The Sugar Mother (25 page)

Cecilia had said in one telephone conversation, the one just before Christmas, when she had described the long walk she had in the snow, with the white soft snow to the tops of her boots in places, that Vorwickl might be coming back with her and could Edwin see that the spare room was vacuumed and the bed made.

Yes, he had said. Yes, he would do that.

At breakfast Leila's mother reading the tea leaves could see no sign of an accident, nothing, plane, train or bus. Nothing tragic near home or far away.

“What about a private car?” Edwin asked.

“Nor a car neither.” Leila's mother put down the last of the cups. It seemed an auspicious day entirely for traveling. Leila, holding the baby, complained that he had wetted her, right through.

“It's good luck, Leila pet,” Leila's mother said. “Slip your dress off and I'll rinse it; it'll be dry before lunch. Sign of good luck!”

“Would the tea leaves need to be read a bit later on?” Edwin felt he ought to feel foolish asking his question.

“Nearer the time?” Leila's mother shook her head. “Not really, but I'll have another read midday to be on the safe side.” She was studying for their own safety, for the takeoff, Edwin knew, but he, deeply ashamed, hoped for some sort of deliverance from the arrival. He, knowing that it was not right to wish for death, either for oneself or for someone else, was wishing that Cecilia's plane might never arrive, that it might
hover somewhere high up above the clouds, lose power quickly and break up into a million fragments, all of it, passengers included, all hurled immediately into a painless oblivion, all kept above the cloud level forever by a curious phenomenon, a new reversal of gravity. A suitable subject perhaps for an honors thesis: not his department, of course, but it would be possible to pass on the idea….

His reverie was interrupted by a wailing noise in another part of the house. He stopped his restless pacing and listened. Blackie never made any such noises and, as far as he knew, Prince was outside the kitchen door. He wondered where Daphne was; she kept leaving the room and then returning, only to disappear again. The scraping wailing continued.

“What on earth's that noise?” he asked Daphne as she came in with the baby's milk.

“Oh, Teddy,” she said, “I hope you won't mind. It's Fiorella. Remember Fiorella? The enormous Rosalind? She's in the bathroom, practicing. The violin. It's Bach, J. S.,” she added as if hopeful for approval. “It's the school orchestra,” she explained. “No, they're not all here; of course not. Only Fiorella. She's simply got to practice and I thought if she was where I could hear her I could call out to her now and again, some sort of correction and encouragement. Mostly correction, I'm afraid. It's so that the violin concerto for two violins, etc.—Fiorella's one of them, isn't it terrible?—won't be too awful. Also…” Daphne paused to make a sort of clucking over the cradle. “Oh, Teddy, he's awake! What a darling little nose and face. Also,” she continued, “I must confess I did feel a bit nervous about being here while you went to meet the plane and Fiorella, d'you see, is the eldest of eight and is awfully experienced.”

They heard the violin start again laboriously.

“I've got the doors open a bit,” Daphne explained, “so that I can teach from here.” She leaned into the passage and sang the notes for Fiorella to imitate. “Sing!” she called. “Sing, Fiorella, with the violin and make the violin sing!”

The baby in the cradle stretched and yawned and twisted
his face and sneezed and made the grunting creaking noises Edwin had become accustomed to recently. He still had his account of the childbirth to write up and, daily, had extra notes to make. He sometimes wondered if he would ever be able to find adequate words for the description of the amniotic membrane and fluid.

 

“Teddy, he doesn't seem to be getting any of this milk.” Daphne held up the bottle. “He's been sucking valiantly at this but it hasn't gone down at all. It's as full as it was.” Edwin, taking the bottle, shook it.

“Must be blocked,” he said. “I'll get another.” Daphne made more of her noises at the baby, who looked at her with solemn eyes.

“I wish he would smile at me,” she said.

“He will later,” Edwin said.

The child lay undressed between them, his little thick pink legs stuck upwards, like the legs of a stuffed toy, and his tiny arms waved, flailing, from side to side.

