The Sugar Mother (11 page)

“I'll sleep in my slip,” she had managed to say after one or two attempts to take it off.

Petticoats: Cecilia had extravagantly pretty things, gathered at the waist some of them and embroidered with little holes. These had a special name, some black and some white. She had an enormous red taffeta one, and several others were frilled in snowy layers. She looked so sweet in them Edwin often thought it was a pity she was not able to go out to dinner wearing one as a dress.

Daphne seemed to favor something very dull, this slip slippery enough to be useful, to stop her top clothes riding up on her underclothes. She had, before falling asleep, tried to ex
plain something of this to Edwin as he patted her shoulder and made what he hoped were loving and soothing noises as softly as he could.

He began now to compare the long legs of his little fling not with Cecilia but with the sad, almost collapsing, Leila, hunched over her apparently unwanted mug of tea. Misery could make a plain person even plainer.

“Oh, Teddy. I've got such an awful headache.” Daphne sat in bed weeping and holding her head with both hands. “I feel so utterly awful! It can't be what they call postcoital melancholy,” she sobbed, “because I haven't…we haven't…”

“No.” Edwin, still holding the tray, sat gently on the side of the bed and placed the tray between them. He patted the bedclothes where he thought one of her thighs would be. “There there,” he said, “don't cry, Daph. You'll feel better in a minute. Don't cry, please don't be so upset. Everything's all right.”

“Oh, you are a dear!” Daphne said, wiping her face on the sheet. “I am sorry to be sitting here in bed in your house howling my head orf like this. What about”—she brightened—“as one disillusioned sinner to another, what about the old hair of the dog,” she said.

Edwin, dismissing quickly the horror of Prince and the disgusting things to be found on his ugly coat, said it was a good idea. “Worth a try,” he said and went into his study. The sight of the empty champagne bottles, and even worse the smell of them, made him more ashamed. The double sight of sorrow, Leila and Daphne, was unbearable.

“We'll try a spot of this with our tea,” he said, returning with the bottle of whisky.

“Oh yes; Father always swore by it.” Daphne raised her tear-blotched face. “He maintained it saved his life—disinfecting his bowels, you know, when he was in New Guinea, and it pickled his liver and mended his broken heart. I don't know who broke it; certainly it couldn't have been Mother, and Miss Heller stayed with him till death did—” She was overcome by more weeping.

“Come on, Daph. Dry up and drink up.” Edwin held out a
carefully measured dose. “Drink up,” he said, “and chase it with a cup of tea.” His own head ached. He did not weep outwardly. He took his medicine, both lots—the one he drank and the other his thought and realization—bravely. It pleased him to parallel Girolamo Cardano (Renaissance lecture number 1) and need a severe pain in the body, the head in this case, to help him to bear his mental anguish.

“This tea is very nice.” Daphne in an absentminded way munched the toast. “I feel such a fool sitting here like this,” she said.

“Don't,” Edwin said. “I'm the fool, if you want to know,” he said. “If you will not mind this, Daph, I'm very fond of you and very grateful to you.”

“Oh, Teddy. Darling! You are being so sweet!” He thought she would cry again. Quickly he poured more tea. She did not cry but ate his share of the toast.

He thought about love and the short-lived anticipation, the accessories, the sensations, which people thought were love. He did not often think about it but recalled now Cecilia's first delight, which was also his, coupled with relief. He had been afraid of failing. “All stops full out!” she had said. As Cecilia, Saint Cecilia, she was supposed to have invented the organ. It, the idea, became their private joke. In their set it was imperative to have some remarks which had connotations, odd words which caused little twisted smiles and raised eyebrows and quick glancing looks. Edwin was unable, even in a moment of anguished truth in his book of the intangible, to acknowledge, to write the words to describe when their intimate joke had palled. The act became predictable and, quite soon, the after-effects were taken for granted. The feeling of being special and chosen and cared for was gradually absorbed, he realized now, in the more important matter of appearances. How they were seen by other people began to mean more to them and they must, all the time, have been meaning less to each other and thinking only of the next thing they were going to do. Things which would be evaluated by other people and measured against standards which were not necessarily their own.
On the voyage, when they left England, both were on their way together but separately to responsible work. Sitting by Daphne in Cecilia's pretty bedroom, Edwin recalled his vision of the university department as it was in his imagination. Brown leather chairs, polished tabletops and desks, laden bookshelves, filtered sunshine, noble minds and thoughtful discussion. Possibly Cecilia too had imaginary pictures of the Mary and Joseph Wing of the general hospital. They respected each other's appointments and spoke about them to other people with reverence during the voyage, but really only thought about themselves and what they each were going to do. They never exchanged their imagined scenery. It lay ahead, undisturbed by spoken thoughts and hopes. He thought now too about the remote scenes on either bank of the Suez Canal. He was not sure whether passenger ships came through the canal any longer. He had an idea that theirs was the last ship to make the journey.

