The New Sonia Wayward Page 5

  ‘Ruddy Blimp!’ Mrs Gotlop shouted this not so much, it seemed, by way of further jovial insult as in tribute to Petticate’s complexion – which still presumably bore, despite the ghastly pallors to which it had of late been intermittently reduced, the tokens of his recent marine vacation. ‘And rural Blimp! And martial Blimp!’ Mrs Gotlop robustly continued, still straightforwardly torturing Petticate’s right hand. ‘What a sight for sore eyes, after all those bloodless bookworms in the B.M.!’

  Petticate managed to murmur an expression of hope that Mrs Gotlop’s researches in the reading-room of the Museum were approaching their usual successful termination. Mrs Gotlop’s books were always biographies of minor eighteenth-century notabilities, and what her scholarly investigations invariably brought for the first time to the light of day were episodes of blameless sentiment which blended admirably with Mrs Gotlop’s sweet and faded prose. For Mrs Gotlop was a striking instance of the disparity which often exists between a writer when commanded by his or her Muse, and the same writer when going about his or her common diurnal occasions. Whereas Sonia Wayward was exactly like her books, Augusta Gotlop was precisely not. Petticate felt that he preferred Sonia. Indeed, swaying in the corridor of this horrible train, and gripped still in the paw of this appalling woman, he felt a sudden strong nostalgic affection for Sonia, so that he positively longed to locate her. It was this feeling that controlled his next utterance.

  ‘You don’t happen to have seen Sonia, by any chance?’

  ‘Here on the train? Not a sliver of the darling!’ Mrs Gotlop laughed loudly, unnervingly, but apparently for mere laughter’s sake. ‘Why, you haven’t lost her, have you?’

  ‘No, no. That’s to say, I rather think she just caught the train. Perhaps she’s having tea. I’m going forward to look.’ Petticate was confused. He had a notion that he mustn’t say anything that was inconsistent with whatever he had said to old Dr Gregory. But he couldn’t remember whether, to old Dr Gregory, he had said anything relevant at all. Nor, just for a second, could he remember just what he was really on his way to do. There had been something about throwing Sonia out of the train. Was that it? But, no – of course it wasn’t. He had seen that for some reason action of that sort was no good. Reconciliation – that was what was on the carpet.

  Petticate, startled to find his wits working so badly, now made some effort simply to push past Mrs Gotlop. But she was a large woman, and here in the narrow corridor the operation involved an awkward and even indelicate squeeze. It was at the crisis of this, and when his face was within a couple of inches of hers, that Mrs Gotlop started shouting again.

  ‘Drinks!’ Mrs Gotlop shouted. ‘Drinks! Drinks!’

  Petticate understood that this was an invitation – and one which certainly included Sonia as well as himself.

  ‘That would be delightful,’ he muttered – muttered because he found it difficult to talk virtually straight into Mrs Gotlop’s teeth. ‘Some time.’

  ‘No, no! Tomorrow! Drinks! Usual time!’ Mrs Gotlop’s laughter gained a new resonance. ‘If Sonia doesn’t mind meeting her rascal of a publisher.’

  ‘Wedge?’ This time, Petticate didn’t mutter. He gaped.

  ‘Certainly, certainly! Ambrose Wedge is to be weekending with the Shotovers at Little Stoat. And Rickie Shotover has promised to bring him over. Gin galore!’

  Petticate’s disgust of a woman who could say ‘Gin galore’ was quite swallowed up in vexation. Even if he could square Sonia so that they told a common story, it would be extremely awkward if Wedge and Mrs Gotlop exchanged notes. And, of course, they were sure to. It would emerge that he had told Wedge that Sonia had gone off into the blue, and had assured Mrs Gotlop, only a few hours later, that they were travelling home together on the same train. It didn’t matter very much, perhaps. With Sonia alive after all, what might crudely be called exposure carried hazards less dire than they would otherwise have been. But Petticate liked neatness in everything round about him. And the Sonia business had become, to say the least, quite desperately untidy.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ he said, as he finally negotiated Mrs Gotlop’s right hip. ‘I’ll have to see how I’m fixed.’ He frowned, conscious that there was something slightly ominous in this precise turn of phrase. And then he added with deliberate bravado: ‘Sonia, you know. I can’t be sure what she may be cooking up for me over the next few days. Goodbye.’

