The New Sonia Wayward (19 page)

Nothing happened. Petticate looked to his left where, only a couple of feet away, a mean bay window, partially shrouded in scruffy lace curtains, peered dejectedly over a grimy little area at the dismal road. Inside, there was a small gimcrack table, on which there perched a cheap plaster statuette of a small girl holding up her skirt in the motions of a blameless pirouette; and behind this he could just glimpse a larger table littered with papers and books. He rang again.

Again nothing happened. Out of the area, however, two grubby infants tumbled. Each held a large confection anchored to a stick with which it dabbed vaguely in the direction of its mouth. Each stared at Petticate with an open gaze of fathomless speculation. Petticate, rather unnerved by this, decided to open the door and see if it was possible to walk in.

He did so. Straight in front of him was a narrow staircase with a few patches of tattered linoleum tacked to the treads. The way to this was barred by a couple of rusty bicycles which lay at random on the floor of the small hall. Beyond these stood a young man who had apparently emerged from the room on the left. He was strikingly good-looking in a haggard intellectual way; he had long dirty hair, and a long very dirty overcoat which he somehow contrived to suggest that he never got out of. He addressed Petticate across the bicycles.

‘Are you looking for somebody? I thought I heard a bell. But of course it might be the brats.’

Petticate glanced behind him. The two gutter-children were now sitting in the gutter, and by good luck had succeeded in directing their confections squarely into their mouths.

‘I’m looking for a Miss Smith,’ Petticate said. He spoke uncertainly, since it always disconcerted him to feel that he was astray in his social bearings.

Before the young man could reply, a woman’s voice spoke from the room on the left.

‘Right at the top of the house. You’d better go up.’

The voice was followed by the appearance of its owner. She was a pale and remarkably beautiful girl with dirty hair – and dressed in what appeared to be black skin-tights topped by a very bulky jacket reaching precisely to the top of her thighs. Now she was looking past Petticate to the urchins in the road.

‘Marcus,’ she called out, ‘Marcus and Dominic – come inside, please.’

The urchins, thus summoned with a mingled politeness and unquestioning expectation of obedience which held social implications more bewildering still to Petticate, tottered up the steps and began crawling over the bicycles. The young man stooped and had the appearance of picking them up like puppies, each by the scruff of its neck.

‘I think you’ll find Susie in,’ he said. ‘There isn’t much doing with her nowadays, it seems to me. What would you say, Persephone?’

‘Poor old dear,’ the girl said. ‘She’s not a bad sort.’

‘Do I understand,’ Petticate asked, ‘that you are not related to – umm – Miss Smith?’

lt was clear that Persephone, had she been the sort that stares, would have stared.

‘Oh, no. We simply have digs here.’

‘Susie is very decent about the brats,’ the young man said. ‘Looks after them sometimes, if we both happen to have tutorials or lectures.’

‘I see.’ What Petticate saw was that these unkempt young people, although they had produced Marcus and Dominic and were presumably married, were in fact undergraduate members of the university. As his own notions of this institution were entirely conventional and second-hand, the realization was rather a shock. The young man might have been a
poète maudit
strayed out of nineteenth-century Paris. The young woman he simply couldn’t place or type at all. ‘I think I’ll take your advice and go up,’ he said. ‘If you will be so very kind as to move one of the bicycles.’

At this the young man, who was shod in tattered gymshoes, deftly inserted a toe in the spokes of the nearest machine and flicked it against the wall. Petticate, although he felt that this manner of complying with his request was lacking in proper acknowledgement of his importance, spoke a stiff word of thanks and mounted the staircase.

‘Susie mayn’t be up yet,’ Persephone called after him. ‘But I don’t suppose it will matter.’

Petticate climbed the steep and treacherously clothed treads with misgiving. Just what had the girl meant by that last remark? What did the young man mean by saying that there didn’t seem to be much doing with Susie nowadays? Surely…surely Susie Smith couldn’t be an elderly harlot? Surely he, Petticate, so securely a man of the world, couldn’t have missed
that
about the woman he had encountered in the train?