“I think he's cold,” Daphne said. “Look, his chin's quivering. I'm sorry I'm so slow and awkward.”

“You're doing fine,” Edwin said, welcoming his own nervous anxiety.

“I can manage Prince,” Daphne said, “but he doesn't have to be dressed.”

It was not the first time Edwin had changed his son, but Leila had always been there at the other times. It was not the first time that he had had doubts about Cecilia's reception of the surprise. But it was quite some time since his other doubts, the uneasiness about Leila herself. Leila, at the end, did not seem to find it hard to leave him.

There had been nothing amiss with the arrangements. Leila and her mother had carried out their share of the deal faithfully. The birth being sooner than expected, Edwin's arrangements for a nursemaid were not completed so Leila and her mother stayed on. On Cecilia's apparently sudden decision to
come home earlier, Leila's mother made herself and Leila ready to leave with efficient haste. Edwin paid all that he owed. He paid off the two fur coats too, as Leila's mother confessed that Mr. Bott still owed on them. Edwin said he was pleased to complete this purchase for them because of all the extra things Leila's mother and Leila had done for him.

That Leila had seemed not to mind going was like a constant pain. He felt ashamed that she did not seem to mind and ashamed because he cared so much in what was after all, in the first place, meant to be a business arrangement. Of course her painful breasts, and they must be unbearably painful, he knew, were enough to stop her showing any feelings. She must have been, and he could understand this, completely wrapped up in her pain. If only he did not love her and want her so much. There was no one to whom he could talk in a purely selfish way about Leila. He wanted to tell someone that he had experienced something so unexpected and immense it must last forever. He wanted, now that it was too late, to tell Leila.

Daphne was concerned because the baby was still not sucking properly.

“He prefers his mother, I suppose,” she said. “We'll just have to keep on trying. Wrong note!” she bellowed through the partly open door. Fiorella started again at the beginning. “Sing!” Daphne bawled. “Sing with the violin.”

During the last few days, Leila's mother, after binding up Leila, sent her to sit with Edwin in the room with the cabbage-rose wallpaper. It was better for them to keep away, she told them, because the sound of the crying would only make the milk come more. Without the child in her arms Leila did not have much to say to Edwin, and in the face of her silence, he had not known what to talk about with her. During these times he checked an indescribable longing to take her in his arms and bury his face in the soft creaminess of her neck.

Leila never talked a great deal, Edwin consoled himself now, and therefore was not lavish with the words of farewell. He always did most of the talking. During the last afternoon she simply sat nursing the contented child and then put him
in the cradle, with the little teddy bear, which he always ignored, beside him. The special toy was fixed to the side of the big crib, “in readiness for when he is older,” she had explained. The panel, once described during a night when they were sweetly pressed close together, was shaped like an elephant and was white. It was made from some sort of washable plastic and had several knobs from which it was possible to produce various rattlings and whistlings and ringings. Leila had demonstrated them all to him. She said she thought red was a good color for the knobs. When Edwin passed the prepared crib, now he could hardly bear to look at it. The toy on the crib seemed to collide with another thought, something so terrible that he refused, at the times when it came to him, to allow it to persist. It was that the child was not his, that Leila and her mother, finding themselves in difficulties, had simply picked out a suitable person to pull them out of their troubles. Daphne hinted, at the beginning, at something of this sort but neither of them, in their conversations, alluded to it again. Edwin knew that such a thought, if fed, could assume enormous proportions. One only had to read, and he did read, widely.

He took the child from Daphne, who stood holding a shawl in an awkward and useless way. “Oh Lord!” she said. “He'll never feed while he's crying like this. Walk up and down with him.” She put the shawl over Edwin's shoulder. “I'll put on the cassette,” she said. “Fiorella needs to listen to the Bach. She hasn't the faintest feeling for the tempo and babies are supposed to respond to music. Fiorella!” she shouted into the passage. “Rest!”

Prince howled at the kitchen door and Blackie whimpered in reply and the Concentus Musicus Wien, with conscientious precision, began to play Johann Sebastian Bach. Somewhere in between, Fiorella, inspired, went on with her own interpretation of the music. She was up to a later passage. And above all this Leila's baby, whose voice was powerful, cried.

