The New Sonia Wayward

by Michael Innes

  ‘It begins in an artist’s studio. An elderly and eminent sculptor called Paul Vedrenne. An Englishman, of course.’

  Wedge nodded.

  ‘But of an old Huguenot family?’

  ‘Certainly. And he has a son called Timmy, who isn’t an artist, but who gives his father a hand with the roughwork from time to time. Slogging away at the marble, you know, in the early stages of some colossal design. Timmy isn’t happy – I’ll explain about that in a moment – and this making the chips fly affords him a certain amount of relief from nervous tension. He’s occupied in this way when the girl calls.’

  ‘Corn-coloured hair?’ Wedge asked. ‘Or dusky and smouldering?’

  ‘Honey-coloured. She has great honey-coloured ramparts at her ears.’

  ‘Good Lord!’ Wedge was respectful. ‘How does Sonia think of these things? It’s positively poetical – that about the ramparts.’

  Petticate cackled.

  ‘It ought to be, my dear chap, since it’s stolen from Yeats. This girl, who’s called Claire…’

  Wedge shook his head doubtfully.

  ‘Aren’t Claires out?’

  ‘Her name can be changed if necessary. Her father is a great industrialist. But she’s a nice girl, because her mother’s people have lived in Shropshire for quite a long time. And – as I say – she calls at Paul Vedrenne’s studio, with a message about a bust that Vedrenne has been commissioned to do of her affluent father. And there is Timmy Vedrenne, chipping away like mad. He is stripped to the buff.’

  ‘To the what?’

  ‘The buff. Better than to the waist, because more indefinite. Means simply to the skin.’

  Wedge looked alarmed.

  ‘Oh, I say – that won’t do at all! Dash it, he must wear something.’

  Petticate waved a reassuring hand.

  ‘That’s all right. The buff is modified to the extent of an old pair of rowing-shorts. Timmy Vedrenne has rowed for Oxford.’

  ‘At stroke – and faster than all the rest?’ Wedge appeared delighted at the aptness with which he had resuscitated this ancient joke at the expense of the female fiction. ‘Tell Sonia that rowing shorts are most uncomfortable to stand up in. They’re tailored to the male figure when crouched over a bloody oar. Don’t I remember it!’

  ‘No doubt.’ Petticate allowed no pause in which Wedge could enlarge on his own athletic past. ‘But there the lad is – and there’s an uncommonly good description of him in action.’

  ‘Golden torso, ripple of muscles under the fine skin, loins of darkness, and all that?’

  ‘Not of darkness, my dear chap. Dash it all, Sonia has some taste in the way in which her work shows – um – literary derivations. She doesn’t set Lawrence and all those fellows absolutely screaming at you. Just loins. Perhaps slim loins in one place. Anyway, Timmy is a nice boy. So Claire is terribly upset later on, when she discovers him in bed with her horrible baby-snatching Aunt Sophia.’

  ‘A sister of the affluent industrialist?’

  ‘Of course. Claire’s aunts on her mother’s side are so aristocratic that they regard sex as interesting only when it happens among dogs or horses. Naturally, Claire’s discovery is delicately done. She doesn’t grossly gape on the thing, as Iago says. It’s those rowing-shorts. Timmy has brought them to a house-party, where there’s to be a certain amount of fun on the river. And Claire sees them draped over the balcony of Aunt Sophia’s bedroom. Poor girl – they are engraved upon her mind, and she would know them anywhere. But she’s a girl of spirit. She climbs up to that balcony, and slips into a pocket of the shorts–’

  ‘Rowing-shorts don’t have pockets.’

  ‘Nowadays they do – or, if they don’t, the readers will never notice it. Because the moment’s a very moving one. Claire slips into that pocket a flower that Timmy had plucked for her in the garden the evening before.’

  ‘Bad form for guests to pluck flowers.’

  ‘Timmy isn’t exactly a guest. The place belongs to his godfather, who is a peer and a Cabinet Minister. The Vedrennes have kept on being well connected ever since they slipped out of the Massacre of St Bartholomew, or whatever it was. Anyway, Timmy finds the flower – crumpled and faded, which makes the symbolism of the thing uncommonly elegant, you’ll agree. So he knows that he’s been found out. And he’s more unhappy than ever. You can see it in his eyes. They’re inscrutable and inchoate. And that’s as far as the thing goes.’

