The New Sonia Wayward

by Michael Innes

  ‘Of course. And in all the great journals – all the great journals of Europe and America. When it is known that your fascinating Sonia is missing from my studio – from the studio of Gialletti – all the world will go in search of her. Yes?’

  ‘No. I mean, yes – I suppose so.’ Petticate again felt sweat on his brow. ‘But wait until – well, until a week today. I may be able to – um – to get through to her. Her last cable was from…from Nassau. Delightful weather, it seems. And – um – brilliant parties. A wealthy and gay society… How are you?’

  ‘I am at the highest pitch of my creative inspiration. That is why I must have your incomparable wife, my dear Major. For one week, however, I will wait… Good-bye.’

  There was a sharp click, and Petticate knew that Gialletti had rung off. He put down the receiver, prepared to tumble exhausted into a chair. But he was prevented. The telephone rang again.

  ‘I say you must be in a deuced chatty mood, my dear chap. I’ve been trying to get you for ages. And by myself, too. I don’t keep a secretary at home, these days. Hard times in publishing, you know. Devilish hard times.’

  Even without this last information, Petticate would instantly have known his interlocutor this time. It was of course Wedge. Petticate remembered inconsequently that Wedge too was an Ambrose. He was so exhausted that he almost asked the publisher whether he liked raw fish.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said instead. ‘Yes, I had somebody on the line. Fellow at the local garage. Had to go into a good deal of detail about repairing a car.’

  ‘That’s funny.’ Wedge sounded suspicious. ‘The exchange seemed to get the wires crossed for a bit, and I thought I heard stuff about advertising in Europe and America.’

  ‘Quite right.’ Although he spoke briskly, Petticate reflected grimly on how much he had fallen from his pristine technique of never telling unnecessary lies. ‘Vintage car, you know. We want a set of old bronze gudgeon pins. Terribly hard to find now, it seems. We think of trying Detroit.’

  ‘I didn’t think you went in for anything like that.’ Wedge’s voice was now impatient. He evidently felt he had something important to say. ‘Heard from Sonia yet?’

  ‘Well, no – not just lately.’

  ‘Then you damned well must. This can’t go on, my boy. Not with what I’ve landed for her.’

  ‘Landed for her?’ Petticate’s heart sank. This could only mean trouble.

  ‘The Golden Nightingale, my dear chap. Nothing less.’

  ‘And what the deuce is the Golden Nightingale?’

  There was a strange explosion in the telephone which Petticate interpreted as a snort of contempt.

  ‘Good God, man! You mean you’ve never heard of the world’s biggest literary prize? I tell you I’ve got the Golden Nightingale for Sonia’s new novel. Not, mind you, that Sonia hasn’t helped. What Youth Desires is a remarkable book. Quite in a class by itself. My travellers were struck all of a heap by it. They see qualities in it that poor old Alspach never touched. I tell you, Petticate, it’s going to be a tremendous occasion.’

  ‘A tremendous occasion?’ Petticate, although naturally gratified at the effect of his Sonia Wayward on Wedge’s travellers, as also upon whoever awarded the Golden Nightingale, experienced deepening alarm. ‘Just what, please, will be a tremendous occasion?’

  ‘Why – the presentation of the prize, you idiot. It’s going to be utterly the highlight of Sonia’s life.’

  ‘I see. And just who presents it?’

  ‘An affair called the Accademia Minerva.’

  ‘Minerva? They ought to present owls, not nightingales.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Wedge appeared to be at a loss before this obscure witticism. ‘It’s a learned society in the little state of San Giorgio, and it has enormous funds because it owns one of the casinos. Know San Giorgio? Rather the same sort of outfit as San Marino. Only it’s a principality with a real live monarch. He hands over these yearly prizes himself. It’s a magnificent do, I gather. Sonia will simply lap it all up. Marvellous break for the old girl.’

  ‘No doubt.’ Petticate, who much resented this disrespectful manner of naming his late wife, spoke without cordiality. He was, of course, inwardly appalled. Coming on top of Gialletti’s demand, this further insistence that Sonia be produced – for of course it was precisely that – appeared as a last straw. But the thought of the sculptor prompted a fresh association in Petticate’s mind. ‘San Giorgio?’ he said. ‘Isn’t that where Gialletti originally comes from?’

