The New Sonia Wayward

by Michael Innes

  ‘The Hennwifes are in charge, all right. And on account of blackmail. But it hasn’t anything to do with me.’

  ‘I see. And will they keep mum in your direction?’

  ‘I’m sure they will. It would be very much to their advantage not to. As it is’ – Petticate slightly brightened as he remembered this – ‘they’ll get a pretty stiff sentence. And quite right, too. Criminals, both of them.’

  ‘Well, it’s one trouble the less – isn’t it dearie?’ Susie said this in tones of the most honest cheer. ‘Now I think I’ll have a look at my room, and then we can have a bite of lunch. I suppose there must be something in the larder?’

  ‘At least there will be Ambrose’s fish.’ Petticate grabbed the nearest suitcase and led the way upstairs. ‘Lunch, certainly,’ he added more graciously. ‘But then we have a lot to get to work on. The Hennwifes are fixed, thank goodness. But your engagement’s only beginning, all the same.’

  Susie Smith nodded. It wasn’t a statement she seemed to have any impulses to dispute.

  At the top of the staircase Petticate hesitated. The Hennwifes, who alone knew which had been Sonia’s actual bedroom, were gone. There appeared to be no reason, therefore, why Miss Smith should not be accommodated with some approximation to propriety in a quarter of the house remote from Petticate’s own. Susie’s new clothes were not immodest; indeed her particular selection from them this morning was uncannily in Sonia’s manner when Sonia had been giving way to facile feelings of opulence. But Susie adequately garbed was as unmistakably a Rubens type as when she had been sitting up in bed seemingly garbed in nothing at all. It was something to which Petticate, whatever had been his tastes in the past, didn’t now respond in the least – or rather responded only by feeling frightened. So this purely instinctive reaction now mingled with his habitual moral and intellectual delicacy in rendering extremely disagreeable the notion of Susie’s slumbers over the next two or three weeks being divided from his own only by a single wall and an inter-communicating door.

  ‘Your Sonia’s room, of course,’ Susie said crisply. ‘I couldn’t you know, manage it from any other. The feel wouldn’t be right. And the feel’s the whole thing, wouldn’t you say?’

  Petticate, although he supposed that in fact it was, gave no audible assent to this proposition. Instead, he marched resignedly along the corridor and threw open Sonia’s door.

  ‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Of course you have your own bathroom. Through there. That other door’s not in use. It’s locked.’

  For the moment Susie didn’t attend to this. She had at once walked over to the bed, sat on it, and bounced up and down critically. Petticate, who had never belonged to a world in which this sort of experimental approach to the means of repose is usual, thought for a confused moment that the action was designed to be provocative. But Susie wasn’t looking at him. She was studying every aspect of the room with care.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s a cut above Eastmoor Road, I must say. Not, mind you, that I shan’t miss the kids.’

  ‘The kids?’ In a further confusion of mind, Petticate wondered whether he might have to deal with some yet undisclosed fruits of Miss Smith’s unlawful loves.

  ‘Persephone’s kids, Marcus and Dominic. Still, perhaps they can come to see us some time.’ Susie was now prodding the pile of the carpet appraisingly with a toe. ‘Don’t think, mind you, that I haven’t known grander in my time.’

  ‘I’m sure you have.’ Petticate felt disinclined to dispute the probable quality of Susie’s past professional successes. ‘I wonder whether there’s any rearrangement you’d like?’

  ‘Well, I won’t say I don’t find it a little on the dull side. Not a good exposure, if you ask me. But that blank wall, now’ – and Susie pointed across the room – ‘what would you say to throwing out a bit of a window there? A nice bay, perhaps, with a few plants in pots. Those indiarubber ones are all the thing just now, they say. Just a suggestion, you know.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’ Petticate spoke flatly. He felt that he was past endeavouring to protect himself from the world with the inflexions of irony. ‘I’ll bring up some more of those suitcases. And then we’ll look in that larder.’

  ‘That’s right, dearie.’ Susie, who had kicked off her shoes and curled her legs luxuriously under her, nodded happily. ‘Fish, did you say? A half bottle of Hock would be the thing. Just put it in the cold part of the refrigerator, and in fifteen minutes it will be fine.’ She gave a long satisfied sigh. ‘There’s quite a lot,’ she said, ‘that I don’t seem to have forgotten, after all.’

