The Sugar Mother (28 page)

Here she was now, taking control. “And then,” she said, “we'd better try to get some sleep. We can't know exactly when they will arrive; it's clear it'll be hours.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” Edwin got up quickly. He steadied himself against the arm of the chair. “Watch it, Gran'pa”—he seemed to hear Tranby's voice—“the old ticker, Gran'pa.”

“What would you like me to do first?” he asked.

 

They walked in single file down the little path to the front door of the house next door. Daphne led the way with the two suitcases. Leila's mother, carrying the two fur coats, followed. Leila, with her baby son asleep in her arms, followed her mother. Edwin came last with the folded-up crib and the special toy for the side of it. He would have to go back for the cradle and the baby bath and the little cupboard of clothes. Daphne would fetch Blackie, she said, and any other things they needed.

“I hope there are no rats.” Leila's mother gave an exaggerated shudder. Daphne unlocked the front door and switched on the light.

“Electricity's on,” she said, with a triumphant note in her voice.

“
Ecce puer
,” Edwin said half to himself as the hall light shone across the child's head. He said he hoped the house was not dirty. Daphne was opening cupboards and examining the beds. Edwin without wanting to recalled a day when, with Cecilia on their own front veranda, he had seen some tenants moving into the house. This was before Leila and her mother had moved in.

“There's only a single bed going in there,” Cecilia had said, looking up from her book, “and a double mattress.”

“That might be awkward.” Edwin remembered his reply. It had seemed to him then that having a double mattress hanging over the sides of a single bed would damage it, the mattress, dreadfully.

“They'll be sleeping on the floor, silly!” Cecilia had giggled so much she had rushed indoors so that the new neighbors would not be embarrassed. Since that time the owner had furnished the house and asked a higher rent…well, he supposed a higher rent.

“Teddy darling,” Daphne said, “do hurry and run back and get the other things. Leila and her mother do need to get to bed. Bring some tea bags and the milk, put them in the cradle—you know, just a few essentials.”

“Oh yes. Yes, of course,” Edwin said.

“I'll come with you,” Leila's mother said. “Gentlemen often forget things.”

“Oh yes,” Edwin said. “Thank you, that is most kind.” With his usual chivalry he helped her up onto the old veranda boards of his house. A few minutes later, laden with provisions, he helped her down from the corner of the veranda and escorted her gently back to the house next door.

 

“
I
could just see—well, imagine,” Daphne said to Edwin when they were back in Edwin's study. “I can just imagine,” she said, “how Vorwickl's eyes must have been shining. Are you listening to me, Teddy?” she asked. Edwin, trying to peer into the darkness across to the house next door, was only able to see the reflection in the
uncurtained window of his own book-lined study and himself and Daphne in seclusion there. The house next door had seemed clean. It was just a bit airless; Daphne had thrown open some windows. She had closed them after helping to arrange the luggage in the bedroom, as Leila's mother was afraid of burglars. “You can contact the agent tomorrow.” Daphne spoke then in her kindest voice.

Later Edwin listened while Daphne telephoned the Honeywells, the Wellatons and the Fairfaxes to tell them about the delay. Now she was stretching her long body in one of the comfortable study chairs.

“What can you imagine?” Edwin, still peering, thought he should ask.

“I'll tell you in a minute,” Daphne said. “We'll have a drink and then I'll tell you.”

