The New Sonia Wayward (11 page)

He even put on his claret-coloured waistcoat and his claret-coloured socks. As long as his tie remained black, he told himself, he was well on the safe side of that sort of sartorial eccentricity which invites confusion with persons who play in bands. Not that Snigg’s Green was very exigent in these matters. It was scarely aware, for instance, of the solecism committed by old Sir Thomas Glyde in visiting other people’s houses in a velvet smoking-jacket. One bachelor might spend an evening with another, so habited. But it was surely a terrible thing – Petticate reflected – to enter a lady’s drawing-room in a garment the historical associations of which were so much with clandestine tobacco in the gun-rooms of great houses in the small hours.

Petticate, as he dressed, found some satisfaction in the discovery that his mind could still pursue such familiar and significant trains of thought as these. He walked across the Green in quite a light-hearted fashion. It was seldom that he had traversed it on such occasions other than as Sonia Wayward’s husband. But now he was, so to speak, Sonia Wayward herself.

There were several cars outside Mrs Gotlop’s. That lady, despite the stigma of her literary activities, lived on the fringe of a larger society than was enjoyed by most of the Snigg’s Green gentry. A scattering of people from quite far away came to her parties, and as they weren’t local they could rationally be accredited as county. Petticate wasn’t of course unduly impressed by this sort of thing – for Petticates, as he had often explained to his wife, were well known to have owned half Somerset, and enjoyed numerous titles of honour, until in some mysterious way they had been rather rubbed out in the course of the sixteenth century. Still, he liked the upper reaches of society. It had been one of his unspoken criticisms of Sonia that she had no talent for being in the swim.

Petticate frowned as he rang Mrs Gotlop’s bell. He kept on thinking of his wife, he noticed, in images and metaphors rather more marine than was wholly comfortable. Sonia had certainly been something of a lion-hunter – that was rather better – but the lions she hunted were literary or artistic; and they generally belonged, so to speak, to a heart of the jungle which she lacked the qualifications to penetrate. She had a vision of herself as among the eminent based on nothing more relevant than the fact that she was herself among the affluent. Could she have got hold of the austere Alspach, for instance, she would have gushed over him as a ‘fellow writer’ at once. To Petticate, so abundantly possessed of the ordered and hierarchical view of things, this had always been embarrassing; he wouldn’t himself have gushed over the President of the Royal College of Surgeons.

He could really, he reflected, go farther without Sonia – always provided, of course, that material resources didn’t fail him. So her death, although it went without saying that he judged it extremely sad, held its possibilities of what might be called social compensation.

The door was opened by Mrs Gotlop’s parlourmaid. The Petticates were the only people in Snigg’s Green who maintained a married couple and thereby rejoiced in a butler; and although this wouldn’t impress Mrs Gotlop herself, it probably accounted for the respect with which Petticate was greeted by the young person in the cap.

‘In the garden, sir, if you will please to walk through.’

Petticate crossed Mrs Gotlop’s large low hall. Its walls were embellished in alternate sections with trophies of the chase, inherited from Mrs Gotlop’s father, and eighteenth-century engraved portraits, which were understood to be associated with Mrs Gotlop’s biographical labours. There was a revolving bookcase with spare copies of Mrs Gotlop’s books, ready for autographing and presentation to particularly favoured visitors as they went away.

It was from Mrs Gotlop that Sonia had picked up that over-expansive custom – but she had never, poor dear, carried it off with quite Mrs Gotlop’s aplomb. On top of the bookcase there was a photograph in a silver frame. Petticate had always vaguely supposed it to represent Mrs Gotlop’s deceased papa in some sort of legal wig. On this occasion, happening to look more closely, he saw that it was really Johnson, taken full muzzle and slavering. Shuddering faintly, Petticate passed out of the hall, and into the racket that was going on in the garden.

It was a racket that almost drowned Mrs Gotlop’s shouting, so that for a moment he had difficulty in locating her. Presently, however, he did hear a mingled yapping and clinking which could have only one conjoint source, and his hostess bore down upon him, waving one bebangled arm and carrying Boswell in the other.

‘Blimp!’ she cried. ‘You poor bereft
darling
! Gin! Gin!’