But again – he realized – his ideas were no doubt conventional and of date. Nowadays, however deplorable the fact, one had to admit that there were all sorts and degrees of sexually irregular courses. And in any case it was too late to go back now. Petticate went resolutely up the final flight of stairs. There was only one door at the top, and – without pausing to consider whether his heart was sinking – he knocked at it.

‘Come in!’

Now, just for a second, he did pause. He had, for some reason, expected any summons to enter that did come from beyond the door to be tinged with apprehension or alarm. Miss Smith, after all, had been full of such feelings when he had last parted from her. But this accent wasn’t alarmed. It was rather cheerful.

Petticate opened the door and walked in – only to pause in dismay when he was securely across the threshold. For Sonia – the woman, that was to say, who so shatteringly resembled Sonia – had certainly not yet risen. She was sitting up in bed, with a small tray before her. For a moment he thought with horror that, like our barbarous Elizabethan ancestors, it was her habit to sleep with nothing on at all. Then he saw that she was in fact wearing some sort of night-attire although its transparency seemed to him indecent in the extreme. He saw too that, in this aspect now revealed to him, Susie Smith was what must be called a remarkably fine woman. Rubens or Renoir would have been delighted with her. Although she wasn’t perhaps much younger than poor Sonia, she was definitely in what would best be described as an earlier and more compelling phase of maturation.

Petticate almost turned and ran. He had known that he disliked the woman – but something very deep in him made him dislike her much more when he felt the strong and gross sexual attractiveness she possessed. This was extremely odd, since he was a man not without intermittent inclinations to venery. But if odd it was absolute. He knew – after this vision amid the bedclothes – that the physical presence of Miss Smith would never be other than alarming to him.

Miss Smith, once more, was not herself alarmed. She put down her cup and stared at Petticate in amused astonishment.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘if it isn’t
you
!’

‘And if it isn’t nice to see you again!’ Susie Smith went on easily. ‘I was a bit under the weather, wasn’t I, that last time? All that about auntie and Higgins. And it looking as if the police might get interested in those cheques. But all’s well that ends well.’

Petticate didn’t manage to speak. Susie looked at him sharply. Then she leaned far out of her bed, so that his scandalized gaze was treated to further expanses of near-nudity. What she was doing, however, was to reach for a dressing-gown in which she now modestly encased herself. She was in her vulgar fashion, he could see, a woman of rapid discernment, who had tumbled to the fact of his being shocked.

‘Yes,’ she went on comfortably, ‘I was in a bad way on that train. Taking you for somebody called Henry Higgins! Where was my social sense? And you seemed offended, all right. So fancy your turning up again. It’s a small world.’

Petticate was staring at her, fascinated. Was the thing conceivably possible? Susie Smith was
much
more vulgar than he had supposed. On the other hand, he now had an impression that she was also much more clever.

‘Is it just a call?’ Susie asked. ‘The time of day, in a manner of speaking? Give me a cigarette, dearie.’

Petticate brought out his cigarette-case and stepped forward. ‘No, not just a call,’ he said. He tried to reach back into his memory for the right tone to strike with a Susie Smith. ‘A little matter of business as well.’

Susie drew herself back on her pillow and looked at him severely.

‘No coarse talk, if you please. Still – you can give me a light.’

Petticate struck a match, and decided to plunge.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘It’s like this. I want you to be my wife. I mean, I want you to take my wife’s place, just for a week or two. You’re the split image of her.’

‘So everybody tells me.’

‘What’s that?’ Petticate was startled. ‘What do you know about it?’

Once more Susie reached out of bed, this time to a small bookcase. ‘Sonia Wayward,’ she said. ‘Her picture’s on the back of her books, isn’t it? Half-a-crown, I paid for this one. Poor reading, if you ask me. But it makes money, I’ll answer for it.’ She had produced a paper-backed novel. ‘It’s a likeness, all right. Particularly above the neck. Which is what most people notice, I don’t doubt. It must have been what you were noticing when you behaved funny on that train…Colonel Petticate.’ Susie had plainly picked up this name from the little biographical blurb under Sonia’s photograph. ‘But why do you want me to take your wife’s place? It sounds a bit crazy to me.’

‘I don’t know that I need explain in great detail.’ It seemed to Petticate that he must make it quite clear from the start that Susie was simply to play a hireling’s role. ‘What worries me is whether you can do it. Do you know much about ladies?’

