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« on: June 10, 2024, 11:29:12 am » |
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GIALLETTI’s HOUSE in Chelsea looked across the river towards Battersea Park. Or rather it didn’t, on the sunny autumn morning upon which Petticate and Susie Smith arrived before it, do precisely this. The prospect was there, but the house had the air of having shut its eyes to it, since the blinds were down in all but two of the top windows.
‘Perhaps they’re away.’ Susie, standing on the doorstep, said this almost hopefully. For the first time since Petticate had renewed his acquaintance with her, she was perceptibly nervous. It was something he found himself regarding as ominous. He knew that if Susie began to fumble she would be lost. But of course it was by no means certain that she would do that. Many an actress before Susie Smith had been in a pitiable state just before putting up a superb performance. And her nervousness on this occasion did testify to her acute intelligence. She was undoubtedly right---Petticate had concluded upon reflection---in seeing the business with Gialletti as her supreme test.
‘Try another ring.’ he said. ‘There may be nobody about except Gialletti himself, and he may be buried in his studio.’
Susie tried another ring. It had no effect in securing any attendance upon the front door, but it was presumably the occasion of a window at the top of the house being thrown violently open. An elderly woman thrust her head through it with an air of some indignation.
‘Ha lei chiamato?’ she shouted.
‘Certainly we rang.’ Petticate thought the question plainly superfluous. And he was reluctant to begin bellowing Italian in a London street. ‘Is Mr. Gialletti at home?’
‘Il signore é partito. Partiremo presto. Viva la liberta!’ The woman waved her hands. She appeared to be in a high state of excitement.
‘Then isn’t there anybody at home?’
‘La scala secondaria.’ The elderly woman made a large circular gesture, and banged down the window.
‘How extremely uncivil,’ Petticate said.
‘An Italian, was she? You can’t expect them to behave like we do.’ Susie offered this pacifically. ‘But what did she say?’
‘She appeared to suggest that we should find another staircase at the back.’
‘Then round we go. The studio may be in a mews, or something like that.’ Susie glanced along the street. ‘Along there, I think.’
It proved to be a good guess. At the back of the house there was a building which must at one time have sheltered carriage, horses, and coachman. It was now rather lavishly and artily got up---in a manner, however, seeming to date from a good many years back, when Gialletti had been fashionable rather than eminent.
‘That’s it,’ Petticate said, and pointed to an affair like a crane that protruded from an upper aperture. ‘I suppose they hoist up his chunks of marble with that.’
‘I don’t see any way of getting in.’ Susie studied the building. ‘Oh, yes---up that outside staircase. It lets you in right at the top.’
They climbed, and came to a door that was ajar. There was no bell or knocker, but in the middle was a small and tarnished brass plate saying ‘Gialletti’. Petticate thumped on the wood and got no reply, although there was some suggestion of sound and movement from inside.
‘Better walk in.’ Susie said. She seemed quite to have recovered her nerve. ‘I’d say it’s what’s intended---wouldn’t you?’
They walked in, and found themselves at once in an open gallery, and looked down into a vast studio filled with a cold clear light that fell through correspondingly vast northward-facing skylights. Curtains, tapestries, and a rolled-up carpet suggested considerable luxury, but the whole place was clearly in process of being closed down. A row of packing cases along one wall appeared intended to take a collection of large and middle-sized bronzes stacked on the floor. Indeed it looked as if nothing was intended to stay put except several masses of marble so huge and amorphous that they had the appearance of geological phenomena which some seismic disturbance had thrust up through the floor of the studio. Or they might have been icebergs, for they gave the whole place a decidedly chilly look. Yet it wasn’t, in fact, chilly. It was, on the contrary, rather hot.
At the far end of the studio was a large stove. It was alight and blazing fiercely. This accounted for the temperature. Petticate saw that it was being used simply for the rapid disposal of piles of miscellaneous rubbish. He was just taking in this fact with some perplexity when there was a clanking sound immediately underneath him, and a young man appeared from below the gallery. He was shoving a wheelbarrow piled with litter, and for a moment it looked as if he were entirely naked. Petticate---and certainly Susie, who gave a squeak of pleasure---had remarked a golden torso, and a ripple of muscle under a fine skin, before it became apparent that the owner of these attributes was at least wearing some very short shorts.
