The Sugar Mother (15 page)

The two bunches of keys lay on the carpet. The women were smooth and sharp-featured, shadowed with fatigue, for though younger than their husbands, they were, neither of them, young. They stood close together as if holding out against some cruel fate. Edwin, because of the rules of the game, picked up one set of keys. He glanced at the waiting faces, and as if reluctant, with an air of regret, he paused and then handed the Honeywells' keys to Buffy.

“My time of the month,” he sighed, with an exaggerated
grimace. He held one hand with its back to his forehead. “Not tonight, Josephine!” he said. Paulette turned on her sharp heel. Her face flushed dark over her cheekbones.

“He has a headache,” Edwin said, adopting the third-person narrative. “H-h-he h-has a-a h-headache.” He tried his trick of stammering, giving delicate little coughs and softening his voice into a lisp and the affectation of not being able to pronounce the letter
r
. “Wight now,” he said, “he's an absolute weck.” He smiled with an innocence created for the moment. “An absolute weck!” he said.

“Look here, Page, am I right in thinking that was a downright insult?” Buffy, flaring red in the face, stepped up close to Edwin.

“I'm sorry, Buffycat. It wasn't meant…”

“I'm not used to having my wife insulted. You took her keys.” Buffy's voice rose, he began to squeak. “You swine, you barstard! You utter…” He began to swing his clenched fist.

“I say—I say.” Tuppy thrust a fat arm between them. “I say, the old number one—the old enemy and all that,” he muttered. “The sangria and all that. Keep your hair on, chaps. The sangria, my fault, don'tcher know, too much of the old ouzo. Not quite ourselves, eh? Eh, what?”

Edwin, in his present misery, thought of all the years of this terrible game. This swinging. This forcing himself to be gallant and charmingly chivalrous. Trying to be ardent when there was no ardor. He remembered, against his will, the times when he made himself learn the caresses which would lead quickly to the moments of required sensation. The combination of having too much to drink and a genuine lack of desire towards an unchosen partner were the ingredients for a certain kind of unhappiness. It seemed now, as he stood in front of Buffy's hurt fury, that the mistakes made long ago when he searched to be part of a new environment, to be part of a group, only became really clear when it was too late. The unbearable thing was the looking back to those evenings on board ship when, in meeting the couples, Buffy and Paulette, Erica and Tuppy, and the Fairfaxes, Dippy and Ida, he had
with Cecilia, in an attempt to ensure friendship, closed in his own life.

The stupidity of it struck him. He put his hand on Buffy's arm and felt the elderly muscles trying to harden.

“Actually, Buffycat,” he said, “I must ask you to take Paulette home tonight. I'm, er, not too well—perfectly okay really, but waiting for the results of a blood test. Actually I'm thinking of Paulette.” He gave Buffy one of his famous little-boy-lost looks and began again to stammer and soften his
r
sounds.

“My dear chap.” Buffy's pale eyes watered. “Of course—oh but of course. Paulette…” He drew her towards himself and whispered something out of the corner of his mouth.

“Try to get some sleep,” Tuppy said, squeezing Edwin's shoulder. They all laughed; it was one of their quotations, one of the things they said to each other at moments when they needed a phrase.

“No hard feelings?” Edwin said.

“No hard feelings,” Buffy said. It was another little phrase they had, something else to see them through.

 

There were a great many dishes to be collected. Edwin stood in the kitchen while the remains of the evening were carried to the two cars. He had a great longing for them, his guests, to be gone. There was no hastening possible. He stood hardly daring to go on thinking of Leila. She must be somewhere quite near and he must find her. Trying to hurry the evening to an end was exhausting and not at all successful. The guests, intent on every little ritual, would not be hurried. They had no idea that Edwin suffered, other than his suffering because Cecilia was away. Even in his wearied state he knew he did not want Cecilia to know. He was grateful to Leila, he would when he found her take her in his arms, just in a kind way, and tell her he was grateful. If these people saw Leila now Cecilia would know very quickly. He had never deceived her before except with his own self-deception, which he now
saw to be like a veneer painted glossily over them both.

During the exchange of cheek peckings and shoulder pattings Edwin felt deeply sorry for Paulette's hurt. He knew it was greater because once, when he had picked up her keys, they had with a certain amount of dignity taken off their shoes by the radiator in his study, and when thoroughly warm and comfortable, they had discussed earnestly, with some slurring of the more difficult words, what Paulette chose to call
the finer side of life
.

