The New Sonia Wayward (2 page)

It was a matter of overhearing something she said on the telephone. There was nothing out of the way in his doing this. Sonia talked so loudly, whether on the telephone or off it, that it was inevitable he should hear a great deal that was not directly addressed to him. It had come about, indeed, that he was thus often unaware whether he was overhearing her or not. A particular remark would catch his attention, and then he might consciously listen until he grew tired of it. This was what happened on the fatal occasion.

‘But,
darling
, you simply
must
meet my husband!’

She was talking, he had vaguely registered, to someone she hadn’t seen for twenty years – a circumstance which naturally made her all the more breathlessly ardent in tone. So he had listened, amused and rather gratified.

‘But you must, you
must
. Come to luncheon, come to dinner. I can guarantee that Ffolliot will be there. He never,
never
misses a meal. And he’s the quaintest little creature in the world!’

It was quite clear to Colonel Petticate afterwards that what had shocked him about this performance was its sheer bad form. It was
that
which he had never quite managed to forgive. He hadn’t – he found as he sat in the little cabin, with Sonia’s body in the open stern behind him – forgiven it yet.

Nevertheless he was only halfway through his first chop when he found that he was weeping. It was his brief tribute to his honest consciousness that she hadn’t been a bad sort. But it was connected, too, with the fact that he didn’t now feel less frightened than he had done when the thing happened. And being thus instinctively frightened induced in him, at another level of his mind, a sort of wary and reasonable alarm. It was clear to him that he had become pretty dependent on Sonia – and perhaps not merely on account of her being the bread-and-butter, as well as the caviar and champagne. He must get rid of his dependence. In fact, he must get rid of
her
.

What he had already got rid of – and all within the hour – was the better part of a bottle of whisky. There was nothing much to that. He was accustomed to knowing just where he stood – or at least just how he lay – when in liquor. It therefore never got him into situations unbecoming a gentleman, as he conceived that becomingness. Which made it strange that the whisky betrayed him now. He was aware that he had a good deal to think about, but less clear that what was now going on in his head was ceasing to be thinking in any very strict sense. The element of rational apprehensiveness in his dismay progressively sank beneath something merely muddled. Presently he was telling himself that he was confronted with a terrible nuisance, a really intolerable bother. What happened when you sailed into port with a dead body? He didn’t at all know – but he was quite sure that the formalities would be extremely vexatious. And just when he had so unmistakably had enough of Sonia! With a flicker of sanity he pushed away the whisky bottle. But it wasn’t before he had had his brilliant idea. Why not just lose Sonia overboard?

He went aft again and stood beside the body. It was dusk and he must do something about his riding-light. But there wasn’t a sail in sight. Any action he was minded to take, he could take in utter secrecy. He bent over the body. It was still quite flexible. He had forgotten how heavy they were – dead bodies. Or was the difficulty something to do with that whisky? He struggled, and something ripped in his hand. It was only the linen shirt beneath her jersey. But it gave him a new idea. Or rather it stirred in him an obscure consciousness that somewhere in his mind there lurked an idea he hadn’t yet managed to haul up and look at. Surely it would be better…

He prowled about the little craft, trying to think what it was that he knew would be better – better than tipping Sonia over the side just as she was. He was unsteady now on his feet, and when right forward he stumbled and was aware of something flapping round his head. He reached up blindly, and found that he had grabbed her bathing-costume, where it hung up to dry. That was it – if only he could manage it. If he could get the clothes off her, and her body into this. He took down the costume and then hesitated, confusedly aware of an obstacle that wasn’t just the physical difficulty. A vast horror rose for a moment in his mind and then blew away as if the chill evening wind had taken it. He went aft and knelt down beside the body. It wasn’t hard to strip. He knew where the zips and fasteners were. But the next stage was more laborious. The bathing-costume was damp still. That didn’t help. Halfway through, he stopped and tried to close the eyes. Perhaps, he thought, it was old professional instinct. Or perhaps he didn’t like them. Perhaps they were still looking at the quaintest little creature in the world.

