The Sugar Mother (4 page)

“I don't think we have met them—have we, Leila? But we both love ickle babies, don't we Leila honey? Come and sit down by Mother. She's so shy,” Leila's mother explained, “and we've had a fright at not being able to get in. Just think, Leila,” she continued, “we are next door to a house with two doctors. Remember
The Young Doctors
?”

“Only one real one,” Edwin said. “I deal only in words and phrases and not with the body. And alas!”—he became a little theatrical—“I am no longer young. I am—how shall I put it?
—a tattered cloak upon a stick
.”

“Come again?” Leila's mother said. “I beg yours?”

“Mostly I…” Edwin swallowed. “Cecilia is away for a year.” Leila's mother, showing no reaction, simply arranged her face for her next question. “And what is your speciality?” she asked in a bright way, her tone dismissing Cecilia and her devotion to her work. “Do you carve people up or are you a bedside man?” Her full red lips, pursed, seemed to wish for both.

O mater pulchra filia pulchrior
. Edwin, smiling, surveyed
his visitors, changing the subject and changing the quotation in his translation, “What a beautiful mother
and
a beautiful daughter,” feeling that any sort of comparison or grading of beauty might be out of place. “Unfortunately for the purse, neither,” he said, going back to the question and glancing with pretended shame at his laden bookshelves. “To have books in more than one room in a house is positively gross,” he said. “But I am helpless!”

“Well, never mind!” Leila's mother said. The compliment had pleased her. “Mercy buttercups.” Yes, she would fancy a glass of port. She had always been fond of a good port. A nice port could do wonders, and being locked out was quite an occasion for a little celebration, wasn't it?

“It's no use our trying to get into that house,” she said over her second glass, “is it, Leila pet? We know! The agent when we rented it off him stressed emphatic that it was burglarproof. ‘Can we get raped in there?' I asked him, and he made a point of that. ‘No, my dear,' he said, ‘you can't ever be raped in there.' That's what he said. ‘No one can break in there and you cannot be raped and burglarized. Two ladies on their only,' he said, ‘need protection.' Mr. Bott. Take Mr. Bott: he would have said the same thing, wouldn't he, Leila? Your daddy, Leila, he always said, ‘If I'm not spared, if I'm took, be sure to choose a house as you can't be raped in.'” Leila's mother sniffed and blinked. “I am sorry,” she said. “Have you a tissue?” Edwin fetched some from the bathroom. “So, Dr. Page,” she said, dabbing her eyes, “we are so to speak completely at your mercy.”

Edwin, knowing that he was unable to sleep if strangers were in the house, and immediately regretting his words, said, “Perhaps you would sleep here?” He began at once to feel, in advance, the uneasiness in the house.

If Cecilia had been coming home from the Mary and Joseph it would have been different. He would sit in her room after Leila and her mother had been seen off to bed, and Cecilia would brush her hair, and giggle, and say that she could hear the guests doing dreadfully sordid things in the spare bed
room. She would giggle again about Leila's clothes, “that awful long red and blue checked skirt! Those cheap boots—did you see the heels? And that purple and white vinyl bag. Oh, I don't mean to laugh, but her gear, it's too terrible!”

“We have a comfortable spare room,” Edwin said, sternly silencing Cecilia's laughter, which was so shrill in his head he felt that the visitors must be hearing it too. “And in the morning,” he said, “we can sort out the problem of entry.”

“Now that would be nice.” Leila's mother put her other leg on the stool and agreed that a cup of tea before bed would be very acceptable.

 

Leila's mother was to have the bathroom first and Leila was to be second and Edwin, as host, would do the locking up and be last.

“Mr. Bott always locked up,” Leila's mother said. Edwin, not knowing what this Bott looked like, tried to look as unlike him as he could. He limped across the room. Mr. Bott would never have limped, he thought.

Leila's mother would be a long time in the bathroom. She made the announcement beforehand. She had to rinse out a few things. “Our lingerie,” she said to Edwin in the hall, where he seemed to be caught. She even suggested that he might like to go first, as she never liked to keep a gentleman waiting, especially in his own house. She had not lost sight, she said, of whose house it was. She did not want to hold him up, she said. But he, with repeated little bows and small words of insisting, said, But no, she must be first. He was sure she was tired; hadn't she said the play was very long? As for himself, he never went to bed early but worked late at night. There was, he said, simply no hurry.

