The New Sonia Wayward Read Online Free PDF Page A

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