People lived lives there quite unlike their own lives, which they felt to be so vitally important. Those people faced life and, in particular, illness in a lonely landscape where only the sky looked down on their suffering. When they had no cure, they were alone beneath a tremendous width of uncaring sky. Vividly he recalled a man and a little boy dressed in striped cloth, like something out of a Bible picture, standing on the crumbling earth. As the ship, full of apparently indifferent people, went by, the two of them stood watching its passing. There were no other people and no signs of human dwellings anywhere within sight. He was deeply moved to see the man and the boy standing quite still watching the ship. He mentioned it to Cecilia.

“Nomads,” she cried. “How exciting!”

Her laughter, which was muffled in the cabin, tinkled in the various bars, bubbled in the swimming pool, and resounded in the ship's dining room at the captain's table and later in the lounge. Everyone liked Cecilia and he was proud of her. He still was, he told himself, as he looked with sympathy at Daphne, who lay back with her eyes closed. During the voy
age Cecilia delivered two babies, used a stomach pump (while the ship's surgeon was busy with an inflamed appendix) on a member of the crew who had tried to poison himself, and diagnosed measles on the children's play deck.

It was during the voyage that they met the people who were to determine, from a few weeks of shipboard companionship, their future ways of living. On board were the couples: the Wellatons, the Honeywells and the Fairfaxes. All, with their own ways of seeking pleasure and relaxation, were quickly attracted to Cecilia and her laugh. Edwin, at the time, had been pleased and grateful for an insulation and a protection which was to be found in this particular form of friendship.

The new country, on the morning of arrival, stretched flatly beyond the customs sheds. They stood together at the ship's rail, feeling the hot dry air. The rail of the now safely berthed ship moved slowly above the horizon and slowly below the horizon. Edwin remembered that he wondered then about success or failure in his new appointment, and he supposed, now, that Cecilia, beside him, was silently wondering about hers.

He was impatient to get back to the kitchen to see Leila, to try to think of words to tell her he was sorry. He took up the ravaged tea tray. Daphne opened her eyes and told him that she felt heaps better. She said she'd be up and dressed in a jiffy and should they walk for ten minutes in the pines with Prince to sort of round things off—literally, a sort of hair of the dog.

“Good idea!” Edwin said over his shoulder, his need to reach the kitchen suddenly the most important thing.

Leila and her mother were not in the kitchen. On the table there was a note to Edwin. It was scribbled in pencil.

He found Daphne in the back garden. “I'm most awfully sorry, Teddy,” she said. “Prince has eaten all your French lavender. I do feel perfectly frightful about it.” She straight
ened up from a ferocious fondling of the animal, who was wagging his tail, Edwin thought, as if he imagined he was providing, with this unfailing movement, electricity for the universe.

“Will you let me provide lunch?” she asked. “I'm not going to school this morning. All I have to get done is to take Miss Heller to the bank and she likes to be back early. I can promise you an incredible disaster, but”—she gave a little laugh—“better a dish of herbs where love is, and so on, or words to that effect. I'll probably never try roasting a stalled ox.”

The sky through the pines across the road was pale yellow and watery. The trees seemed immense, very tall and still, as if maintaining their sentinel duties. He thought he would leave a note for Leila's mother, for Leila, telling them that he would be in for dinner. His lecture was not until four o'clock.