Petticate, returning a somewhat coldly conventional greeting in return for this extravagance, was aware that several people – all, naturally, locals – had turned to look at him. Mrs Gotlop could not in fairness be called a gossip. But she did carelessly fling out anything that happened to be in her head, and Petticate had no doubt that the interesting news of Sonia’s indefinite holiday had travelled round the village. Quite apart from the martinis – which he blessedly saw approaching – he had been wise to come to this party. Were he to take to hiding himself away at home, much more speculation would be aroused.

‘Ambrose Wedge is here,’ Mrs Gotlop shouted. ‘There he is by the bird-bath, talking to Rickie Shotover and dear old Edward Lifton. He wants Edward’s memoirs, you know, only he’s a little scared about the libels.’ Mrs Gotlop roared with laughter, so that Boswell, to his marked displeasure, shook in her arms. ‘Of course you know Edward’s wife? No! You absurd pet!’ And Mrs Gotlop, who had addressed this last remark to her guest and not to her dog, turned and bellowed across the hubbub of the party. ‘Daphne,’ she shouted, ‘come here at once! I have the loveliest man for you.’ She turned back to Petticate. ‘Be kind to the little woman,’ she said. ‘She’s shy.’

Petticate, much gratified that Lady Edward should thus be summoned into his presence – for the Liftons were clearly the most important guests – straightened his black tie. He was a shade disconcerted, indeed, when Lady Edward turned out to have the bulk of an armoured vehicle and very much an armoured vehicle’s manner. She even scrutinized Petticate through a lorgnette, an article of polite equipment which he had supposed scarcely any longer in use except to indicate exalted rank in West End comedies. The roar of Mrs Gotlop’s laughter at her little joke reverberated in the middle distance.

‘The Blues?’ Lady Edward said.

The question was not phrased precisely as if it expected an affirmative answer. Petticate, however, received with complacency even an unconvincing suggestion that his background might be in the Brigade of Guards.

‘My dear lady,’ he said whimsically, ‘an old army doctor – nothing more.’

‘Augusta Gale-Warning – who married the man Gotlop – tells me that your wife is a famous novelist. I never read novels. My husband reads them when fatigued. But he commonly chooses those by the older writers. They are more reliable. Edward naturally likes to know in advance that adequate diversion is assured to him.’ Lady Edward put up her lorgnette again and stared through them with some fixed intent over Petticate’s left shoulder. ‘I thought I knew them, but I don’t,’ she said with satisfaction.

‘The older writers?’

‘Certainly not. Some persons who have just arrived.’ Lady Edward paused. ‘I presume, Colonel Petticate, that you and your wife move in artistic society, as poor Augusta now so often seems to do. Be so good as to give me your opinion of Mr Gialletti.’

‘Gialletti?’ It was with some surprise that Petticate received this apparently inconsequent inquiry. ‘Why, he’s undoubtedly the greatest portrait sculptor alive today.’

The shy little Lady Edward inclined her majestic head towards her ample bosom. ‘So I am given to understand. It appears that amateurs approve his work. I am unacquainted with it, naturally.’

‘Naturally,’ Petticate echoed.

‘And it goes without saying that, until now, I have not met the man himself. I do happen, however, to have met his son. You know the young man?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Timothy Gialletti. Familiarly, he is known as Timmy.’

‘A sculptor’s son? Timmy?’ Petticate was vaguely troubled by the oddity of this.

‘An unassuming young man with unaffected manners. I have made no objection to Claire’s presenting him to me.’

‘Claire is your daughter?’ Petticate asked, rather faintly.

Lady Edward stared at him, much as if this question had been impertinent.

‘Certainly Claire is my daughter,’ she said. ‘I should have judged the fact tolerably well known.’

‘Ah, not in Snigg’s Green.’ Petticate gave this disarming reply automatically. Of course he had remembered now. It was Sonia’s regular habit to pick up persons and names wherever she went, and at once to tip them quite recklessly into her fiction. After each novel went in, a questionnaire regularly arrived from some lawyer apparently retained by Wedge for the purpose. And in the light of this, various precautionary changes were made in proof. It was clear that, unknown to him, Sonia had lately been in some contact with the Giallettis. But why had Lady Edward introduced the subject of the sculptor in the first place? He had better try to find out.

‘Are you thinking, Lady Edward,’ he asked, ‘of commissioning Gialletti to do something? I’ve been told that, nowadays, he’s most frightfully hard to get hold of.’

