The New Sonia Wayward Page 4

  Petticate chuckled – but without eliciting any surprise from Dr Gregory, who naturally supposed his diversion to be occasioned by one of The Times’ irresistibly humorous Fourth Leaders.

  Income tax. There was really no difficulty there either. Every year Sonia must sign a return of income – and perhaps a receipt or two if the Commissioners generously decided, as they sometimes do, to send some inconsiderable trifle back. But nobody is going to scrutinize that sort of signature. Of course any sort of trouble over taxation would be fatal, and he would now himself have to do all the accounting with a care that should insure that no awkward inquiries were ever launched. Sonia’s own bank account presented another problem. There would have to be a letter closing that – and it is precisely to a banker that one doesn’t care to send a signature which it not quite all it should be. Still, there was only a minor risk there. In fact it looked as if, on the business and legal side, common prudence would again ensure sailing that was plain enough. It was in the social sphere that the real conundrums lay.

  He must decide, in the first place, where Sonia had gone to. It was all very well being airy with Wedge, but with his neighbours at Snigg’s Green another and different technique would be required. To announce that his wife had departed into the blue would be to invite no end of gossip. On the other hand, if he acquiesced in the natural assumption that he knew her whereabouts, there would presently be requests for her address from people who wanted to correspond with her on one trifling occasion or another. So Sonia must be represented as having gone away in circumstances that precluded her having a known address for the time being, but which held out the expectation of her being heard from quite soon. That would afford a breathing- space. And during that breathing-space he must decide what he himself was going to do.

  He had, he told himself, great freedom of manoeuvre. A successful novelist can take up residence pretty well in any corner of the globe that strikes her fancy – and so can her husband, if he happens to be a retired professional man of independent means. Taxation and the servant problem being what they were, people in their position were constantly going off nowadays to settle in quarters which would have been regarded as merely outlandish a generation ago. Sonia, in fact, had only to find some enchanting spot to which she should summon him in her well-known imperious way. And he had only to pack his trunks and follow her.

  The whole thing must be made not too vague and yet not too precise. It wouldn’t do, for instance, to name Nassau or Nairobi, since that might well lead to pilgrims from Snigg’s Green or elsewhere making casual attempt to look them up. ‘Sonia has almost settled on the Bahamas, but the Bermudas are another possibility.’ Something like that must be the formula. And once he himself had got plausibly away under cover of it, almost nothing could go wrong.

  Apart from a vague cloud of distant cousins, Sonia had no surviving relations. He himself, although possessed, of course, of a certain inherent distinction, had long been content with a private station in virtue of which the world was likely to take very little interest in his movements or circumstances. If permanent exile didn’t suit him – and he much doubted whether it would – he could always come home for a month or two now and then, explaining to anybody who inquired that his wife’s health – or perhaps just her unremitting devotion to the art of fiction – did not admit of her travelling at the moment. He might even, if he thought out the problems clearly beforehand, revisit Snigg’s Green and treat its inhabitants to a great deal of agreeable fantasy. For there was no doubt – Petticate told himself, still behind his Times – that he would come to take a virtuoso’s delight in the whole delicious deception. That he would be fooling people on rather a large scale – for, after all, didn’t tens of thousands of people regularly look out for the new Sonia Wayward? – was the particular charm of the whole situation.

  Colonel Petticate had reached this entirely satisfactory point in his reflections, and had become aware, from without, of the slightly enhanced bustle that preluded his departure for the next stage of his adventure, when the voice of Dr Gregory sounded from across the compartment.

  ‘Petticate,’ Dr Gregory said, ‘doesn’t it look as if your wife is going to miss the train?’

  4

  It was the first unexpected question he had been asked about Sonia. And he didn’t stand up to it at all well. In fact he lowered his newspaper and stared at Dr Gregory in consternation.

  ‘My wife!’ he said.

  There was a moment’s silence in which he realized that he had spoken the word rather wildly – so that it would scarcely have surprised him to hear himself add, like the unfortunate Moor of Venice, What wife? I have no wife. Quite abruptly, he had almost met absolute shipwreck.

