The Sugar Mother (17 page)

“I'm sorry, Daphne.” Edwin tried to think of words. “I'm sorry,” he said again.

“I must look a perfect fright.” Daphne blew her nose. “My nose is all red; it always is if I cry, and my eyes look awful. The girls will be waiting for the rehearsal…. They'll know I've been crying.”

“I'm sorry,” Edwin said again. “You look all right, Daph.” He found he could not speak. He patted her arm.

“Prince! Prince! Here, boy!” Daphne's tremendous dog-calling voice hit the pines. Prince came lazily from between the dark trees. “Hurry up, Prince!” Daphne yelled. “I shall have to go, Teddy,” she said. “Do put your thinking cap on.” She paused. “And, Teddy, don't talk about it to other people: you know,
people
, our friends at the club; not yet anyway. Some people,” she said, “don't have any standards or conscience, and gossip would reach Cecilia and hurt her dreadfully. It's one thing to hear gossip and not know whether to believe it and another to be told something straight out by the person concerned. Don't you see, Teddy, how awkward it's going to be? I'm not at all sure,” she added, bending down to put an unnecessary lead on the slow-moving Prince, “about Cecilia. It seems to me that Cecilia would have had a baby herself, more than one, if she had wanted to. Do think carefully, Teddy.”

 

Edwin hurried home through the black pines. The rain was starting again. At this time of the evening the plantation seemed endless, like a wild place. Small wonder that poor little Leila lost her way in the dark. The idea of the plantation offering the possibilities of being lost and yet confined within two parallel but wide-apart suburban roads was quite pleasant. It was possible to walk for considerable fresh distances lost in the fragrance and the greenness and to know that ultimately it was possible to emerge, to come out, on safe roads any of which could be followed to find the way home. Because he was hungry he thought of Leila's mother. Surprisingly, he found it easy to talk to her and easy to think of the talking later.

“That is a great shame,” Leila's mother had said about there being apparently no possibility of a baby son or daughter. “Leila,” she had said, “Leila'll carry, if I put it to her, Leila'll carry for you. I'd have no trouble with Leila.” To start with, he had not been able to understand.

“I'm saying,” Leila's mother said, “Leila would oblige with carrying for you and Dr. Sissilly. It's being done all over the place now. It's quite the thing these days.”

He had managed to overcome self-conscious and awkward feelings.

“There's different ways,” Leila's mother had said, “but I favor Nature's way myself. It's like home baking, as I always say; you know what's in it.”

It was not hard to recall, as he walked alone, his thoughts and feelings about the idea, and contemplating Leila's fresh, youthful body in this way was not in the least disagreeable, especially since his restrained and tempting foretaste on the night she had been lost and found in the pines.

“Take it slowly,” Leila's mother had said, “and never you worry, Dr. Page; just let Nature take her course. There's nothing to pay till conception and then we'll go from there. Make sure,” she added, “make sure she turns and lies on her face. I'll tell her, but you remind her afterwards. Tell her to lie face down; that way she's sure to fall.”

“Fall?” Edwin remembered now his perplexed question.

“Fall pregnant,” Leila's mother had said. “It never fails.” The idea made him smile.

He was hungry, pleasantly hungry. Leila's mother, he knew, was thinking of making a mutton casserole with rosemary and mint and peas and carrots and potatoes. Did Dr. Page like mutton? Edwin, not able at that moment to remember whether mutton was one of the things he never ate, said the casserole sounded delicious. “Lovely,” he said, giving Leila's arm a tiny pinch. “Lovely!”

The plantation was a wonderful place, richly moist and soft and comfortably dark. Leila would be waiting for him. He ran.

T
he room where they sat was already full of people.

“The whatsaname, the coil, was in the side of the afterbirth. She'd had the mini pill—it's no use, I tode her, taking the mini pill the next day when you're s'posed to take it of a nighttime, s'posed to take it the night before, I tode her…”

Edwin had noticed before how Leila's mother attracted confidences from strangers. He had not been to many shops with Leila and her mother, but of the few, he could not recall one where they had managed to leave without Leila's mother being waylaid by someone with a story, usually something gruesome. Leila, he noticed, being used to this, always stood patiently by; often she slipped a few extra items into the supermarket cart as if to avoid wasting time.

They sat side by side on some shabby chairs. Leila sat in the middle, between her mother and Edwin. Leila's mother was leaning towards another mother and her daughter. A small child clung to the younger woman, who sat leaning back, with her hands across the tightly stretched material of her dress. It was impossible not to overhear the intimate narrative which was interrupted now and then with little moans of sympathy and curiosity as Leila's mother listened and nodded. Sometimes the child staggered two steps and, falling, had to be rescued unwillingly by his mother.