  ‘Leaving you,’ Wedge asked, ‘dead keen to know how it will go on?’

  ‘Certainly – as all Sonia’s readers will be.’ Petticate paused. ‘What’s your guess,’ he asked, ‘about what happens next?’

  Wedge waved his cigar airily. He appeared amused by Petticate’s question.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he asked, ‘is it really a matter of guess-work? Isn’t it rather a matter of inference? But I don’t think I have all the facts. Is Claire’s Aunt Sophia a married woman?’

  Petticate thought for a moment.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She is. Her husband’s pretty dim, as Sonia rates them – merely a top-ranking surgeon, or something of the sort – but he’s there.’

  ‘And this fellow Timmy Vedrenne is to get Claire in the end? A wedding at St Margaret’s, and all that?’

  ‘That’s just what I’m asking you. But I’d suppose so. As I’ve said, it’s Sonia’s usual charming thing, and one can’t doubt that sunshine will bathe the last pages. You wouldn’t have her taking over from Alspach, would you?’

  Wedge answered this only with a gesture of horrified repudiation.

  ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘If the story’s to be kept from going badly off the rails, one thing is clear. Timmy wasn’t sleeping with Aunt Sophia, after all. You can involve your hero in a little fornification, you know, provided he goes about it in a good-hearted sort of way. But adultery is out. In no wholesome and popular fiction does an adulterer finally marry the heroine. Take Shakespeare.’

  ‘And what the devil has Shakespeare to do with it?’ The cultivated soul of Colonel Petticate was outraged that a name of some distinction in the chronicles of authentic art should thus be cited by the ludicrous Wedge. ‘Aren’t we talking about the plumbing?’

  Wedge, fortunately, was too taken up in his subject to notice this oddly savage volte face on the part of the admiring husband of Sonia Wayward. He pursued his theme.

  ‘In all Shakespeare’s plays, my boy, it happens only once. And that’s in the very special case of What’s-his-name, whom they’d bullied into marrying the lady doctor.’

  ‘Bertram and Helena,’ Petticate said coldly. ‘But I suppose you’re right. If Timmy has slept with Sophia, then repentance in Claire’s arms – which is the honest, real-life thing – won’t do within the conventions of Sonia’s curious world. Do you know, it hadn’t struck me? And yet I felt I knew Sonia’s vein of romance quite well.’ And Petticate stared rather thoughtfully at the diminishing length of his cigar.

  ‘You haven’t considered it analytically,’ Wedge said, and shook his head with an air of high intelligence. ‘You’ll find that what Sonia does about those rowing-shorts on Aunt Sophia’s balcony is simply to explain them away.’ This time Wedge nodded weightily. ‘That’s it. She’ll simply explain them away.’

  ‘But you forgot that the boy has been terribly unhappy all the time. We first met him like that, when he was taking it out of his eminent father’s best-quality marble. And that can only be because he had some sense of guilt.’

  ‘My dear chap, that’s something utterly different.’ Wedge spoke with fine assurance. ‘It’s something that shows he has quite exceptionally fine feelings. He failed, I’d say, to visit his old nanny on her death-bed. It was a real fault. But the dear fellow has got it all out of proportion, and Claire is eventually going to give him a sane view of the matter. Mark my word – she’ll confess some similar mild turpitude from her own childhood days. I’ll wager you a dozen champagne on it.’ Wedge seemed to recall that he was one whom the service
of literature kept on the near fringes of destitution. ‘That is,’ he emended, ‘a dozen drinkable Beaujolais.’

  Petticate was impressed – and not least by his own address in thus eliciting some useful information about hitherto unsuspected pitfalls in the production of popular fiction.

  ‘I’ve no doubt,’ he said, ‘that Sonia’s mind is working precisely as you say. But I’ll be uncommonly interested to discover how she gets round that pair of pants.’

