The New Sonia Wayward (10 page)

‘Thank you, sir.’

Petticate reached for the Stilton without appetite. He had strained his ears in an endeavour to determine whether Mrs Hennwife knew or did not know that Sonia and he were supposed to be without any present means of communication. He had, after all, told Sergeant Bradnack so. And Bradnack had no doubt paid Mrs Hennwife’s husband that visit in his pantry. Petticate decided that even in Mrs Hennwife’s dim mind some disturbing thought might be at work. He had better say something more. But
lightly
! That, he reflected, was his cue every time.

‘It’s Mrs Petticate’s old passport, of course. And simply goes back to the Foreign Office.’

‘I see, sir.’

And now Mrs Hennwife did withdraw. Was it entirely his fancy – or had she done so with a shade of haste?

Had he said something utterly fatal?

He hadn’t heard that the Hennwifes had ever been in service with persons resident abroad. Probably they knew nothing about passports. If they did, their knowledge mightn’t extend to the odd fact that when one gets a new passport one keeps the old one as well – with no more than a corner mysteriously lopped from it. But, if Mrs Hennwife
was
curious, there was nothing to prevent her from taking another look at the document at this moment. And even an unintelligent woman could scarcely misunderstand the plain statement that its validity extended over the next two or three years. He hadn’t been too clever with that particular lie.
No
lie – it suddenly struck him – could be nearly as clever as managing to avoid having to tell one. In this particular instance, he should have been content simply to leave Mrs Hennwife guessing – if she
was
guessing. Then, in all probability, it would pass from her mind. Whereas, if she did happen to spot the fact that he had engaged in deliberate and unaccountable prevarication, she would almost certainly pursue the matter.

After his coffee he took a turn in the garden. He was fond of it, and rather strongly felt that he had no inclination to exchange its cherished and familiar blooms for whatever outlandish stuff the Bermudas or Bahamas sprouted. Perhaps if he hung on at Snigg’s Green – or quietly returned to it after, say, a year’s absence – people would simply forget about Sonia: forget about her, that was to say, except as a name on an eagerly awaited title-page. Perhaps he had been exaggerating the difficulties. Perhaps he should work out a bolder policy.

Puffing cigar smoke at the President Hoovers – for he had comfortably old-fashioned ideas about dealing with pests – Petticate tried to work out this more aggressive line of action. The Hennwifes, for example. It was really intolerable that he should be rendered uneasy by them. Would it not, after all, be perfectly simple to turn them out? Would it really be at all likely – as he had rather feebly persuaded himself – to arouse suspicions of any sort? He had only to tell them firmly that he needed them no longer, assure them of excellent references, pay them a month’s wages and board-wages on the spot – and that would be the end of the matter. Probably they would relish the holiday on pay before taking another situation. It was most unlikely that they would attempt to spread malicious gossip. They had always, so far as he knew, been in good service. And they understood that in superior places nobody much wants employees who have been involved in scandal.

It was after having taken a resolution to act in this sense that Petticate returned to his study to get on with
What Youth Desires
. He had locked up the typescript before going to lunch, and no doubt he had better, for the time being, continue to take that precaution. Not that the Hennwifes were at all likely to smell a rat
there
. They were accustomed to the sight of him amiably doing a bit of typing on Sonia’s books, and it was inconceivable that they should penetrate to the fine distinction that he was now engaged in original composition. Of course he couldn’t go on indefinitely tapping away in Sonia’s absence with the Hennwifes still about the place; eventually they would come to judge his industry odd. And that was another reason for getting rid of them. He would speak to Hennwife after dinner.

Petticate entered his study and unlocked his desk. He had got out his papers before he noticed that a small slim book had been put down beside the typewriter. It had a blue cover in which there was cut an oblong window, and within the oblong window there was printed in ink his wife’s name. Most of the cover was taken up with a large gilt representation of a massively uddered cow. It was the sort of book in which conservatively minded tradesmen still render their monthly accounts. And that, in fact, was the explanation of it. It was the account book from Sonia’s diary.

But why should it have thus appeared on Petticate’s desk? Petticate – oddly enough – found himself quite unable to answer this question. So he rang the bell.

It was Hennwife who appeared. The study bell was within his province.