  And Dr Gregory was giving him a sharp look.

  ‘I ran across her at the bookstall,’ he said.

  ‘Sonia?’ Petticate was entirely surprised to hear his own voice. He had very strongly the sensation – sometimes referred to in Sonia’s fictions – of being struck dumb. ‘You spoke to her?’

  ‘No, no – I merely noticed her buying a magazine.’ Dr Gregory paused as the guard’s whistle blew. ‘She has missed it,’ he added.

  It ought certainly to have been true. Only it wasn’t. For, even as Dr Gregory spoke, there was a shout on the platform, a door opened and then banged shut again – and Petticate, glancing, already pale and stricken, into the corridor, saw with frozen horror his wife standing there. It was only for a second’s space. She had boarded, along with a suitcase, the already moving train. And then instantly she had vanished in search of another compartment.

  Dr Gregory had seen nothing of this preternatural catastrophe. He had been much too occupied in staring at Petticate – towards whom he now leant forward for the purpose of making a professional grab at his wrist.

  ‘Keep still,’ Dr Gregory said. ‘Breathe easily. And don’t be alarmed. Just a digestive matter. It will pass off in a few minutes.’ He accompanied these remarks with a glance in which Petticate, even in his prostration, recognized the plainest expectation of immediate fatality. No doubt Gregory supposed him to have suffered a severe cerebral thrombosis.

  The perception of this hopelessly erroneous diagnosis almost steadied Petticate. Gregory had always been a bit of an ass.

  ‘You’re quite right,’ he heard himself say. ‘Flatulence, Gregory – just a touch of flatulence. Been troubled a little by it lately. And you needn’t bother about that pulse.’

  Gregory sat back. In appearance, at least, Petticate must have rallied. Nevertheless his mind was in a dreadful state. It was not the less so because it had registered, at least for a brief moment, enormous relief. Sonia was alive! The thing hadn’t happened. It had been all a dream.

  Petticate closed his eyes, and tried to accept Dr Gregory’s advice to breathe easily. He searched for proofs and signs – for anything in his recent circumstances that would render indubitable the fact that it had been a dream; that he had suffered a terrible nightmare in which he had appeared to lose his wife. But he searched, of course, in vain. He hadn’t just woken up. He had lost Sonia. He had himself done that thing…

  And yet she was on board the train. Sonia – or was it Sonia’s ghost? – was within a few yards of him now. Still with his eyes closed, Petticate set his mind painfully to work. Not a ghost – because there is no such thing. And not a hallucination. He could give himself no reason for knowing this – but he did know it, all the same. There had been real flesh and blood in the corridor. It was the real Sonia. She was on her way home.

  But it was impossible, he told himself. And then, in an instantaneous flash that brought simultaneously a rush of horror and of relief, he saw the entirely naturalistic, the perfectly rational truth of the matter. The Sonia who had seemed to sink forever beneath the waters of the English Channel had not been dead but alive. He had been too cocksure, too confident of his sadly rusty medical expertness. Almost, he had been aware of that at the time. And now real professional knowledge came back to
him. He remembered cases of trance, of suddenly induced coma, of which he had read. When that sort of thing happened – and it did happen, although admittedly it was rare – only tests far more searching than he had applied could distinguish between the resulting suspended animation and actual death. That was it!

  But, even so…? And then he recalled the other yacht. He had been very shaky, and the sight of that unexpected yacht so close at hand had pretty well finished him for the time. He had staggered into the cabin, and anything might have happened after that. Probably the shock of her sudden immersion had brought Sonia back to consciousness. And, knowing what he had done, she had managed to attract the attention of that other craft, and had been taken on board it. Then she had persuaded its owners to sail straight on. She had done that because she was already nursing some diabolical scheme of revenge.

  The sudden glimpse of this extreme wickedness in Sonia upset Petticate even more violently than the first shock of her return had done. From head to foot, he suddenly discovered himself to be bathed in an icy sweat. And Gregrory was looking at him in that queer way again. He found he couldn’t stand it. He staggered to his feet.