But she went in and down with hardly a ripple. Once he had got her over the side – which was a struggle – she just sank, lost form, vanished. He had been intent on the job, secure in his solitude. He had been so secure, indeed, that he had failed to notice that it was no longer solitude, after all. He had got her over the port gunwale; he turned to starboard – and there was another little yacht, no distance away. He was gripped by horrible fear – fear that took him and unmanned him, so that he could hardly stumble into the cabin before his knees gave way and he was on the floor. He lay for a long time shivering, expecting to hear a hail, or even the sound of another craft coming alongside. But there was no sound but the faint lapping of the water against the shell of his own yacht. Even that terrified him. It sounded like somebody tapping. It sounded like
her
…

Nothing happened. He got up and peered out – first warily through the little porthole, and then from out in the open. The other yacht had grown small in the distance. Of course he hadn’t been discovered. But it had been a near thing. Lucky he had chosen the port side. He had been careless, of course – not to take a good look round. And one can’t afford to be careless.

Petticate paused, frowning. Why had he said that to himself? It was the sort of thing a fellow said when engaged in a piece of wrong-doing, even in a crime. He himself wasn’t in the least involved in anything of
that
sort. He had simply been taking a modern, strictly rational view of the sensible way of disposing of a dead body. It might offend old-fashioned sensibilities. There were still people who were shocked if you didn’t wear mourning. And no doubt if the undertakers got hold of the matter, they might feel done out of a job. But of course he had acted entirely within his rights. He was more than three miles out at sea – decidedly in international waters. And he was captain or master or whatever it was called of this particular craft. It was entirely for him to decide for or against burial at sea. It would have been a shade more regular, perhaps, if he had read the appropriate parson’s piece. But that wasn’t among such literature as the yacht carried.

It was almost dark, and he busied himself with his light. He had no fancy for being run down by a liner. If he was to drown, he would, somehow, like it to be in another part of the ocean. And something was puzzling him. He tried to remember what it was. Yes – of course. Why had he put Sonia into that bathing-costume? It didn’t seem to hitch on to burial at sea. He must have had something else in mind. And if he could only recall what it was, then things would be more comfortable.

In great perplexity, Petticate wandered back into the cabin. There was, he seemed to remember, some whisky somewhere. A dash of that might serve to clear his head. But now he couldn’t find the whisky. The bottle, although it was straight in front of his thin and rather handsome nose, somehow eluded him. He sat down wearily and listened again to the lapping. This time he connected it with nothing in particular – except with hearing it, night by night, as he went to sleep. Yes, it was a pleasant drowsy sound.

He woke up to darkness, and to cold and cramp. Something was digging into his side. But for a moment he didn’t attend to that, since his mind was wholly occupied with some inexplicable sense of horror. He called out incoherently to his wife, but she didn’t answer him. Then he knew that an irrevocable thing had happened. That was why he was sitting here, with the little folding table digging into him, instead of lying in his bunk. He had done something gratuitous and wanton, something with no reasonable sense to it. He sat up, and the movement put him abruptly in possession of the whole thing. What he had done had been not merely irrational. It had been fearfully dangerous as well. For no conceivable advantage, he was committed to telling a thumping lie – to swearing that Sonia had vanished while swimming from the side of the yacht. Of course she might have had her fatal attack while in the water, so that even if her body were recovered – as it well might be – he would probably be all right after all. Provided, that was to say, that nobody on that other yacht began to remember seeing anything odd.

Petticate got to his feet and lit the lamp, pumping clumsily and cautiously to get the pressure right. Then he moved about the cabin uneasily, conscious that there was something he had to find. But what he had to find was really inside his own head – something that was somehow going to lift a great burden, a great shame, from his mind. His foot slipped on paper, and he found himself looking down at the litter of typescript on the floor. Next, he stared at the typewriter – stared at it with narrowed apprehensive eyes, as if it might begin to clatter of itself. He didn’t much like what it was accustomed to produce. Yet he had lived on it for years. The click of its keys had been the same as the clink of coins in his pocket; the rustle of its carbon paper and its quarto sheets had merged with the crinkle of bank notes in his wallet.

