The Sugar Mother (7 page)

“So of course you said yes.” Daphne threw a fresh stick. “Here, Prince!” Her voice rang through the trees.

“That's right, I did.” Edwin in an absentminded way watched Daphne's dog. “And then Leila's mother,” he said, “thought that the cutlery provided in their house was awful, ‘cheap and nasty,' she said; she wouldn't want me to eat with it. So I then said to her to use mine, and so it seemed simpler to eat the meal, which was by the way delicious, in my house. And today when I came home Leila was playing records….”

“In your place? Your house?” Daphne stood still. They both stood still and watched while Prince ate the stick he had retrieved.

“I've said all along he's insane,” Edwin said.

“Yes, I'm inclined to agree with you.” Daphne found another stick and threw it. “Playing records,” she said, “in your house on your player in your…”

“Yes,” Edwin said. “The hot water system in that house is apparently quite useless, and her mother was sure that I wouldn't mind if she, Leila, washed her hair in my bathroom. And there she was curled up in an armchair with her head in a towel and the whole house full of what the dear child calls music. It was only one record; she'd bought it the day before and wanted to hear it. She must have played it a dozen times, over and over again.”

“No record player in the house next door,” Daphne said.

“Yes, that's right.” Edwin paused. “She kept playing the
record and then she told me she hoped I wouldn't mind her saying what she was going to say and of course I said no of course I wouldn't mind and she then told me that she liked me very much. She had really liked me straight away. She had never in her life ever really liked anyone as she liked me. She said she felt more at home in my house than in any other house….”

“Oh Lord!” Daphne said. “All I know is that Father was most awfully foolish, Teddy, over Miss Heller. He was completely taken up in a sort of splendid insane self-exaltation. He thought he could do and have anything and give it all to poor Miss Heller, who, as you know, did not turn out to be all that poor. I would not be in the rather straitened circumstances…That reminds me: Miss Heller's new bank—she's always falling out with bank managers—her new bank has a name which sounds like some kind of sensible tampon. I have to take her to see the new manager…can't remember the name. Anyway that's not what I'm trying to say….” Her voice broke and she turned away, calling, “Prince! Here, Prince!” her voice recovering as voices do when in command of wayward dogs. She turned to Edwin. “I feel sort of responsible, Teddy, while Cecilia's away,” she said. “You will have to be very firm. You must not be available. You must try not to be available and the house must not be available. Have it painted throughout, or something, to make it thoroughly uncomfortable. It's the only way. Sometimes,” she continued, “men are flattered by younger women. Miss Heller, d'you see, was so much younger than Father, but the youthfulness was not only in years. He could teach her…all sorts of things, and…oh well! Never mind all that. How old is Leila?”

“I don't know,” he said.

“It sounds to me,” Daphne said after a moment of consideration, “very like what we, at St. Monica's, call a crush. You know the sort of thing. One of the girls feels very passionate about one of the mistresses. For a time—while the crush is on—the girl in question wants to praise the mistress in all sorts of ways. She wants to pay homage to her and do things for her. All very
ennobling. Quite embarrassing!” Edwin, turning, noticed Daphne's slight blush, which spread deepening on either side of her neck. “Fiorella,” Daphne said, “is at present, at the present time, addressing all the poems she writes to me. She writes several every day. Naturally I do not want to hurt her feelings, but I do take care not to encourage her too much in the direction her poetry is taking. It's one of the problems of boarding school. Fiorella's mother too.” She sighed. “She has done that thing in Venetian needlepoint. It must have taken her ages. It's for me. I think I'm supposed to wear it, but I'm not sure if it goes on top of my clothes or underneath like a vest—an English vest, you understand.”

Edwin glanced quickly at Daphne. He saw that she was not in the least critical and felt relieved. She had a kind face. He had always thought that. Her chin was large and rather square; her features, though heavy, were handsome.

“So you don't know her age.” Daphne was thoughtful.

“No, I haven't any idea,” he said.

“Cecilia's good at guessing ages,” Daphne said. “It's a pity she's not here.”

Edwin was not sure that he wanted Cecilia just now. He said nothing. Leila's mother was cooking a dinner. “I'll pop a roast in,” she had said. “Roast pork and applesauce—how does that sound?”

“It sounds very good,” Edwin, who was usually nervous about pork, had replied, with one of his most charming smiles.

As they came to the edge of the pines they paused before crossing the road. Edwin looked forward, he realized, with eagerness to standing at the head of his dining table, stripping off the crackling and carving the meat, and asking Leila and her mother in turn (they would be on either side of him) how they liked their meat and one potato or two? He was hungry. He smiled slightly at the thought of the fruit pie which was to follow the pork.

“You could get the painters in,” Daphne was saying, “and have the house rewired at the same time. That really makes a terrible mess.”

“I'm not sure that Cecilia would like that,” Edwin said, with his practiced slow gentleness. He could imagine all too easily the discomforts: Leila's mother in the bathroom or that awful man Hodd, or whatever his name was, the endlessly talkative electrician. “Cecilia might not like the house done while she is away. It wouldn't be kind to her to do something she wouldn't like,” he said.

“No, I suppose not,” Daphne said, “and she really is attached to the cabbage roses. You wouldn't want to do anything that might upset her.”

“No,” Edwin said.

They crossed the road.

 

S
he looked like a poached egg, her daddy said, when she was born, but everybody else saw Queen Victoria. ‘My!'—they all said it—‘She's Queen Victoria.' Well, it's funny, isn't it—I mean Queen Victoria, dead all these years and not even a relation. You must miss a lot not having kiddies of your own. Dr. Sissilly must in her most secret heart wish for a little boy or girl just like you. All of us ladies are mothers in our real true hearts….”