  ‘Just going along the corridor,’ he muttered almost incoherently. And then he escaped from the compartment.

  Petticate stumbled down the corridor with his senses in considerable disorder. Far on his left hand, he was perfectly aware of the silhouette of Windsor Castle against the skyline. But on the persons seated immediately behind the plate-glass on his right, his vision refused to give him any intelligible report. He was clearly too apprehensive of what he might glimpse there. Probably he had been rash to emerge from his own compartment. If Sonia saw him – as, almost certainly, she had not done when she tumbled into the train – it might precipitate a crisis. It might bring about at once an appalling public exposure, which otherwise he might yet find some means of avoiding. His best plan would be to lock himself into the nearest lavatory and think.

  Petticate did this. It was a resource altogether distasteful to his refined sensibilities – the more so when people came and rattled at the door. Such behaviour in first-class passengers – if they were first-class passengers – struck him as unseemly if not positively immoral. He stood by the window and peered through the little oval of clear glass, set high in the pane, which was all that the modesty of this apartment permitted by way of glimpse of the outer world.

  He had better, he thought, murder Sonia.

  The abrupt emergence of this idea occasioned Petticate great dismay. Here was the logical course to pursue – and yet only a few minutes ago the emotion which knowledge of his wife’s continued existence prompted in him had been one of vast relief! It was evident that he was in some state of intellectual confusion. There was, of course, nothing that he more disliked. He had better forget about that feeling of relief – which had demonstrably proceeded from some muddle unworthy of him – and get to work upon the details of his new and entirely rational proposal. For there could be no doubt as to the necessity of the thing. Sonia’s present conduct was incompatible with anything other than some plan for his utter exposure and confusion.

  He had no time, in fact, to spare. And there was just a possibility, he thought, that Sonia, who like himself would be travelling first-class, might be discovered in a compartment by herself. Perhaps, having located her, he could simply rush in, hurl open the door at the farther end of the compartment, and pitch her through it –That would almost certainly do the trick, since they must be travelling at over sixty miles an hour.

  It was an excellent plan, because an utterly simple one. Then he realized, with a shock of dismay, that it had been conceived by a mind fatally behind the times. Railway coaches such as these no longer had doors at the farther side; their only mode of egress was through the corridor. And unless, as was most unlikely, Sonia had a whole coach to herself, bundling her first into the corridor and then through another door on to the permanent way would simply not be feasible.

  Petticate sat down – it was again a disagreeable thing to do – and reviewed other methods of killing a vigorous woman such as Sonia. The one course he must avoid – and he saw this with perfect clarity – was that of relying upon any of those methods which were peculiarly within the scope of his own profession. It must not – decidedly it must not – be anything that could be called a doctor’s murder.

  Surprisingly in one whose mental processes were normally so acute, Colonel Petticate spent a good fifteen minutes in these lethal reveries. In fact the train was already running into Reading before it dawned on him that all these drastic thoughts were needless. Why ever should he murder poor old Sonia? Surely all that was necessary was to insist that she was off her head? For he had himself, so far, said and done nothing at all which could be taken to bear out the unlikely story she would have to tell.

  It was true that he had arrived back in port without her and said nothing. But if she had been, say, in some state of evident emotional disturbance, and had insisted on being somewhere set quietly ashore, his subsequent conduct could only be read as having been thoroughly discreet. Of course there would be difficulties. It was going to be embarrassing to have Sonia running round with such an extraordinary yarn. And if she persisted in it, and he found it necessary to have the poor soul confined in a mental hospital, it would scarcely be possible to carry out his engaging plan of writing all the new Sonia Waywards himself. If, on the other hand, Sonia thought better of her plan of public denunciation, it was unlikely that she would be willing to have much to do with him in future – or even to support him in the station of life to which he was accustomed.

  So perhaps, after all, and despite the fact that there could be no legal case against him, he had better proceed as planned. A fire? A car accident? He could not be certain that Sonia had not already told her story to someone. It was a possibility that made his task a peculiarly delicate one.