  And Petticate fled down the corridor.

  He had gone quite a long way, and was supposing that there could be only one or two more coaches before the restaurant car, when his attention was caught and held, quite unaccountably, by an empty second-class compartment. Not indeed that it was quite empty. There was a suitcase planted on a corner seat, as if to reserve – unnecessarily – a place for its absent owner. And Petticate believed that he had seen the suitcase before. That was what had arrested him.

  Yes – he surely couldn’t be mistaken. In that horrifying instant, when Sonia, returned from the dead, had tumbled into the moving train, the case she was carrying had, by some trick of his startled nerves, photographed itself indelibly on his mind.

  It wasn’t at all Sonia’s sort of luggage. But then the clothes she had been wearing were decidedly not her sort of clothes either. All that was to be expected. The poor old soul had been fished out of the English Channel in a bathing-costume – and naturally without twopence. She had borrowed what she could for the purpose of getting home. It was perhaps a little odd that these borrowings included a suitcase, since it was hard to see how she could have anything to convey in such a receptacle.

  Still, there it was. He had no doubt whatever that the shabby-looking object on the seat was what he had glimpsed in that agonizing moment.

  Suddenly he noticed that the suitcase had a paste-board label attached to it. The thing was hanging with only a blank side exposed, but he could easily slip into the deserted compartment and see what was written on the other side. He looked up and down the corridor. There was nobody about. He pushed back the door of the compartment, walked in, and turned the label over. Printed in a straggling and uncontrolled hand he read:

  Smith

  116 Eastmoor Road

  Oxford

  Petticate slipped back into the corridor and stood there for some moments, irresolute and scowling. What he had read was presumably the name and address of the normal owner of the suitcase. But there was the odd fact that the train was heading for Oxford now; they were just passing through Didcot, which meant that they would be in Oxford in twenty minutes. Was it possible that Sonia, in pursuance of some dreadful design against him, had actually taken on the obscure name of Smith and the resolution of going into hiding?

  There was a large vague threat in this conjecture which Petticate found unnerving. It sent him, after another furtive look up and down the corridor, back into the compartment. Quickly he tried to open the case. But, although it was such a battered affair, ready indeed to give at the corners, it was nevertheless securely locked. Petticate, aware that he was now chargeable with loitering under suspicious circumstances, judged it well to waste no more time, but once more to get back into the corridor. He must simply continue his search.

  And then, with an effect of great suddenness, it was over. He had entered the restaurant car – and there she was. She was sitting facing him, and there was an empty seat in front of her. Petticate took a deep breath, walked straight forward, and sat down.

  ‘Sonia,’ he said. ‘Sonia – dear old girl – just listen. I’ll explain.’ He got so far, and then stopped. He had realized that the woman wasn’t Sonia. She was looking at him out of amazing dark green eyes – eyes in which he obscurely discerned that there lurked some extreme trepidation. But she wasn’t Sonia.

  Petticate was never to know how long he had sat there, speechless and staring. The woman was younger than Sonia – but not much younger. She was less good-looking – but not much less good-looking. And in the coming together of these two approximations there was, he could
appreciate, something that enchanced the fact of actual resemblance, both of feature and figure, to the borders of positive hallucination. But it was the eyes – the amazing likeness of those so striking eyes – that really clinched the matter. He did know, it was true, absolutely and without a flicker of doubt, that this was not Sonia. But then he was Sonia’s husband.

  But no! And Petticate felt the restaurant car wheel around him, much as if it had been abruptly derailed. He wasn’t Sonia’s husband. Not any longer. Sonia was dead.

  5

  ‘I’m most terribly sorry,’ Petticate managed to say to the strange woman opposite whom he had sat down. ‘I mistook you for my wife.’

