The Sugar Mother (18 page)

 

“I
n the evening, overflowing with tenderness and a large quantity of one of his finer burgundies, a soft Pinot Noir, he wrote a letter to Cecilia. Not a long letter but one in which he stressed the importance of writing. He asked her to write to him; he said that phone calls were fine but he felt he was inarticulate and repetitive and then their relationship seemed brittle. In letters, he wrote, they could express their real feelings. He was pleased with the letter; it included spontaneously a line from Donne. As he sealed the envelope he realized that so far he had been able to take all phone calls privately in his study, out of earshot. Leila's mother never answered the phone. It was as if she had a small personal rule of never answering the phone in someone else's house. He felt she was the soul of discretion; he was sure that was how she would describe herself. He knew he had written the letter to try to avoid the possibility of Leila overhearing things, the “love love you” and the “kiss kiss” nibblings. He put the letter in his pocket and, with one gentle finger, stroked the soft neck which was near his knee. Leila was sitting on the floor. She had been playing with a sleepy puppy, the last and smallest of Prince's litter. She leaned her head against Edwin's knee. He wanted there and then to draw her up beside him as close as possible. He found, at such times, a real longing coming over him and he thought impatiently of the bed they had been sharing. His study seemed different, he
reflected, as did the room in which they were now sitting. He glanced at the shabby roses on the wallpaper and seemed to be seeing them after a long absence. The doctor, a young, serious-looking woman, had offered with other words of congratulation and advice that continuing sexual relations were permissible, indeed desirable for good health and well-being. Leila was a healthy little primipara, she said, and she would see her again in four weeks time unless there were any problems and an earlier appointment was needed. As he fondled Leila's soft short hair he thought that this must be what real happiness was. He supposed people at his age began to consider whether they were happy or not. Once, during one of their nights, he had asked Leila, “Happy, darling?” and she had not replied. She lay with her head moving slightly, rising and falling with every breath he took because his chest was her pillow. She had not replied because she was asleep.

As if to heighten his contented feeling of happiness he had to recall that it was always his habit to ask “Happy, darling?” of Cecilia and she had always her little words of reply, always the same words, accompanied by the same little snuggle movement. He did not want particularly to think of this now; he was not sure that such thoughts enhanced happiness. He went on, in spite of this thought, to discuss in his mind the changes for the better for himself and Cecilia when the time came for them to be parents. They would never again, he thought, need an artificial life of parties to fill an emptiness. He tried not to think of Cecilia and of their lives. Thinking about her brought the keys game to his mind. Did Cecilia, he wondered, repeatedly sit on Buffy's knees and laugh and fondle with her icy little fingers his ears and, at the same time, laugh and twitter and pretend to be a bird to amuse him? In that repetitive game was that all she ever permitted anyone, himself included? Without wanting to, he remembered the constant high-pitched laughing, the laugh in a minor key, and the “Oh, exquisite, darling! You do love me, don't you.” The words, not requiring any answer, were always the same. He found he was frowning and he looked down on the crown of
Leila's round head, at the place from which her hair seemed to spring. He thought of the silence during those solemn times when he, with reverence, took her soft youthful body in his arms and turned her towards himself. He smiled now as he recalled the way in which she moved closer to him, with the whole of her body and without laughing. Perhaps he was glad to think of the keys game and to dismiss it, to know that he need never play it again. Everything was going to change.

They sat together. The little puppy was asleep on his sheets of newspaper. Leila's mother, ever careful about other people's carpets, spread papers over all the places she thought the puppy would occupy.

Paulette, Erica, Ida and Cecilia talked too much during lovemaking. He understood this now. He understood too that his own elaborate preparations for being the perfect lover and the rituals employed to create an art called lovemaking were worthless. They—Paulette, Erica, Ida and Cecilia (there were others too)—told anecdotes, one after another, little stories with related conversations to hold off, as it were, the finale. Perhaps they talked in order to build up the climax like the suspending of drama in the writing of a good play or a novel. But so often the climax, the ultimate, the “all the way” as Erica called it, the “full out” (Cecilia), and the “over the top” (Paulette), was over without being anything and had lost the special afterfeelings of tenderness.

