The New Sonia Wayward

by Michael Innes

  Petticate entered his study and unlocked his desk. He had got out his papers before he noticed that a small slim book had been put down beside the typewriter. It had a blue cover in which there was cut an oblong window, and within the oblong window there was printed in ink his wife’s name. Most of the cover was taken up with a large gilt representation of a massively uddered cow. It was the sort of book in which conservatively minded tradesmen still render their monthly accounts. And that, in fact, was the explanation of it. It was the account book from Sonia’s diary.

  But why should it have thus appeared on Petticate’s desk? Petticate – oddly enough – found himself quite unable to answer this question. So he rang the bell.

  It was Hennwife who appeared. The study bell was within his province.

  ‘You rang, sir?’

  ‘Yes, Hennwife. What in the world is the dairyman’s book doing here? It’s not the end of the month. And you never bring me these things, in any case.’

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir. Mrs H thought you would understand. I think she mentioned a matter of the mistress’ passport. She said she had noticed it in the mistress’ room, sir. And you asked her to put it on your desk. You offered certain observations on it, sir, if my wife was not mistaken. But of course she was mistaken – in another sense, that is, sir. What she remarked, as you will now see, was not the travel document she had supposed. It was that.’ And with a gesture which indubitably contained a hint of insolence, Hennwife pointed at the gilded cow.

  Petticate stared at the thing. It was uncommonly like a British passport. The cow, although unnaturally square, was not, indeed, quite so square as the Lion and the Unicorn fighting for the Crown. And where a passport would have said ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ this object said ‘Wm. Snailum, High Class Dairyman, Snigg’s Green.’ But the resemblance was there, all the same.

  It was instantly in Petticate’s mind that he was confronted with alternative possibilities, each of them dire, but one decidedly direr than the other. Hennwife might be speaking the truth. Mrs H – as he somewhat familiarly called her – might have mistaken the dairyman’s book for a passport, and discovered her error only when she went, on Petticate’s instruction, to fetch it. If that were the state of the case, then he himself had offered ‘observations’ – as Hennwife called them – that were substantially unaccountable. He had represented himself as unconcernedly aware of the fact that an obsolete passport of Sonia’s was indeed in her room and waiting to be returned to the Foreign Office.

  But was this the likelier of the alternatives? Petticate wished he could believe so. But it entailed the supposition that Snailum’s book had really been lying on the bureau in Sonia’s bedroom. And this seemed scarcely plausible. Sonia took very little interest in household accounts. Nor, for that matter, did Petticate himself. It had been his habit for a long time simply to repair monthly to his butler’s pantry, briefly satisfy himself that the demands made upon him were in order, and write out a number of cheques.

  Petticate faced it grimly. If what Mrs H had seen on the bureau was really Sonia’s passport – and that was how it looked – then either Mrs H herself, or her husband who was now standing here in an impassive convention of respect, was a much cleverer person than Petticate had supposed. This substitution – if it was that – of Snailum’s book was a quite brilliant stroke of wickedness. It meant that the Hennwifes had Sonia’s passport – her current and valid passport – in their possession. They knew that Sonia was not abroad. They knew that Sonia could not go abroad. And they were in a position to prove these facts at any time.

  Petticate felt that it was time he uttered. And he remembered his recent judgement that even the cleverest lies are less clever than a course involving no lies at all.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But Snailum’s book is of no interest to me. You can take it away.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Hennwife smoothly picked up the book. He had the superior servant’s irritating trick of offering thanks where no benefit has been conferred. He looked at Snailum’s cow, and Snailum’s cow appeared to prompt him to further speech. ‘Perhaps, sir, it would be as well if Mrs H were to reduce the milk order by a little?’

  Petticate was irritated. He commonly was, he had been finding, when he was frightened as well.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Let Mrs Hennwife do as she pleases.’

  ‘Shall you wish to continue the Daily Telegraph as well as The Times, sir? I have noticed that you yourself seldom take up the former publication. It was the mistress’ choice. And The Times provides my own reading, if I may so far venture as to mention the fact, sir.’