As far as he could see, Susie Smith accepted this question without offence.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I know quite a lot about gentlemen.’ She paused. ‘I had to,’ she added a shade grimly.

Petticate was embarrassed. It could scarcely be doubted now that Susie’s past was not one of unimpaired moral integrity.

‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘that that’s not quite the same thing. The question is this: if I made it thoroughly well worth your while, could you pass yourself off as my wife, who was – I mean, who is – a lady? I hope you won’t think me rude.’

‘I think you damned odd, anyway.’ Susie blew a puff of cigarette smoke and spoke robustly. ‘What’s wrong with the real Sonia? Why do you want another one?’

Petticate hesitated. It seemed impossible to go further without taking Miss Smith at least in some degree into his confidence.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘my wife is dead. But it’s inconvenient to me that the fact should be known – at least for a few more weeks. It’s a matter of property, and insurance, and that sort of thing. Also, she’s been awarded a big literary prize, and that will go west if it’s discovered that she’s no longer alive. But I’ll explain all that later. The question is, will you try? Will you consider discussing terms?’

‘Terms?’ Susie looked at him with a thoughtfulness that made him feel uneasy. ‘Do you know, I think I rather like you?’

Petticate felt his uneasiness mount sharply. He certainly didn’t like Susie. But it equally certainly wouldn’t do to let that fact slip out.

‘It will be more a matter of just showing yourself than of talking and so on. But you
will
have to talk. You’ll have to attend a party or two, for instance.’

Susie looked interested.

‘I like parties. And I don’t get many of them nowadays. Life’s dull, Colonel. Life’s dull like you’d hardly believe. That’s your strong card with me, I can tell you.’

‘You might get quite a lot of fun out of it.’ Petticate was wondering if this could possibly be true. He was also wondering, and with a good deal of dismay, whether anything could be done about Susie’s accent, syntax, and idiom. ‘Have you ever had fun before, passing yourself off as–’

‘As a perfect lady?’ Susie, whose interest in his proposal seemed to be mounting, cheerfully helped him out. ‘Oh Lord, yes. You should have seen me in India.’

‘India?’ Petticate was surprised.

‘It was usually soldiers with me, you know. Once, I tried being married to one. He was a colonel, just like you, and I was a fool not to stick to him. But it was the young majors that tempted me – never much cared for the boys – subalterns and the like. Will you have a cup of char?’

Since this offer appeared to involve Susie’s climbing out of bed and roaming round the room, Petticate declined it hastily.

‘Yes,’ Susie continued reminiscently, ‘you don’t know what’s your life, when you’re young. Having an establishment, now. Servants and so on, like the higher-ups could turn on for you. It was crazy to turn down all that.’

‘That reminds me,’ Petticate said. ‘One of the first things you will have to do is to dismiss my present servants. A married couple called Hennwife. Do you think you can manage that?’

‘Goodness, yes. They’ll get the right-about-turn from me, all right. If they’re no good, that’s to say.’

‘They’re worse than no good. They’re trying to blackmail me.’

‘The dirty dogs.’ Susie again looked thoughtful. ‘Do they suspect your wife is dead?’

‘Yes. That’s why they’re going to be confounded when you turn up.’

‘I see.’ Susie’s mind seemed to be working rapidly. ‘It looks as if we’re getting to the sticky part of this. Mind your step, and no questions asked.’

‘Exactly.’ Petticate was emphatic. ‘That’s just the basis on which I see the matter. Say three weeks, and five hundred pounds down at the end.’

‘Well, I don’t see any reason to quarrel with that. It’s a bargain, Colonel. And I won’t fail you.’

‘I’m sure you’ll do your best.’ Petticate offered this encouragement with genuine benevolence. ‘The chief difficulty will be – well, the talking. We’d better have a little practice at that.’

But at this Susie Smith burst into unexpected laughter

‘Don’t you worry your head about that, dearie. I know all about being the colonel’s wife. You just speak in that sort of voice, and loud, and always as if you were challenging something or talking to the dog. Leave it to me.’

Petticate, although somewhat disconcerted by this harsh analysis, acknowledged to himself the measure of penetration it evinced.