  ‘Not at all,’ the woman said. She spoke in a husky and gasping voice which could scarcely be habitual with her.

  It seemed to Petticate that she was unnaturally alarmed. It was understandable, of course, that she should at least be disconcerted, for he had addressed her, in the first instance, face to face and having taken a full view of her. Had he said ‘I mistook you for an acquaintance’ it might have made the incident seem a little less bizarre. Moreover – he acknowledged as his head cleared a little – he had made a tactical mistake. It wasn’t, in all probability, in the least an important mistake, since he would never see this total stranger again. But it was certainly true that, in a general way, the less he said about his wife the better. There might be a danger, he could foresee, that he should come to talk obsessively about Sonia on inappropriate occasions.

  ‘I hope I didn’t startle you,’ he said. For some reason he had failed to stand up again and walk away after apologizing for his error.

  ‘Not at all,’ the woman repeated. This time her voice was even huskier. And the tea-cup which she had just picked up trembled in her hand in a fashion that wasn’t to be accounted for by the motion of the train. Petticate decided that she was for some reason in a bad nervous state, so that his gaffe had been doubly unfortunate. He was about to make his escape when the woman spoke again – setting down her cup, as she did so, with an odd air of sudden resolution.

  ‘But you don’t think I believe you, do you?’ the woman asked.

  Petticate could hear the breath drawn sharply in through his own teeth. They were coming too thick and fast – the jolts he was receiving on this abominable journey. He felt himself to be physically tiring. It was as if for a long time he had been plodding up some steep interminable hill.

  ‘Believe me?’ he echoed stupidly.

  ‘You don’t think I believe you, do you?’ The woman repeated her identical words with a stupidity quite as striking as his own. ‘Or do you?’ she added – rather as if with a desperate attempt to carry the matter farther.

  ‘Why ever shouldn’t you?’ Petticate felt dimly that whimsical indignation was the right note. But he had no notion whether he had contrived anything approximating to it.

  ‘I know all about you,’ the woman said. ‘So why pretend? Thought I was your wife, indeed!’

  It was an instance of the sterling quality of Colonel Petticate’s character as an Englishman that even in this most alarming turn in his affairs his powers of social appraisement did not altogether cease to operate. This woman was not, like Sonia and Mrs Gotlop, a lady. On the other hand she was not hopelessly plebeian. She had been, perhaps, in some position which had enabled her to draw profit from the observation of her betters and could no doubt cut a genteel figure for a time if she tried – which, for the present, she was too excited to do.

  Petticate felt a returning flicker of confidence. It was no doubt the result of this perception of his own superior social station. And the woman’s words, he suddenly saw, were susceptible of a harmless, a merely vulgar, interpretation. She had been insinuating that his sitting down beside her on the excuse of a mistaken identification had been a subterfuge for the purpose of making some improper proposal. She thought that he had been ‘picking her up’.

  Most naturally, the delicacy of Colonel Petticate was outraged by such an imputation. But at the same time, of course, he was vastly relieved. For a moment, he had believed that he was hearing something with a decidedly sinister ring. That had been nonsense. The extraordinary circumstance of the woman’s close likeness to Sonia had disturbed his judgement. All that was now needed was a display of dignity.

  ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I regret this incident, which is doubtless liable to misconstruction. I renew my apologies. And now you will permit me to withdraw.’

  The woman was not impressed.

  ‘Your wife’s dead,’ she said. ‘And well you know it.’

  Petticate perceived – rather as drowning men are said to perceive irrelevant things – that an attendant of whose existence he had been unaware had set before him a pot of tea, a tea-cake, a slice of buttered toast, a piece of white bread and butter, a piece of brown bread and butter, and a large cream bun. The man was now officiously pushing towards him a contraption filled with miniature pots of jam. Petticate looked at this coarse abundance rather as the condemned murderer must look at his boiled egg. Fantastic speculations flitted uselessly through his head. Perhaps Sonia had a younger sister of whom he had never heard. Perhaps that younger sister had happened to be on board that second yacht. And perhaps this was she – armed with Sonia’s story, and subjecting him to fiendish torture. Or perhaps…

  ‘Your wife’s dead,’ the woman was repeating. ‘And it’s my belief you drowned her.’