  If Miss Smith had forgotten little, it presently appeared that she was concerned to learn much. Before they had finished the Hock (and since Petticate had been unable to find a half-bottle they drank a whole one) there was very little she didn’t know about her putative husband’s affairs. Petticate hadn’t meant to be nearly so communicative. There was, of course, a sense in which he was entirely in this woman’s power – even more unmistakably so than he had ever been in the Hennwifes’. Even so, he had felt, it would be only prudent that she should be told as little as possible; and it had been his original intention to give her precise instructions while actually confiding to her nothing more than was absolutely necessary.

  That this proposal broke down wasn’t at all a consequence of Susie’s bullying him. He would have resisted anything of that sort, at least for a time. The trouble – if it was to be viewed in that way – lay in Susie’s intelligence. This, although untutored, was rapid. Certainly she was a good deal quicker than Petticate himself in spotting points she must be sure about. But if she saw some difficulties that his own mind hadn’t got round to, this didn’t seem to shake her entire confidence in her ability to sustain her deception for as long as was necessary. If she was anxious, it was about him – and indeed she was cheerfully unconcerned to conceal her feeling that he would need keeping an eye on.

  Petticate didn’t react too well to this suggestion that he was the weak link in the chain. There was implicit in it an assumption of his own intellectual inferiority that was naturally highly disagreeable to him. His view of the relationship in which Miss Smith would stand to him during their association had been based, he now realized, on that first impression of her gained during their brief encounter in the restaurant car. But the present Miss Smith just wasn’t that Miss Smith at all. Her temporary removal into a higher social sphere – one, it seemed, of which she had a little tasted the sweets in earlier days – had transformed the woman. And it hadn’t only given her an enviable confidence. It had positively transformed her wits. Poor old Sonia had been clever in her way. It did, after all, need a certain cleverness to pour out all that stuff on the printing press. But Sonia had never had the power to run things that this woman showed. It became clearer and clearer to Petticate that there would be enormous relief in the moment at which Miss Susie disappeared over his horizon for the last time.

  And at least she seemed to be all for getting on with the job.

  ‘About this San Giorgio place,’ she said. ‘Would Sonia ever have been there?’

  ‘Not along with me. But probably she was there at one time or another. When she was younger, she put in quite a lot of time travelling around.’

  ‘I see. Well, that’s not serious. What do they talk there?’

  ‘In San Giorgio? Why, they talk Italian, of course.’

  ‘In Italy, is it? Well, I did once have ten days in a motor-coach there. Did Sonia talk Italian?’

  ‘She talked a little. The usual thing.’

  ‘Bad accent?’

  ‘Very bad.’ Petticate, who prided himself on speaking what was virtually Tuscan in a Roman mouth, was decided about this.

  ‘Well, I can have a few phrases in a bad accent too. It will all be pie, this Accademia Minerva business. Still, there’s no point in taking risks. We’ll arrive by air just before the curtain goes up, and have a date in Paris the next day. Dear old Paree.’

  Petticate frowne
d.

  ‘You can’t talk about Paree,’ he said. ‘It’s an impossible vulgarism – and out of date at that.’

  Susie was greatly amused.

  ‘And do you think I don’t know all that stuff? But I could call it Paree to that old Lady Edward and get away with it. It’s just a matter of the right air. Will you take a bet on it?’

  ‘Certainly not. This is a serious matter.’

  ‘It’s a lark, dearie. It’s an enormous lark – or what would really be the point of it? What was the point of your writing that Sonia Wayward novel, if it wasn’t a lark?’

  ‘That was a matter of sober bread and butter.’ Petticate judged it well to keep economic realities if possible, well within Susie’s view. At the same time, he was struck by what she said. He was both struck and depressed by it, because it suddenly made him feel old. He had, after all, gone at What Youth Desires at least partly for a lark. But he hadn’t stayed the pace. The élan with which he had started off had all been drained out of him by the horrors and alarms he had been through. Now, he just wanted to survive. And it was this still almost unknown female who was making all the going.

