The New Sonia Wayward Read Free Page A

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.

 
     
2
    ‘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