Read The New Sonia Wayward for Free Online Page B

the moment. He might even, if he thought out the problems clearly beforehand, revisit Snigg’s Green and treat its inhabitants to a great deal of agreeable fantasy. For there was no doubt – Petticate told himself, still behind his Times – that he would come to take a virtuoso’s delight in the whole delicious deception. That he would be fooling people on rather a large scale – for, after all, didn’t tens of thousands of people regularly look out for the new Sonia Wayward? – was the particular charm of the whole situation.
    Colonel Petticate had reached this entirely satisfactory point in his reflections, and had become aware, from without, of the slightly enhanced bustle that preluded his departure for the next stage of his adventure, when the voice of Dr Gregory sounded from across the compartment.
    ‘Petticate,’ Dr Gregory said, ‘doesn’t it look as if your wife is going to miss the train?’

 
     
4
    It was the first unexpected question he had been asked about Sonia. And he didn’t stand up to it at all well. In fact he lowered his newspaper and stared at Dr Gregory in consternation.
    ‘My wife!’ he said.
    There was a moment’s silence in which he realized that he had spoken the word rather wildly – so that it would scarcely have surprised him to hear himself add, like the unfortunate Moor of Venice, What wife? I have no wife . Quite abruptly, he had almost met absolute shipwreck.
    And Dr Gregory was giving him a sharp look.
    ‘I ran across her at the bookstall,’ he said.
    ‘Sonia?’ Petticate was entirely surprised to hear his own voice. He had very strongly the sensation – sometimes referred to in Sonia’s fictions – of being struck dumb. ‘You spoke to her?’
    ‘No, no – I merely noticed her buying a magazine.’ Dr Gregory paused as the guard’s whistle blew. ‘She has missed it,’ he added.
    It ought certainly to have been true. Only it wasn’t. For, even as Dr Gregory spoke, there was a shout on the platform, a door opened and then banged shut again – and Petticate, glancing, already pale and stricken, into the corridor, saw with frozen horror his wife standing there. It was only for a second’s space. She had boarded, along with a suitcase, the already moving train. And then instantly she had vanished in search of another compartment.
    Dr Gregory had seen nothing of this preternatural catastrophe. He had been much too occupied in staring at Petticate – towards whom he now leant forward for the purpose of making a professional grab at his wrist.
    ‘Keep still,’ Dr Gregory said. ‘Breathe easily. And don’t be alarmed. Just a digestive matter. It will pass off in a few minutes.’ He accompanied these remarks with a glance in which Petticate, even in his prostration, recognized the plainest expectation of immediate fatality. No doubt Gregory supposed him to have suffered a severe cerebral thrombosis.
    The perception of this hopelessly erroneous diagnosis almost steadied Petticate. Gregory had always been a bit of an ass.
    ‘You’re quite right,’ he heard himself say. ‘Flatulence, Gregory – just a touch of flatulence. Been troubled a little by it lately. And you needn’t bother about that pulse.’
    Gregory sat back. In appearance, at least, Petticate must have rallied. Nevertheless his mind was in a dreadful state. It was not the less so because it had registered, at least for a brief moment, enormous relief. Sonia was alive! The thing hadn’t happened. It had been all a dream.
    Petticate closed his eyes, and tried to accept Dr Gregory’s advice to breathe easily. He searched for proofs and signs – for anything in his recent circumstances that would render indubitable the fact that it had been a dream; that he had suffered a terrible nightmare in which he had appeared to lose his wife. But he searched, of course, in vain. He hadn’t just woken up. He had lost Sonia. He had himself done that thing…
    And yet she was on board the train. Sonia – or