Daphne had been having quite a long talk with Buffy. Edwin, listening, was sure that Buffy was telling her something trivial but, at the same time, important to him. It was something about people; he had gathered some of the meaning from what he heard in Daphne's replies. They had been out to dinner, Buffy and Paulette and Tuppy and Erica, filling in the time before going to meet Cecilia. Buffy's indignant conversation was apparently because he could not understand how people professing to be knowledgeable about food, gourmet people of all things, could fail to chill their white wine and then, on top of that, serve tasteless, partly cooked food. Edwin, half-listening to Daphne's sympathetic noises, longed for a life of small worries and irritations about food instead of all that weighed on him. He could not stop thinking of Leila and the child, the precious child, now far away in the house next door. His own house was terribly quiet. He could not think who could have served the badly prepared meal. He wondered, for a moment, which house they had been to to eat. Perhaps he was hungry himself. He tried to think about food. He was hungry but not for food. In fairness to Buffy, he reminded himself, Buffy had had his share of worry and sadness. Tuppy too. Both had ornamental framed portraits of the handsome
Mountbatten in their dining rooms. Both had left India with Mountbatten in the rather rushed exodus, as Buffy described it once. And both, just before that time, when they were quite young men, were suddenly widowed. The young wives were ill, after the same party, with an infection. The sort of thing, Buffy explained from time to time, that you picked up in India. Perfectly all right first thing, a bit seedy at eleven, decidedly orf at luncheon and dead before sundowners. Each retelling was accompanied by a small shining of tears and an unmistakable huskiness in the voice. In their houses they had left-over cane chairs, tabletops of brass, and various basins and jugs of bronzed metals reminding of endless polishings. They had silk-covered screens and wall hangings embroidered with tigers (rampant) and elephants (in repose). They talked still of tiffin and said
doodle ally tap
when someone uttered something which they did not fully understand. They were now in their middle sixties, Edwin thought, and, with the added energy of their second wives (both younger and certainly still youthfully adventurous), had several years of what is called life expectancy. It would be pleasant now to talk to Buffy—he could have a soothing effect with his expected phrases—but Daphne, after a series of telephone gruntings, had replaced the receiver. It was Buffy who often made enlightening remarks, divulging once the secret of married happiness. It was the ability, he said that time, to know when and how to slink away. The women had not been present on that occasion and there had been a certain pleasure, Edwin remembered, imagining the secret slinkings Buffy must have managed. Edwin leaned forward now, holding his head with both hands, and began again to torment himself with the thought that the child was not his and that Leila and her mother had made use of him because he was soft and rich and they were in a predicament which needed a kind man and a man who had enough money. Furthermore—and this thought shocked him with its depths, not the depths of the thought itself but the implications it carried—they needed a man who was lonely. The implications were deep. Hurriedly he began to think of Leila differently.
That she wanted her baby was absolutely clear. She had been unable to leave him; perhaps now that she was back with the child she would realize there was someone else she needed too. He groaned into his cupped hands. He could not give up Leila and the child. He had never expected to feel like this. Never mind who the father was. If
he
was not, he loved Leila enough to have fathered several children in the time they had had together. He would have to check the possibility of this in one of Cecilia's books. Oh God! Cecilia! He groaned aloud. It was unbearable. In the end, what did all that forty weeks reckoning mean? Leila and her baby had ignored the reckoned time. The baby had arrived sooner than expected and Cecilia was on her way home earlier than arranged in her original plan. But the baby? His baby? His and Leila's? Or whose? He must keep his mind off these thoughts. Then there was the birth certificate. He had never seen it to know if his name was on it. There was no one to whom he could speak about this. How could he have not remembered during the recent swift changing of arrangements to ask Leila for it? Perhaps she had put it safely with all the other baby things. Perhaps it was in the little pile of pink and blue instructions. He supposed, if it was there, it would be a narrow beige-colored folded piece of paper. Without wanting to, he remembered his own guilty search for his birth certificate, which his mother thought was so carefully hidden. That one, in an elegant but cramped copperplate handwriting, simply had her maiden name on it and the words “male child” beneath a date. For his mother's occupation was the single word “domestic.” The signature of the registrar was equally elegant but, unlike the other details, illegible.

“Just don't you worry, Dr. Page.” The familiar words of Leila's mother consoled him at all times. She was dressed for going out with Leila. The baby, closely wrapped, was in Leila's competent arms. “Leila'll register,” Leila's mother said, “she'll see to all the necessary, won't you, Leila pet?” And Edwin at his desk, “The Study of Man” spreading to the edges, had smiled across to where they stood at the door of his room. He
remembered now his smile and his vague words. It was the same when he refused his first receipt. He was never offered another. It was his own fault.

