The New Sonia Wayward

by Michael Innes

  ‘Gialletti?’ It was with some surprise that Petticate received this apparently inconsequent inquiry. ‘Why, he’s undoubtedly the greatest portrait sculptor alive today.’

  The shy little Lady Edward inclined her majestic head towards her ample bosom. ‘So I am given to understand. It appears that amateurs approve his work. I am unacquainted with it, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally,’ Petticate echoed.

  ‘And it goes without saying that, until now, I have not met the man himself. I do happen, however, to have met his son. You know the young man?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Timothy Gialletti. Familiarly, he is known as Timmy.’

  ‘A sculptor’s son? Timmy?’ Petticate was vaguely troubled by the oddity of this.

  ‘An unassuming young man with unaffected manners. I have made no objection to Claire’s presenting him to me.’

  ‘Claire is your daughter?’ Petticate asked, rather faintly.

  Lady Edward stared at him, much as if this question had been impertinent.

  ‘Certainly Claire is my daughter,’ she said. ‘I should have judged the fact tolerably well known.’

  ‘Ah, not in Snigg’s Green.’ Petticate gave this disarming reply automatically. Of course he had remembered now. It was Sonia’s regular habit to pick up persons and names wherever she went, and at once to tip them quite recklessly into her fiction. After each novel went in, a questionnaire regularly arrived from some lawyer apparently retained by Wedge for the purpose. And in the light of this, various precautionary changes were made in proof. It was clear that, unknown to him, Sonia had lately been in some contact with the Giallettis. But why had Lady Edward introduced the subject of the sculptor in the first place? He had better try to find out.

  ‘Are you thinking, Lady Edward,’ he asked, ‘of commissioning Gialletti to do something? I’ve been told that, nowadays, he’s most frightfully hard to get hold of.’

  ‘Precisely.’ Lady Edward Lifton now spoke with measured indignation. ‘Mr Gialletti made a represention of Lifton a year ago. You may have seen it at the Royal Academy. Lifton is, of course, the head of my husband’s family. But he is also tolerably well known to be the fool of it. And now Mr Gialletti has declined to execute a similar representation of my husband, which some of my husband’s colleagues in his many business enterprises are anxious to present to him. The amount of the fee, I am given to understand, is not in question. Mr Gialletti has been pleased to say that Lord Edward has an uninteresting face. It appears that he even told his son Timothy that Lord Edward’s only tolerable features are his ears. Claire, I am pained to say, judged this an acceptable pleasantry. Considering that I actually received the young man, I am bound to consider that the father’s insolence in this matter falls little short of the criminal.’

  ‘I entirely agree with you.’ Petticate, with his proper respect for the highest ranks of society, was able to say this in all due sincerity.

  Lady Edward inclined her head. Petticate supposed for a moment that she was bowing to an acquaintance straight over his shoulder – which her stature made it perfectly easy for her to do. But in fact she was acknowledging the propriety of his response to her complaint.

  ‘And I can scarcely forgive dear Augusta,’ Lady Edward said, ‘for inviting so ineligible a person this evening. Whatever Edward may say in his easy-going fashion, a meeting with Mr Gialletti cannot be agreeable.’

  ‘Gialletti – here?’ Petticate stared in astonishment.

  Lady Edward raised her lorgnette once more – but this time as a pointer.

  ‘There!’ she said.

  Petticate turned. It was perfectly true. The great sculptor – the really very great sculptor – was at Mrs Gotlop’s party.

  4

  Lady Edward Lifton had moved majestically on. In the considerable crowd now present, there were several persons whom it would be proper for her to acknowledge. Petticate was about to seek local and less exalted society when Ambrose Wedge hove up on him.

  ‘Well, well,’ Wedge said. ‘I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.’ He made no attempt to render this a felicitous remark. ‘I heard Edward Lifton was to be here, so I allowed young Shotover to bring me over. I’m trying to persuade Lifton to do me a book.’

  Petticate grinned.

  ‘Then keep away from his wife at the moment. She’s not in a good humour.’

  ‘She doesn’t much look as if she ever was.’

  ‘Well, she’s taken particular offence at being asked to the same party as Gialletti. It seems he did Lord Lifton, and that now he won’t do Lord Edward.’

