The New Sonia Wayward (12 page)

Wedge moved forward across the lawn.

‘And does Sonia share it with you?’

Petticate, for some reason, found himself considering this question carefully.

‘I’m sure I don’t know. I can’t remember her ever mentioning it. I should have thought Gialletti wasn’t quite enough in the naturalistic manner to enchant my dear wife.’ For the first time that day, Petticate produced his cackle.

Wedge eyed him curiously.

‘But at least she’d recognize him as no end of a swell?’

‘Lord, yes. There’s nobody like Sonia for knowing the exact size of lions. To have Gialletti in her menagerie would be the seventh heaven for her.’

‘But you say she does in fact appear to have had some contact with him?’

‘Yes, indeed.’ Momentarily, Petticate had his now familiar uneasy feeling that he had been saying too much.

‘Sonia hasn’t been confiding in you, it seems.’

‘It seems not.’ Petticate tried to speak lightly. But he didn’t care for Wedge’s tone. It was as if the fellow were deliberately concealing something. ‘But perhaps we can find out.’

Wedge made no reply for a moment. They were making their way through a particularly clotted group of Mrs Gotlop’s friends.

‘I’m not sure,’ he then oddly offered, ‘that it would be quite playing the game, old boy.’

Before Petticate could make anything of this, or decide whether it would be prudent to ask for an explanation, they were in the presence of the great man.

Gialletti was large and flabby – and he certainly wasn’t of an old Huguenot family. To that extent, at least, Sonia’s transforming imagination had been at work in the fabricating of Timmy Vedrenne’s marble-chipping father. No doubt he did himself bang away with a hammer and chisel from time to time, but one could almost have guessed that nowadays he was happier with clay. He would have been just another elderly Italian, badly out of condition, if it hadn’t been for his eyes.

These were dark under jutting brows, and they contrived to be at once brilliant and brooding. He might have been at this moment in a blaze of excitement over what was immediately before him. But as this consisted of a dozen of Mrs Gotlop’s vacantly vivacious guests, diversified only by the enormous and snuffling Johnson, it didn’t seem altogether likely. The late Sir Edwin Landseer, Petticate reflected, might have found Johnson stimulating; but he didn’t recall that Gialletti had ever regarded the brute creation as sculpturesque. Alternatively it might have been supposed that the eminent man was in fact immensely withdrawn upon the inexhaustible riches of his own interior vision. But, if this were so, he was at least not so lost to his surroundings as to fail to stretch out his glass whenever Mrs Gotlop’s gardener (who was disguised in a black jacket) came within collaring distance with the drinks. Petticate found this evidence of thirst infectious. He had a third cocktail, after all.

‘May I introduce my friend Colonel Petticate?’ Wedge asked.

‘But assuredly.’ Gialletti managed mysteriously to add to both the brooding and the brilliance the expression of one in swift expectation of some surprising pleasure. Having risen to fame as much on the Continent as in England, he had long ago acquired the expectations and accepted the responsibilities of minor royalty. He took Petticate’s hand in an unexpectedly firm grip. ‘I am pleased to meet you, sir,’ he said.

Petticate was impressed. He would not, in normal circumstances, have admitted this form of words as a permissible variant upon that ejaculatory ‘how d’ye do’ with which the well-bred Englishman instantly makes known his total lack of concern for a new acquaintance. But one had to realize that Gialletti was privileged. He was decidedly – in the amusing terminology of Petticate’s favourite journal – a top person.

If Sonia had really got on speaking terms with Gialletti, it had been uncommonly deep in her not to proclaim the fact. Petticate himself, although so much more sophisticated a person than his unhappily deceased wife, would certainly have done so. If he met a Gialletti on Monday – which he didn’t often do – a good many people would be casually told of the fact throughout the remaining days of the week.

Wedge, who had also seized another drink, addressed himself to further explanations.

‘Petticate, you know, is another of Mrs Gotlop’s neighbours. A hospitable old soul. She asks the whole crowd.’ Wedge waved his hand to indicate a number of those standing by. It didn’t seem to occur to him that there was anything derogatory in this compendious description. ‘An interesting community, Snigg’s Green.’

Gialletti looked round at the company. He was habituated to a circle of people more or less staring.

‘Ah, yes,’ he murmured. ‘The people are charming. There is a
ton
.’

‘They all have their points.’ Wedge was looking at Sir Thomas Glyde, and for a moment he hesitated, as if constrained to wonder what conceivable point such a useless and noisome old person could be credited with. ‘They collect pretty objects. They have knowledge of roses and of the feeding habits of tits. They visit the good poor.’