“Yes,” Leila's mother said, “we have often seen your light.” She held, in both hands, nightdresses belonging to Cecilia. She thought she was too large herself but perhaps Leila might…Edwin hoped the night would be a comfortable one for them.

“Thank you,” Leila's mother said, taking up all the space in the hall. “It's a funny thing about lingerie,” she said. “Lingerie”: she let the word roll on her tongue before she finished saying it. “Lingerie,” she said, “seems to be based on the idea that we are attracted to clothing which reveals a great deal but not our all. Not everything about the human body. We enjoy,” she said, “the suspense of peeking at each other even though we know, often very well, what we are peeking at.” She moved slightly, Edwin hoped in the direction of the bathroom. She shook a plump finger at him. “No peeking,” she said. She seemed to savor the idea.

 

The water was running in the bathroom for a long time. He sat at his desk and stared at Jason's despair:
If only children could be got some other way…
Leila's mother certainly had some ideas on underclothes. Surely she could not have read Donne quoting Pliny. It would be amusing, perhaps, to read the passage aloud to her, perhaps at breakfast:

It was one thing for Leila's mother to talk about what she called lingerie; he was sure she would be outraged and her respectability wounded if he quoted Pliny. It was quite in order for women to say certain things. If a man said them, then a woman would set about accusing him.

In an attempt to soothe himself and to make the night as ordinary as possible, he gazed upon the pensive and gentle faces of the Madonna. Because of his lecture preparations he had several on his desk. Uppermost were the Hans Memling, the Dürer and the Van Eycks. The children lay there in complacent repose, each with innocent limbs and a babyish head which contrasted with the facial expressions of wisdom more
suited to those of an old man. This contemplation of the representation of the human individual as a naked, plump, contented child, the subject of countless acts of adoration and contrition, never ceased to fill him with indescribable longings.

Perhaps, as others had for centuries before him, he would meditate, keep to his quiet existence and dwell in the peacefulness reflected in the patient expression in the face of the blessed Mother as she holds her child.

He heard the regular beat of the water meter. Perhaps they, Leila and her mother, were both in the bathroom. The throb of the water in the pipe as it passed below his window seemed to echo in his head. Women, he knew, were often sociable in bathrooms, flipping up their skirts to perch, chatting, on the lavatory and removing clothes shamelessly to step one after the other under the same shower. Often he'd heard peals of silvery laughter (Cecilia's) from the bathroom when she had a friend, not Daphne, to stay. Sometimes he'd heard snatches of songs and conversations over the noise of running water and filling toilet tanks. Women, he knew, continued to talk even while they cleaned their teeth. He preferred having the bathroom to himself.

He thought he would examine the dry patch on his shin. He found it with difficulty. It looked the same as it had looked earlier. There was not much point, he thought, in recording a measurement, as he had not written down, though he meant to, the earlier size. At a guess it did not seem to have grown bigger. He wished he had asked Cecilia what he should rub on it. He folded back the cover on his bed, neatly, and put his pajamas out. Cecilia always thought this action of his cute and said so every time she came into his study and saw his pajamas spread out ready.

When they were first married she laughed so much when she saw him fold up the hotel counterpane, and when she saw him shake out and put his pajamas on his side of the bed, she had laughed even more. It had seemed as if she was going to cry. Later, in the night, she said she was sorry for laughing,
that it was all her fault, laughing the way she did. All her life, she explained to him tenderly, she had been a nuisance, laughing at the wrong times, at school in particular. Daphne could tell him.

“Good heavens, yes,” Daphne's deeper voice bore witness on many occasions. Daphne was not given to shaking with helpless mirth during times of crisis. Edwin thought she bore up wonderfully well under Cecilia's often inexplicable behavior. He often relied on Daphne. He, though he would never have asked, wondered if Cecilia had ever had to leave the labor room or the operating table when, just for an example, she was removing something internal and vital, doubled up with the giggles, as she sometimes had to leave their dining room when visitors were present. Like the time he was helping the wife of his own head of department to dislodge a king-size prawn from where it had dropped. Cecilia's unsuccessful attempts at smothering her laughter (she was hidden, her face buried in her old Girl Guide uniform, behind the kitchen door) were fortunately drowned by Daphne, who, rising to her feet, proposed in immense tones a recitation from Shakespeare and a toast to the Great Bard, as he was called at St. Monica's. The prawn ultimately escaped from its temporary mooring and the meal continued, Cecilia, demure, solemn and pretty, placing Icebergs, exquisite chocolate-coated buds, in front of every guest in turn as if to make up, to appease.