‘You rang, sir?’

‘Yes, Hennwife. What in the world is the dairyman’s book doing here? It’s not the end of the month. And you never bring me these things, in any case.’

‘I beg your pardon, sir. Mrs H thought you would understand. I think she mentioned a matter of the mistress’ passport. She said she had noticed it in the mistress’ room, sir. And you asked her to put it on your desk. You offered certain observations on it, sir, if my wife was not mistaken. But of course she
was
mistaken – in another sense, that is, sir. What she remarked, as you will now see, was not the travel document she had supposed. It was
that
.’ And with a gesture which indubitably contained a hint of insolence, Hennwife pointed at the gilded cow.

Petticate stared at the thing. It was uncommonly like a British passport. The cow, although unnaturally square, was not, indeed, quite so square as the Lion and the Unicorn fighting for the Crown. And where a passport would have said ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ this object said ‘Wm. Snailum, High Class Dairyman, Snigg’s Green.’ But the resemblance was there, all the same.

It was instantly in Petticate’s mind that he was confronted with alternative possibilities, each of them dire, but one decidedly direr than the other. Hennwife might be speaking the truth. Mrs H – as he somewhat familiarly called her – might have mistaken the dairyman’s book for a passport, and discovered her error only when she went, on Petticate’s instruction, to fetch it. If that were the state of the case, then he himself had offered ‘observations’ – as Hennwife called them – that were substantially unaccountable. He had represented himself as unconcernedly aware of the fact that an obsolete passport of Sonia’s was indeed in her room and waiting to be returned to the Foreign Office.

But was this the likelier of the alternatives? Petticate wished he could believe so. But it entailed the supposition that Snailum’s book had really been lying on the bureau in Sonia’s bedroom. And this seemed scarcely plausible. Sonia took very little interest in household accounts. Nor, for that matter, did Petticate himself. It had been his habit for a long time simply to repair monthly to his butler’s pantry, briefly satisfy himself that the demands made upon him were in order, and write out a number of cheques.

Petticate faced it grimly. If what Mrs H had seen on the bureau was
really
Sonia’s passport – and that was how it looked – then either Mrs H herself, or her husband who was now standing here in an impassive convention of respect, was a much cleverer person than Petticate had supposed. This substitution – if it was that – of Snailum’s book was a quite brilliant stroke of wickedness. It meant that the Hennwifes had Sonia’s passport – her current and valid passport – in their possession. They knew that Sonia was not abroad. They knew that Sonia could not go abroad. And they were in a position to prove these facts at any time.

Petticate felt that it was time he uttered. And he remembered his recent judgement that even the cleverest lies are less clever than a course involving no lies at all.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But Snailum’s book is of no interest to me. You can take it away.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Hennwife smoothly picked up the book. He had the superior servant’s irritating trick of offering thanks where no benefit has been conferred. He looked at Snailum’s cow, and Snailum’s cow appeared to prompt him to further speech. ‘Perhaps, sir, it would be as well if Mrs H were to reduce the milk order by a little?’

Petticate was irritated. He commonly was, he had been finding, when he was frightened as well.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Let Mrs Hennwife do as she pleases.’

‘Shall you wish to continue the
Daily Telegraph
as well as
The Times
, sir? I have noticed that you yourself seldom take up the former publication. It was the mistress’ choice. And
The
Times
provides my own reading, if I may so far venture as to mention the fact, sir.’

Petticate tried giving Hennwife what would be called a stiff look. It had no distinguishable effect on the man’s bearing.

‘Then you may stop the
Telegraph
,’ he said. ‘And that weekly thing in the coloured cover.’

‘Very good, sir. But there is just one other matter.’

‘Yes?’

‘The proposed oriel, sir.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Hennwife.’

‘It may have slipped your memory, sir. But the mistress was talking about putting in a window of that character in the west wall of her room. Very agreeable, it sounded to be. And it has occurred to me that this might be the opportunity, sir – if the mistress’ absence will be sufficiently prolonged – for the work to be completed.’

‘My wife will be away a long time.’ Petticate snapped out this, confident at least in its truth. ‘But I see no occasion to begin making windows. When I want you to advise me in such matters, I’ll let you know.’

