The New Sonia Wayward (7 page)

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.

‘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!’

Petticate felt a strong impulse to lean forward and smack the woman’s face. Instead, he got to his feet and bowed. This quite literal rising to the occasion probably disconcerted her a good deal more than low violence would have done. She turned and hurried away.

A few minutes later he saw her on the platform of Oxford station. Yes – she was clutching the shabby suitcase which he had endeavoured to investigate a short time ago. She was, in fact, Miss Smith. Or Mrs Smith. And she lived at 116 Eastmoor Road – somewhere amid the dreaming spires that now began to wheel and recede as Colonel Petticate’s train resumed its course westward.

It was deplorable, he reflected, that the exquisite city of Arnold and Pater should harbour so disagreeable a person.

He now found that he had an appetite. The toast was by this time cold and unpalatable, but he ate everything else. There were still a few people in the restaurant car, and he wondered a shade uneasily to what extent any of them had been aware of the contretemps in which he had been involved. But he didn’t think that much could have been overheard – and of course it was extremely fortunate that the instinctive good breeding of which he was possessed had enabled him to terminate it on that superbly dignified note. Henry Higgins, forsooth! Colonel Petticate was now able to smile at the absurdity of the whole incident.

But he pulled himself up. It was time, after all, for serious thoughts. He must get clear the outline of his position – of his restored position. For that was the crux of the matter: that he had got back precisely to where he was before he boarded this train and was lured into so false and dangerous a supposition by the Smith woman’s preposterous resemblance to Sonia. Old Dr Gregory had started the trouble; and to Gregory in his compartment farther down the train he must presently return.

He had allowed Gregory to see that he was upset. But Gregory had been willing to put this down to purely physiological causes, and Petticate couldn’t remember that he had done or said anything to upset the idea. So far, so good. But Mrs Gotlop was a different matter.

Yes, he had definitely put a foot wrong there. He had asked the tiresome woman, bellowing her offensive nonsense about ruddy Blimp and rural Blimp, whether she had come across Sonia on the train. Whereas he had told Ambrose Wedge that Sonia had vanished, and that he had no expectation of seeing her soon. It was an awkward discrepancy – and the more awkward because Wedge was being brought to Mrs Gotlop’s party on the following day.

Petticate finished his tea and paid his bill. It was annoying, he thought, that when he should be beginning to enjoy all the reflective quiet which the worthy and adequate finishing of
The Gates
of Delight
– no, of
Man’s Desire
– demanded, he should have to spend time on ironing out one difficulty after another in which his pious taking up of poor Sonia’s literary burden seemed to be involving him. Still, Mrs Gotlop could be dealt with at once. He saw precisely how to do it.

He looked out for Mrs Gotlop as he walked back down the train – just as he had looked for Sonia, the non-existent Sonia, when he had walked up it. The eminent female biographer would almost certainly be in a compartment shared only with Johnson and Boswell. And so it proved. Mrs Gotlop was sitting with her back to the engine, while the two slavering brutes faced it. Johnson, who seemed more enormous than ever, was wheezing dreadfully. Boswell seemed to have rather a bad smell. Petticate, having courteously asked permission to enter the compartment, sat down between these two canine friends. Johnson eyed him with a compassionate sadness such as only bloodhounds know. Perhaps Wedge’s star performer Alspach, Petticate reflected, had established his celebrated sombre tone by consorting with these creatures. Boswell, a Pekinese, looked at the newcomer in stony aristocratic contempt.

‘Do you take Johnson and Boswell to the British Museum with you?’ Petticate asked this question casually and cheerfully. He mustn’t make too much of a business of what he was coming to.

‘Certainly not. Too many
dull
dogs there. Evil communications, you know. I wouldn’t have Johnson and Boswell corrupted for the world.’ Mrs Gotlop made a roaring noise, rather, Petticate thought, like a pride of lions. As so often, she was amused. Anybody of nervous disposition in an adjoining compartment – Petticate added to himself – might be excused for making a grab at the communication cord.