But the birth certificate. Where was it? And what was on it? How could he have been so stupid? Not much use to fret over it now. His thoughts were too painful. Perhaps the birth certificate was a way of slipping clear of the even more painful. He almost spoke to Daphne. She would applaud anything, he knew, which would keep him and Cecilia together. She wanted them to remain as a couple and any doubt about the baby's father would strengthen any argument she might have. She might even applaud the help, what looked like help, as she saw it, that he had given Leila and her mother—seeing them through a difficult time, through Leila's pregnancy, which might have been an unwanted one. The father having shot through—he had heard the phrase—it carried echoes of Tranby and Bushby, or was it Burton, gossip. Daphne might see what he had done as one of the things people did, at times, for one another. His own beginnings, though he had long ceased to consider them, were similar.

He remembered the sloping ceilings of the attic bedrooms and the neat sitting room at the side of the kitchen from which his mother could be summoned at all hours of the day. His mother, he remembered, liked being there and later when he was at boarding school that was the place he longed for.

Would Leila's baby have a birth certificate with “domestic” carefully written beside his mother's name? His bookshelves, his desk and his layers of carefully written pages seemed now to belong to an insignificance. Trying not to allow the tears to spill from his eyes, he looked up and saw Daphne opposite. She was looking at him.

“I wanted…” he began.

“Teddy. Darling.” Her large face was tired and lined with concern. He almost told her then that the morning sickness came on very early, that Leila's breasts were full and tender almost as soon as…but he could not speak to her, to Daphne, of these things. The radishes, a long time ago, after their first
breakfast, Leila in the garden next door eating radishes hungrily as if there was something in them she needed. “Craved” was the word Leila's mother used when she spoke of it, telling him that Leila had not been able to keep them down. He supposed he could read now, in one of Cecilia's books, the actual time of the onset, the expected onset of morning sickness. In the textbook it might have a more professional name. Morning sickness suggested folklore, an old wives' tale. There was another private and very intimate question about Leila, something which he could not mention to anyone.

It was easy, he knew from literature, to see onself as a victim. He tried to grin at Daphne.

“I'm sorry, Daph.” He felt his eyes about to overflow once more. “What was it you were going to say? You started saying you could imagine. What was it you could imagine?”

“Did I?” Daphne said. “It seems like years ago. It was because of the telephone call. Didn't you hear anything? Really? Teddy?”

“Not a thing,” Edwin said. “It was a bad line, all cracklings and hummings, and my head, in any case, was full of the sound of the baby crying. You probably heard it too; felt it perhaps is a better way of saying it.” He paused. “I keep expecting to hear him cry again.” He wanted to tell Daphne about his son, about his little legs and feet. Had she noticed how sweet they looked? Yes, “sweet” was the word, when they hung below an arm, Leila's arm, when she held him sitting on her arm, upright against her breast. Children's bodies were sweet. He had always known this.

“I think,” Daphne was saying, “that I was going to say that I could imagine Vorwickl's eyes shining; she always seemed to speak with her eyes. It belongs with German. I have noticed that people, when they are speaking German, do seem to be very expressive with their hands and their eyes—mostly their eyes.” Daphne stood up and stretched. “Vorwickl,” she said, “seemed quite excited about being on the banks of the Nile. It didn't seem to put her out at all, the plane being diverted; the engine trouble or whatever it is seemed to amuse her. Her
English is quaint and I suppose there is something exotic about a hotel bedroom in Cairo. One does not go there often. My head, like yours,” she added, “is full of the noise of a baby crying.” Daphne sat down again. “You see, Teddy,” she said, “I actually began to have a foolish little fantasy about a baby, a little princess, starting her life on the edge of the Nile. You know, the Nile,
great father of waters, thou that rollest thy floods through eighty nations…
” She sighed and continued. “I know there is no child there but I thought, I imagined, what it would be like to cherish and nurture a child who has played on the grass and the sands along the banks of that great river.”