  ‘What they call an artificial plot, my boy. Perhaps a spot of calumny. In romance, you’ll find, balconies have always been great places for nasty machinations of that sort. Think of that other wench in Shakespeare – the one that gets called a rotten orange.’

  ‘Hero,’ Petticate said with renewed chilliness.

  ‘That’s right. Dumb sort of kid. They made out she was entertaining a lover. Wonderful expression that, isn’t it? Well, perhaps there’s somebody in Sonia’s book who’s just making out that Aunt Sophia has been entertaining Timmy.’ Wedge chuckled. ‘Torso and all,’ he added.

  Petticate frowned. He always deprecated coarse talk.

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ he said.

  ‘Or Aunt Sophia may a little dote on the young man in a respectable motherly way. She may have found the shorts down by the river, and decided to wash them for the dear lad, and then hung them out to dry on her balcony. Only it wouldn’t be easy to give much dramatic colouring to a mere misunderstanding like that. I come back to deliberate deception by some jealous and malign person as much the likeliest thing.’

  ‘I think you’ll prove to be right.’ Unconsciously, Petticate spoke as one who weighs his words and arrives at a decision of moment. ‘And I’ve no doubt that you can rely upon the delivery of the manuscript pretty soon.’

  ‘Even with things as they are?’

  Petticate was to wonder whether this question had left him for a fraction of a second just discernibly blank. But memory quickly returned to him and he replied easily enough.

  ‘Oh, dear me, yes. I thought I’d made that clear. Sonia’s going wandering won’t affect the matter in the slightest. And as for the story, what may appear difficulties to us will be plain sailing to her.’

  ‘A lucid mind,’ Wedge said contentedly. ‘Bright and clear and sparkling – although not, between you and me, precisely given to sounding the depths.’

  ‘Certainly not that.’ Petticate, finding his cigar finished, had got to his feet. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said as he shook hands with Wedge, ‘Sonia’s ever getting into deep water.’

  3

  It was in a reasonably contented frame of mind that Colonel Ffolliot Petticate settled himself into a first-class compartment of the 4.45 from Paddington. As he walked past the second-class coaches – cluttered with string bags and brown-paper parcels, sticky with children, and generally given over to the horrors of plebeian life – they had struck him as a vivid illustration of the penury which his resolute conduct during the past forty-eight hours had put him fairly in the way of escaping. Widows in reduced circumstances are a dismal lumber enough; a widower in similar straits must necessarily be not only dismal but ridiculous as well. To sit in the pit and to be there remarked by old companions of the stalls; to drive up in some clever little foreign car to the houses of friends whom one has hitherto visited in a respectable English saloon; to have to think twice about a new suit; or even about picking up half-a-dozen ties in the Burlington Arcade; to slip warily into the shops of licensed grocers for the purpose of buying colonial sherry: Colonel Petticate could visualize only too vividly a sort of intensifying series of such encounters with darkness. He was not a spendthrift, and the breadth of his intellectual and aesthetic interests had the natural consequence of rendering him largely superior to sordid material consideration of any sort. Still, there were limits. And fortune, he knew, would have been ready to cast him remorselessly beyond the pale, had he not risen up before his unlooked-for crisis and declared himself to be the master of his own fate and the captain – indeed the colonel – of his own soul.

  And so far – he told himself – so good. It had been admirable strategy to tackle Wedge straight away. Wedge was cast for the role of his principal dupe – if ‘dupe’, indeed, was not a word exceptionable as carrying inappropriate suggestions of fraud. Perhaps ‘unconscious collaborator’ would be better. Petticate registered a faint grin as he made this silent correction in his own thought. He was really in excellent spirits.

  Wedge had eaten out of his hand. And this desirable state of affairs he had brought off almost without a thought. His own temerity almost scared him in retrospect – although it gratified him too. For he had simply walked in and extemporized. It was only his grand design – only the broadest outline of the beckoning glimmering thing – that had been in the least clear to him. Even now, when he had spent, before catching the train, a meditative hour in his club, he had done nothing to fill in the picture. Just in what circumstances had his wife parted from him? He had no idea. Had she intimated any proposed destination – and, if so, what? He had no idea of this either. To Wedge he had murmured something about Brazil, but that had been by way of more or less airy hypothesis. If Wedge had been more curious, had asked even two or three searching questions, his own trust in the inspiration of the moment might conceivably have failed him. So he must really go about the matter more systematically. Nearly the whole of the spadework, he could see, was yet to do.