  The people on that yacht. Suddenly, and with a fresh chill of dismay, Petticate realized that he had been leaving them fatally out of account. Whatever story he told must be made to square with the fact that they had veritably fished Sonia out of the sea. And this, when he came to ponder it, just couldn’t be done. Accident might have taken Sonia overboard. Or she might have jumped into the sea as a first expression of the lunacy which subsequently prompted her to a baseless charge against her husband. But nothing could account for that husband’s keeping quiet about it and giving out that his wife had simply departed on some sort of holiday. Nothing whatever.

  Petticate saw that he had now at last accurately analysed the whole situation. And he just didn’t know where to turn. In fact, it wasn’t Sonia Wayward who was at sea, after all. It was her husband. Murder wouldn’t do – for as soon as the people in the yacht told their story he would almost certainly be done for. Only one course remained open to him: the most disagreeable he could conceive. He must throw himself on Sonia’s mercy.

  After all, he said to himself as he unlocked the lavatory door and emerged again into the corridor, it wasn’t as if he had acted in any criminal way against Sonia. On the contrary, hadn’t he just this moment turned down the idea of murdering her? He had never even acted in any unfriendly spirit against her. If he had been a trifle unceremonious with her, that had been when he had supposed her to be dead. What he had done had been the result partly of shock and partly of a positively laudable plan to keep, so to speak, Sonia Wayward’s flag flying. If Sonia were reasonable – but unfortunately no woman is that – she would feel, on balance, that she owed him a certain gratitude for his conduct of the affair.

  Of course she might be nursing entirely mistaken notions. She might imagine that it hadn’t been a mere dead body that he had supposed himself to have chucked overboard. If this were so, the sooner he made an effort to re-establish himself in her good graces the better. It would be very awkward, for instance, if unjust indignation, bubbling up in her during the course of this journey, prompted her to leave the train at Oxford – which was the next
stop – for the purpose of communicating with the police. Yes, he had better nerve himself to seek her out at once. There was something to be said, perhaps, for a first interview in the publicity, or semi-publicity, of a railway compartment.

  Petticate moved forward along the train. His vision was at least no longer playing tricks with him, and he could take in his fellow travellers, compartment by compartment, as he walked. There wasn’t, after all, any great crowd. Here and there even a second-class compartment was entirely empty. In others there were pieces of hand-luggage but no passengers. That meant that people were having tea in the restaurant car in front. Perhaps Sonia was there.

  He went on, glancing into one compartment after another. It was a most disagreeable occupation. At any moment he might find himself looking into the accusing eyes of his wife. The thought made him remember – and for a second or two it brought a quite fresh sense of shock – that they were eyes which he had clumsily attempted to close, when Sonia was lying in her coma in the cockpit of the yacht. Her eyes, being a very unusual dark green, were her most striking feature. And Petticate felt a most disconcerting dread at the prospect of meeting them. Nevertheless he pressed on. He pressed on, in fact, until he was brought up short by colliding with some massive but more or less pneumatic obstacle. He had been so intent upon the successive compartments as he passed them that he had bumped straight into a passenger walking in the other direction.

  Much to Petticate’s alarm, the passenger roared aloud. And he was very little reassured when he realized that the roar was a roar of laughter, and moreover that it proceeded through female lips. There could be only one explanation, and a glance, as he recovered balance, assured him of its correctness. Here, most disastrously, was another neighbour. It was Mrs Gotlop herself.

  ‘Why – if it isn’t my own enchanting Blimp!’

  Mrs Gotlop, who combined large expanses of tweed with a profusion of rings, earrings, and bangles of obtrusively barbaric suggestion, had seized Petticate’s hand in a savage grip. He disliked this even more than being greeted with such a foolish and impertinent nickname. But no sort of indignation ever registered with Mrs Gotlop, and by now Petticate was, after all, pretty well used to her. For Augusta Gotlop did not merely live at Snigg’s Green. She was an authoress of talent, and as such at once the rival and the familiar of Sonia Wayward.