The New Sonia Wayward (17 page)

Petticate started off through the orchard, leading Ambrose behind him. Everything was still utterly and perplexingly silent. Only, in his inward ear, that single scream yet rang. Had it been a man’s or a woman’s voice? Had it been Hennwife or Mrs Hennwife who had been aware for a moment of the heavens thundering down?

He let Ambrose go free as soon as they were through the orchard. He told himself that this showed that he was still capable of following out the details of his plan. It must become the theory of the thing at the inquest that the Hennwifes had gone out in search of their dog. With luck Ambrose would now trot off to the village and be found wandering. This would be good corroborative detail.

In the house – in the empty house – a single light was shining. It came from his own study. That was where the brandy was.

They were dead. They were dead, they were dead, they were dead. He knew that this was a circumstance that conferred some enormous benefit upon him. Only he couldn’t remember what it was. Did that mean that he might let it slip? He came to a halt in the darkness, knowing precisely what his situation was, and astounded that the knowledge could for a second have eluded him. It was what they called shock. Detained in hospital, suffering from shock. What if they really took him to hospital, and what if his mental state remained confused there? But that was nonsense. He only needed brandy.

He went in through the French window. There was a fire in the study grate. Hennwife had condescended to bring in a scuttle of coal. That was over now. He must get his own coal. Until he found fresh servants. Dead, dead, dead.

He must search their things and recover Sonia’s passport. He must search carefully. The Hennwifes might have had other awkward things hidden away: photographs of manuscripts, for instance. He was remembering all that clearly enough. This showed he was recovering. People might be running over from the village at any time now, he supposed. And he must have the right attitude prepared for them. But he could take the inside of five minutes for a stiff brandy.

Petticate paused in the middle of his study, suddenly uneasy. Had he heard something, seen something,
failed
to see something? What could he be failing to see? Perhaps it was only Ambrose, who of late had been so impertinently prominent in this room. He went over to the cupboard and unlocked it. He had gone on keeping the brandy locked up, even after the ludicrous exposure by Hennwife. That showed how he had been slipping into some sort of mental confusion. But he was out of it now – out of it for good. Or he would be, just as soon as he had swallowed that single big glass.

Petticate reached for the bottle. As he did so, he became instinctively aware that the study door had opened behind him. Not that he had heard it. It had been opened too silently, too professionally, for that.

‘You rang, sir?’

The bottle went to the floor with a crash as Petticate swung round. Hennwife was confronting him.

Petticate had a dim feeling, as the room swayed around him, that precisely this had happened a long time before. He didn’t in the least suppose himself to be confronted by a ghost. And that too was how it had been long, long ago. Not a ghost. Really… Sonia. For that had been it. Sonia tumbling into the corridor of a train. But of course it hadn’t been Sonia. It had only been somebody very, very like her.

Perhaps this was only somebody very, very like Hennwife – Hennwife who now lay dead beside Mrs Hennwife beneath tons and tons of stone.

Petticate pulled himself together sufficiently to look full at the thing in the doorway. But it wasn’t a thing. It was really a man, and really Hennwife.

‘No, I didn’t ring, thank you.’

The words, with an infinite strangeness, seemed to drift around the room and return to Petticate’s ear. He must himself have uttered them. He remembered that, since all this began, he had several times experienced this sensation; the sensation that his own spoken words couldn’t be his.

‘I thought that you might have missed something, sir.’

‘Missed something?’ This time, Petticate knew that he spoke stupidly and mechanically. His awareness was entirely taken up with the deep diabolical glee with which the monster Hennwife was indulging in his now customary torture: the torture of pretending that he was still the respectful servant.

‘Your apparatus, sir.’ And Hennwife pointed at an empty table. ‘I remark that it isn’t in its customary place.’

Petticate stared. He did now see that something was missing. It was his tape-recorder. In a flash the essence of the whole dire truth was clear to him. The Hennwifes, in their incredible malignity, had tricked him once more. They had tumbled to what he was about in the barn, and turned what ought to have been their own final tragedy into this savage piece of comedy at his, Petticate’s, expense. They had recorded their own voices. They had concealed the machine, ready plugged-in, in the barn. And, at the last moment, Hennwife had slipped in, switched it on so as to begin playing back a few seconds later, and then returned to join his wife in the orchard.