  ‘Certainly it is. Glad you mentioned it. We must soft pedal on that bust for a while. Gialletti, it seems, is a fanatical republican. He hasn’t been inside San Giorgio for ages, and they pretty well have a price on his head. So we can’t have that bust on the platform when the Prince of San Giorgio hands over the prize on behalf of the Accademia.’

  ‘Too bad, I’m sure.’ Petticate, who felt strongly that about all this he couldn’t care less, was by this time beyond disguising the blended rage and exhaustion that possessed him. ‘Forgive me if I’m not just enthusiastic about such foolery. I never much cared for comic opera myself.’

  ‘And who cares what you care for, Petticate? You didn’t write What Youth Desires, did you?’

  ‘Yes, I did, you damned fool.’

  There was a second’s pause, during which Petticate felt a mingled wave of horror and relief sweep over him. It was all up now. His wonderful imposture had come to an inglorious end.

  ‘I didn’t hear what you said, Petticate. Don’t get so excited. Relax. Take yourself less seriously.’ Wedge, who was clearly speaking the truth about not having picked up Petticate’s almost fatal outburst, was now soothing and heavily reasonable. ‘After all, my dear fellow, it is Sonia’s show. Of course you have very superior notions about literature, and all that sort of thing. But no need to bite the hand that feeds you, eh? And the Accademia Minerva is proposing to do just that – and pretty handsomely, too. So get hold of Sonia as soon as you can, there’s a good fellow. Night-night.’

  ‘Night-night.’ Petticate felt himself now at such an extremity of helplessness and dismay that he repeated this atrociously vulgar valediction simply without noticing it. Then he replaced the receiver and tumbled with a groan into a chair.

  For a long time his mind was a blank. Nothing, that is to say, that could be called thought took place there. He was aware of nothing except a brutish and static terror. He did just obscurely know that when he did begin to think it could be only to review the several reasons why he was hopelessly trapped.

  But presently pictures began to form themselves in his head. They were of no practical utility, since they were simply of a succession of totally improbable horrors befalling the Hennwifes. Gialletti was a threat: he had presented a sort of seven-day ultimatum. Wedge was a threat: he had presented an ultimatum only slightly more elastic. But the Hennwifes were both a threat and an object of intense hatred. Petticate didn’t find himself imagining Gialletti suddenly blinded in some painful accident and incapacitated from ever handling a lump of clay again. He didn’t imagine Wedge suddenly struck demented and carried screaming and for good to an asylum. He didn’t even imagine the tiny state of San Giorgio and all its casinos obliterated by an earthquake or buried beneath the boiling lava of a volcanic eruption. But he did imagine what the Hennwifes would look like while succumbing to some dreadful pestilence, or brought to the gallows for some long-concealed crime, or suffering in the torture chambers of a revived Gestapo or Inquisition. And these pictures, although extravagantly improbable wish-fulfilments, did a little help him to compose his sadly jangled spirits. Slowly and as the small hours wore on – for he continued to sit before his dead fire with only the vaguest sense of time – milder imaginations took the place of these lurid ones. Eventually he found himself involved in the simplest and most pleasant – yes, most pleasant – of daydreams. Sonia had come back again.

  They went to Gialletti’s studio together, and afterwards dined in some long-familiar restaurant in
Soho. They went across to Mrs Gotlop’s for drinks, and laughed at the absurd scandals they guessed had been put out about them. They went to San Giorgio – and after the grand prize-giving Petticate had the most amicable of chats with the Prince.

  And the Hennwifes? Petticate imagined Sonia walking casually into the house and instantly dismissing them. He saw their faces, utterly confounded before the knowledge that their foul suspicions had been cobweb and their hopes of blackmail a mere fatuity. He saw them piling their shabby luggage into the Snigg’s Green taxi and departing miserably to whatever low employment was open to disgraced menials without a ‘reference’. This particular vision was so agreeable to Petticate that he presently found himself resenting intensely the one fact that made its realization impossible. Sonia couldn’t come back. She wouldn’t come back. It was thoroughly disobliging of her.

