonia on the train. Whereas he had told Ambrose Wedge that Sonia had vanished, and that he had no expectation of seeing her soon. It was an awkward discrepancy – and the more awkward because Wedge was being brought to Mrs Gotlop’s party on the following day.

  Petticate finished his tea and paid his bill. It was annoying, he thought, that when he should be beginning to enjoy all the reflective quiet which the worthy and adequate finishing of The Gates of Delight – no, of Man’s Desire – demanded, he should have to spend time on ironing out one difficulty after another in which his pious taking up of poor Sonia’s literary burden seemed to be involving him. Still, Mrs Gotlop could be dealt with at once. He saw precisely how to do it.

  He looked out for Mrs Gotlop as he walked back down the train – just as he had looked for Sonia, the non-existent Sonia, when he had walked up it. The eminent female biographer would almost certainly be in a compartment shared only with Johnson and Boswell. And so it proved. Mrs Gotlop was sitting with her back to the engine, while the two slavering brutes faced it. Johnson, who seemed more enormous than ever, was wheezing dreadfully. Boswell seemed to have rather a bad smell. Petticate, having courteously asked permission to enter the compartment, sat down between these two canine friends. Johnson eyed him with a compassionate sadness such as only bloodhounds know. Perhaps Wedge’s star performer Alspach, Petticate reflected, had established his celebrated sombre tone by consorting with these creatures. Boswell, a Pekinese, looked at the newcomer in stony aristocratic contempt.

  ‘Do you take Johnson and Boswell to the British Museum with you?’ Petticate asked this question casually and cheerfully. He mustn’t make too much of a business of what he was coming to.

  ‘Certainly not. Too many dull dogs there. Evil communications, you know. I wouldn’t have Johnson and Boswell corrupted for the world.’ Mrs Gotlop made a roaring noise, rather, Petticate thought, like a pride of lions. As so often, she was amused. Anybody of nervous disposition in an adjoining compartment – Petticate added to himself – might be excused for making a grab at the communication cord.

  ‘Then do you leave them with friends?’

  Mrs Gotlop shook her head vigorously – so that her earrings, each of which took the form of a congeries of freely moving objects, rather in the manner of what persons of artistic refinement call a mobile, clinked and clanged together to the effect of a strange music.

  ‘Never to friends, never! They go to the Canine Clinic. Johnson has massage. But I don’t know that he is benefiting. I begin to wonder whether it mayn’t be a slipped disc.’

  Petticate contrived to look at the disgusting bloodhound with a great appearance of neighbourly affection.

  ‘And Boswell?’ he asked.

  ‘Occupational therapy. We are a little apprehensive that there may be a latent neurosis. Boswell is encouraged to bury and unbury bones.’

  Mrs Gotlop again laughed loudly, and Petticate was left in doubt whether he had been listening to a joke or to some actual, if gross, absurdity in the way of dog-mania. He wanted to say something about Boswell being encouraged not to smell, but judged that this might well give offence. So, instead, he took a plunge into the matter in hand.

  ‘About Sonia,’ he said. ‘You remember my asking you whether you had seen her on the train? Well, I knew you couldn’t have.’

  Mrs Gotlop stared. ‘Don’t follow you, Blimp. Don’t follow you at all. Why couldn’t I see Sonia as well as you could? Did you take me to be blind drunk?’

  ‘Sonia isn’t on this train. She couldn’t possibly be on this train. She’s gone away.’

  ‘I don’t blame her, if you’ve taken to raving. Why should you ask me if I’d seen a woman who wasn’t there?’

  ‘It was very childish, I’m afraid,’ Petticate said. ‘A sort of make believe. I was pretending that Sonia was still with me, after all.’

  ‘Do you mean that she’s left you at last?’

  Petticate frowned. He found Mrs Gotlop’s last two words most offensive.

  ‘Nothing like that,’ he said. ‘Or rather, nothing quite like that. But she has gone off on rather an indefinite holiday. I’ve no idea where to. We did have a certain mild disagreement when we were on the yacht. Close quarters like that can be a little trying, you know. So we decided on splitting up for a time. Nothing serious. But I feel a little sensitive about it, all the same. That’s why I asked you that senseless question. A naïve impulse to cover the matter up. Foolish of me. Of course I don’t mind telling a very old friend like yourself.’

  Petticate’s voice had rather tailed off. He was conscious that his speech had been a little too wordy. He was conscious, too, that Mrs Gotlop had sniffed loudly. It was not, of course, a vulgar sniff of disapproval, such as might have been indulged in by a parlourmaid. It was genuinely directed to discovering whether the compartment reeked not merely of Boswell but of spirits as well. Petticate was being suspected of inebriety.

  ‘You seem to me to be prevaricating,’ Mrs Gotlop said.

  ‘Prevaricating!’ Petticate was dismayed.