Then – quite suddenly – Petticate had a sensation of standing amid blinding light. The effect was purely psychological, since there was now in the cabin a very good light already. He squared his shoulders. He put up his chin. The muscles round his mouth relaxed. If he had been challenged at that moment by some recording angel, he would have declared that Ffolliot Petticate, MB, RAMS (retired), was an honest man again. For he had, after all, done nothing that betrayed the noble rationality of the creed by which he lived.

He sat down before the machine. He tapped out a single word. Then he read the completed sentence. His guess, he found, hadn’t been a bad one. The sentence read:

There was that which was at once inscrutable and inchoate in eyes.

He looked back at the previous sentence and got his bearings. Then he tapped again, pausing only to locate the shift key, so that he produced:

There was that which was at once inscrutable and inchoate in his eyes.

It didn’t mean a thing. But that, of course, was just as it should be. To hell with the
opera
being
interrupta
. Business As Usual was to be his motto henceforth. He was sure that Sonia would have wanted just that.

‘I’ve read the first thirty thousand words,’ Petticate said. ‘Quite charming. Sonia at her best. And you know – you and I know, my dear man – just what
that
means.’

He was sitting in the office of Sonia’s publisher, Ambrose Wedge. It was an extremely shabby office. It had been an extremely shabby office ever since the day Ambrose Wedge’s father had opened it – buying up for the purpose the entire
mise en scène
of a decayed and obscurely disgraced late Victorian solicitor. By this simple means Ambrose Wedge’s father successfully created the impression that Wedges had been prominent pretty well at the birth of English publishing – finding the poet Milton, perhaps, that risky ten pounds for
Paradise Lost
, or extending timely aid to the genteel indigence of Fielding or Steele. The solicitor’s black-japanned deed-boxes remained ranged round the walls, with the names of the old clients erased and new ones painted in – this in a paint so obtrusively yellowed by age that one rather expected to read among them
Miss
Emily Brontë
or
William Wordsworth Esquire
or even just
The Author of Waverley
. Among the actual names, such as they were,
Sonia Wayward
held an honourable prominence. Petticate, indeed, was regarding it complacently now.
Executors
of
Sonia Wayward
, he was reflecting, wouldn’t look nearly so nice.

‘Sonia at her best?’ Wedge – who was in fact a man of curiously pyramidal structure – tilted back comfortably in his swivel-chair. ‘But when, bless her heart, is she anything else? It’s always a pleasure to see the new Sonia Wayward in the bookshops. Don’t you agree?’

‘I do.’

Petticate spoke with conviction. Perhaps because he had been constrained to tell so many lies of late, he was emphatic wherever his sincerity could be unflawed.

‘Never tires.’

‘Never. This new book is entirely fresh.’

‘Fresh?’ A shade of misgiving, even of alarm, spread over Wedge’s features. ‘She’s not breaking new ground?’

‘No, no – nothing of the sort.’ Petticate hastily clarified his statement. ‘I mean merely that the writing has a wonderful quality of freshness. But the – um – general outlines are much as usual. In fact precisely as usual.’

‘Then that’s all right.’ Wedge beamed again. ‘Even one’s most reliable authors, you know, are liable to go right off the rails from time to time. Turn in something you’d never expect from them. Of course, it never does. Sells badly itself, and kills the succeeding book.’

Petticate shook his head.

‘I’m sure Sonia will never do anything like that. Certainly not if I have anything to do with it.’

‘That’s fine. And you’re tremendously useful to her, I know.’ In an access of what appeared to be sheer affection, Wedge fished a cigar-box from a drawer and thrust it towards the husband of his esteemed authoress. ‘Havana,’ he said.

Petticate registered his gratified awareness of this impressive circumstance, and took a cigar.