  Only the exceptional strains to which he had been subjected in the past few hours could have reduced Petticate – normally so splendidly rational – to this pitiable travesty of thought. But, once launched upon it, he plunged further into absurdity. He didn’t, after all, ask for the old girl back for keeps. That, of course, would have its advantages: she could get on with the rubbishy novel-writing against which he himself had experienced so sharp and unexpected a revulsion. But he didn’t ask for that. Just a few weeks would do – and it would be only decent in her to oblige him thus far. Hadn’t he always been a good husband?

  Petticate stirred a little in his chair, dimly conscious that the room was becoming chilly. The inside of a month would do: to cook the goose of the Hennwifes, pick up the Golden Nightingale, satisfy the absurd Gialletti, and organize that phased withdrawal once more – this time on a more considered and less hand-to-mouth basis. Almost, it could be managed in the inside of a week.

  Suddenly Petticate found himself sitting bolt upright. This was no purposeless musing. Through its apparent irrationality his reason – his powerful reason – had been secretly at work. There was a way, after all, of bringing Sonia briefly but sufficiently back from the dead. It was dangerous. It was fantastic. It was wrapped, as to its details, in formidable obscurity. But yet it was surely a way.

  And he could begin to explore it by taking the first train to Oxford in the morning.

  3

  He got out of the house before breakfast, and without the Hennwifes appearing to be aware of him. They must be pretty confident that he wouldn’t simply cut and run for good. They must be pretty confident altogether. Well, there was a shock in store for them.

  But at the moment there was a shock for himself. Old Dr Gregory was on the up platform. As Snigg’s Green was no more than a halt, and the platforms exiguous affairs each provided with a wooden shelter into which one could just wheel a perambulator, conversation was unavoidable. Petticate hadn’t expected any neighbours to be stirring at this hour. But medical men, he supposed, were accustomed to being early birds.

  ‘Good morning, Petticate.’ Gregory seemed not much interested in the encounter, nor to have heard about the collapse of the barn. ‘Going to town?’

  ‘Only to Oxford. I mean to look up one or two things in the Bodleian. My military history, you know.’

  ‘Never heard of it.’ Old Gregory gave Petticate his familiar keen look. ‘Something you’re burning the midnight oil over, eh?’

  ‘Well, yes – to a certain extent.’ Petticate, who knew that he must look decidedly seedy, seized upon this explanation. ‘It comes of having to lead a bachelor life. But that’s nearly over, by the way. I expect Sonia back any time. Just while we clear up at Snigg’s Green, that is. As I think I’ve told you, we propose to prepare for old age by settling down in some corner of the globe with a little more sunshine.’

  ‘No doubt I shall envy you.’ Gregory, although he had certainly been taking in everything that Petticate had said, gave only a casual nod as he strolled off to have a word with the Snigg’s Green porter. When the train came in he would then be able, without incivility, to get into a different compartment from Petticate’s. Petticate thought this highly commendable. Gregory was really a civilized old person. But why had he said all that to him? Gregory, despite his air of polite discretion, would certainly scatter about Snigg’s Green the news that Sonia was returning. What Petticate had done, therefore, was boldly to burn his boats. It was something he had done before, and with far from happy results. If this Oxford gamble didn’t come off, the results this time would be more unhappy still. Yet he believed that he had acted out of a wise instinct in thus committing himself by these few words to a neighbour. He couldn’t go back on the enterprise now. However alarming it was, it lay straight in front of him.

  The train came in, and he found an empty compartment. Smith, he said to himself as he settled in a corner, 116 Eastmoor Road, Oxford. It was remarkable – it was surely almost a good augury – that he had remembered the name and address. He must now try to remember more about the woman who was virtually indistinguishable from Sonia.

  The most memorable fact about her, of course, was that she had given him a terrific shock. ‘Your wife’s dead,’ she had said. ‘And well you know it.’