‘Hullo!’ Susie called out. ‘Please, may we come down?’
The young man dropped the handles of his barrow, turned round, and looked up at the gallery.
‘Oh, I say, Mrs. Petticate---what tremendous fun!’ The young man, having produced this greeting without a second’s hesitation, turned a more formal, but still frank and pleasing, regard upon Mrs. Petticate’s husband. ‘Good morning, sir. You won’t know me, but I’m Timmy Gialletti. How nice of you to drop in. Won’t you come downstairs?’
+++
They found an inside staircase and descended it. Petticate, a good deal shaken by his sudden immersion in the world of What Youth Desires, found it necessary to resist a tendency positively to grope his way. He had entirely forgotten the existence of this young man, whose acquaintance Sonia must have gained when making a professional study of the Giallettis from the life. Of Timmy, indeed, such a study might rather be called from the nude; and Petticate wondered whether some morbid strain of exhibitionism was perhaps in question.
‘I’m so sorry to appear like this.’ Timmy smiled charmingly, grabbed a chair that was lying overturned beside the wall, dusted it deftly with the palm of a hand, and presented it to Susie. ‘The fact is, I’m shoving a good deal of stuff around, and this is how I have the habit of doing it.’ He turned to Petticate. ‘I couldn’t by any chance,’ he asked blandly, ‘interest you in five tons of a very tolerable Carrara marble? It would be a standby for years---whenever, I mean, aunts and uncles and so forth passed away.’
Susie laughed unrestrainedly at this. ‘Isn’t Timmy’---she gave his naked upper arm a skittish pat that froze Petticate’s blood---‘just too droll?’
‘We have come, as you may guess, to call on your father.’ Petticate preserved a decent cordiality, but sought to show that he was disposed to get down to business. ‘There are sittings to arrange for the bust he is to undertake of my wife. I think you will have heard of it.’
‘Oh, yes---but of course.’ For a moment Timmy Gialletti appeared almost at a loss. ‘My father wanted to execute it very much, very much indeed. He will be’---Timmy hesitated, and then chose a word that came plainly from the paternal vocabulary---‘he will be desolated. But I suppose you haven’t heard the news?’
‘The news?’ Petticate was extremely disconcerted. He couldn’t square either Timmy’s words or manner with the first notion that had come into his head: namely, that the great sculptor must be dead.
‘The revolution in San Giorgio, sir. Of course you may have missed it. The splash in the papers isn’t anything very much. But it’s the supreme event of my father’s life. He’s been working for it for years.’
‘But how marvellous!’ Susie’s utterance was a gasp of admiration and joy. Her Anglo-Indian background, it appeared, was unexpectedly blended with republican fervour.
‘The old man’s been pouring money into the revolutionary underground for years. And now it’s paid off He left for San Giorgio by air last night. The whole household---they’re mostly Italians, of course---are following today. But I’m staying behind myself. You see, I feel entirely English. And, as a matter of fact, I shall soon be marrying an English girl.’
‘I congratulate you.’ Petticate’s correct demeanour did not desert him in face of this confusing situation. ‘And your father will no doubt be---um---a moderating influence upon the rebels. Not that I use the word in any derogatory sense.’
Timmy Gialletti laughed. ‘Well, sir, they’re not rebels any longer now. There’s no doubt that the coup has been a complete success, and that the new men are firmly in the saddle. My father, of course, is going to be first President.’
‘But how perfectly splendid!’ Susie’s enthusiasm grew. ‘Do you think he will be willing to receive old friends? How much Ffolliot and I would love to dine with the President of darling San Giorgio! Wouldn’t we, my poppet?’
‘Oh---most certainly.’ Petticate only felt that Susie must at all costs be got away. ‘No doubt in the circumstances,’ he went on, ‘the bust your father has been so anxious to execute of Sonia will have to wait.’