He bent forward and touched Leila's unpretentious clean hair with his lips. “How would you like to have your bath now,” he said in a low voice, “and I'll come in a little while.” She smiled up at him, her plain round face almost pretty with the pleasure of obedience. She scrambled to her feet and went away. He sat alone, staring at the sleeping baby dog. He could not bear the thought of Cecilia's homecoming. The inevitability of it was appalling. He must stop that arrangement for the Christmas visit to England; that much was certain. Other thoughts, as if someone had made an effigy of him and was sticking pins into it, came in a very unwelcome and sharp sequence. A sudden understanding of his position surprised
him. Joy at the hoped-for certainty of conception was followed now by an ache which filled his whole body. In the settled arrangement it was time for the first payment. It was not that, not the paying of the agreed sum; it was the beginning of the farewell to Leila. She was pregnant now and he was not required to go on making her pregnant. He had not expected to feel as he did. To take advantage now would not be in keeping with the arrangement and not in keeping with the standards he wanted to adopt in his new life. He watched the little dog twitching in his sleep. He supposed life was simple for dogs. He tried to think of Cecilia, to turn some of his wishing in her direction. He tried to think of her as she was years ago but in his mind he heard her laughter and shrank from it. He must look forward to her return. It was unfair to her not to. He jumped up and made for the door. He turned back from the door. He must, he told himself, take his mind and his longing away from Leila. His desk, he said aloud, was a mess. He must get back to his work.

Leila's mother was in the kitchen, ironing and folding clothes. Edwin, as he entered, could hear the bathwater running. He could not help thinking of Leila's slippery body, partly submerged. Her body amused him. He smiled, thinking of the neat triangle of dark hair filled with tiny bubbles in the foam. For the full young breasts he felt a curious reverence. He took his checkbook and his narrow silver pen, a recent gift from Cecilia. “I think,” he said to Leila's mother with his best smile, “that tonight I must make my first payment.”

“If it's convenient,” Leila's mother said. “There's no hurry, no particular hurry. Anytime this week or next.”

“Cash, is it?” Edwin raised one handsome eyebrow.

“Thank you.” Leila's mother moved a pile of clothes to one side. “I'll give you a receipt,” she said, watching as Edwin wrote the check.

“Oh, that's not necessary,” he said, immediately regretting his words; of course he might need a proof of payment at some stage. Leila's mother said thank you again and took the offered check, blowing on it to dry the ink.

“Leila's looking well,” he said to cover any awkwardness and to dismiss the uneasiness he had caused for himself by grandly refusing the receipt. He wanted to say that he was sorry that his time with Leila was at an end. Unable to find the words for this, he continued to smile, saying, “I do hope that you and Leila will consider my suggestion that you continue to stay here till…”

“Thank you,” Leila's mother said. “We're ever so pleased to stay. I hope you find everything to your satisfaction,” she added.

“Oh yes, very,” Edwin said.

“Perhaps I should mention,” Leila's mother said, “Leila's had her little cry; just now she came in here to have her little weep.”

“Why on earth?” Edwin was startled. “Is anything wrong? Would she prefer you to keep the other house?”

“Aw Gawd, no!” Leila's mother said. “It's not that at all. It's just that she likes spending her time with you but I've told her you've got your work to do. ‘The doctor's got his writing and studying to do,' I told her. ‘We've got to get busy and get things ready for the baby,' I said to her. ‘The doctor's a busy man,' I said.”

Edwin, knowing what she meant, wanted to ask her what she thought he should do. Even while he was thinking this, Leila's mother said, “A man knows what he should do and he knows what he wants to do, and if I know anything about men, they usually do what they want.” With her mouth pursed and demure, she pressed the iron hard down on a heap of folded pillowcases.

“What d'you think I should do?” Edwin was helpless.

“If you're asking me,” Leila's mother replied, “I think as head of your own house and you being a gentleman you should do as you think best.” She jerked her head in the direction of the door. “I think,” she said, “that's Leila now coming out of the bath”—she paused—“or is she just going in? I'm sure I can't tell from here.”

