The New Sonia Wayward (6 page)

Surprisingly in one whose mental processes were normally so acute, Colonel Petticate spent a good fifteen minutes in these lethal reveries. In fact the train was already running into Reading before it dawned on him that all these drastic thoughts were needless. Why ever
should
he murder poor old Sonia? Surely all that was necessary was to insist that she was off her head? For he had himself, so far, said and done nothing at all which could be taken to bear out the unlikely story she would have to tell.

It was true that he had arrived back in port without her and said nothing. But if she had been, say, in some state of evident emotional disturbance, and had insisted on being somewhere set quietly ashore, his subsequent conduct could only be read as having been thoroughly discreet. Of course there would be difficulties. It was going to be embarrassing to have Sonia running round with such an extraordinary yarn. And if she persisted in it, and he found it necessary to have the poor soul confined in a mental hospital, it would scarcely be possible to carry out his engaging plan of writing all the new Sonia Waywards himself. If, on the other hand, Sonia thought better of her plan of public denunciation, it was unlikely that she would be willing to have much to do with him in future – or even to support him in the station of life to which he was accustomed.

So perhaps, after all, and despite the fact that there could be no legal case against him, he had better proceed as planned. A fire? A car accident? He could not be certain that Sonia had not already told her story to someone. It was a possibility that made his task a peculiarly delicate one.

The people on that yacht
. Suddenly, and with a fresh chill of dismay, Petticate realized that he had been leaving them fatally out of account. Whatever story
he
told must be made to square with the fact that they had veritably fished Sonia out of the sea. And this, when he came to ponder it, just couldn’t be done. Accident might have taken Sonia overboard. Or she might have jumped into the sea as a first expression of the lunacy which subsequently prompted her to a baseless charge against her husband. But nothing could account for that husband’s keeping quiet about it and giving out that his wife had simply departed on some sort of holiday. Nothing whatever.

Petticate saw that he had now at last accurately analysed the whole situation. And he just didn’t know where to turn. In fact, it wasn’t Sonia Wayward who was at sea, after all. It was her husband. Murder wouldn’t do – for as soon as the people in the yacht told their story he would almost certainly be done for. Only one course remained open to him: the most disagreeable he could conceive. He must throw himself on Sonia’s mercy.

After all, he said to himself as he unlocked the lavatory door and emerged again into the corridor, it wasn’t as if he had acted in any criminal way against Sonia. On the contrary, hadn’t he just this moment turned down the idea of murdering her? He had never even acted in any unfriendly spirit against her. If he had been a trifle unceremonious with her, that had been when he had supposed her to be dead. What he had done had been the result partly of shock and partly of a positively laudable plan to keep, so to speak, Sonia Wayward’s flag flying. If Sonia were reasonable – but unfortunately no woman is that – she would feel, on balance, that she owed him a certain gratitude for his conduct of the affair.

Of course she might be nursing entirely mistaken notions. She might imagine that it
hadn’t
been a mere dead body that he had supposed himself to have chucked overboard. If this were so, the sooner he made an effort to re-establish himself in her good graces the better. It would be very awkward, for instance, if unjust indignation, bubbling up in her during the course of this journey, prompted her to leave the train at Oxford – which was the next stop – for the purpose of communicating with the police. Yes, he had better nerve himself to seek her out at once. There was something to be said, perhaps, for a first interview in the publicity, or semi-publicity, of a railway compartment.

Petticate moved forward along the train. His vision was at least no longer playing tricks with him, and he could take in his fellow travellers, compartment by compartment, as he walked. There wasn’t, after all, any great crowd. Here and there even a second-class compartment was entirely empty. In others there were pieces of hand-luggage but no passengers. That meant that people were having tea in the restaurant car in front. Perhaps Sonia was there.

He went on, glancing into one compartment after another. It was a most disagreeable occupation. At any moment he might find himself looking into the accusing eyes of his wife. The thought made him remember – and for a second or two it brought a quite fresh sense of shock – that they were eyes which he had clumsily attempted to close, when Sonia was lying in her coma in the cockpit of the yacht. Her eyes, being a very unusual dark green, were her most striking feature. And Petticate felt a most disconcerting dread at the prospect of meeting them. Nevertheless he pressed on. He pressed on, in fact, until he was brought up short by colliding with some massive but more or less pneumatic obstacle. He had been so intent upon the successive compartments as he passed them that he had bumped straight into a passenger walking in the other direction.

Much to Petticate’s alarm, the passenger roared aloud. And he was very little reassured when he realized that the roar was a roar of laughter, and moreover that it proceeded through female lips. There could be only one explanation, and a glance, as he recovered balance, assured him of its correctness. Here, most disastrously, was another neighbour. It was Mrs Gotlop herself.

‘Why – if it isn’t my own enchanting Blimp!’

Mrs Gotlop, who combined large expanses of tweed with a profusion of rings, earrings, and bangles of obtrusively barbaric suggestion, had seized Petticate’s hand in a savage grip. He disliked this even more than being greeted with such a foolish and impertinent nickname. But no sort of indignation ever registered with Mrs Gotlop, and by now Petticate was, after all, pretty well used to her. For Augusta Gotlop did not merely live at Snigg’s Green. She was an authoress of talent, and as such at once the rival and the familiar of Sonia Wayward.

‘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
.