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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.
    Petticate chuckled – but without eliciting any surprise from Dr Gregory, who naturally supposed his diversion to be occasioned by one of The Times ’ irresistibly humorous Fourth Leaders.
    Income tax. There was really no difficulty there either. Every year Sonia must sign a return of income – and perhaps a receipt or two if the Commissioners generously decided, as they sometimes do, to send some inconsiderable trifle back. But nobody is going to scrutinize that sort of signature. Of course any sort of trouble over taxation would be fatal, and he would now himself have to do all the accounting with a care that should insure that no awkward inquiries were ever launched. Sonia’s own bank account presented another problem. There would have to be a letter closing that – and it is precisely to a banker that one doesn’t care to send a signature which it not quite all it should be. Still, there was only a minor risk there. In fact it looked as if, on the business and legal side, common prudence would again ensure sailing that was plain enough. It was in the social sphere that the real conundrums lay.
    He must decide, in the first place, where Sonia had gone to. It was all very well being airy with Wedge, but with his neighbours at Snigg’s Green another and different technique would be required. To announce that his wife had departed into the blue would be to invite no end of gossip. On the other hand, if he acquiesced in the natural assumption that he knew her whereabouts, there would presently be requests for her address from people who wanted to correspond with her on one trifling occasion or another. So Sonia must be represented as having gone away in circumstances that precluded her having a known address for the time being, but which held out the expectation of her being heard from quite soon. That would afford a breathing- space. And during that breathing-space he must decide what he himself was going to do.
    He had, he told himself, great freedom of manoeuvre. A successful novelist can take up residence pretty well in any corner of the globe that strikes her fancy – and so can her husband, if he happens to be a retired professional man of independent means. Taxation and the servant problem being what they were, people in their position were constantly going off nowadays to settle in quarters which would have been regarded as merely outlandish a generation ago. Sonia, in fact, had only to find some enchanting spot to which she should summon him in her well-known imperious way. And he had only to pack his trunks and follow her.
    The whole thing must be made not too vague and yet not too precise. It wouldn’t do, for instance, to name Nassau or Nairobi, since that might well lead to pilgrims from Snigg’s Green or elsewhere making casual attempt to look them up. ‘Sonia has almost settled on the Bahamas, but the Bermudas are another possibility.’ Something like that must be the formula. And once he himself had got plausibly away under cover of it, almost nothing could go wrong.
    Apart from a vague cloud of distant cousins, Sonia had no surviving relations. He himself, although possessed, of course, of a certain inherent distinction, had long been content with a private station in virtue of which the world was likely to take very little interest in his movements or circumstances. If permanent exile didn’t suit him – and he much doubted whether it would – he could always come home for a month or two now and then, explaining to anybody who inquired that his wife’s health – or perhaps just her unremitting devotion to the art of fiction – did not admit of her travelling at