As he left the kitchen Edwin felt like a young man, a boy
even, given permission, in a sense, but not knowing what to do with an apparent freedom. He had manners, knowledge and experience but none of these things fitted the occasion. He paused outside the bathroom door. He could hear Leila splashing the water—mixing the bath, she called it—and singing softly without tune. He waited smiling to himself and almost opened the door.

 

H
e lived in Arcadia where he guarded flocks and matchless herds and beehives, took part in the revels of mountain nymphs and helped hunters…

 

Edwin tried to read during his sleeplessness. Muffled in the distance, the puppy was crying. Edwin heard the piteous yelpings. The puppy, lonely without his mother, had cried for several nights. He knew Leila's mother got up to it patiently, spending some time in the kitchen every night. The puppy lived a curious life, Edwin thought, with bursts of destructive energy alternating with sudden periods of unexpected sleep. A sleep with powerful qualities which restored the little animal quickly. He found himself longing for such a sleep. It was a night of wind and rain. He could hear the pines straining in the wind. The complications of his life, without the relaxation of the pleasures, seemed to rest heavily on him. He had never felt so alone. Without Leila his bed was incredibly empty. His life, even with looking forward to the child, was empty. The unborn child, the expectation of it, was not enough. In the
unexpected realization of this he tried to console himself with the promise of Leila's company at breakfast. Without the secrecy of the night together the breakfast table would be barren.

Pregnancy: the doctor reduced the whole thing to forty weeks. Nine months. Thirteen weeks is three months. Thirty-nine weeks is nine months plus one week more. The twenty-eighth week would be Christmas. Swiftly she had worked out the approximate date of birth, March the fourteenth. Sitting upright in bed, Edwin, thinking about the weeks of his life which could be spent with Leila, added his own calculations. Leila's baby, the baby, would be about three months old when Cecilia came home. Eleven weeks old, to be exact. Cecilia would come home to be mother to an eleven-weeks-old child.

It was better, Leila's mother said, for the mother of the baby not to handle the child if she was to part with it. Edwin, agreeing at the time, wondered about a nursemaid. Now, during this long stormy night, no other woman seemed suitable for the care of his child. Cecilia herself would need a nursemaid. Edwin knew he could not hope for her to give up her work altogether; some of it perhaps, but not all. The thought of this settled heavily.

He sat huddled over his notebook of the intangible, unable to remember if the line was from Yeats or from
Oedipus at Colonus
. He was not sure if he had misquoted or put two different things together. It was not his way to be inaccurate though he was known to be forgetful. In some ways his forgetfulness now was because life suddenly had much to offer. He had neglected to go to the spring for water. The stained plastic containers were in a heap in a corner of the garage. He seemed to be in perfect health on Leila's mother's tea made with ordinary tap water. He understood that Leila's mother would never question tap water.

Knowing that he could not, he wrote in his book that he must go in to Leila even if it meant, as it did, invading the mother and daughter nest. He thought about the spare room and about the tidiness of Leila and her mother and how they folded everything into neat plastic envelopes. He was neat too. He always folded his pajamas every morning in a flat way to lie under his pillow. When he unfolded his pajamas in the evening and put them out on his folded-back bed cover, Cecilia laughed. At least she had laughed when they were in a room together. He did not think it was amusing to be tidy. Cecilia was untidy; she left her clothes everywhere: desperately untidy, he thought, forgiving her every time, knowing from films that surgeons stepped out of their white surgery boots, leaving them just where they stepped out of them. They threw off their gowns and ripped away their masks and rubber gloves before the nurse, trotting alongside, had a chance, with her pink nimble fingers, to remove them. Naturally Cecilia adopted their ways. She was one of them, and though the mess in her bedroom disturbed Edwin, he put up with it because it was the background to her work. There was no reason, he told himself, why he should have given up Leila. Tomorrow he would suggest that Leila come back. After all, Leila's mother said he should do what he thought best.