Hennwife had even thought to record that last agonized scream…

Petticate was aware that he was now sitting down. He was aware that Hennwife – the other and naked Hennwife – was close to him, with a contorted face thrust into his face.

‘We’ll squeeze you to hell for this,’ Hennwife said.

Petticate made no reply. He was now listening to something else: the sound of voices hurriedly approaching the front of the house. As he had supposed would happen, Snigg’s Green had taken alarm. He would have to go out with these people, whoever they were, and affect to stare in astonishment and consternation at the ruins of his barn. But more than his barn lay in ruins. His cherished plan lay in ruins as well. And here was Hennwife, still on his two feet – or were they cloven hooves? – promising to step up the torment. Mrs Hennwife, no doubt, had gone to look for Ambrose. Petticate found himself wondering dimly whether her husband had found difficulty in persuading her to risk the creature’s safety in pursuance of their fiendish counterplot. The barn, of course, might very well have come down of itself. People had sometimes had the impertinence to speak to him of its dangerous condition. But what about that fresh clean rope caught in the ruins? What about the smashed tape-recorder, lying pulverized beneath the mess? With a gleam of returning reason, he realized that Hennwife would have to take care of that – and was no doubt up to doing so. Hennwife was a capable man. It seemed incredible that he, Petticate, had ever supposed him a stupid one. It certainly wasn’t the Hennwifes’ policy to have any immediate exposure. They believed – the vile conspirators – that they were in on far too good a thing for that.

The front door bell rang loudly. And Petticate managed to sit up and square himself.

‘Go and attend to it,’ he said. ‘Go and tell them’ – and, in a manner that was afterwards to surprise him, he rose to something like a stroke of macabre humour – ‘go and tell them that nothing serious has occurred.’

But Hennwife too had his notion of fun. He was already at the study door.

‘Thank you, sir,’ he said gravely. ‘Like hell,’ he added. And then he was gone.

Later, of course, Petticate had to join in inspecting the barn. The tiresome Sergeant Bradnack was there, in a great state of self-importance. People brought torches and lanterns, and fussed around. Most of them were yokels. But Sir Thomas Glyde – idle old idiot that he was – had turned up among them. Glyde would have to be taken in afterwards and given a drink – which meant both opening another bottle of brandy and risking Hennwife’s amusing himself by some outbreak of embarrassing insolence. The business of the barn itself wasn’t actually alarming. There was really nothing to be done; there was no reason to suppose that either man or beast had come to any harm in the collapse; nor could anybody express much surprise that the structure had collapsed at all. Somebody spoke knowledgeably about deathwatch beetles. Another claimant to sagacity declared that the barn, in any case, couldn’t have survived the first sharp frost. Mrs Gotlop’s gardener actually stumbled over the tell-tale rope’s end. But he was so intent upon describing to anybody who would listen the similar fate of a similar barn when he was a lad some sixty years ago, that he kicked the rope aside without pausing to look at it. So presently everybody went away; and for half an hour Petticate sat in a sort of dream in his study, watching old Glyde drinking brandy and listening to old Glyde talking nonsense. But, when the tedious old person finally went home, Petticate found that he was reluctant to let him go.

After that, he sat for a long time simply staring vacantly at the fire. He would have locked himself into his study, if the key hadn’t disappeared from the damned door. He was in terror of the Hennwifes. And it was an immediate and physical terror, like that of a small boy who knows that at any moment he may be mocked or bullied or beaten at the whim of bigger boys in the next room. Strive as he would, Petticate couldn’t now rid himself of this sheer morbidity.

