The New Sonia Wayward (21 page)

‘I see.’ For the first time since the rays of Bradnack’s lantern had so paralysingly fallen on him, Petticate achieved articulate speech. ‘But I’d never have believed it – never.’ He looked straight at the Hennwifes. ‘I’d never have believed it of you,’ he said, sternly but sadly. ‘You must have been carried away, I suppose, by some sudden temptation. I am sorry – very sorry, indeed.’

And now Hennwife spoke – first licking his dry lips. ‘Thank you, sir. I trust you will bear witness to character, sir. I think I may say we have always endeavoured to give satisfaction.’

‘Yes, yes – my good fellow. I have no complaint.’ Petticate stood up and gave a heavy discouraged sigh. ‘Let us hope, Sergeant, that nothing else of a similar sort comes to light. If they proved to be anything like professional blackmailers it would of course be very much worse for them. Anything up to fifteen years.’

‘Quite so, sir.’ Sergeant Bradnack seemed a little disappointed by this turn of things. ‘We have naturally been wondering if they’ve been giving any trouble elsewhere. To yourself, for instance.’ Bradnack paused, as if conscious, too late, that this had not been happily phrased. ‘Not in the way of attempted blackmail, of course. But perhaps the disappearance of valuables, or something of that sort.’

Petticate shook his head. ‘No, no – they are both blameless, so far as I am concerned. But now you had better take them away, Sergeant. It’s a most painful situation.’ Again he looked straight at the Hennwifes. ‘I am glad,’ he said, ‘that this didn’t happen after Mrs Petticate’s return tomorrow morning. She would be deeply pained. Indeed, I shall hardly like to break it to her. Good night.’

Mrs Hennwife said nothing. Hennwife offered his employer his customary expression of thanks upon withdrawing from his presence. He even managed – although somewhat hampered by the close contiguity of the police – to back out of the front door in his established professional manner.

Petticate watched him go. He watched Bradnack and his mustered subordinates go. Then he staggered upstairs, tumbled on to his bed, drew the eiderdown over himself, and fell asleep.

For some hours Petticate enjoyed oblivion – if indeed oblivion can be enjoyed. And then he was assailed by dreams.

He was on the yacht with Sonia – the real Sonia – and they quarrelled. It was not the sort of quarrel that he had ever actually known with her: a measurable irritation or bad temper, bred of boredom or competing selfishness. It was the sort of quarrel for which a man stores the fuel deep in his heart – and commonly obeys a prudent instinct to keep away from. But in this dream it was suddenly a flame all around him, so that nothing seemed more natural than that he should strike at her, and strike at her to kill. That he succeeded in killing her was evident from the fact that her body as it fell to the deck shrank to the size of a dog’s body – since this (Petticate knew in his dreams) always does instantly happen to dead bodies. So he picked up Sonia’s small dead body and threw it into the sea. Then, turning to the other side of the yacht, he saw Sonia instantly climb on board again – only this was not the true Sonia but the false Sonia, Susie Smith. Susie came out of the sea and over the gunnel and he noticed that her clothes were quite dry. He wasn’t surprised by her dry crisp clothes – because he remembered that they were only acting parts in a film, and that in films actresses who have been immersed are always for some mysterious reason quite dry again a few seconds later. But he knew that he must kill the false Sonia too, and he ran at her with the boat-hook. The boat-hook went clean through her, so that he had to shake her body off into the sea as one shakes a dead leaf off a walking-stick. He watched the false Sonia sink very slowly, as a dead leaf might sink, and then he thought how silent it was. But not entirely silent. For from somewhere behind him there came the rapid click-click of the keys of a typewriter. The sound came from the cabin. He ran towards it and looked in – and somehow it was entirely without surprise that he saw the true Sonia sitting at the machine and the keys jumping beneath her fingers. Sheets of typescript littered the cabin floor, and he thought what a pity it was that they should all be turning to pulp. They were turning to pulp because the true Sonia sat dripping wet at the typewriter, so that all the floor around her was becoming a pool and the papers were floating in it. Petticate knew that he must let out the water – for the true Sonia was now in a bath in which he had drowned her – and there was a plug to pull out which turned to a rope as he heaved, and he hoped against hope that beneath the ruins of the barn as it came tumbling down both Sonias were buried together.

The barn made a great noise as it fell. And Petticate woke up and knew that somebody was hammering at the front door.

Susie Smith had stepped back on the drive when she heard the window open almost above her head.

‘Hullo!’ she called. ‘So you’re there after all. I was beginning to think it must be all a hoax. Come down and let me in.’