‘Thank you very much, sir.’ Hennwife did his smooth bow – which Petticate imagined him to have picked up from some disgusting exemplar of his servile calling on the movies. ‘I note that the mistress’ absence is to be prolonged.’

Both the matter and manner of this irritated Petticate yet further. He sometimes imagined, too, that there were no other surviving servants in England who talked about ‘the mistress’ in quite the Hennwifes’ tiresome way. Perhaps the Hennwifes read the novels of Miss Ivy Compton-Burnett. But they were even less likely to do that than to read those of Sonia Wayward.

‘Certainly a matter of months,’ Petticate said, with as much of crispness as he could manage. ‘You may tell Mrs Hennwife as much. That’s all, thank you.’

‘Thank
you
, sir. Mrs H and I must do our best to make you comfortable, sir, while the mistress is away. And I think we can undertake it, sir. Until she turns up, sir, I think we can promise to keep an eye on you. If the manner of speaking be allowed, sir.’

This time, Hennwife didn’t bow. He adopted the altogether unfamiliar course of giving his employer a swift glance. And then he left the room.

There was nothing for it, Petticate realized later that afternoon, but to go to Mrs Gotlop’s party. It was true that before tea – which had been brought to him in professionally irreproachable yet somehow sinister silence by Mrs Hennwife – he had managed another five hundred words on Claire and Timmy. It was really
their
world, he was beginning to see, that he had a flair for. He knew that as the romance went on he would have increasingly little difficulty in shoving his – and Sonia’s – characters around. His logistics would be precisely right; as the denouement approached, each of these shadowy figures, like the Corps and Divisions of some Supreme Commander’s dream, would move unobtrusively and effortlessly into his or her most effective place. Whereas with Wedge and Mrs Gotlop, with Sergeant Bradnack and the Hennwifes, things didn’t appear to be working in that smooth way. Petticate was coming to realize vividly the justice of the Aristotelian distinction between the confused and refractory particulars of actual life on the one hand and the beautiful lucidity and inevitability of imaginative creation on the other.

Actual life looked – to put it frankly – like landing him in a mess. Over his chop he had decided happily that the Hennwifes must, and could, go. Now, over his China tea and shortbread biscuits, he was confronting the gloomy possibility that it was perhaps for the Hennwifes to say whether
he
should go – and go, moreover, to some excessively disagreeable destination. Of course their present suspicions, whatever they were, could hardly be other than quite wide of the mark. They might well be imagining something entirely lurid. Like that dreadful double of Sonia’s on the train, they were certainly well up in the world of Sunday newspaper crime. Or they might be seeing the mystery – which for them consisted simply in their employer’s telling unaccountable lies about his wife – merely in terms of some unedifying amatory intrigue. The only thing that was assured was their sense of having got a ‘handle’, as they might say, upon the person whom they were doubtless accustomed to refer to as ‘the master’ when conversing with Sonia. They had got – they not in the least fondly hoped – the master on the spot. Or at least, granted the indefiniteness of the thing, on
a
spot. And they were going to see what could be made of it.

Mrs Gotlop’s party would at least get him away from these vipers in his bosom. To one who had forsaken domestic potations, moreover – even to the rash extent of emptying his decanters – there was an undeniable attractiveness in the thought of Mrs Gotlop’s cocktails. One didn’t need to yearn for what she had so coarsely called ‘gin galore’ to acknowledge the tug, towards the end of such an appalling day, of a modest couple of dry martinis. And he couldn’t go wrong on that.

He decided even to put on a dinner jacket. At Snigg’s Green, as in most places nowadays, one went to cocktail parties in one’s tweeds or whatever, unless it happened that one was ‘going on’. ‘Going on’ – the phrase palely shadowed those metropolitan grandeurs in the pursuit of which one left dinner parties upon the approach of midnight to participate in yet wilder revels – was commonly a matter of crossing the Green (for there was a real Green, and nearly everybody lived round it) to eat lamb cutlets or fricassée of chicken among faces as familiar as the fare. Petticate wasn’t ‘going on’. All too certainly, he was ‘going back’ – to whatever the Hennwifes were, literally and metaphorically, cooking up for him. Nevertheless he would go to Mrs Gotlop’s in a stately way. It would be a sort of showing the flag.