‘Well, yes.’ Timmy Gialletti’s delightful features once more seemed to admit a tinge of embarrassment. ‘In fact---well, definitely. I’m terribly afraid it will seem like a broken promise. But it’s really a matter of religion---or almost of religion. The fact is, my father has taken a sort of vow. In thanksgiving for the deliverance of San Giorgio from a century of tyranny, and so forth. The entire energies of his life are now to be devoted to a colossal memorial to the heroes of the revolution. Really colossal. The marble, you know, won’t have so far to come. How I can see him making the chips fly! I expect I’ll go out and give him a hand, now and then. It’s surpringly good exercise, when you can’t row.’
‘I’m very, very disappointed,’ Susie said. ‘ But I always thought your father was a dear. And---shall I tell you something, Timmy? Ffolliot won’t mind, I know. I think you’re a dear, too.’
+++
The Petticates---as it might be reasonable to call them---set off for Snigg’s Green largely in silence. Petticate himself was aware that in Susie Smith the unexpected issue of their expedition had induced a conflict of emotions. She was relieved, just as he himself was not. But she was also disappointed, as he decidedly was not. It came down, no doubt, to a difference of temperament. He, being entirely the rational and prudent man, had no relish for unnecessary risks. The necessary ones were harassing enough, in all conscience. But Miss Smith---there was no denying it---was an artist, and it had been in the great Gialletti’s studio that she had believed herself destined to bring off the supreme thing. She would rejoice in the turn she was to put on before the Accademia Minerva. But, because easier, it would be less satisfactory.
Petticate, although his own mind didn’t work at all in this way, was conscious of having---although very obscurely---certain feelings of dissatisfaction himself. It was puzzling, because his perplexed situation was really resolving itself very nicely. The Hennwifes had turned out to be no danger at all; as a menace they had unexpectedly collapsed---and without even the necessity of confronting them with the false Mrs. Petticate. And now it had been much the same with Gialletti. Petticate’s horizons were clearing rapidly. And yet he wasn’t---for some reason he couldn’t fix---entirely happy about it all.
They had lunch in Oxford, where Susie had decided she must take the opportunity of seeing Marcus and Dominic. She spoke of them---she really seemed to contrive to think of them---as parts of a remote past for which she from time to time nostalgically yearned. Petticate judged this silly, and he certainly didn’t propose to accompany her to Eastmoor Road---to which her return indeed, while briefly enjoying the handsome outer trappings of Mrs. Petticate, struck him as being in dubious taste. But he did feel that he deserved a good luncheon, and that he could enjoy a quiet cigar afterwards, while Miss Smith went about her tiresome occasion. He wondered how she would explain to the children’s parents the sudden and obtrusive change in her fortunes, and whether she had it in mind simply to return to her former dwelling, the richer by £500, when her present adventure was concluded.
The lunch at least was satisfactory---and would have been more so but for a certain solicitousness in Susie as to what he should eat and drink that struck him as being entirely without appropriateness to their situation. It was a quite vast relief when she left him for an hour. Not that he then ceased to be conscious of her. Though she was no longer with him in the flesh---that abounding flesh which he had to acknowledge himself positively repelled by---she remained a problem to brood over. Susie Smith had, he supposed, a suppressed maternal instinct as well as an uninhibited and cheerful acquisitive one. The combination was peculiarly disagreeable to him.
They got home by tea-time. Susie insisted on stopping in the Village and going into the baker’s. Petticate, waiting impatiently in the car, could see her gossiping happily with the baker’s wife behind the counter. As far as the business of being Mrs. Ffolliot Petticate was concerned, this could only be reckoned as a very minor turn. But Susie emerged from it quite cheered up. She put down a paper bag on the seat between them.
‘Crumpets for today,’ she said. ‘And muffins for tomorrow.’
Petticate received this grumpily. ‘Please yourself,’ he growled as he started up the engine. ‘At tea-time I never eat anything except shortbread biscuits.’
‘Then wait.’ Susie was out of the car again in an instant---and this time she returned quite quickly, carrying a tin. ‘From Edinburgh,’ she said. ‘I once lived there. It was with a very nice Major. And I learnt just what shortbread to ask for. Alex that was my Major’s name used to love it too.’
To this trivial reminiscence Petticate made no reply. He was noticing that the quality of his uneasiness had changed. Foreboding would have been the better word for it now.