For a moment Petticate stared at the woman in stupefaction. He had been convinced, for one thing, as he stumbled across the room, that it must still be the middle of the night. But he was looking out on broad daylight, and he realized that he must have slept until nearly noon. It was an autumn day, but Susie stood in only a short pool of her own shadow. She was surrounded by trunks and suitcases and bandboxes. She must have had all the stuff unloaded from a taxi, and then dismissed it. Petticate reflected with dismay that there could be nothing in this whole outfit for which he had not himself paid in cash or pledged credit on the previous day.

‘Hullo,’ he said. It wasn’t a usual form of greeting with him. But he could, for the moment, think of none other to utter.

‘You don’t sound very pleased to see me.’ Susie spoke with no suggestion of being aggrieved; indeed, she appeared uncommonly cheerful. ‘But do come and open this door. It doesn’t look right, this Romeo and Juliet turn – not in an old married couple like you and me.’

‘I’ll be down in a minute.’ Petticate turned round and went hurriedly to his wash-basin. He had no need to dress, since he was still in the clothes – now sadly crumpled – in which he had tumbled upon his bed. But he couldn’t of course go downstairs unshaved – even if some intrusive neighbour, coming up the drive, were to judge it odd that Mrs Ffolliot Petticate should be cooling her heels outside her own front door.

But rapid shaving didn’t prove easy. His troubled night had scarcely refreshed him, and his hand was trembling as he manipulated the razor. It was true that he hadn’t been very pleased to see his substitute wife. On rather, he had been even less pleased to see her than he had expected. He wasn’t, at the moment, at all clear why this should be. He just had an obscure sense that a certain anticlimax was involved in the occasion.

The house – cold and still shuttered as he passed through it – affected him disagreeably, and he found himself fumbling with the lock that had closed automatically behind the police as they had retired with their prisoners the night before. When he did get the door open, it was to find that Susie was standing within inches of him. This was a bit of a shock.

‘I’ve done well, haven’t I?’ she asked. ‘I got the ten-five. And guess who I travelled with.’

Petticate’s sense of discomfort grew. The care-free tone of Susie’s voice seemed entirely genuine; and he reflected that nothing in the world builds up a woman’s confidence like oceans of new clothes. At the same time she was looking at him sharply, rather as if making sure of some impression she had formed the day before.

‘Travelled with?’ he repeated stupidly. ‘No – I’ve no idea.’

‘Dear old Augusta.’

‘Augusta?’ He stared at her. ‘Who is Augusta?’

‘Augusta Gotlop, of course. By the way, did you know she had been a Gale-Warning?’

Petticate took a long breath. Or rather he tried to do this, out of a dim notion that it might fortify the system. It was, of course, all to the good that Susie was something of an artist. Only an artist’s instinct could have carried her through that sudden crisis in Fortnum’s the previous afternoon. And there were occasions in the immediate future upon which she would abundantly require this power. Nevertheless there was something alarming about it.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’d better come in. I’ll give a hand with your things.’

‘What about those servants?’ Susie looked into the empty hall behind Petticate, evidently surprised. ‘They might as well make themselves useful – until I give them the sack, that is.’

‘You won’t have to give them the sack. They’ve gone.’

Petticate, as he said this, suddenly remembered why a sense of anticlimax was attending Susie Smith’s arrival. The scene to which he had really looked forward – the confounding of the fiendish Hennwifes by a Sonia returned as from the grave – would never now take place. It didn’t now
need
to take place. The Hennwife goose was otherwise cooked.

‘Gone, have they?’ Miss Smith took this quite casually. ‘Well we can easily get more. But I’d kept the taxi man waiting if I’d known. The trunks aren’t all that light. Haven’t you got a chauffeur?’

‘No, I always drive myself.’

‘I think it might be a good idea if you had a chauffeur. A chauffeur’s smart, if you ask me. And Augusta has one… You’d better fetch the gardener.’

‘There isn’t a gardener. That’s to say, he comes three times a week, and this isn’t one.’

Petticate, feeling understandably exasperated and also inexplicably alarmed, began ferrying suitcases into the hall. There seemed to be no end to them. Miss Smith at least didn’t stand idly by. She joined in the work with gusto.

‘We’ll get somebody from the village to help with the trunks,’ she said decisively. ‘And of course somebody to come in and clean and wash up. I can cook for a bit; I’m really not bad at it. While you advertise.’ She paused, evidently remembering. ‘But what about that blackmail? You don’t mean they’ve gone because you risked giving them in charge?’

‘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.’