  Wedge nodded. The mention of Gialletti seemed to excite him. ‘He’ll do hardly anybody. The Lifton was the first Gialletti bust for years.’

  ‘Do you know, I think Sonia must have been having some contact with Gialletti and his family? But she never told me.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Wedge looked curiously at Petticate. ‘What a pity Sonia can’t be here now.’

  ‘Yes, yes. How she would have loved a party today.’ Petticate found himself nervous at the mention of Sonia, although he had himself introduced her into the conversation. It pleased him, however, to manage an almost sacrilegious quotation from a lyric of Thomas Hardy’s. Wedge, although professionally engaged with literature, wasn’t quite the man to pick up an allusion of that sort.

  Wedge looked about him. In their perfectly refined way, Mrs Gotlop’s guests were beginning to acknowledge the influence of the gin galore. Old Sir Thomas Glyde’s complexion was creeping nearer and nearer to the shade of his red velvet smoking-jacket.

  ‘Yes,’ Petticate said, following Wedge’s glance. ‘One day high blood-pressure will do its work, and the late Sir Thomas will be carried out amid the distressed exclamations of his ci-devant fellow revellers.’

  ‘Oh, I say!’ Wedge looked at Petticate rather queerly. ‘I don’t know that sudden death’s all that funny. It might happen to any of us, after all. Drop down dead any minute.’

  Petticate amiably smiled.

  ‘Ah, you mustn’t think me callous, my dear fellow. One gets used to that sort of thing in my profession. And, if you die at a bolt from the blue, you’re damned lucky, believe me. I could tell you a thing or two about the ingenuities of keeping wretches alive nowadays.’

  Wedge drained his rather full glass – and then appeared to wish that he had done nothing so hazardous.

  ‘All right, all right, Petticate. But just remember your party manners.’ For a moment he appeared to hesitate. ‘Shall I take you over and introduce you to Gialletti?’

  ‘Please do.’ Petticate had drunk his two cocktails, and was resolved to drink no more. He was, he felt, at the top of his form. And there was no reason why he shouldn’t try to find out just what sort of contact Sonia had been having with the sculptor. ‘I’ve a great admiration for Gialletti’s work – really a very great admiration.’

  Wedge moved forward across the lawn.

  ‘And does Sonia share it with you?’

  Petticate, for some reason, found himself considering this question carefully.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know. I can’t remember her ever mentioning it. I should have thought Gialletti wasn’t quite enough in the naturalistic manner to enchant my dear wife.’ For the first time that day, Petticate produced his cackle.

  Wedge eyed him curiously.

  ‘But at least she’d recognize him as no end of a swell?’

  ‘Lord, yes. There’s nobody like Sonia for knowing the exact size of lions. To have Gialletti in her menagerie would be the seventh heaven for her.’

  ‘But you say she does in fact appear to have had some contact with him?’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ Momentarily, Petticate had his now familiar uneasy feeling that he had been saying too much.

  ‘Sonia hasn’t been confiding in you, it seems.’

  ‘It seems not.’ Petticate tried to speak lightly. But he didn’t care for Wedge’s tone. It was as if the fellow were deliberately concealin
g something. ‘But perhaps we can find out.’

  Wedge made no reply for a moment. They were making their way through a particularly clotted group of Mrs Gotlop’s friends.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ he then oddly offered, ‘that it would be quite playing the game, old boy.’

  Before Petticate could make anything of this, or decide whether it would be prudent to ask for an explanation, they were in the presence of the great man.

  Gialletti was large and flabby – and he certainly wasn’t of an old Huguenot family. To that extent, at least, Sonia’s transforming imagination had been at work in the fabricating of Timmy Vedrenne’s marble-chipping father. No doubt he did himself bang away with a hammer and chisel from time to time, but one could almost have guessed that nowadays he was happier with clay. He would have been just another elderly Italian, badly out of condition, if it hadn’t been for his eyes.

