The Sugar Mother (5 page)

“Good night,” Edwin said and pretended to be looking along the hall for a cat to catch and push out of the kitchen door. Leila, without attempting to pull her clothes together, disappeared into the guest room.

Edwin, deeply moved by the sight, the glimpse of the girlish
pink body, unseen, he thought, by anyone except herself and her mother and, now, him, stopped at the door of the bathroom. Voluminous undergarments hung dripping from the shower curtain rail. He turned abruptly and fled from Leila's mother's washing.

The pink mounds which were Leila were sweetly inviting. He searched along his shelves for poems which would recall what he had just seen. It was a hardship not to be able to use his own bathroom. He, in spite of this, became quite excited as he sat down at his desk with John Donne and Goethe.

 

“
A
nyone for tennis?” Somewhere, as if in his dream, Edwin thought he heard Daphne calling. It was hardly light. He realized he had been asleep, still partly dressed and in his dressing gown. He sat, full of sleep, on the edge of his bed. “Anyone for tennis?” It was Daphne, immediately outside and below his open window. Usually he closed his window. He remembered now why it was open. Daphne must have come down the side of the house. “Three times round the oval and a jog-jog-jog through the pines,” she bellowed pleasantly. “I promised Cecilia”—she lowered her voice as Edwin leaned over his desk towards her—“I promised Cecilia,” she said, “that I'd exercise you every day.”

“Daphne,” Edwin said, “whatever time is it?”

“Six, or just back or front of six,” she said.

“Sssh! Do keep your voice down.” Edwin was breathless and agitated. “I have guests, you know, houseguests.”

“You what!” Daphne's attempt at a whisper failed.

“Yes; Leila and her mother, forget their other name…”

“Good heavens! But how! Does Cecilia know?”

“Of course not; they only came last night. Locked out. That house, behind you; left keys inside.”

“What a hoot!” Daphne said. “But why on earth, Teddy, didn't you pack them orf to the El Sombrero or that darling little chez nooky nook, the guesthouse, Pilgrims Roost?”

“I must say, the wise thought did not occur to me.” Edwin yawned.

Daphne thought for a moment. “You'll have to get rid of them, straight away, otherwise you'll be stuck.” She pulled the brilliant hockey colors she wore as a belt into a tighter knot. “Well, come along. Leila or no Leila, we'll do the oval.” She began running on the spot, her large feet pounding on the earthy path. “High knee-raising,” she cried, “one two, one two.”

“Oh, I can't, Daphne,” Edwin almost whimpered. “I haven't slept!”

“Rubbish,” Daphne said. “Ten minutes in the fresh air is worth an hour of sleep. Let me into the kitchen then. I could do with a pot of tea.”

“Oh, I don't think you should come in…” Edwin began, but Daphne had disappeared. He could hear the thudding of her feet on the damp ground as she made for the back of the house. He retied his dressing gown cord and went as quickly as he could to unlock the kitchen door before she, with her hunting horn voice, roused Leila's mother and Leila.

 

“Oh yes, we were on TV, the both of us,” Leila's mother said, “the both of us interviewed by ever such a nice young man—remember, Leila? That nice young man—not the one with glasses; the other, gingery one. Well, we made a complaint, you see, about this holiday tour we'd been on. Really dreadful it was.” She pulled her cardigan closer, seeming to Edwin to cuddle herself in the inimitable way some women
did. Leila was still in her nightdress, the one Cecilia wore when she was not well, a sort of stretchy material; it always made her look appealing when, flushed with a temperature, she lay in bed and put her hot hand in his. Edwin supposed that the stretchy stockinette fitted Leila, who was definitely plump, the best. He wondered whether Leila's mother had stayed dressed or slept raw, as Cecilia would have said. He thought again, as he sat at a corner of his own kitchen table while Leila's mother poured tea, of the tremulous untouched pinkness which was Leila when she was unbuttoned. Without meaning to, he remembered the delphiniums, years ago in Cecilia's mother's garden, with their intense blue flowers reaching up into the small branches of an apple tree where the little apples, ungrown, were like nipples hidden among the leaves. The flowers of the delphiniums seemed to be apple-tree flowers then. Lying on the grass between spindles of rosemary, he sketched Cecilia as she sunbathed. When the pencil (2B for drawing) rounded the curves of her neat white breasts, the sensation which darted through his body made him catch his breath and exclaim, “How lovely you are! I do love you!”

