Free The New Sonia Wayward by Michael Innes Page A

must. You live on her, don’t you?’
    The fact that Mrs Gotlop offered this with a massive return to joviality by no means excused the woman’s insolence in Petticate’s eyes.
    ‘I have my competence,’ he said with dignity. ‘I remarked as much to Ambrose Wedge earlier today, when I told him about the present situation.’
    ‘Oho!’ Mrs Gotlop gave a yell which might have been appropriate to some emergency of the hunting field. ‘So that’s the way of it? You were going to keep quiet about this humiliating rupture at Snigg’s Green – which was why you asked me that idiotic question on this train. But when you heard that Wedge was coming over tomorrow, you realized the truth was bound to come out. Hence your visit to me now. My dear Blimp, what a laborious fellow you are!’
    Petticate found nothing to say to this. Mrs Gotlop had not, of course, got it quite right, since she knew nothing either of Sonia’s actual death or of the false alarm of her resuscitation. But she was as securely in the target area as her limited information permitted. And Petticate certainly couldn’t feel that this interview with her had been a very distinguished tactical success. It was clear that the main impression he had given was of unnecessary and unconvincing talk about his wife. And that was the very thing he knew he must avoid! He stood up.
    ‘I must be getting back to my own carriage,’ he said. He spoke as easily as he could. ‘Gregory is there. I mustn’t lose the chance of a chat with the dear old fellow.’
    ‘Tell him about your wife, Blimp, my boy.’
    Petticate cast about for some retort to this further impertinence, and found nothing. But his eye fell on the Pekinese.
    ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I rather imagine Boswell must want to step along the corridor?’
    And he gave Boswell’s mistress a cold look and withdrew.
    It occurred to him as he moved down the train that Dr Gregory had probably been anxious about him. He had left the compartment in poor shape, and presumably to fulfil a need such as he had just so wittily attributed to Mrs Gotlop’s Boswell. And then he had been absent all this time. Yes, old Gregory would certainly be worried.
    But this proved not, in fact, to be discernibly the case. Indeed Dr Gregory was comfortably asleep – and he awoke only when the train slowed for the next station, the last before that at which both travellers were due to alight.
    ‘Ah – Petticate,’ he said casually. ‘Feeling better, eh?’
    ‘I’m entirely all right, thank you. But I thought it would be a good idea to have a cup of tea.’
    ‘Humph! And did you eat all the carbohydrate they gave you along with it?’
    ‘Certainly not, my dear Gregory. I hold your excellent counsels too much in mind.’ Petticate remembered that this was true at least to the extent that he had rejected the buttered toast.
    ‘You can pay less and eat less,’ Gregory said. ‘That’s to say, if you make it clear at the start. It’s an important tip.’
    ‘Decidedly it is.’ Petticate paused. ‘By the way, I saw the woman you mistook for my wife.’
    ‘Mistook for your wife? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
    ‘Don’t you remember telling me you’d seen Sonia at the bookstall, and that it looked as if she might miss the train?’
    ‘Ah, yes – of course I do.’
    ‘And my telling you it couldn’t be Sonia, since she’d gone off on holiday?’
    ‘I don’t remember your telling me that , Petticate.’
    Petticate looked surprised.
    ‘Didn’t I? I was almost sure I did. But perhaps I was prevented by that seedy turn.’
    ‘Perhaps you were.’ The quality of Dr Gregory’s interest in all this remained slight. ‘It was somebody like her, you say?’
    ‘Amazingly like her. And I sat down opposite to her in the restaurant car. An odd coincidence. She even had the same eyes.’
    ‘Remarkable.’
    ‘Of course, in a sense, Sonia might have been on the train. That’s so say, she might have changed