  These were dark under jutting brows, and they contrived to be at once brilliant and brooding. He might have been at this moment in a blaze of excitement over what was immediately before him. But as this consisted of a dozen of Mrs Gotlop’s vacantly vivacious guests, diversified only by the enormous and snuffling Johnson, it didn’t seem altogether likely. The late Sir Edwin Landseer, Petticate reflected, might have found Johnson stimulating; but he didn’t recall that Gialletti had ever regarded the brute creation as sculpturesque. Alternatively it might have been supposed that the eminent man was in fact immensely withdrawn upon the inexhaustible riches of his own interior vision. But, if this were so, he was at least not so lost to his surroundings as to fail to stretch out his glass whenever Mrs Gotlop’s gardener (who was disguised in a black jacket) came within collaring distance with the drinks. Petticate found this evidence of thirst infectious. He had a third cocktail, after all.

  ‘May I introduce my friend Colonel Petticate?’ Wedge asked.

  ‘But assuredly.’ Gialletti managed mysteriously to add to both the brooding and the brilliance the expression of one in swift expectation of some surprising pleasure. Having risen to fame as much on the Continent as in England, he had long ago acquired the expectations and accepted the responsibilities of minor royalty. He took Petticate’s hand in an unexpectedly firm grip. ‘I am pleased to meet you, sir,’ he said.

  Petticate was impressed. He would not, in normal circumstances, have admitted this form of words as a permissible variant upon that ejaculatory ‘how d’ye do’ with which the well-bred Englishman instantly makes known his total lack of concern for a new acquaintance. But one had to realize that Gialletti was privileged. He was decidedly – in the amusing terminology of Petticate’s favourite journal – a top person.

  If Sonia had really got on speaking terms with Gialletti, it had been uncommonly deep in her not to proclaim the fact. Petticate himself, although so much more sophisticated a person than his unhappily deceased wife, would certainly have done so. If he met a Gialletti on Monday – which he didn’t often do – a good many people would be casually told of the fact throughout the remaining days of the week.

  Wedge, who had also seized another drink, addressed himself to further explanations.

  ‘Petticate, you know, is another of Mrs Gotlop’s neighbours. A hospitable old soul. She asks the whole crowd.’ Wedge waved his hand to indicate a number of those standing by. It didn’t seem to occur to him that there was anything derogatory in this compendious description. ‘An interesting community, Snigg’s Green.’

  Gialletti looked round at the company. He was habituated to a circle of people more or less staring.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he murmured. ‘The people are charming. There is a ton.’

  ‘They all have their points.’ Wedge was looking at Sir Thomas Glyde, and for a moment he hesitated, as if constrained to wonder what conceivable point such a useless and noisome old person could be credited with. ‘They collect pretty objects. They have knowledge of roses and of the feeding habits of tits. They visit the good poor.’

  Gialletti nodded indulgently. He must be very accustomed, Petticate thought, to people showing off.

  ‘Petticate,’ Wedge pursued, ‘is an old campaigner. No man is more fascinating upon the intricate topic of tropical hygiene.’

  Gialletti smiled politely. At the same time he ever so slightly raised his beetling brows. It was possible to feel that a court chamberlain might advance and tactfully lead Wedge away.

  Wedge patted Petticate on the shoulder – an act which the recipient of this familiarity regarded as wholly outrageous.

  ‘But Petticate’s strong suit,’ he continued, ‘is his wife. We rather think you may know her.’

  Gialletti bowed very slightly to Petticate.

  ‘I am enchanted,’ he said, ‘to learn that I may have met Mrs Petticate.’

  ‘But very probably,’ Wedge went on, ‘not as plain Mrs Petticate.’

  Gialletti made a deprecatory gesture.

  ‘Assuredly not,’ he said.

  Wedge laughed robustly – thus making clear to everybody standing round that he had appreciated this delightful witticism.

  ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘you have almost certainly met her as Sonia Wayward. The famous novelist, you know. One of my best authors.’

  ‘But Sonia!’

  Gialletti produced this like a glad cry. A good many of Mrs Gotlop’s guests had now frankly constituted themselves an audience. And Gialletti’s enthusiasm – which didn’t in the least appear to be a matter of his putting on a turn – was very well received. Even those who regarded Mrs Gotlop as the superior ornament of Snigg’s Green were gratified that her principal rival was thus acclaimed by so exotic a lion as the sculptor.

  Wedge, of course, was particularly delighted.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ he said to nobody in particular. ‘Dear old Sonia has been going everywhere. Quite, you know, the girl of the year.’