+++
It was certainly under the influence of this feeling that Petticate, after tea, and hard upon wiping the last crumbs of shortbread from his moustache, grabbed the telephone and called up Wedge. There was now, after all, only one major crisis ahead, and the sooner he got a grip on it the better. Sonia Wayward must turn up for her prize. After that---only provided that Petticate benefited from past experience to arrange matters more skilfully this time---she could vanish as a physical entity, as distinct from a creative mind, once and for all. In other words this tiresome Susie Smith could go one way, and Petticate himself with his portable typewriter would go another. The novel-writing would be a terrible bore. But, with only himself to provide for in inexpensive but agreeable parts of the world, he need not labour at his curious future livelihood too often.
After some irritating palaver with a subordinate, he got through.
‘Wedge? Petticate speaking.’
‘Oh . . . you.’
Petticate, although he was unable to judge this at all civil, continued to endeavour after a cordial tone.
‘I have a piece of news for you, my dear fellow. Sonia is home.’
‘Well?’ Petticate frowned over the instrument. He supposed it must be defective.
‘Can you hear me?’ he asked. ‘Shall I insist on another line? I said that Sonia is home.’
‘I can hear you perfectly well. You said that Sonia is home. What about it?’
This time, Petticate was really alarmed. There was an odd quality in Wedge’s voice that the Postmaster-General certainly wasn’t to blame for.
‘Dash it all, Wedge---that prize. The Golden Nightingale, or whatever it’s called. We can fix up the arrangements now.’
This produced no articulate reply. It did however produce a noise that Petticate found entirely perplexing.
‘What was that?’ he asked.
‘What was that? It was a howl of rage, Petticate. And now can your hear me grinding my teeth?’
‘My dear chap, stop fooling.’ Petticate said this without conviction. There was now no mistaking the fact that Wedge was in a singularly bad temper.
‘Fooling? And who the devil is fooling, if it isn’t yourself. Haven’t you heard of the revolution in San Giorgio? There won’t be any more prizes. There won’t be any more Accademia Minerva. It’s been dissolved. After all, the whole thing was just publicity for their rotten casinos and things, wasn’t it? And the new government is far too high-minded for all that.’
‘But this is outrageous!’ Petticate himself was now near to gibbering with rage. ‘Think of their new President! Gialletti himself. A man who is a great admirer of my wife’s books.’
‘Rubbish, Petticate. You mean your wife’s bones---and he’s far too busy to bother his head about them now. You don’t think that an artist like Gialletti---a thorough highbrow after your own heart---could really admire Sonia’s tripe? The idea’s just silly. And, by the way, have you any notion of how many copies of What Youth Desires I’ve had printed? Have you any notion of how much money I’m going to drop now that the whole stunt’s off? If it doesn’t mean bankruptcy, it means something damned near it.’
For some moments Petticate, assaulted in this way, could find no words. His mind was in a most pitiable confusion. Much of what Wedge had told him he now realized that he might reasonably have guessed at. His chief difficulty appeared to be in deciding whether the news was good or bad. On the one hand it meant a very considerable sum of money going west. But on the other hand it represented the distintegration and disappearance of the last remaining crisis in his affairs---of what was, in fact, already the sole surviving occasion of his bringing his wife spuriously back to life again. This thought did presently prompt him to speech.
‘But, look here,’ he said---and was aware of his own incoherence as he spoke. ‘Look here, Wedge---what am I to do about Sonia?’
‘Do about her? Good Lord, man---do as you please. Pack her off again to the Bermudas, or wherever it was. If we’re to judge by What Youth Desires, she does her stuff the hell of a lot better there than when living at your blessed Snigg’s Green.’ The bad temper had by no means departed from Wedge’s voice. ‘Buy her a tropic isle somewhere, and make a yearly trip in that yacht of yours to collect the latest manuscript. We'll have to think again, by the way, about changing that sliding scale. Good bye.’
+++
Petticate put down the receiver, left his study, and walked like aman in a dream to the drawing-room---which was the apartment in which Susie Smith had established herself. She had cleared away the tea-things and was sitting by the fire. And she was knitting.
It was the knitting, somehow, that unnerved Petticate most. Susie might have been a tricoteuse, waiting to see him go rolling past on a tumbrel.