  Not, fortunately, that Sonia had made any call upon spadework in the literal sense. The happy circumstances of her decease had obviated the need for any arduous toil at the bottom of the garden from which the dear old girl’s labours had – in Wedge’s rather impertinent image – hitherto excluded the wolf.

  This start of graveyard wit so amused Petticate that he almost laughed aloud. But to have done so – he suddenly realized – would have been unfortunate, since the compartment now held another passenger. Nor – and he had been most remiss in not remarking this earlier – was this second passenger a stranger. He was, in fact, old Dr Gregory, Petticate’s physician and near neighbour. And Dr Gregory, observing that he had been observed, now spoke.

  ‘Afternoon, Petticate. Another of those heavy lunches – eh?’

  Petticate made what reply he considered judicious to this unceremonious greeting. Although his mental state was now so satisfactory, it was conceivable – he realized – that he was looking physically a little off colour. He had had a nasty shock, after all. But, of course, he couldn’t tell old Gregory about that. Indeed, he couldn’t safely tell him anything at all, since Gregory represented his first contact with the rural society amid which he lived, and whatever story was to be circulated through that society must be meditated with care. No more happy extemporization. The thing must be thought out in all its bearings. Now. Before this journey was over.

  Petticate, having thus determined, offered a single further civil remark to Dr Gregory, and then unfolded his Times – that ritual gesture whereby an English gentleman claims inviolable privacy for a season. Dr Gregory in his turn opened The British Medical Journal. The train was not due out for another ten minutes. Petticate turned to the page which Printing House Square dedicates weekly to the interests of female readers. This was not the consequence of a nostalgic thought for Sonia. He judged it the page least likely to distract his thoughts from the important task before them.

  Dispassionately put, his project involved two kinds – and, he supposed, degrees – of forgery. There was forgery as it had been pursued by James Macpherson in the laudible interest of endowing the world with an ancient Gaelic epic, or by William Ireland in the yet more commendable endeavour to add to the number of surviving plays by Shakespeare. Petticate was not very clear about the legal aspect of this part of his plans. Plenty of books published as being by X were in fact in whole or part the work of Y. But there was no doubt a point at which this sort of thing might elicit the disapprobation of the Law Officers of the Crown – and if they couldn’t get at you one
way it was pretty certain that they could get at you another.

  Income tax, for instance. There was certainly a field to which he would have to give careful consideration. It would be foolish to deny that very considerable hazards awaited him. Some of them he was, no doubt, still in no position to take account of. They would bob up unexpectedly as a ready test of wit. He hadn’t, for instance, until that talk with Wedge, quite succeeded in getting into clear focus the business of the morality of popular fiction. Still, he had hold of that now, and he would write nothing to shock the sensibilities of those wives of the clergy who no doubt formed a solid block of Sonia’s readers.

  That sort of forgery was going to be plain sailing. The more technical kind – that involving the actual simulating of Sonia’s signature – was really going to crop up surprisingly seldom. When a new agreement had to be made with publishers, the signature must appear on it. But such an agreement would always contain – as for some years it had contained – a clause requiring all payments to be made to the author’s agent, Colonel Petticate, whose discharge thereof would be final. That was, in the world of publishing, common form. And it meant that once the money was in Colonel Petticate’s bank, its further destination was nobody’s business but his own – his own and that of a nonexistent lady. There was perhaps no other profession or occupation in the world – Petticate happily speculated – to the pursuit of which mere continued fleshly existence was so inessential.

  Of course there was a natural term to the thing. He could scarcely hope to pursue his new activity beyond his own ninetieth birthday, since by that date Sonia Wayward would be verifiable from Who’s Who as well over a hundred, and not very plausibly, therefore, to be represented as still in the full vigour of her career. Still, there was plenty of scope between now and then.