  Instinct prompted Petticate to pour himself out a cup of tea. He took a scalding gulp of it.

  ‘You had better be careful what you’re saying,’ he managed to articulate. And he added: ‘Talk of that sort is best conducted in private.’ He had seized upon the wild thought that this woman with her fiend-like knowledge could perhaps be bought off.

  ‘We’ve heard of that sort of heart attack before, haven’t we? And it’s meant the rope for some of them that said they found the body.’

  Petticate took a second gulp of tea. Inevitably, it scalded worse than the first.

  ‘I didn’t drown my wife,’ he said – and reflected that never could a true statement have sounded so like a miserable lie. ‘I swear I didn’t.’

  ‘Grabbed her by the ankles,’ the woman said. ‘You read about these things in the Sundays, don’t you? No end of times. And tipped her up in the bath.’

  For a moment Petticate supposed this last astounding word to represent a piece of slang – as when the sea is sometimes referred to as the big drink. But the invoking of the Sunday newspapers was definitive. He gave a long painful gasp.

  ‘You think,’ he asked, ‘that I drowned my wife in her bath?’

  ‘Oh, I know it’s not what they said at the inquest–’Enry ’Iggins.’ The woman looked abashed. ‘Henry Higgins, I mean.’

  Once more the train did its derailment act.

  ‘What did you call me?’ he gasped.

  ‘Never mind what I called you. I’m not ashamed of coming from a humble home, I can tell you. There are worse things to be ashamed of than that, aren’t there? You ought to know. You’re Henry Higgins, and you married my aunt!’

  ‘I did nothing of the sort.’ Colonel Petticate was so indignant at this imputation that for a moment he ceased being terrified. ‘I don’t even know your aunt. We couldn’t conceivably move in the same circle. And I am not Henry Higgins!’

  ‘Losing your courage now, aren’t you? You’re a coward, Higgins, and like a coward you’ve acted. Giving yourself out to be a millionaire, and carrying off auntie, and never letting her relations have a sight of either of you, and then drowning her without telling us.’

  ‘Without telling you!’ It was dawning upon Petticate that poor Sonia’s double must be a madwoman.

  ‘Without a word of warning. So how was I to know there would be trouble over those bills? But I tell you, Higgins, if they get me, they’ll get you. So you needn’t come after me about that stuff. Whether you’re a millionaire or not, you’d better pay up and have them ask no questions. I’m not frightened,
I can tell you.’

  ‘There might be two opinions about that – my good woman.’ Petticate made these last words a sort of manifesto of recovered poise. It was clear that he and this deplorable simulacrum of Sonia had been entirely at cross-purposes, and that he had nothing whatever to fear from her. Nor, for that matter, had she anything to fear from him – although, for some reason that was still largely obscure, she seemed on the verge of panic.

  He was glad to think that she was having a bad time. He very properly much resented being taken for some unrefined person called Higgins – and being by implication involved, moreover, in some web of squalid criminal suspicions and petty frauds. It sounded as if this niece of the real Higgins’ late wife had found herself making criminally free with her aunt’s name and credit at some awkward time after the lady’s sudden decease. But Petticate wanted to make no inquiry into all that. The vagaries of low life held no charm for him. He was about to get up and walk away in silent disdain when Sonia’s double forestalled him.

  ‘Oxford,’ she said, as the train slowed down. ‘And I haven’t got my bag!’ She scrambled into the gangway between the tables. ‘But perhaps you’d like to get off here too, Higgins? What about a quiet chat with Lord Nuffield – just as between one millionaire and another?’ This primitive jeer, Petticate observed, appeared to give the wretched woman as much satisfaction as if it had been a withering witticism. And she accompanied it with a defiant look from those astonishing green eyes. ‘Goodbye, Henry Higgins, the great industrialist. And bad luck to you!’