Cecilia's mother never commented on the sketches. “Daddy will cover them up,” Cecilia said, which he did, with several old copies of the
Radio Times
. At the time Edwin thought it odd that an art dealer should cover nakedness. “I suppose it's because it's me”: Cecilia provided the simple explanation.

The morning now seemed like the morning of an English summer, Edwin thought, as he glanced through the kitchen window across to the mist-shrouded pine plantation. Every moment the trees became more evident. The distant sound of crows, high up in the trees, suggested the spaciousness of open fields and paddocks as though, overnight, the quiet suburb and the locked house next door could have disappeared.

“We never ever knew where we were going to sleep,” Leila's mother was saying, “and you
know
what Spain is!” She turned her eyes up to the ceiling so that only the whites
showed. “And once,” she continued, “the coach left without us and there we were, stranded!”

“Good Lord!” Daphne said. She cradled her mug of tea in both hands and gazed with her honest sort of sympathy at the two visitors.

“Delphiniums,” Edwin said aloud, but no one heard. He thought of the blue, like china blue; it—the china—was meant to mean something, he supposed. When Cecilia was near delphiniums, her eyes seemed even more blue, bright with a kind of blue fire if there could be such a thing. “Blue eyes is over-sexed”: he'd heard this unforgettable remark once; he thought it was said behind him on a bus. Now he wondered how to correct it grammatically without altering the impact. He was enjoying his tea. He had not expected to like it, having been dreadfully put out to find Leila's mother already in the kitchen, with the kettle on, when he went through to let Daphne in. Unable to let her in secretly, he had opened the door with a flourish and now they all sat, a curious assortment of people in curious clothes: Edwin still partly dressed, as he had been all night, under his dressing gown; Daphne in her old school hockey tunic; and Leila with her clumsy skirt pulled on over Cecilia's fever nightdress. The skirt was obviously meant to hide the way in which the clinging material was stretched round her plump body. The skirt only covered the lower half and Edwin, though he tried not to, noticed how Leila kept her arms folded as often as she could over the revealing quality of the top part of the gown.

Cecilia never made the tea because of his little ways with the teapot. In the early days of their marriage he had once tried to expound on his theories. Freshly drawn water and the right size of the special scoop, not used for anything else, but kept especially for the purpose in the tea tin, which, he explained, must have a well-fitting lid. Cecilia, concentrating, he thought, narrowed her eyes so that they looked like splinters of blue ice. Suddenly she had started one of her laughing fits. She laughed till tears sprang from the corners of the half-closed eyes. He thought she was crying.

“What's the matter?” he asked then. “Are you all right?”

“Oh, quite all right.” She was positively howling, he remembered.

“Do go on”—she was gasping—“but do first tell me what formula did you have, or”—she could hardly get the words out—“or were you breast fed?” She exploded in further mirth.

“What d'you mean?” He could remember all too well his perplexed feeling. “Mother was most particular about…”

“That's just it.” Cecilia was calmer. “But never mind!” And she had rushed out of the kitchen, leaving him with the tea tray. The happy notion of taking the tray to her bedside seemed to be the answer that morning and for all subsequent mornings. Later he began to drink his tea alone in his study, as it suited his bowels to do this.

It was Edwin's policy to take the teapot to the kettle and he noticed, with a surprising feeling of approval, that Leila's mother did this and that she had the water at an unsurpassable boiling point. “On the boil!” she said, when it came into forceful contact with the tea leaves.

“Who's for eggs and bacon?” Leila's mother was looking into the refrigerator. She managed during this examination of the contents to extend a questioning look towards them all.

“Oh, rather! Scrumptious!” Daphne seemed eager. Good manners caused her to raise her eyebrows in the direction of Edwin. He nodded, not quite certain what he wanted himself, and went on sipping his tea, looking across to the window as if studying the sky for a weather warning. The pines, as if they had stepped away from the last shreds of the rain mist, seemed suddenly closer. The crows had moved on. The pine plantation was, after all, only on the other side of the road.