  Petticate tried giving Hennwife what would be called a stiff look. It had no distinguishable effect on the man’s bearing.

  ‘Then you may stop the Telegraph,’ he said. ‘And that weekly thing in the coloured cover.’

  ‘Very good, sir. But there is just one other matter.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The proposed oriel, sir.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Hennwife.’

  ‘It may have slipped your memory, sir. But the mistress was talking about putting in a window of that character in the west wall of her room. Very agreeable, it sounded to be. And it has occurred to me that this might be the opportunity, sir – if the mistress’ absence will be sufficiently prolonged – for the work to be completed.’

  ‘My wife will be away a long time.’ Petticate snapped out this, confident at least in its truth. ‘But I see no occasion to begin making windows. When I want you to advise me in such matters, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Thank you very much, sir.’ Hennwife did his smooth bow – which Petticate imagined him to have picked up from some disgusting exemplar of his servile calling on the movies. ‘I note that the mistress’ absence is to be prolonged.’

  Both the matter and manner of this irritated Petticate yet further. He sometimes imagined, too, that there were no other surviving servants in England who talked about ‘the mistress’ in quite the Hennwifes’ tiresome way. Perhaps the Hennwifes read the novels of Miss Ivy Compton-Burnett. But they were even less likely to do that than to read those of Sonia Wayward.

  ‘Certainly a matter of months,’ Petticate said, with as much of crispness as he could manage. ‘You may tell Mrs Hennwife as much. That’s all, thank you.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Mrs H and I must do our best to make you comfortable, sir, while the mistress is away. And I think we can undertake it, sir. Until she turns up, sir, I think we can promise to keep an eye on you. If the manner of speaking be allowed, sir.’

  This time, Hennwife didn’t bow. He adopted the altogether unfamiliar course of giving his employer a swift glance. And then he left the room.

  3

  There was nothing for it, Petticate realized later that afternoon, but to go to Mrs Gotlop’s party. It was true that before tea – which had been brought to him in professionally irreproachable yet somehow sinister silence by Mrs Hennwife – he had managed another five hundred words on Claire and Timmy. It was really their world, he was beginning to see, that he had a flair for. He knew that as the romance went on he would have increasingly little difficulty in shoving his – and Sonia’s – characters around. His logistics would be precisely right; as the denouement approached, each of these shadowy figures, like the Corps and Divisions of some Supreme Commander’s dream, would move unobtrusively and effortlessly into his or her most effective place. Whereas with Wedge and Mrs Gotlop, with Sergeant Bradnack and the Hennwifes, things didn’t appear to be working in that smooth way. Petticate was coming to realize vividly the justice of the Aristotelian distinction between the confused and refractory particulars of actual life on the one hand and the beautiful lucidity and inevitability of imaginative creation on the other.

  Actual life looked – to put it frankly – like landing him in a mess. Over his chop he had decided happily that the Hennwifes must, and could, go. Now, over his China tea and shortbread
biscuits, he was confronting the gloomy possibility that it was perhaps for the Hennwifes to say whether he should go – and go, moreover, to some excessively disagreeable destination. Of course their present suspicions, whatever they were, could hardly be other than quite wide of the mark. They might well be imagining something entirely lurid. Like that dreadful double of Sonia’s on the train, they were certainly well up in the world of Sunday newspaper crime. Or they might be seeing the mystery – which for them consisted simply in their employer’s telling unaccountable lies about his wife – merely in terms of some unedifying amatory intrigue. The only thing that was assured was their sense of having got a ‘handle’, as they might say, upon the person whom they were doubtless accustomed to refer to as ‘the master’ when conversing with Sonia. They had got – they not in the least fondly hoped – the master on the spot. Or at least, granted the indefiniteness of the thing, on a spot. And they were going to see what could be made of it.