  ‘Remember my profession, Blimp. I am accustomed to discriminate between truth and falsehood as they are conveyed in the tone of a voice. Yes!’ – and Mrs Gotlop pointed a be-ringed finger dramatically at Petticate – ‘even when it comes to me muted in the pages of an old diary, a forgotten memoir. I cannot be deceived!’

  ‘I assure you…’ Petticate began, and then broke off helplessly. He was unnerved. Minutes had passed since Mrs Gotlop had last roared with laughter, and this in itself was unfamiliar and alarming. But even more alarming was the absoluteness of the claim she had just enunciated. It reminded Petticate of the terrible text, bordered with forget-me-nots, which had hung above his childish cot: I, God, see you. The claim was one which his conscious intellect had long ago dismissed as meani
ngless. Had this not been so, he might at least have been preserved from even momentarily viewing Mrs Gotlop as one possessed of a supernatural perspicacity now.

  ‘You cannot assure me, Blimp,’ Mrs Gotlop said. ‘I know.’

  Petticate took a large gulp of air – so that Johnson, who was still wheezing, turned and gave him a sympathetic glance.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Petticate said desperately. ‘I suppose you’re right in a way. I haven’t been entirely candid. Sonia has been getting very restless during the last few months. Probably you’ve noticed it yourself. And she doubts whether Snigg’s Green agrees with her health. It’s quite possible that, when we do join up again, it will be elsewhere. She has heard very good reports of the Bermudas. I’m not terribly keen on a move myself. But, of course, I must stick to Sonia.’

  ‘Certainly you must. You live on her, don’t you?’

  The fact that Mrs Gotlop offered this with a massive return to joviality by no means excused the woman’s insolence in Petticate’s eyes.

  ‘I have my competence,’ he said with dignity. ‘I remarked as much to Ambrose Wedge earlier today, when I told him about the present situation.’

  ‘Oho!’ Mrs Gotlop gave a yell which might have been appropriate to some emergency of the hunting field. ‘So that’s the way of it? You were going to keep quiet about this humiliating rupture at Snigg’s Green – which was why you asked me that idiotic question on this train. But when you heard that Wedge was coming over tomorrow, you realized the truth was bound to come out. Hence your visit to me now. My dear Blimp, what a laborious fellow you are!’

  Petticate found nothing to say to this. Mrs Gotlop had not, of course, got it quite right, since she knew nothing either of Sonia’s actual death or of the false alarm of her resuscitation. But she was as securely in the target area as her limited information permitted. And Petticate certainly couldn’t feel that this interview with her had been a very distinguished tactical success. It was clear that the main impression he had given was of unnecessary and unconvincing talk about his wife. And that was the very thing he knew he must avoid! He stood up.

  ‘I must be getting back to my own carriage,’ he said. He spoke as easily as he could. ‘Gregory is there. I mustn’t lose the chance of a chat with the dear old fellow.’

  ‘Tell him about your wife, Blimp, my boy.’

  Petticate cast about for some retort to this further impertinence, and found nothing. But his eye fell on the Pekinese.

  ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I rather imagine Boswell must want to step along the corridor?’

  And he gave Boswell’s mistress a cold look and withdrew.

  It occurred to him as he moved down the train that Dr Gregory had probably been anxious about him. He had left the compartment in poor shape, and presumably to fulfil a need such as he had just so wittily attributed to Mrs Gotlop’s Boswell. And then he had been absent all this time. Yes, old Gregory would certainly be worried.

  But this proved not, in fact, to be discernibly the case. Indeed Dr Gregory was comfortably asleep – and he awoke only when the train slowed for the next station, the last before that at which both travellers were due to alight.

  ‘Ah – Petticate,’ he said casually. ‘Feeling better, eh?’

  ‘I’m entirely all right, thank you. But I thought it would be a good idea to have a cup of tea.’

  ‘Humph! And did you eat all the carbohydrate they gave you along with it?’

  ‘Certainly not, my dear Gregory. I hold your excellent counsels too much in mind.’ Petticate remembered that this was true at least to the extent that he had rejected the buttered toast.

  ‘You can pay less and eat less,’ Gregory said. ‘That’s to say, if you make it clear at the start. It’s an important tip.’

  ‘Decidedly it is.’ Petticate paused. ‘By the way, I saw the woman you mistook for my wife.’

  ‘Mistook for your wife? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Don’t you remember telling me you’d seen Sonia at the bookstall, and that it looked as if she might miss the train?’

  ‘Ah, yes – of course I do.’

  ‘And my telling you it couldn’t be Sonia, since she’d gone off on holiday?’

  ‘I don’t remember your telling me that, Petticate.’

  Petticate looked surprised.

  ‘Didn’t I? I was almost sure I did. But perhaps I was prevented by that seedy turn.’

  ‘Perhaps you were.’ The quality of Dr Gregory’s interest in all this remained slight. ‘It was somebody like her, you say?’

  ‘Amazingly like her. And I sat down opposite to her in the restaurant car. An odd coincidence. She even had the same eyes.’