Dear sweet Cecilia, how sweet and kind she was their first night together, all naked and new and young, saying she would love him forever. Edwin often turned to the relevant pages in the notebook of the intangible. He enjoyed rereading all the sweet things Cecilia had said when they were first together. He had noted them all, word for word.

The telephone started to interrupt them immediately, for she was always on call. They blamed the phone.

“Oh! Stupid old phone!” Cecilia said. And, singing, she dressed so quickly Edwin was hardly aware of her leaving the room. Though he recalled on all subsequent disturbed nights
the sound of the car in reverse as he had heard it on their first night in their own house, after the honeymoon.

All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above
. Edwin thought he heard the words when Cecilia sang. He never heard more words, as she hummed the rest. If she had shown a tendency towards religion, he thought, she could have been praying or singing inside herself with angels, a sort of hidden choir.

“What is it you sing when you go out?” he asked her once.

“Oh, do I sing?” Cecilia, suppressing mirth, was surprised. “Perhaps,” she said, “it's something I sang at school. I can't remember.” Perhaps, Edwin thought, she did pray as she set out to deliver another child. He respected her privacy too much to question her more.

He looked at the quotation from Jason and at the passage he wanted from a certain novel, where a father lifts up his naked baby son to his lips in the presence of a woman who has come to take the baby, to buy him if necessary. Finding material for his lectures sometimes made him the more aware of his loss. Life seemed altogether brittle and without meaning then and he longed to give up, once for all, the habits of pleasure, which included overeating and stupid excessive drinking. Some literary references made the idea, the idea of having children, very desirable. It comforted him to linger near the children's playground on his way home from the university. He often stood for some minutes watching the children as they climbed and jumped and scrambled. Children's bodies were loose and free in their clothes, he thought. He liked to hear their excited voices.

Suddenly, like the symptoms of an illness, the bitterness returned. He trembled as he thought again of the way in which he had been introduced by his colleague before giving his lecture. It was as if he had achieved nothing in the last thirty years. The bitterness was like a symptom which comes at intervals, growing in intensity, as a pain grows, and fading as a pain fades. Always it left him worn out and depressed. Cecilia, when he spoke of it to her, had said not to keep think
ing about upsetting things. “Think of something else,” she interrupted his complaining. “What shall we have for dinner? I'm starving,” she said. And he felt ashamed because he saw himself on these occasions as small-headed and with the petulant mouth of a disagreeable child.

Cecilia loved food. He could hardly bear watching her eat broccoli. “Pass the butter,” she asked him, with her mouth full, and spreading the melting mass with her fork, she positively stuffed herself. He was afraid she would burst something, she ate so much. But she never did and she remained slender whereas he, picking and choosing and being careful, was bulging horribly in places where he wanted to be neat and flat.

He thought the water had stopped. They must have finished in the bathroom. He stood uneasily in the middle of his study, failing to feel protected by the extra wall provided by his books and journals. There is no greater annoyance than being annoyed with oneself. He wished that he had never invited them, this Leila and her mother. But what could he have done in circumstances like these? He opened his door a crack. The hall was deserted. The light was still on, for him presumably. There was no sound from the room opposite. Not even a murmur of voices as the two women might quite expectedly have comforted each other with the better memories of the day and the hopes for tomorrow. He set off along the hall. He would not be able to sleep; he would not even contemplate sleep. A warm shower would be relaxing. It was almost as if Cecilia was prescribing a shower, a long warm shower. He saw Leila coming out of the bathroom. He was too far along the hall to turn back. He saw that her blouse was unbuttoned. She gave a shy half-smile and slid by him sideways; her full youthful breasts, pinkly innocent, moved slightly in the opening of her garment.