  And then she had addressed him as Henry Higgins. Petticate recalled vividly how extremely offensive he had found the plebeian associations of that. But more had emerged. The woman had clearly done something shady and was frightened about it: something connected with pledging the credit of an aunt who had been tricked into imagining the real Henry Higgins was a millionaire. Petticate felt no interest in the details of all this. The vital point was that a woman thus obscurely involved in some squalid manoeuvre over cheques was very likely to be in chronic trouble that way. The chance of coming into a substantial sum of money as payment for a simple act of deception would probably be attractive to her. He had only to find her – and of course it was by no means certain that he could do that – and play his cards properly. She would impersonate Sonia in that sequence of short glimpses which alone were required in order to clear up the difficulties in which he had involved himself.

  There was of course the formidable fact that this unknown and problematical woman didn’t at all belong to the sort of social world typified by Snigg’s Green. Nevertheless Petticate remembered an obscure impression – not now easy to give any definition to – that there was something about the woman which might make this difficulty less absolute. Had she been at one time a sharply observing lady’s maid? Or had small parts on the stage? It might be something like that. Whatever it was, it did, he felt sure, make his bizarre project sufficiently feasible to take a chance on. Of course it was going to be extremely disagreeable. Nothing was clearer to him than that he had disliked the woman. But beggars, he told himself grimly, can’t be choosers. And adversity makes strange bedfellows.

  Petticate frowned in distaste at the implications of this second piece of proverbial wisdom. There wouldn’t, at least, be any question of that.

  Safely arrived in Oxford, Petticate drove to Eastmoor Road in a cab. It looked promising. It was hard, that was to say, to conceive of anybody who wouldn’t be glad to be out of it. Whatever the beauties of this celebrated city, they didn’t extend to Eastmoor Road. The drearier parts of Reading, Petticate supposed, must wear a less discouraged air. If Mrs Smith – or was it Miss Smith? – wasn’t ready for a break, she must be so stupid that she would be of no use to him anyway. It was with this reasonable confidence in the acceptability of his proposals that Petticate mounted to the dingy door of No. 116 and rang the bell.

  Nothing happened. Petticate looked to his left where, only a couple of feet away, a mean bay window, partially shrouded in scruffy lace curtains, peered dejectedly over a grimy little area at the dismal road. Inside, there was a small gimcrack table, on which there perched a cheap plaster statuette of a small girl holding up her skirt in the motions of a blameless pirouette; and behind this he could just glimpse a larger table littered with papers and books. He rang again.

  Again nothing happened. Out of the area, however, tw
o grubby infants tumbled. Each held a large confection anchored to a stick with which it dabbed vaguely in the direction of its mouth. Each stared at Petticate with an open gaze of fathomless speculation. Petticate, rather unnerved by this, decided to open the door and see if it was possible to walk in.

  He did so. Straight in front of him was a narrow staircase with a few patches of tattered linoleum tacked to the treads. The way to this was barred by a couple of rusty bicycles which lay at random on the floor of the small hall. Beyond these stood a young man who had apparently emerged from the room on the left. He was strikingly good-looking in a haggard intellectual way; he had long dirty hair, and a long very dirty overcoat which he somehow contrived to suggest that he never got out of. He addressed Petticate across the bicycles.

  ‘Are you looking for somebody? I thought I heard a bell. But of course it might be the brats.’

  Petticate glanced behind him. The two gutter-children were now sitting in the gutter, and by good luck had succeeded in directing their confections squarely into their mouths.

  ‘I’m looking for a Miss Smith,’ Petticate said. He spoke uncertainly, since it always disconcerted him to feel that he was astray in his social bearings.

  Before the young man could reply, a woman’s voice spoke from the room on the left.

  ‘Right at the top of the house. You’d better go up.’

  The voice was followed by the appearance of its owner. She was a pale and remarkably beautiful girl with dirty hair – and dressed in what appeared to be black skin-tights topped by a very bulky jacket reaching precisely to the top of her thighs. Now she was looking past Petticate to the urchins in the road.

  ‘Marcus,’ she called out, ‘Marcus and Dominic – come inside, please.’

  The urchins, thus summoned with a mingled politeness and unquestioning expectation of obedience which held social implications more bewildering still to Petticate, tottered up the steps and began crawling over the bicycles. The young man stooped and had the appearance of picking them up like puppies, each by the scruff of its neck.