“Take books,” she had said, “literature,” she said, “books these days, the fuckin' books all got too much bloody filthy language in them and too much sex. What d'you think, Teddy? Can't stand lesbians. Teddy, what d'you think about 'em, eh? I mean for real.”

After quite a long time Edwin had offered her a mug of cocoa which she had taken eagerly and gratefully, like a little girl, and then, quite gently and softly leaning against him, she had fallen asleep. He should have picked up Erica's keys. The refusal would not have hurt her so much.

He knew he should not have picked up any keys. He stood in the light of the open front door watching the cars reverse and turn out of his drive. All evening he had been aware that Paulette had been urging him with little signs to pick up her keys.

Conversations, dancing in whispers from years ago, came back to him. He thought of dinners where they sat with china plates, almost too hot to handle, sliding off their laps while the stems of the wineglasses froze in their fingers. The nervous jokes about homosexuals had given way to the more sinister references to disease. The muddled pattern of his life seemed to swim before him, in sequence, going back to his arrival and his first tentative game at the tennis club. There had been years of arranged things: arranged games at the squash courts, folk dancing on Thursdays—it still was on Thursdays and was sometimes changed to old-time dancing, with the nostalgia of music from the thirties. And more tennis, of course. There was swimming too; early mornings in summer, the whole set
would meet on the beach. The older men, strutting, reached over their bellies for their toes, and the women, teeth bared, greeted each other in shrill voices.

“Oh, dahling, but your new cozzie, it's heaven. Truly!” There had been a time too of exotic bathing caps. Cecilia still had hers. It was made to look like a salad, a floating salad complete with a hard-boiled egg (plastic), halved, and a realistic-looking crayfish, its white flesh invitingly edible until proved otherwise by playful bites. And then there was the running and the jogging, very seriously taken up, but recently, because of Paulette's slipped disks (the unforeseen result of running) and subsequent weeks on traction and bedpans, having given way to aerobics. Arms and legs and sometimes bodies all moving in time to disco music. They were all into aerobics. It was possible, they knew, to sustain injuries even here, and they watched over their own and each other's tendons and ligaments lovingly.

During all the years of sports and games and building the body, right from preparatory school onwards, he really preferred to read. He liked to sit bent over his desk, reading and writing. But life and society, and the set, demanded physical beauty and prowess. Reading and writing, writing in particular, thickened the waist, made rolls of fat, and he must, he told himself, avoid these, especially now. He would, he thought, run—free of these people—in the pines at five in the morning. Every morning he would run and regain some of his youthfulness.

He watched the headlights with real pleasure as they dipped and turned. He felt the uneasiness still over Paulette. For some reason something else about her came into his mind. Once, when the floating salad was coming towards him in a calm warm sea after a wickedly hot day, he had dived, for fun, beneath the lazy waves and, for fun, had bitten Cecilia's thigh under water. Nosing up the inviting thigh he had bitten a second time, high up, almost where the thigh became another part of the body. In a flurry of churning water they grappled and suddenly he was face to face with Paulette, the salad
pushed crazily to one side. She was wearing the crayfish and the hard-boiled egg to protect her new rinse. Cecilia, smoothing herself with oil on the beach, overcome with mirth, pointed and laughed till everyone was looking at him and laughing.

For some time at dinners and at dances the story was told with embellishment, and in the earlier tellings, Paulette enjoyed lifting her skirts and peeling down her panty hose to show Edwin's tooth marks and the subsequent love-bite bruising. She always took everything so well; Buffy too—he had enjoyed the story more than anyone. Edwin never wanted to hurt them.

The headlights picked out their way along the dark road and gradually he heard the cars gather speed alongside the black pines.

“Leila!” he called softly in the quiet house. He opened, one after the other, all the doors in the house. She was not in any of the rooms. Suddenly he knew he was afraid, he knew he had been afraid all evening. Fear was part of the nightmare. Something must have happened to Leila and yet what could happen? All she had done—he tried to be reasonable—all she had done was to hide successfully for the evening. In the kitchen he picked up a plate and put it down and took up another plate and put that one down somewhere else. Leila could have gone to the station to wait for her mother's return. That was probably what she had done. It was annoying, in one sense, that Leila and her mother had a very close bond. He made a face at the phrase. They had something that seemed to physically hold them together. In the presence of this he felt excluded, jealous even. He tried to laugh at himself, without success. They would be home soon, he told himself, the two of them, in a taxi from the station. Paulette and Erica had stacked the dishwasher, so the kitchen was not too bad. They, Leila and her mother, were probably sitting in a café somewhere near the station having coffee. Vienna coffee was what Leila's mother called it when she piled whipped cream on top of the hot sweet blackness. Leila would be sure to be telling her mother everything. They seemed to live their lives close, as if
they were in a nest. Nothing seemed to upset or annoy Leila's mother, he thought, as he began to get undressed. It seemed as if she was prepared to put up with anything, even Daphne's hideous love song from the bathroom. He was sure now that she was, between sips of coffee, the cream fringing her upper lip richly, telling Leila that it did not matter that the evening went wrong. “Men forget their arrangements.” He almost heard the comfortable voice as she must be speaking now to Leila. Life, she would be saying, had more evenings.