“Talk about trouble,” his grandmother said proudly. “He's give us that much trouble, that one. Her and me we've not had
two hours sleep of a night ever since he was born.” The doctor's waiting room was crowded. Unused to such places, Edwin felt shy. He would have liked to talk to Leila but did not want the sound of his voice to bring about a silence among those waiting.

“After her fifth or was it her sixth”—both mothers looked at the shameless multipara—“blowed if they didn't have to remove the coil. Embedded it was. I mean it just wasn't stopping her. The doctor, you'll like her, ever so nice she is, the doctor said to her you're four months pregnant, she says, just you take that baby offer the breast at once but clever boots here said she was only one week pregnant. Shortest pregnancy I ever heard of, I said, now I arsk you…”

The doctor called in Leila's mother then. She was going to have her bandaged leg unbandaged and checked and rebandaged. A lengthy business, Edwin felt sure, especially as Leila's mother, on the way there, had expressed an enjoyment in a heart-to-heart with the doctor, who was, in her words, a lovely girl.

It was Leila's first antenatal appointment. She sat close to Edwin, who covered her hand with his hand. He wished they could be somewhere else. He knew from a careful study of Cecilia's textbooks the position Leila would have to adopt for the examination. She would lie on her left side with her left leg straight and the right leg flexed, with the knee almost on her chest. In the photographs of the position the patient had her face covered with a square of white cardboard. Like the woman in the photographs, Leila would lie still and when asked she would roll onto her back and allow the doctor's hands to press her soft belly and to gently squeeze, first one and then the other, her soft but somehow full breasts. Leila's breasts had been tender for a few weeks, he reflected. Gently he stroked her hand. She seemed docile and not at all nervous about being examined.

“Shall I come in with you?” he asked in a low voice.

“If you want to,” she replied.

“I expect you'll be examined behind a screen,” he said.

“I expect so,” she said. It seemed to him that as on the night of the pines, when she was frightened and cold, she displayed an extraordinary calm, saying in her matter-of-fact way, “I think I better have a bath,” she was wonderfully serene now. Accustomed to people who talked a great deal, he found this lack of speech refreshing and honest.

“All right?” he asked a few minutes later. He gave her hand a small gentle squeeze.

“Oh yes,” she said. “I'm hungry, but…” she added.

“We'll go somewhere nice for lunch,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I love fish and chips with salt and vinegar; that's what I'll have.”

There were several notices about fees pinned up on a notice board. Notices too about antenatal classes, postnatal clinics, breast feeding and child care centers.
How to Take Care of Your Episiotomy
. Edwin read the title of a forthcoming lecture. The world, he reflected, was full of mystery. He would look up “episiotomy” at home.

Leila's mother and Edwin accompanied Leila into the surgery when it was Leila's turn.

 

Edwin sat in the car reading and making some fresh notes for his four-thirty lecture. Leila and her mother were choosing a green vegetable and some jars of pickles and honey in the market. They had asked to stop on the way home, Leila having declared a fancy for a particular kind of pickle. Normally, Leila's mother told Edwin, she made her own, but as Leila was bound to be a bit capricious during the next few months, pickles bought in single jars would be best. “She's as likely to go off them as soon as not,” Leila's mother said, “and then what!” Leila's mother hated waste, she said.

On reflection it seemed to Edwin that the whole of life could be lifted up and pinned to a notice board. All feeling and thought and emotion could be reduced to little squares and oblongs of paper containing the passionless sensible care of the human body from conception onwards. The doctor's waiting
room had not overlooked the elderly. A menopause support group, traveling dinners and a complete guide to funeral arrangements were included. He supposed it was a mixture of fortune and misfortune which made him one of those people who read every available notice. It sometimes took him several minutes to leave the corridors of his department because of the notice boards. Many of the notices there were completely out of date. Often he meant to mention this to someone. For example, Tranby could devote her energy to the complete reorganization of the boards and get her desired promotion. It was the sort of thing people did.

The things on the surgery notice board, many of them, were a part of Cecilia's work. She would be familiar with them. He did not want particularly to think of Cecilia, though everything about the appointment was ultimately to do with her. He wondered whether Leila craved a sweet mustard pickle or a more sophisticated chutney—spiced banana and raisin perhaps.

The booking of the bed, the suddenness of an actual date and an arranged bed at a maternity hospital, not the Mary and Joseph, brought the event very close and he found he had to make an effort to read. The doctor, not the one he always went to but a stranger, had seemed very efficient. He was too excited and too tender to think of anything other than Leila and her condition. He turned the page of his Renaissance text.

Edwin made a little pencil mark beside this amazing similarity with his own life. The descriptions Cardano gave of his chosen meals were another source of satisfaction.

He had seen Leila's mother on her hands and knees slapping the meat on the kitchen tiles, something he was sure Cecilia did not know about. Leila's mother understood meat.