  ‘Remarkable.’

  ‘Of course, in a sense, Sonia might have been on the train. That’s so say, she might have changed her mind and decided to come home. But it was unlikely – if only because she’s rather taken against Snigg’s Green.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it.’ Dr Gregory was too courteous an old person to say this in an absolutely perfunctory manner. But he certainly didn’t go out of his way to register distress. ‘But I can’t say I’m surprised,’ he went on. ‘A lively woman, Mrs Petticate. And our average age is on the sombre side, round about Snigg’s Green. A great deal of quiet embalming going on. I’m at it myself all day, you know – although I’d rather be bringing babies into the world than preventing a lot of prosperous semi-corpses from leaving it. Ever read Landor? Beautiful writer.’

  ‘Certainly I read Landor.’ Colonel Petticate, as a man of high literary cultivation, was naturally indignant at the suggestion that the Imaginary Conversations was not among his bedside books.

  ‘Well, there’s a bit in “Aesop and Rhodope” that I sometimes think of having stuck up in my surgery. Something about it being better to go to bed betimes than to sit up late.’

  ‘Or to procrastinate an inevitable fall.’ Petticate was delighted to be able thus to cap the quotation. ‘But I don’t know that it would persuade your patients to look round for one of the remaining killing diseases.’

  ‘Look round for another doctor, more likely.’ Gregory chuckled happily. ‘Yes, they all keep alive – goodness knows why. Or rather, goodness knows what for. For nothing ever happens at Snigg’s Green. Or does it, and am I myself too senile to be aware of it?’

  ‘Certainly not much happens.’ Petticate nodded genially. ‘That was one of the things that Sonia said when we had our little tiff on board the yacht.’ He paused to be prompted. Dr Gregory’s good manners, however, were proof against such an invitation. Petticate had to plunge on – keeping it carefully light in tone. ‘So Sonia has gone off, you see, goodness knows where, in search of gaiety. And copy, no doubt. One must remember her work. It no doubt demands a change of residence from time to time. If I have a cable from her next week, summoning me to become an inhabitant of the Bahamas, I shall sigh. But doubtless I shall obey.’

  ‘Quite so. And I’ve no doubt there’s excellent sailing. And golf-courses like great emeralds. And air like wine.’

  Dr Gregory’s tone was polite and idle. But Petticate was uneasily aware of getting a searching look, all the same.

  Part Two

  Sensation in Snigg’s Green

  1

  Colonel Petticate spent the following morning quietly at home, working on the new Sonia Wayward. He had scrapped Robert Bridges as the poet providing the book’s title, and turned to Matthew Arnold:

  ’ Tis all perhaps which man acquires,

  But ’tis not what our youth desires.

  There was about that, he considered, a really superb flatness that would afford him keen gratification when he came to see it on the title-page. It would have to be explained to Wedge that Sonia had a little changed her mind. Wedge would be very unlikely to demur.

  ‘Demur’ was a delightfully literary word. Petticate doubted whether Sonia had ever used it. But it was just right for her, all the same. So he amused himself by working it into the nex
t paragraph. ‘Without demur,’ he wrote, ‘the great sculptor turned on his heel.’ That was delicious. The great sculptor was, of course, Timmy Vedrenne’s father. On the next page he would call him ‘the eminent artist’. And when he made Timmy quote Byron – it would be with a quiet intensity of passion – he must remember to call Byron ‘the melancholy Lord of Newstead’.

  All this was highly entertaining, and as easy as falling off a house. The morning wore on; Petticate tapped happily away; the quarto pages of What Youth Desires began to litter the floor in a manner that reduced him almost to a fond nostalgia. He was saved from sentimental indulgence, however, by what was the harder part of the job: the working out of what remained obscure in the basic plot. While accepting Wedge’s moral criteria, he was becoming extremely doubtful about the effectiveness of that whole business of the rowing shorts. Sonia, he felt, hadn’t been quite up to her usual mark there. Perhaps he had better turn back over that first thirty thousand words and do a little revising for her. Wouldn’t it be better, for instance, if the occasion of Claire’s apparent discovery of Timmy in a guilty relationship was in some thematic correspondence with her first vision of him? That meant getting him stripped to the buff again. So what about a midnight bathing party – with just a little more suggestion of not wholly decorous elements than Sonia commonly ran to? One must, after all, move with the times. And it was clear enough where they were moving to, so far as the traditional decencies of life and art’s mirror of life were concerned… Petticate chuckled to himself. Yes, perhaps Wedge, in the new Sonia Wayward, should be presented with something just a titillating shade new.

  Petticate, sitting in the pleasant bay window of his own small study, was happily and profitably engaged in these activities and speculations when, happening to glance up and along the garden path, he observed the approach of Sergeant Bradnack.

  He was being called on by the police.

  The front door bell rang. And a minute later Hennwife entered the study silently and with a long face.