  ‘But now about this Gialletti,’ Susie was saying. ‘He’s another matter, if you ask me. That’s where the tough work lies.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Petticate was rather surprised by this estimate. ‘It seems he never knew Sonia very well, although he talks about her in a silly enthusiastic way. All you’ll have to do is to sit on a throne or whatever it’s called in his studio while he chucks his clay about. You needn’t even talk much.’

  Susie shook her head.

  ‘Believe me dearie, if we come a cropper, it will be while that’s going on. What did he like about Sonia? Not, you may be sure, just the look of her in a big vague way. I’ve been in on this, and I know.’

  ‘In on it?’ Petticate was puzzled.

  ‘Modelling, dearie. I once did quite a lot of it. In the altogether. And it had to be that, because all those painters cared about was the exact position of my navel. Unusual, it seems. I’ll show you, one day.’ Susie paused to smile at Petticate’s evident alarm. Almost for the first time, it wasn’t, perhaps, a smile that was wholly kindly. ‘Yes, they just showed no interest in the rest of me – which wasn’t how it was with gentlemen in other professions, I can assure you. It was just my navel – or perhaps I should say the way the position of that a little changed the balance of things generally. And it will be like that with this Gialletti. He’ll know your Sonia’s head like it was a cop with a finger-print. It will be tough, you can take it from me.’

  Petticate was silent for a moment. He remembered the eminent sculptor talking his rubbish about the bones round Sonia’s temples, or something of the sort. Perhaps that wasn’t just the usual pretentious thing artists did go in for. Old Gialletti, after all, was fearfully eminent. Perhaps he really would know Sonia’s temples from anybody else’s in the world. Perhaps – although he himself couldn’t see it – Susie’s temples were quite different.

  ‘He’s pretty old, is Gialletti.’ Petticate spoke without a great deal of conviction. ‘I rather got the impression that this affair of Sonia might be about his last portrait bust. He mayn’t be as acute as he still thinks he is.’

  ‘We’ll hope he isn’t. I wonder how long he’ll want?’

  ‘I found out something about that. His usual method with these things is every day for a week, and then it’s all over.’

  Susie considered this with more sobriety than she had as yet shown about anything.

  ‘No use putting it off,’ she said. ‘We’d better get cracking tomorrow. Drive straight up to town, I’d say, and simply ring the bell. There’s value’ – Susie paused, as if seeking for an expression quite out of the ordinary – ‘there’s psychological value in surprise… And now we’ll wash up.’

  Petticate washed up without protest. The process reminded him, more than a little nostalgically, of life on the yacht before Sonia had been so inconsiderate as to die on him and involve him in all this.

  ‘Yes,’ Susie said as she put away the dishes, ‘we’ll go by car, this time. What sort of a car do you run, dearie?’

  Petticate named the highly respectable species of conveyance which had now served his needs for some years.

  But Susie shook her head.

  ‘I think,’ she said, ‘you’d better think of getting an Aston Martin. There’s a lot to be said for a touch of class.’

  7

  Gialletti’s house in Chelsea looked across the river towards Battersea Park. Or rather it didn’t, on the sunny autumn morning upon which Petticate and Susie Smith arrived before it, do precisely this. The prospect was there, but the house had the air of having shut its eyes to it, since the blinds were down in all but two of the top windows.

  ‘Perhaps they’re away.’ Susie, standing on the doorstep, said this almost hopefully. For the first time since Petticate had renewed his acquaintance with her, she was perceptibly nervous. It was something he found himself regarding as ominous. He knew that if Susie began to fumble she would be lost. But of course it was by no means certain that she would do that. Many an actress before Susie Smith had been in a pitiable state just before putting up a superb performance. And her nervousness on this occasion did testify to her acute intelligence. She was undoubtedly right – Petticate had concluded upon reflection – in seeing the business with Gialletti as her supreme test.

  ‘Try another ring,’ he said. ‘There may be nobody about except Gialletti himself, and he may be buried in his studio.’

  Susie tried another ring. It had no effect in securing any attendance upon the front door, but it was presumably the occasion of a window at the top of the house being thrown violently open. An elderly woman thrust her head through it with an air of some indignation.