‘Precisely.’ Lady Edward Lifton now spoke with measured indignation. ‘Mr Gialletti made a represention of Lifton a year ago. You may have seen it at the Royal Academy. Lifton is, of course, the head of my husband’s family. But he is also tolerably well known to be the fool of it. And now Mr Gialletti has declined to execute a similar representation of my husband, which some of my husband’s colleagues in his many business enterprises are anxious to present to him. The amount of the fee, I am given to understand, is not in question. Mr Gialletti has been pleased to say that Lord Edward has an uninteresting face. It appears that he even told his son Timothy that Lord Edward’s only tolerable features are his ears. Claire, I am pained to say, judged this an acceptable pleasantry. Considering that I actually received the young man, I am bound to consider that the father’s insolence in this matter falls little short of the criminal.’

‘I entirely agree with you.’ Petticate, with his proper respect for the highest ranks of society, was able to say this in all due sincerity.

Lady Edward inclined her head. Petticate supposed for a moment that she was bowing to an acquaintance straight over his shoulder – which her stature made it perfectly easy for her to do. But in fact she was acknowledging the propriety of his response to her complaint.

‘And I can scarcely forgive dear Augusta,’ Lady Edward said, ‘for inviting so ineligible a person this evening. Whatever Edward may say in his easy-going fashion, a meeting with Mr Gialletti
cannot
be agreeable.’

‘Gialletti – here?’ Petticate stared in astonishment.

Lady Edward raised her lorgnette once more – but this time as a pointer.

‘
There
!’ she said.

Petticate turned. It was perfectly true. The great sculptor – the really very great sculptor – was at Mrs Gotlop’s party.

Lady Edward Lifton had moved majestically on. In the considerable crowd now present, there were several persons whom it would be proper for her to acknowledge. Petticate was about to seek local and less exalted society when Ambrose Wedge hove up on him.

‘Well, well,’ Wedge said. ‘I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.’ He made no attempt to render this a felicitous remark. ‘I heard Edward Lifton was to be here, so I allowed young Shotover to bring me over. I’m trying to persuade Lifton to do me a book.’

Petticate grinned.

‘Then keep away from his wife at the moment. She’s not in a good humour.’

‘She doesn’t much look as if she ever was.’

‘Well, she’s taken particular offence at being asked to the same party as Gialletti. It seems he did Lord Lifton, and that now he won’t do Lord Edward.’

Wedge nodded. The mention of Gialletti seemed to excite him. ‘He’ll do hardly anybody. The Lifton was the first Gialletti bust for years.’

‘Do you know, I think Sonia must have been having some contact with Gialletti and his family? But she never told me.’

‘Is that so?’ Wedge looked curiously at Petticate. ‘What a pity Sonia can’t be here now.’

‘Yes, yes. How she would have loved a party today.’ Petticate found himself nervous at the mention of Sonia, although he had himself introduced her into the conversation. It pleased him, however, to manage an almost sacrilegious quotation from a lyric of Thomas Hardy’s. Wedge, although professionally engaged with literature, wasn’t quite the man to pick up an allusion of that sort.

Wedge looked about him. In their perfectly refined way, Mrs Gotlop’s guests were beginning to acknowledge the influence of the gin galore. Old Sir Thomas Glyde’s complexion was creeping nearer and nearer to the shade of his red velvet smoking-jacket.

‘Yes,’ Petticate said, following Wedge’s glance. ‘One day high blood-pressure will do its work, and the late Sir Thomas will be carried out amid the distressed exclamations of his
ci-devant
fellow revellers.’

‘Oh, I say!’ Wedge looked at Petticate rather queerly. ‘I don’t know that sudden death’s all that funny. It might happen to any of us, after all. Drop down dead any minute.’

Petticate amiably smiled.

‘Ah, you mustn’t think me callous, my dear fellow. One gets used to that sort of thing in my profession. And, if you die at a bolt from the blue, you’re damned lucky, believe me. I could tell you a thing or two about the ingenuities of keeping wretches alive nowadays.’

Wedge drained his rather full glass – and then appeared to wish that he had done nothing so hazardous.

‘All right, all right, Petticate. But just remember your party manners.’ For a moment he appeared to hesitate. ‘Shall I take you over and introduce you to Gialletti?’

‘Please do.’ Petticate had drunk his two cocktails, and was resolved to drink no more. He was, he felt, at the top of his form. And there was no reason why he shouldn’t try to find out just what sort of contact Sonia had been having with the sculptor. ‘I’ve a great admiration for Gialletti’s work – really a very great admiration.’