Gialletti nodded indulgently. He must be very accustomed, Petticate thought, to people showing off.

‘Petticate,’ Wedge pursued, ‘is an old campaigner. No man is more fascinating upon the intricate topic of tropical hygiene.’

Gialletti smiled politely. At the same time he ever so slightly raised his beetling brows. It was possible to feel that a court chamberlain might advance and tactfully lead Wedge away.

Wedge patted Petticate on the shoulder – an act which the recipient of this familiarity regarded as wholly outrageous.

‘But Petticate’s strong suit,’ he continued, ‘is his wife. We rather think you may know her.’

Gialletti bowed very slightly to Petticate.

‘I am enchanted,’ he said, ‘to learn that I may have met Mrs Petticate.’

‘But very probably,’ Wedge went on, ‘not as plain Mrs Petticate.’

Gialletti made a deprecatory gesture.

‘Assuredly not,’ he said.

Wedge laughed robustly – thus making clear to everybody standing round that he had appreciated this delightful witticism.

‘In fact,’ he said, ‘you have almost certainly met her as Sonia Wayward. The famous novelist, you know. One of my best authors.’

‘But Sonia!’

Gialletti produced this like a glad cry. A good many of Mrs Gotlop’s guests had now frankly constituted themselves an audience. And Gialletti’s enthusiasm – which didn’t in the least appear to be a matter of his putting on a turn – was very well received. Even those who regarded Mrs Gotlop as the superior ornament of Snigg’s Green were gratified that her principal rival was thus acclaimed by so exotic a lion as the sculptor.

Wedge, of course, was particularly delighted.

‘Didn’t I tell you?’ he said to nobody in particular. ‘Dear old Sonia has been going everywhere. Quite, you know, the girl of the year.’

Petticate, although displeased by this absurd description of his wife, found a certain satisfaction in thus becoming a focus of attention. Sonia, it was true, was the precipitating occasion of it. But at least Sonia couldn’t butt in.

‘She is here?’ Gialletti – with a gesture that was at an opposite remove from Wedge’s oafish back-patting – had for a moment taken both Petticate’s hands impulsively in his. ‘She is here – your charming wife?’

‘Alas, no.’ Petticate felt he perfectly knew how to carry off this embrance of genius. ‘Sonia, as Wedge knows, has gone on holiday – or rather indefinite holiday.’

‘I am certain she deserves it.’ The cordiality with which Gialletti pronounced this made it comfortably certain – despite his casting a distinguishably speculative glance on Petticate – that there was nothing double-edged in the remark. ‘She works so hard – no? Her books, alas, I have not read, since the reading of books eludes me. But her conversation delights me. And with her bones I am unutterably in love.’

Snigg’s Green produced, at this, a perceptible gasp. It seemed, perhaps, a rather stiff dose of
la vie de bohème
. Petticate himself was startled, until his superior acumen brought him a dim sense of what Gialletti was talking about.

‘My wife is professionally interesting to you?’ he asked with a whimsical deference which he felt to be just right.

‘The structure round the temples – it is ravishing! Ah, she is a subject, your divine Sonia.’

This was so handsome that Petticate felt he must reiterate his apologies for Sonia’s not being in a position to present herself to her admirer.

‘She will be terribly sorry to have missed seeing you,’ he said. ‘But she’s not only taking a holiday. She’s making a little mystery of it, bless her. I’ve no idea, where she is.’

Given its present context of the artistic life, this confession of Petticate’s went down well with Snigg’s Green. Sonia’s supporters turned to one another with gratified smiles. Mrs Gotlop’s supporters were almost out of countenance.

‘But at least she will be back,’ Gialletti said with confidence, ‘by the fifteenth of October.’

Petticate could make nothing of this.

‘The fifteenth of October?’ he echoed.

Gialletti smiled delightfully.

‘But, my dear sir, you are the most modest of men! Can you have forgotten your own birthday?’

Petticate had certainly forgotten it. But he remembered, with rather a shock, that Sonia never did. The keeping of birthdays was a solemn matter with her. Gialletti’s prediction had been quite reasonably grounded in her character. But how did the sculptor come to know anything about it? Despite Mrs Gotlop’s cocktails, Petticate once more experienced the now familiar sinking feeling.

‘Yes,’ he said rather feebly, ‘perhaps Sonia will be back by then.’

‘She will be back earlier. She will be back three weeks earlier, at least.’ Gialletti turned roguishly to Wedge. ‘But our friend,’ he asked, ‘doesn’t know? It is a surprise – yes?’