  ‘Ha lei chiamato?’ she shouted.

  ‘Certainly we rang.’ Petticate thought the question plainly superfluous. And he was reluctant to begin bellowing Italian in a London street. ‘Is Mr Gialletti at home?’

  ‘Il signore è partito. Partiremo presto. Viva la libertà!’ The woman waved her hands. She appeared to be in a high state of excitement.

  ‘Then isn’t there anybody at home?’

  ‘La scala secondaria.’ The elderly woman made a large circular gesture, and banged down the window.

  ‘How extremely uncivil,’ Petticate said.

  ‘An Italian, was she? You can’t expect them to behave like we do.’ Susie offered this pacifically. ‘But what did she say?’

  ‘She appeared to suggest that we should find another staircase at the back.’

  ‘Then round we go. The studio may be in a mews, or something like that.’ Susie glanced along the street. ‘Along there, I think.’

  It proved to be a good guess. At the back of the house there was a building which must at one time have sheltered carriage, horses, and coachman. It was now rather lavishly and artily got up – in a manner, however, seeming to date from a good many years back, when Gialletti had been fashionable rather than eminent.

  ‘That’s it,’ Petticate said, and pointed to an affair like a crane that protruded from an upper aperture. ‘I suppose they hoist up his chunks of marble with that.’

  ‘I don’t see any way of getting in.’ Susie studied the building. ‘Oh, yes – up that outside staircase. It lets you in right at the top.’

  They climbed, and came to a door that was ajar. There was no bell or knocker, but in the middle was a small and tarnished brass plate saying ‘Gialletti’. Petticate thumped on the wood and got no reply, although there was some suggestion of sound and movement from inside.

  ‘Better walk in.’ Susie said. She seemed quite to have recovered her nerve. ‘I’d say it’s what’s intended – wouldn’t you?’

  They walked in, and found themselves at once in an open gallery, and looked down into a vast studio filled with a cold clear light that fell through correspondingly vast northward-facing skylights. Curtains, tapestries, and a rolle
d-up carpet suggested considerable luxury, but the whole place was clearly in process of being closed down. A row of packing cases along one wall appeared intended to take a collection of large and middle-sized bronzes stacked on the floor. Indeed it looked as if nothing was intended to stay put except several masses of marble so huge and amorphous that they had the appearance of geological phenomena which some seismic disturbance had thrust up through the floor of the studio. Or they might have been icebergs, for they gave the whole place a decidedly chilly look. Yet it wasn’t, in fact, chilly. It was, on the contrary, rather hot.

  At the far end of the studio was a large stove. It was alight and blazing fiercely. This accounted for the temperature. Petticate saw that it was being used simply for the rapid disposal of piles of miscellaneous rubbish. He was just taking in this fact with some perplexity when there was a clanking sound immediately underneath him, and a young man appeared from below the gallery. He was shoving a wheelbarrow piled with litter, and for a moment it looked as if he were entirely naked. Petticate – and certainly Susie, who gave a squeak of pleasure – had remarked a golden torso, and a ripple of muscle under a fine skin, before it became apparent that the owner of these attributes was at least wearing some very short shorts.

  ‘Hullo!’ Susie called out. ‘Please, may we come down?’

  The young man dropped the handles of his barrow, turned round, and looked up at the gallery.

  ‘Oh, I say, Mrs Petticate – what tremendous fun!’ The young man, having produced this greeting without a second’s hesitation, turned a more formal, but still frank and pleasing, regard upon Mrs Petticate’s husband. ‘Good morning, sir. You won’t know me, but I’m Timmy Gialletti. How nice of you to drop in. Won’t you come downstairs?’

  They found an inside staircase and descended it. Petticate, a good deal shaken by his sudden immersion in the world of What Youth Desires, found it necessary to resist a tendency positively to grope his way. He had entirely forgotten the existence of this young man, whose acquaintance Sonia must have gained when making a professional study of the Giallettis from the life. Of Timmy, indeed, such a study might rather be called from the nude; and Petticate wondered whether some morbid strain of exhibitionism was perhaps in question.