There was his lecture to give before it would be dinnertime. He felt quite hungry. He was not accustomed to having a real appetite as he so often had now. He wondered if in some way he could open the four-thirty lecture with some of the mouthwatering details, the wings, the livers and the giblets of young fowls and pigeons. Forgetting that he avoided those parts of poultry, he tried to read on but wondered instead whether it was natural for a man of his age—he would be fifty-four soon—to be excited. Perhaps too much excitement would cause heart failure or a cerebral hemorrhage. He must be careful to protect himself from either of these. He made a note in the margin of his notes, a reminder to see his bank manager and his lawyer and to make arrangements to have his will put in order. Leila and her mother and the baby must all be provided for. Cecilia was no longer the “one and only” three other people must have a share in whatever arrangements were made. This was an entirely new thought. There was an unusual pleasure in dwelling on his possessions and on what money he thought he might have to distribute. He wondered how Cecilia would feel being reduced to one of four beneficiaries. He made some rapid calculations and worked out an order of precedence to the grave.

Cecilia was fifteen years younger than he was. It had always seemed a startling difference in age. Buffy and Tuppy, both widowers, had much younger wives, younger that is than Buffy and Tuppy, smart and devoted and very hungry, and really, when you faced it, no longer young, elderly in comparison with Leila. Dippy Fairfax and Ida were the closest in age, he thought, suddenly seeing them all at Sunday tennis, good-natured and healthy, spinning their racquets and flexing their
muscles. Leila was approximately eighteen years younger than Cecilia and about thirty-three (he had not been quite truthful, give or take a year, to Daphne) years younger than he was. He did not know Leila's mother's age. Cecilia would know at a glance if she was postmenopausal. In any case he felt sure he was older than she was. When the child was born he would be fifty-four years older than the child. It was quite clear that he would be the first to die, and it was his responsibility to see that all these people would be well provided for, especially the child.

The child, the thought of the child, filled him with a strange wonder and joy. He began to remember all sorts of things. When he was a boy there was a wooden train; till this moment he had forgotten it. There was a red-painted engine, some freight cars and a yellow caboose. The freight cars, as he thought about them loaded with sand and stones and coal and timber, became more vivid. He remembered scraping the earth with his hands to make tracks. He played, then, at the end of the garden in a part not used for vegetables. He had a trench hut there too, a hole dug in the ground with a roof of wood covered with turf. From the top it looked like a slight rise in the grassy place. There might be, he thought, a suitable spot in their garden where he and Cecilia could make such a hut. His own hut had a fireplace with a chimney. He hoped for his child to be a boy because of the idea of a hut.

One summer the dry roof of his hut caught fire. He had clear memories of his mother rushing with buckets of water, and of her tears when she found he was not in the hut but in an apple tree close by. He heard her crying again in the night. She wept without any deep voice consoling. She seemed to weep all night. Alone.

But about the wooden train. It was inherited, as was the trench hut, from the grown-up family in the household where his mother was employed. He remembered clearly now, with pleasure, how he played. He made a yard in the sandy soil. He banked up the earth into slopes and tunnels. He made platforms and sheds and a passenger station decorated with flow
ers. He had lights and signals and pens for animals. He made fences and planted bits of broken-off bushes to make trees. When it rained, realistic puddles lay in the hollows and he set about correcting drainage problems. He spent hours, he remembered, down at the wild end of the garden, day after day after day.

Outside the market, where he sat, was just such a place as his goods yard. His lecture notes slipped sideways off his lap as he looked out at the rough patch of gravel where recent rain had left patches of water, gleaming now in the sunshine. Some cars were parked as if a child had set them out in a game. One car had a horse trailer. Along the fence there were some trees, and immediately outside the entrance to the market were boards bearing chalked messages about the bargains to be found inside. He could have made this place in one of his games long ago. Perhaps every place made in childhood games persisted: yards for wooden trains, parking lots, shopping centers, police stations, law courts, schools, churches, hospitals, army barracks and houses. Perhaps every person walking along the street had been drawn, created, by some child somewhere. Perhaps that was why some individuals had no necks or were completely bald or devoid of teeth or, if they had teeth, seemed to have a mouthful of pickets. Some people had long legs and others had legs which did not match. And some, mainly women, had legs which came out of the edges of their skirts and could not, by any stretch of the imagination, fit at the tops of their thighs to their bodies. The legs, if you took a line upwards, would pass by each side of the body unrelated and useless. It was an idea of the ancient Greeks, he thought, that an idea, a vision, if written about, could be brought into existence. He wondered, as he saw them coming, who it was had created Leila's mother and Leila. They were laden with plastic shopping bags. Edwin, as fast as he could, picked his way across the wet gravel to help them. As he looked at Leila with a mixture of love and tender curiosity about her changed state, so closely and exquisitely linked to him, he did not pursue the question as to who was, at this
moment perhaps, just drawing and decorating with paints or crayons their unborn baby.