Edwin, waking suddenly, seemed to be hearing Leila's mother still as he heard her, filled with roast dinner, over the coffee cups. His own replies came back to him, word for word, his pillow suddenly uncomfortable and something about the bed making him turn over, trying to put aside the words he'd said. Yes, he'd said, he agreed they, he and Cecilia, did miss awfully having children, expanding, children led to pets and
sports and parties and hobbies—all sorts of things and places and holidays one would never have thought of. It was so sad, he explained during Leila's mother's third glass of port, Cecilia having three abortions—miscarriages. Quickly he changed from the more technical to the popular, thinking that he saw Leila's mother stiffen slightly at the implications carried in the word “abortion.”

“Aw! Lorst three little ones; that is sad, very sad!” Leila's mother squinted at the ruby liquid. “Goodness, I am clucky this evening.” She rustled and settled more comfortably in the nest of cushions Edwin had made for her. “Funny thing—I seem to hear a baby crying in this house,” she said. “I wonder if the tea leaves would tell me something tomorrow. Remind me, Leila: tea leaves in the morning.” She sighed. “Nursery ready three times.” She shook her head. “Children,” she said, “they're like teeth, all trouble. Trouble coming, trouble while you've got them and trouble when they go. But for all that who'd be without them!”

He thought Leila was smiling at him during this conversation. She was turning the pages of a magazine and gazing, with her head on one side, at pictures of royal wedding dresses. “Beautiful Brides”: Edwin read the heading; it was upside down for him. He thought Leila glanced at him several times with quick little shy smiles. To enter a conspiracy he returned the smiles, but each time Leila seemed to be turning another page, absorbed afresh in a world of white lace and demure expressions. Now he was not certain if her smile was for him or simply for the happiness of the queens and princesses on the thick pages. Leila's mother, her mind clearly on blue and pink cradles, was having her own smiles over real or imagined little bodies and limbs—dressed of course in pretty clothes. She enjoyed, she said, just talking about baby clothes.

Edwin turned over again, in that curious restlessness which accompanies the self-torture of going over things said in conversations and the wish, later, to be able to unsay them. While talking to Leila's mother it was not difficult to imagine Cecilia, delicate and thin-fingered, crying and crying in a hospital bed,
not at the Mary and Joseph, of course, but in a place somewhere in the mountains, near Zurich or not far from Vienna, so that a world-famous obstetrician could be in attendance. While talking to Leila's mother he had imagined easily the way in which Cecilia, hot with an unforeseen complicating infection, would have put her small but capable hands into his. The first time and the second time in similar circumstances, but the third perhaps different, perhaps in a hospice run by an obscure order of nuns on the outskirts of Budapest, where they, he and Cecilia, would have been on holiday, the confinement coming upon them before time—not full term, he corrected himself. This time, no crying and no tears, only something like a pretense of not minding. That it was better this way. The whole sad thing bundled up in a small sheet and carried away in the gnarled hands of an ancient nun, leaving them with endlessly empty freedom to do all the things they were supposed to like doing. Having children, they decided, wordlessly, really meant there was never a time without some kind of anxiety, and always there was the responsibility.

With all the care in the world you could never know how your child would turn out. Euripides knew what he was talking about when he gave the words,
They can never know whether all their toil / Is spent for worthy or worthless children
to an old woman in the chorus. And Cardano (Renaissance lecture number 1), relentlessly honest, made it quite clear that most of his own misery was brought about by the stupidity of his sons.

It was impossible to sleep with so many thoughts crowding one after the other. He was absolutely awake. He thought about lace. Leila liked a wedding dress which was decorated with it, a square of heavy lace on the bodice of the dress. She had drawn attention to it. He thought the thick lace made a sort of breastplate, an armor, but did not say so. Now he wondered did Leila know about lace? Mechlin, Honiton, Chantilly—there were so many elaborate designs and patterns. Leila and her mother liked clothes, it was clear, but they had no taste. Green and white. He thought he would like to dress
Leila in the colors of the Elizabethan court, the area of his thesis years ago, and now rather in obscurity like so much of his work. Leila in these colors…he would make the suggestion at the right moment. He sat up.

“Pork takes five hours to digest.” He remembered reading this in a pamphlet on the human body, or was it, he pondered, in a recipe book? He often read recipe books. He had read too, in another book, about a man industriously eating an enormous meal one night and then waking up, a few hours later, completely crippled with arthritis. Carefully he tried to move his legs. They moved and he felt no pain. He switched on the light and studied his hands. They did not look gnarled, though the veins were enlarged as if sluggish. Perhaps, he thought, turning his hands over, he should note in writing the condition of his veins. He reached for two of his body books. He opened the one for the internal. He sat tense and upright in bed, wondering what his symptoms were.

He tried to scribble down the words of Leila's record, what he thought he'd heard. He had the tune in his head. He sang what he heard in his head. It was not as it should be, but pleasing all the same to have something to sing.

Leila's record was played several times, and Leila's mother had shown him a photograph album containing pictures of
Leila as a square-shaped little girl with a solemn face.

“She was always sturdy and very healthy,” Leila's mother assured him, “the biggest little girl in her class.”

Thinking about Leila, Edwin wished he could take her for a long walk somewhere, not too far away, secluded and pleasant, where he could talk to her and encourage her to talk to him. Her mother did all the talking when they were together. He wondered about the plantation. There they would be sure to meet Daphne. She took Prince for walks twice a day, sometimes three times. Other people walked in the pines too. Littering the sandy tufts of grass and the paths were squashed chocolate-milk cartons and the remnants of more intimate things discarded, the relics of human relationships, as Daphne had once described the rubbish. She chose times to walk when other people would be cooking and eating and safely at home watching television. If Edwin and Leila walked then to avoid these other people, they would be sure to meet Daphne.