“Shall I feed the dogs?” Daphne's voice came from a distant place. Edwin walked up and down patting the baby, holding
him upright in case he had some sort of pain.

“At least it's not a pin”—Daphne was back at his side once more with a crazy pile of roughly made sandwiches—“since we haven't been able to put a pin on him.”

“I don't think the music's having any effect,” Edwin said. Daphne turned it off and they heard Fiorella's violin scraping. The notes climbed slowly higher and then, with a screeching sound, slid down the scale to the lowest notes, and after an agony of confused noise, the climbing began once more. Daphne ate a sandwich and nodded with momentary unexpected approval. “Not bad,” she said. “Not bad!” she shouted into the hall. “Eat something,” she said to Edwin in her sensible way. “We must keep our strength up.” She munched a second sandwich. “Here,” she said, “let me hold him while you eat—you must eat, Teddy.”

There was a smell of burning in the room. It was the dust in the electric heater. It was strangely cold for March. There were two fans placed so that Leila was able to have the coolest spot during the height of the heat. Now Edwin had to put on the radiator. He was afraid that the child might have been chilled during their lengthy undressing and dressing. Leila's mother, with her way of approving of everything Edwin did, disapproved of air-conditioning. The Pages did not have it and Leila's mother often consoled them at breakfast, while they were struggling, after a sleepless hot night, with chops and eggs, saying that there were some terrible diseases straight out of air-conditioners. Take Legionnaires' for a start. It stuffed up people's systems, causing more deaths than you'd like to think about. She wouldn't be at all surprised, she said, if most of the world's troubles came from air-conditioning. She'd rather be hot, she said, than poisoned.

For a few days before the departure of Leila and her mother and the arrival of Cecilia (possibly with Vorwickl) the sky was laden with clouds. In a poetic moment Edwin thought the sky seemed quiet. The ridges of cloud seemed filled with silence. Daphne would have said, if he had spoken of it to her, that the sky was always quiet. There was a feeling of autumn in the
new coolness and it was possible to imagine that the summer was over. But in spite of the delicate mist, which softened the outlines of the pines, the summer was not over and the sun, with burning heat, would make the fans indispensable again. The pines could be quite motionless and dark beneath the low cloud, they could groan and labor in the wind when it came and, almost at once, be motionless once more with the uncanny stillness and the fragrance familiar in the great heat. The hot fragrant air was as refreshing at times as the cold wind.

It was almost impossible to think of snow when walking over the sun-dried grass and the hot sand between the pines. Cecilia, crossing the world, was coming from the snow. The winter in England, especially in London, had been long and intensely cold. Reminding him what it was like to wake up in the morning to the curious silence of a snowbound world and the strange light it spread on the bedroom ceiling, she said the slush, when it came, was awful. Black wet slush; she said it froze overnight, did he remember? It was hard to walk. Vorwickl clung to the railings alongside the pavement when there were railings. They clung to each other and, one day, had fallen. A terrible shock because Vorwickl, who was big, had not been able to get up for some time. The taxis all had chains on.

Better to go by underground, Edwin had said during the particular telephone call when she said she would never again complain about the heat. For some time after that call he sat remembering her flushed and happy during their first winter.
That winter
, Cecilia always called it, when they had chased each other round her mother's own special garden disregarding the hidden flower beds and the pruned-back rosebushes. Then, throwing snowballs, they had spattered the leaded panes of the dining room windows. Because they were laughing so much they could not throw properly.

There was the toboggan too; Cecilia's father seemed pleased to unearth it from a refined sort of potting shed where he kept, among other things, ornamental frames for crumbling nudes
and other antique art. After rushing down the hill together on the sledge, Cecilia wanted to make love in the park in the snow, but Edwin, with a natural prudence, reminded her that too many windows overlooked the snowbound gardens and the park. Even if they buried themselves in a snowdrift someone would be sure to see them; after all, it was a suburb.