‘I think it was meant to be.’ Wedge seemed slightly uneasy. ‘I was certainly surprised myself when you told me. And I’m not quite sure it is playing fair, you know, to let Petticate in on the secret.’

This time, when Petticate spoke it was positively weakly.

‘You intend,’ he asked, ‘to make a study of my wife?’

‘But certainly! And perhaps it will be the last of all my portrait busts. Sonia – your divine Sonia – I could not resist. And she has been kind enough to be enchanted. This year, she said, you should have a birthday present worthy of you.’

There was a murmur of approbation and pleasure among the Waywardians. Petticate realized that his stock had never stood so high in the place before. He also realized that, if he failed to keep a tight grip on his superbly rational
Weltanschauung
, this evidence of Sonia’s amiable marital disposition might become the occasion with him for some undesirably distracting uneasiness of mind. Meanwhile, he must rise to some response to Gialletti’s revelation.

‘I’m quite astonished,’ he said. ‘I really don’t know what to say.’

Here at least was the truth – and when he had added to it – not quite so sincerely – sundry cordial but not extravagant expressions of pleasure and gratitude, he could feel that, for the moment, nothing had gone disastrously wrong. Even the ill behaviour of Wedge, who seemed disposed to communicate to the world at large the amusing fact that the husband of this wifely paragon had only the day before been disposed to hint that she was quitting him for good, didn’t utterly confound him.

And fortunately, just at this moment, Boswell, who had been set down by his mistress and was in consequence feeling slighted, took Lady Edward Lifton craftily in the rear and managed to bite her in the ankle. In the subsequent commotion, which included a hunt for Dr Gregory and a telephone-call to the district nurse, Mrs Gotlop’s party began to break up.

But a number of people made a point of speaking to Petticate before he went away. It was evident that any rumour of domestic disharmony that had previously got around was quite swamped and forgotten beneath the sensation caused by the news of Gialletti’s undertaking. Ladies who had seen works by the master when on visits to London – or who were certain that somewhere they must have done so – assured Petticate with animation that dear Sonia was the most apt of conceivable sitters for him. If it were not that it was destined to pass into the proud ownership of Petticate himself, it would undoubtedly be purchased for the nation.

Once out on the Green, Petticate made his way somewhat reluctantly and circuitously home. Like the lowing herd, in fact, he wound slowly o’er the lea. He was very sober again, despite the cocktails. Perhaps it was because he had been given a good deal of food for thought.

And now Colonel Petticate began to experience more fully the mysterious ways of artistic creation.

On the morning after Mrs Gotlop’s disturbing – although in some aspects gratifying – party he found himself writing the new Sonia Wayward with the ease of one who has discovered a vein of sustained inspiration. He even evolved a technique for marvellously speeding up the work. In the morning he typed; in the afternoon he read what he had written into his tape-recorder; in the evening he played this through to himself while he revised the typescript before him. This invoking of his own well-modulated voice he found extremely encouraging. It really quite brought Sonia’s sort of stuff alive.

The process continued for weeks. However much he was harassed by the peculiar situation in which he had placed himself, whatever anxious consideration he had to give to every step which he must take in the actual world around him, the ideal world in which Timmy Vedrenne and his beloved trod their devious but ineluctable path towards St Margaret’s Church in Westminster remained inviolate and genially beckoning.

Moreover the new Sonia Wayward
was
just that. It didn’t, that was to say, in the least turn out to be the new, the first, Wayward-Petticate or Petticate-Wayward. His fancy for giving poor old Ambrose Wedge a jolt by gingering the stuff up, for importing into his fable some of the larger liberties recently gained for imaginative fiction, faded before the commanding fact that this was Sonia’s book. It was indeed her best book. Almost from the start of his labours, Petticate had little doubt about this. It was a knowledge which afforded him much spiritual solace. He had, he realized, been a shade cavalier – not certainly towards Sonia herself, since he was far too much a gentleman for that, but to her mere mortal tenement when he had so unexpectedly found himself confronted with it on the yacht. Those fine feelings which were so nicely blended in him with a disposition inherently rational had undoubtedly given him some uncomfortable hours. But now he was making a large amends. He was putting Sonia on the map – her own mildly inimitable map – as she had never been on it before. He was so much possessed by the sense of his own piety in all this that, finding her framed photograph in a somewhat inconspicuous corner of his study, he placed it squarely on his desk beside the typewriter and regularly communed with it when some tricky moment in his narrative turned up.