‘I’ve been talking to Wedge,’ he said. ‘The whole business in San Giorgio is off. The revolution has killed it.’
‘You mean we don’t go?’
‘Just that. Certainly we don’t go.’
‘But what a shame!’ Susie was genuinely upset. ‘All that fun of being Sonia Wayward and getting a prize from a prince gone down the drain because of a stupid revolution! I looked forward to that, I did. And you’d have loved hob-nobbing with royalties.’ Momentarily and for the first time, Susie looked thoroughly dejected. Then she brightened and laid down her knitting. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Let’s cheer ourselves up, dearie. Let’s have a party.’
‘A party?’ Petticate was merely bewildered.
‘Drinks. And just by ringing round. That’s much the nicest way. I'll begin with Augusta.’
‘Augusta?’ To Petticate the name seemed to do no more than ring the faintest of bells.
‘Who was a Gale-Warning. Augusta Gotlop. And do you think Lady Edward would come? We’ll ask some others, and you’ll tell me all about them first. It will be our next big lark.’
Petticate had gone quite pale. ‘I must point out----’ he began.
‘But there’s one other thing---before the post goes. The advertisement for the Times.’
‘The advertisement for the Times?’ Quite unconsciously, Petticate had got out a handkerchief and was mopping his brow.
‘For servants. We can’t go on doing all our own skivvying, dearie.’
‘I suppose we could---for the fortnight or three weeks that it looked as if you would have to remain here. But, as it is, your engagement’---Petticate advanced this word boldly---‘is really at an end already. Come to think of it, you haven’t been necessary at all.’ He laughed an insincere and hideous laugh. ‘As things have fallen out---first about the Hennwifes, and then about this whole Gialletti and San Giorgio business---I need never have invented you.’
She was looking at him with amusement.
‘But you have, dearie. And here I am.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Petticate contrived some grotesque travesty of genial response. ‘And you did well, and you’d have continued to do well, I’m sure. But it’s all over. And I'll get you that £500 tomorrow.’
For a moment Susie seemed to consider this seriously. Then she took up her knitting again.
‘Of course that was the arrangement, dearie. But it wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t do for me. I couldn’t bear to leave you---not now. And it isn’t just that things look like being very comfortable here.’ Susie paused in her knitting to look appreciatively round the room. ‘It’s certainly very nice. There’s a touch of class to it that comes natural to me, as you can see. And I’ll like that room upstairs---the one next to yours, that is---once we get the new window thrown out. But that’s all on the side, as I say. The real thing is that I don’t want to leave you.’ Susie paused again---this time to gaze at Petticate with perfect sincerity. ‘Of course you’re a bit of a low hound. There’s no denying it. But I’ve taken a fancy to you.’
During most of this speech, Petticate had stood as if petrified before an approaching doom. But now he did manage to begin to speak.
‘If you think that I’ve taken----’
‘And it wouldn’t do for you, dearie. You may think it would---but it wouldn’t. Ffolliot Petticate without Sonia Wayward---a real live Sonia Wayward, at bed and board, as they say---just wouldn’t work. You’d begin to slip at once, my boy. And you’d be far down the hill within a year.’
There was a long moment’s silence. Petticate’s absolute dismay before what he had heard was only deepened by a lurking knowledge that this fatal woman’s words held some grain of horrible truth.
‘You really imagine,’ he asked with feeble sarcasm, ‘that you can take Sonia’s place for good? I suppose you think you can even write her novels?’
Susie laughed easily.
‘We know who can do that, dearie. And I think, by the way, you should be able to manage two a year. At least for a good time ahead, that is. It’s just a matter---isn’t it?---of regular hours. And it will be worth it. We might have that Aston-Martin in no time. And now I'll go and ring up Augusta.’
And Susie got up and left the room. Petticate watched her go. It was her mere way of moving, somehow, that set the seal on the thing as inevitable. She was---nobody could question it for a moment---the long-established mistress of the house. Weakly, unprotestingly, Petticate sank into a chair. The rest of his life, he saw, was to be lived, in more sense than one, under the shadow of the new Sonia Wayward.
THE END
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