“I'd like that very much, thank you, Daph,” he said. “I'll join you in the pines shortly.”

 

All day Edwin wished for a few minutes alone with Leila to explain to her about the stupid night. A sort of joke, he would say. He wanted her to know that the whole thing was nothing more than that. Leila's mother too, he wanted her to know, but perhaps she already did. “That woman's got a hide like a rhinoceros!” Cecilia sometimes used a cliché he could almost know how she would see Leila's mother, and Leila for that matter, and then apologize for the cliché, but not for the thought that it expressed.

All day, except for the short time spent with Daphne eating a surprise omelet which had, among other things, olive stones in it—“The olives should have stayed on top,” Daphne explained—he could not stop thinking of Leila. Daphne too came into his thoughts a great deal and his lecture, still Renaissance 1, suffered third place. Both Leila and Daphne had something in common, and this was that they had not been gazed upon naked by anyone with adoration or admiration, except of course by their mothers and, perhaps once or twice,
by their fathers when they were babies. Naturally people could not be expected to gaze at other people's bodies so that the ungazed-upon need not feel slighted. It was not so simple. “Those wishing to be admired naked step this way, please.” Ludicrous. He thought the reason for Daphne's weeping might have been partly because of this sad fact, unacknowledged, but then, knowing Daphne's tremendous self-honesty, not unacknowledged.

Once, in England, one midsummer, the three of them—Cecilia, Daphne and Edwin—thought they would bathe naked at midnight on midsummer eve in the river where they were having a holiday, Daphne having come to visit. Edwin remembered it all vividly. He, finding it difficult to take off all his clothes in spite of the darkness, was huddled on the grassy bank. Cecilia was prancing naked beside him. The grass was soft and wet and there was a river smell of water and weeds. Suddenly there was a rush of movement, a dash of white across the grass, and a mighty splash followed by a gasping and gurgling sound. “It's Daphne!” Cecilia, laughing, was helpless on the bank. Daphne came rearing out of the water. In the faint, partly clouded moonlight it was possible to see that she was covered in mud and slime. She pulled the sticks and weeds from her long hair. It was then Cecilia was sure they were being watched from the far bank. As Daphne scrambled out Cecilia whispered, “Those dark shapes over there—they're looking at us!” They had as quickly as possible grabbed their clothes and their shoes, and as they ran, Cecilia, almost collapsing with laughter, declared she thought it was only cows. “Cows over there,” she could only gasp. “It's only some cows!”

He did not know why he was remembering something that had happened years ago except that it had to do with Daphne having no clothes on.

Daphne was unashamedly literal at times. Much later on, when her father was hardly able to leave his bed, Daphne, in the supermarket (for some reason they—Edwin, Cecilia and Daphne—were all there together), had chosen a yellow plastic pail.

“Father wants a bucket,” she said simply. “He prefers to stand, do you see, and yellow seems the appropriate color, don't you think?”

 

H
aving a certain phrase of music in his head, Edwin set about a plan to play all the Mozart piano concertos in turn till he came to the phrase he wanted. His lecture had been a flop; he admitted this to himself, surprised to find that he was trembling in the seclusion of his study. He felt that he had actually run away from the lecture hall, leaping down the stairs three at a time and crossing the grassy courtyard in long running strides in order to end as quickly as possible the encounter between inability (his) and intolerable stupidity (theirs). He came home and found there was considerable time to spare before dinner. Delicious cooking smells came from the kitchen, accompanied by choppings and stirrings indicating that Leila's mother was there.

He put on the Mozart and sat down with a sherry almost opposite Leila, who was laboriously writing a letter on a pink pad on her knee. She did not look up at Edwin. Leila's mother said she would have her sherry in the kitchen. He listened attentively, allowing himself to look at Leila.

“It's as if the pianist goes back as if to replay, to redo the run of notes and the chords,” he had tried to explain to Daphne over the olive-stone omelet. “I can see him go racing forward, leaning forward, coattails up, and then it's as if he sits back and knows he has to play it again, so he does and then he continues,
bending his head forward with a serious satisfaction.” He wanted to know, he said, which concerto.