He found himself wondering whether he could run away. Presumably the Hennwifes had to sleep. It seemed extravagant to suppose that they did so only by turns, so that there was always one keeping an eye on him. What if he were to wait till the small hours, pack a suitcase, and creep from the house? His car would start instantly; he could be beyond their reach in no time. He could be outside his London bank when it opened, draw out every penny in his current account, and then simply vanish. And of course there were two possible degrees, so to speak, of vanishing. He might vanish merely beyond any ready reach by his persecutors, or he could vanish altogether. The second was a resource that seemed utterly desperate. He would be through his ready cash very quickly – and his disappearance (apart from whatever mischief the Hennwifes might make) would engender so much suspicion that he would simply never be able to turn up again. On the other hand, merely to disappear from the view of the Hennwifes, while retaining his identity as Colonel Petticate (not to speak of his identity as Sonia Wayward), didn’t look like being at all easy. In fact this whole line of thought was unprofitable. If only – if only, he told himself with sweat breaking out on his brow – he hadn’t this irrational fear that his helplessness might tempt the hellhound Hennwife to sadistic outrage!

Petticate was back with this humiliating and probably irrational fear when the telephone rang on his desk.

Everything was terrifying to him now. At first he sat frozen in his chair, as if to lift the receiver would be to hear the voice of the Lord Chief Justice of England summoning him to his deserts. But the instrument went on ringing. He was even more terrified that it might bring Hennwife into the room. So he got up and made a grab at it.

‘Gialletti,’ said a voice.

‘What’s that?’ For a moment the name meant nothing to Petticate. He didn’t even realize that it was a name. It sounded as if somebody had uttered mere gibberish.

‘Gialletti. I am a sculptor.’

‘Yes, of course.’ Petticate was conscious that there had been outraged irony in the extreme courtesy with which this amplification had been offered. ‘What can I do for you?’

This brusque question, appropriate perhaps in the mouth of a dentist or a house-agent, naturally produced a moment’s pause.

‘Nothing, I am constrained to fear.’

‘Then why the devil should you ring up?’ Petticate was, of course, sadly beside himself to be speaking thus to a person of such large eminence as Gialletti. ‘I’d gone to bed,’ he added with perfectly unnecessary mendacity.

‘I rang up just on the chance that you
may
know the whereabouts of your wife. She has failed to turn up for her first sitting with me. I do not understand it. It is a thing almost impossible to happen. Did I mention my name? Gialletti.’

‘My wife is travelling abroad. I’m afraid I can’t help it if she has forgotten an appointment with you.’

‘But I think I can. I think that there are steps I can take. I am determined to model her. It is something I do not go back on, my dear General. Not ever.’

‘Well, it looks as if you’ll have to go back on it this time.’ Not even being so casually promoted had any power to bring the desperately frayed Petticate back to civility. ‘May I ask if you know my wife well?’

‘Not well. Hardly at all. But she delights and enchants me. Those bones, that is. I intend to find her. I intend to advertise.’

‘
What
!’ Petticate was flabbergasted. ‘You mean in
The Times
– that sort of thing?’

‘Of course. And in all the great journals – all the great journals of Europe and America. When it is known that your fascinating Sonia is missing from my studio – from the studio of Gialletti – all the world will go in search of her. Yes?’

‘No. I mean, yes – I suppose so.’ Petticate again felt sweat on his brow. ‘But wait until – well, until a week today. I may be able to – um – to get through to her. Her last cable was from…from Nassau. Delightful weather, it seems. And – um – brilliant parties. A wealthy and gay society… How are you?’

‘I am at the highest pitch of my creative inspiration. That is why I must have your incomparable wife, my dear Major. For one week, however, I will wait… Good-bye.’

There was a sharp click, and Petticate knew that Gialletti had rung off. He put down the receiver, prepared to tumble exhausted into a chair. But he was prevented. The telephone rang again.

‘I say you must be in a deuced chatty mood, my dear chap. I’ve been trying to get you for ages. And by myself, too. I don’t keep a secretary at home, these days. Hard times in publishing, you know. Devilish hard times.’

Even without this last information, Petticate would instantly have known his interlocutor this time. It was of course Wedge. Petticate remembered inconsequently that Wedge too was an Ambrose. He was so exhausted that he almost asked the publisher whether he liked raw fish.

‘Hullo,’ he said instead. ‘Yes, I had somebody on the line. Fellow at the local garage. Had to go into a good deal of detail about repairing a car.’