He thought he was beginning to feel unwell, threatened, insecure, lonely—all the things he knew he often felt during his life. He remembered a particularly tasteless white fish Cecilia cooked. She bought it because it had no bones. She couldn't stand, she said, eating with someone who was making a thing about bones. He remembered how hurt he'd felt at the time and how he thought about it every time they had fish.

The telephone rang as he was folding back his bed cover. “Leila?” He could not keep the eagerness out of his voice. “Ahh!” he said into the crackling sound. It was a very bad line. “Mrs. Bott—everything all right?”

Leila's mother was ever so sorry. She had missed her one and only train just by the skin of her teeth and had been obliged to go back to her sister's. She was ever so sorry, she said again, and she'd be home as soon as ever tomorrow, probably about noon, she thought, and not to wake Leila, she said. Leila would realize as she had not come home that she would be staying the night. He could tell Leila in the morning if he didn't mind. She was ever so sorry to ring so late. Her sister was all nerves and no body. He said he hoped Mrs. Bott's sister would feel better and yes he would tell Leila and Leila's mother said, “Thank you ever so much, Dr. Page.” She said she was sorry it was such a bad line and he said it was not her fault.

 

Edwin dressed quickly. All he could think of was Leila sitting and waiting at the station, seeing trains come in and not one of them bringing her mother.

As the headlamps of his car swung round, he thought he saw
something white in among the pines. He turned the car again in the middle of the deserted road and again thought he saw something. He left the car at the side of the road and walked into the trees. He had been there before during the night and knew that the trees seemed to move and sigh all the time. The bark and the needles were fragrant. He walked off the path, stumbling and knocking himself against the rough tree trunks.

“Leila,” he called softly, “are you there?” It was cold and there was a continuous sighing in the treetops. Everything about himself seemed full of noise and clumsy movement. He thought he heard something ahead of him. His feet made too much noise and his own breathing deafened.

“Leila!” he called. “Leila!”

 

“I
do always try and smile at the Hatchet,” Daphne said, quickening her step, lifting her feet high over the tufts of wet grass. “Miss Hearnsted's a great but horrid little person,” she said, “half my size, as you know. They do say, don't they, that short people either love madly someone tall or else they hate them.” Daphne gave a snort; Edwin knew the sound. He did not interrupt her, partly because his mind was on other things. He had been justifying his recent actions by remembering the more negative side of his marriage. Cecilia saying in one of the more bitter moments that she felt trapped with him and that her work was her way out of the trap, so would he remember not to remark that she was always off to the Mary and Joseph. There had been other small bitternesses, but in complete honesty, Edwin knew that
he was trying to drag these to the surface and he knew he was having difficulty in suppressing the memory of the sweet, exceptionally sweet, way in which Cecilia had said she was sorry for saying something she hadn't really meant. He tried to listen to Daphne and to follow her remarks about the Hatchet. He knew Daphne tried, all the time, to appease this selfish and self-absorbed woman. He knew that she had been considered a great beauty in her time; he did not need to depend on Daphne's well-bred wailing. The headmistress was a disagreeable elderly woman made up to look young and failing. Her face, he had always agreed with Daphne, was like an ax head and did not in any way retain a prettiness she was supposed to have had. He could see in Daphne's serious eyes the hurt she experienced daily. He had always thought privately that her face, the Hatchet's face, was like a flint. “A faded but sharp flint,” Daphne was saying, “made up with pinks and mauves and unwillingly wrinkled.” Edwin agreed that Miss Hearnsted should not be Head of St. Monica's. She knew nothing and he felt, like Daphne, that she should not be in charge of innocent girls. He agreed on every point and said so, adding, “Yes, she keeps people back.” All the time, though, he was thinking about Leila's wise and delightful decision to have a hot bath the night he found her shivering and crying, lost in the pines. He made an effort to keep up with Daphne's longer stride. She wanted to get Prince round the near edge of the plantation and home before going to a rehearsal at the school. Daphne's pelvis, he knew, was constructed in a way which gave her an advantage when walking.