  Mrs Gotlop’s party would at least get him away from these vipers in his bosom. To one who had forsaken domestic potations, moreover – even to the rash extent of emptying his decanters – there was an undeniable attractiveness in the thought of Mrs Gotlop’s cocktails. One didn’t need to yearn for what she had so coarsely called ‘gin galore’ to acknowledge the tug, towards the end of such an appalling day, of a modest couple of dry martinis. And he couldn’t go wrong on that.

  He decided even to put on a dinner jacket. At Snigg’s Green, as in most places nowadays, one went to cocktail parties in one’s tweeds or whatever, unless it happened that one was ‘going on’. ‘Going on’ – the phrase palely shadowed those metropolitan grandeurs in the pursuit of which one left dinner parties upon the approach of midnight to participate in yet wilder revels – was commonly a matter of crossing the Green (for there was a real Green, and nearly everybody lived round it) to eat lamb cutlets or fricassée of chicken among faces as familiar as the fare. Petticate wasn’t ‘going on’. All too certainly, he was ‘going back’ – to whatever the Hennwifes were, literally and metaphorically, cooking up for him. Nevertheless he would go to Mrs Gotlop’s in a stately way. It would be a sort of showing the flag.

  He even put on his claret-coloured waistcoat and his claret-coloured socks. As long as his tie remained black, he told himself, he was well on the safe side of that sort of sartorial eccentricity which invites confusion with persons who play in bands. Not that Snigg’s Green was very exigent in these matters. It was scarely aware, for instance, of the solecism committed by old Sir Thomas Glyde in visiting other people’s houses in a velvet smoking-jacket. One bachelor might spend an evening with another, so habited. But it was surely a terrible thing – Petticate reflected – to enter a lady’s drawing-room in a garment the historical associations of which were so much with clandestine tobacco in the gun-rooms of great houses in the small hours.

  Petticate, as he dressed, found some satisfaction in the discovery that his mind could still pursue such familiar and significant trains of thought as these. He walked across the Green in quite a light-hearted fashion. It was seldom that he had traversed it on such occasions other than as Sonia Wayward’s husband. But now he was, so to speak, Sonia Wayward herself.

  There were several cars outside Mrs Gotlop’s. That lady, despite the stigma of her literary activities, lived on the fringe of a larger society than was enjoyed by most of the Snigg’s Green gentry. A scattering of people from quite far away came to her parties, and as they weren’t local they could rationally be accredited as county. Petticate wasn’t of course unduly impressed by this sort of thing – for Petticates, as he had often explained to his wife, were well known to have owned half Somerset, and enjoyed numerous titles of honour, until in some mysterious way they had been rather rubbed out in the course of the sixteenth century. Still, he liked the upper reaches of society. It had been one of his unspoken criticisms of Sonia that she had no talent for being in the swim.

  Petticate frowned as he rang Mrs Gotlop’s bell. He kept on thinking of his wife, he noticed, in images and metaphors rather more marine than was wholly comfortable. Sonia had certainly been something of a lion-hunter – that was rather better – but the lions she hunted were literary or artistic; and they generally belonged, so to speak, to a heart of the jungle which she lacked the qualifications to penetrate. She had a vision of herself as among the eminent based on nothing more relevant than the fact that she was herself among the affluent. Could she have got hold of the austere Alspach, for instance, she would have gushed over him as a ‘fellow writer’ at once. To Petticate, so abundantly possessed of the ordered and hierarchical view of things, this had always been embarrassing; he wouldn’t himself have gushed over the President of the Royal College of Surgeons.

  He could really, he reflected, go farther without Sonia – always provided, of course, that material resources didn’t fail him. So her death, although it went without saying that he judged it extremely sad, held its possibilities of what might be called social compensation.

  The door was opened by Mrs Gotlop’s parlourmaid. The Petticates were the only people in Snigg’s Green who maintained a married couple and thereby rejoiced in a butler; and although this wouldn’t impress Mrs Gotlop herself, it probably accounted for the respect with which Petticate was greeted by the young person in the cap.

  ‘In the garden, sir, if you will please to walk through.’