  Petticate, although displeased by this absurd description of his wife, found a certain satisfaction in thus becoming a focus of attention. Sonia, it was true, was the precipitating occasion of it. But at least Sonia couldn’t butt in.

  ‘She is here?’ Gialletti – with a gesture that was at an opposite remove from Wedge’s oafish back-patting – had for a moment taken both Petticate’s hands impulsively in his. ‘She is here – your charming wife?’

  ‘Alas, no.’ Petticate felt he perfectly knew how to carry off this embrance of genius. ‘Sonia, as Wedge knows, has gone on holiday – or rather indefinite holiday.’

  ‘I am certain she deserves it.’ The cordiality with which Gialletti pronounced this made it comfortably certain – despite his casting a distinguishably speculative glance on Petticate – that there was nothing double-edged in the remark. ‘She works so hard – no? Her books, alas, I have not read, since the reading of books eludes me. But her conversation delights me. And with her bones I am unutterably in love.’

  Snigg’s Green produced, at this, a perceptible gasp. It seemed, perhaps, a rather stiff dose of la vie de bohème. Petticate himself was startled, until his superior acumen brought him a dim sense of what Gialletti was talking about.

  ‘My wife is professionally interesting to you?’ he asked with a whimsical deference which he felt to be just right.

  ‘The structure round the temples – it is ravishing! Ah, she is a subject, your divine Sonia.’

  This was so handsome that Petticate felt he must reiterate his apologies for Sonia’s not being in a position to present herself to her admirer.

  ‘She will be terribly sorry to have missed seeing you,’ he said. ‘But she’s not only taking a holiday. She’s making a little mystery of it, bless her. I’ve no idea, where she is.’

  Given its present context of the artistic life, this confession of Petticate’s went down well with Snigg’s Green. Sonia’s supporters turned to one another with gratified smiles. Mrs Gotlop’s supporters were almost out of countenance.

  ‘But at least she will be back,’ Gialletti said with confidence, ‘by the fifteenth of October.’


  Petticate could make nothing of this.

  ‘The fifteenth of October?’ he echoed.

  Gialletti smiled delightfully.

  ‘But, my dear sir, you are the most modest of men! Can you have forgotten your own birthday?’

  Petticate had certainly forgotten it. But he remembered, with rather a shock, that Sonia never did. The keeping of birthdays was a solemn matter with her. Gialletti’s prediction had been quite reasonably grounded in her character. But how did the sculptor come to know anything about it? Despite Mrs Gotlop’s cocktails, Petticate once more experienced the now familiar sinking feeling.

  ‘Yes,’ he said rather feebly, ‘perhaps Sonia will be back by then.’

  ‘She will be back earlier. She will be back three weeks earlier, at least.’ Gialletti turned roguishly to Wedge. ‘But our friend,’ he asked, ‘doesn’t know? It is a surprise – yes?’

  ‘I think it was meant to be.’ Wedge seemed slightly uneasy. ‘I was certainly surprised myself when you told me. And I’m not quite sure it is playing fair, you know, to let Petticate in on the secret.’

  This time, when Petticate spoke it was positively weakly.

  ‘You intend,’ he asked, ‘to make a study of my wife?’

  ‘But certainly! And perhaps it will be the last of all my portrait busts. Sonia – your divine Sonia – I could not resist. And she has been kind enough to be enchanted. This year, she said, you should have a birthday present worthy of you.’

  There was a murmur of approbation and pleasure among the Waywardians. Petticate realized that his stock had never stood so high in the place before. He also realized that, if he failed to keep a tight grip on his superbly rational Weltanschauung, this evidence of Sonia’s amiable marital disposition might become the occasion with him for some undesirably distracting uneasiness of mind. Meanwhile, he must rise to some response to Gialletti’s revelation.

  ‘I’m quite astonished,’ he said. ‘I really don’t know what to say.’

  Here at least was the truth – and when he had added to it – not quite so sincerely – sundry cordial but not extravagant expressions of pleasure and gratitude, he could feel that, for the moment, nothing had gone disastrously wrong. Even the ill behaviour of Wedge, who seemed disposed to communicate to the world at large the amusing fact that the husband of this wifely paragon had only the day before been disposed to hint that she was quitting him for good, didn’t utterly confound him.