“More tea, Doctor?” Leila's mother had the teapot almost level with his head. She liked to pour from a height, she said. “Airyates the tea,” she explained. The pines, as Edwin accepted his second cup, seemed taller and blacker and he began to feel shut in by them, closed in in the suburb and in his own house.

Leila's mother rattled about in a cupboard and emerged with a frying pan.

“Housekeeper's sitting room, billiards room, pink parlor,
rose room, green room”—Leila's mother was nodding her head, counting—“the yellow drawing room, the blue room, the music room”—she thought for a moment—“the vestibool, the nursery and the schoolroom, the master bedroom, the bathroom and the dining room.” She turned the bacon with deft movements. She was describing the Botts' house and was pausing on the panel of bells which was, she said, smack bang right over the door of the pantry. Seeing her by the stove, Edwin felt that she had always been there.

“Then there was the other bathrooms and the north entrance and the garden room and the south entrance…”

“Good heavens!” Daphne said. “We must each have been given identical wiping up clorths for Christmas. Miss Heller…” She paused. “Good Lord!” she said. “It might have been Miss Hearnsted…One of them gave me mine. It's got a greeny background with little pictures of bells and all the names of the rooms made into a delirious pattern; an ancient manor house I thought was the nearest thing to it. What color was yours?”

“Yes.” Leila's mother continued with an excessive calm in the face of Daphne's lack of tact. “Mr. Bott had a tea towel, pure linen, designed as a reminder of our lovely home before we had to part with it. It was, if my memory is not playing tricks today, one of the last things Mr. Bott did. What was the very last thing your daddy did, Leila pet? Can you remember? He was always into something.” She smiled at the assembled little company and began to break eggs, one after another, into a cup, passing each one under her nose with a knowledgeable look before tipping it into the appetizing contents of the frying pan. “Pass up some plates to warm, Leila,” she said, “and put out the knives and forks. Bread, everyone?” she asked. “Or would anyone prefer toast?”

 

“I must walk Prince before I go to school,” Daphne said as Edwin accompanied her to the front gate. “Are you coming? I'll meet you in the pines….”

“I'm going for water,” Edwin said. “You know, to the spring. I always fetch it. I've got the containers ready. Like to come?”

Daphne shook her head. “No,” she said, “must take Prince. Honestly, Teddy, I don't think it's worth all the trouble you take—going to that so-called spring. Every time I pass there, in the car, you know, and I see you crouched there, in the rain sometimes, filling all those dreadful plastic things, I feel I must tell you that it isn't a sacred spring at all and you shouldn't kneel there, getting your knees wet. That water, honestly, Teddy, I bet it seeps down there from all sorts of horrid places, factories, septic tanks, the cemetery is not all that far away and the dogs' home. I wouldn't touch it. Honestly, Teddy!”

“You sound just like Cecilia,” Edwin said.

Daphne paused on the path. “Well, I did promise to do my best to look after you,” she said, “to convert you if necessary. I'm only trying!” She glanced back at the house. “However will you get rid of them?” she said.

“Supposed to be phoning the agent now.” Edwin glanced too, with some uneasiness, at his own house, which had a secretive look about its front windows. He felt as if he were looking at his house for the first time and perhaps seeing it as a stranger might see it. “The owner's away,” he said, moving his head slightly in the direction of the house next door. “Place has been let, on and off, for some years.”

“Pity Cecilia isn't here,” Daphne said. “She would straighten things.”

Edwin sighed. He would have to manage, he told Daphne.

“That was a huge breakfast.” Daphne changed the subject, but only partly. “I'll have to get Prince. I hope,” she added, “you don't have troubles.”

“I hope not,” Edwin said.

 

Leila's mother removed her washing from Edwin's bathroom. The two of them, Leila and her mother, carried the wet clothes to the neighboring garden, where they threw them over the clothesline. Edwin, watching from his study window,
saw glimpses of Leila through the thick leafy bushes. She was walking about, eating. She seemed to have something in the palm of her hand. She ate quite hungrily, he thought, even though it was not long since breakfast. Her mother, as if unable to resist, began pulling up long grass and the tough stalks of weeds. These came up from the wet soil easily. He wondered how anyone could be enthusiastic enough about a garden belonging to someone else to pull out weeds.