  Petticate crossed Mrs Gotlop’s large low hall. Its walls were embellished in alternate sections with trophies of the chase, inherited from Mrs Gotlop’s father, and eighteenth-century engraved portraits, which were understood to be associated with Mrs Gotlop’s biographical labours. There was a revolving bookcase with spare copies of Mrs Gotlop’s books, ready for autographing and presentation to particularly favoured visitors as they went away.

  It was from Mrs Gotlop that Sonia had picked up that over-expansive custom – but she had never, poor dear, carried it off with quite Mrs Gotlop’s aplomb. On top of the bookcase there was a photograph in a silver frame. Petticate had always vaguely supposed it to represent Mrs Gotlop’s deceased papa in some sort of legal wig. On this occasion, happening to look more closely, he saw that it was really Johnson, taken full muzzle and slavering. Shuddering faintly, Petticate passed out of the hall, and into the racket that was going on in the garden.

  It was a racket that almost drowned Mrs Gotlop’s shouting, so that for a moment he had difficulty in locating her. Presently, however, he did hear a mingled yapping and clinking which could have only one conjoint source, and his hostess bore down upon him, waving one bebangled arm and carrying Boswell in the other.

  ‘Blimp!’ she cried. ‘You poor bereft darling! Gin! Gin!’

  Petticate, returning a somewhat coldly conventional greeting in return for this extravagance, was aware that several people – all, naturally, locals – had turned to look at him. Mrs Gotlop could not in fairness be called a gossip. But she did carelessly fling out anything that happened to be in her head, and Petticate had no doubt that the interesting news of Sonia’s indefinite holiday had travelled round the village. Quite apart from the martinis – which he blessedly saw approaching – he had been wise to come to this party. Were he to take to hiding himself away at home, much more speculation would be aroused.

  ‘Ambrose Wedge is here,’ Mrs Gotlop shouted. ‘There he is by the bird-bath, talking to Rickie Shotover and dear old Edward Lifton. He wants Edward’s memoirs, you know, only he’s a little scared about the libels.’ Mrs Gotlop roared with laughter, so that Boswell, to his marked displeasure, shook in her arms. ‘Of course you know Edward’s wife? No! You absurd pet!’ And Mrs Gotlop, who had addressed this last remark to her guest and not to her dog, turned and bellowed across the hubbub of the party. ‘Daphne,’ she shouted, ‘come here at once! I have the loveliest man for you.’ She turned back to Petticate. ‘Be kind to the little woman,’ she said. ‘She’s shy.’

  Petticate, much gratified that Lady Edward should thus be summoned into
his presence – for the Liftons were clearly the most important guests – straightened his black tie. He was a shade disconcerted, indeed, when Lady Edward turned out to have the bulk of an armoured vehicle and very much an armoured vehicle’s manner. She even scrutinized Petticate through a lorgnette, an article of polite equipment which he had supposed scarcely any longer in use except to indicate exalted rank in West End comedies. The roar of Mrs Gotlop’s laughter at her little joke reverberated in the middle distance.

  ‘The Blues?’ Lady Edward said.

  The question was not phrased precisely as if it expected an affirmative answer. Petticate, however, received with complacency even an unconvincing suggestion that his background might be in the Brigade of Guards.

  ‘My dear lady,’ he said whimsically, ‘an old army doctor – nothing more.’

  ‘Augusta Gale-Warning – who married the man Gotlop – tells me that your wife is a famous novelist. I never read novels. My husband reads them when fatigued. But he commonly chooses those by the older writers. They are more reliable. Edward naturally likes to know in advance that adequate diversion is assured to him.’ Lady Edward put up her lorgnette again and stared through them with some fixed intent over Petticate’s left shoulder. ‘I thought I knew them, but I don’t,’ she said with satisfaction.

  ‘The older writers?’

  ‘Certainly not. Some persons who have just arrived.’ Lady Edward paused. ‘I presume, Colonel Petticate, that you and your wife move in artistic society, as poor Augusta now so often seems to do. Be so good as to give me your opinion of Mr Gialletti.’