The Sugar Mother (19 page)

“What's an episiotomy?” he asked Cecilia as he picked up the telephone quickly. “Lord knows”: he heard Daphne's voice. “Teddy, darling!” she said. “Most awfully sorry to call you at this unearthly hour. I know it's after midnight, almost one, to be exact, but it's Cecilia. Will you phone her, please. She's in a state because you haven't phoned and she says she hasn't heard a thing from you and wants to know if you're all right. I told her you'd ring straight back. She's waiting by her phone. I'm sorry,” Daphne said, “I can't help with episiotomy, whatever it is. Is it anything to do with dogs? Nothing wrong with Blackie, is there? I've got an awfully good dog book. Teddy,” Daphne said, “you'll have to tell Cecilia something. Apparently both of them, Cecilia and Vorwickl, are freaking out on Muesli. Vorwickl is enormous and is trying to reduce.
They've been measuring each other's waists and hips and thighs.” Daphne, unsuccessfully, tried to stifle a yawn. “Teddy,” she said, “you must phone at once. To put it plainly, it's getting awkward for me. Sorry to sound so selfish. She wants to know how the dinner parties are. You haven't canceled the Fairfaxes' evening, have you? How will you manage? I know Leila and her mother went to
Mary Poppins—
oh, sorry
—The Sound of Music
, the rerun, last time but what will you do about the next one? Oh, I see”—Daphne made little noises of understanding—“it's at the Fairfaxes' place. Yes, I'll try and be there, though you know, Teddy, it's awkward for me having to be careful what I say. It's pretty drastic, Teddy; I feel I'm losing you and Cecilia and I don't want to.”

“I'll write to her,” Edwin promised, “and I'll ring now,” he said.

“Oh, you are a dear!” Daphne said and rang off. Edwin imagined he could hear her thumping her pillows to make them comfortable, as she might have done, with Cecilia in the next bed, at school.

 

S
ometimes in the mornings the pines were green in the misty sunshine. The tufted grass from a distance looked smooth and soft, spreading carpet-like in little slopes and rises, making linings for hollows and hiding broken-off branches or stumps with a wonderful velvet quality. Close to, it was possible to see how the grass sparkled with moisture. In the early morning there was an ethereal quality in the light, and the sky, seen through the trees, was pale and
clear. Later on, tall flowers, with pink bells on their stalks, would grow between the trees. These flowers always reminded Edwin of foxgloves as he had known them in England. They were not foxgloves. He always forgot about them from one year to the next. When he saw them he was pleased and, without any sadness, remembered real foxgloves. Somewhere, quite early in his book of the intangible, he had written about these flowers and his feelings of surprise at their faithfulness in being reborn in another country in a likeness which was familiar.

Leila's mother said during breakfast that it would be a good idea to start getting things ready for the baby. “Time flies,” she said. Carefully she turned Leila's teacup round and round to see if the leaves gave any signs about a boy or a girl. “One thing's clear,” she said, “you're carrying that baby in your face and your shoulders.” She said she thought the little dressing room would be best for the nursery. She did not want to disagree with Dr. Page, she said, but there was no need to use Dr. Sissilly's own beautiful bedroom. Babies, she told Edwin, had only two things in their heads and these, being feeding and sleeping, could be done anywhere. The small room between Dr. Sissy's room and the study had a nice window and would be entirely suitable. Should it be painted? Edwin wanted to know. That was up to him, Leila's mother said. What did Leila think? Edwin asked, but Leila, unable to eat her breakfast, was leaving the table unable to speak.

“Go and lie down, Leila pet,” Leila's mother called after her. “I'll fix you some juice and some nice bread and butter for later.” She turned to Edwin. “No one ever lost a baby through the mouth,” she said. “Being sick like she is, having the morning sickness as bad as she's got it, means she's keeping that baby. She'll not lose it. Throwing up like that, it's a sign.” She poured herself another cup of tea. “Just don't you worry yourself, Dr. Page.”

Edwin saw Leila's shoulders, rounded and thick with misery, and felt he was to blame. “Isn't there anything we can do?” he asked. Without expecting to, he felt helpless. “A doc
tor,” he began, and thinking of Cecilia, he wondered if he should telephone her for a remedy for this awful thing.

“It's only the morning sickness,” Leila's mother said. “She'll be over it directly and in a week or two she'll forget she ever had it. We'll go shopping,” she said. “We'll get a few things, put a deposit on a pram and a crib and get the nappies; that'll take her mind off.” Edwin took out his wallet and began counting notes. Leila's mother, with her eyes on the money, said, “She'll need three dozen Turkish toweling and a dozen of the muslin and three dozen disposable for taking in to the hospital. Babies' bottoms cost a fortune.” She began to squeeze oranges.

Edwin heard, in the distance, Leila's distress. He wanted to rush to her to do the things people did for each other at such times. Without the experience of ever helping anyone, he suddenly felt he wanted to support her, hold her head, rinse her face flannel in fresh cold water and wipe away her tears. Long-forgotten times came back to him; he remembered his mother's hands and the incredible softness of her forearm. Perhaps it was during measles, he could not recall exactly, perhaps after overeating at a party.

They heard Leila calling for her mother.

“Just don't you worry, Dr. Page,” Leila's mother said again. “Just you get on with your work and when Leila's better we'll be off out to the shops. She's looking forward to the shopping. She'll be as right as rain. She knows what she wants.” She picked up the money. “I shan't need all this,” Leila's mother said as she folded the notes into her purse.

“Leila might see something she needs.” Edwin smiled.

“She might too,” Leila's mother said.

 

U
nable to read and unable to write, Edwin thought he should, after Daphne's telephone call, write to Cecilia. During the sleepless night he had dialed the long-distance call but clapped down the receiver as soon as he heard the telephone ringing. He then, as was his custom for a good deal of the time, disconnected the telephone. It was disturbing that he did not know what to say to Cecilia. He found, when he tried, that he could not write either. He stared at the sheets of paper on his desk and wrote Leila's name several times on one of them. He added words of consolation and endearment to her name. He sat thinking. He did not live in Arcadia but in a suburb desirable because of a pine plantation and an easy walk to the university. The Mary and Joseph was near and so was the tennis club. He had no flocks, beehives or matchless herds to guard, only the pine plantation, over which he did watch in an unprofessional way, noticing, with a comfortable vagueness, the removal of trees and the replantings, the burning off and the occasional stacks of trimmed trunks when the life span of certain groups of trees was declared by an authority to be over. In any case the pines were not his.

He must do something. Daphne's telephone call, which was really Cecilia's, could not be ignored. He would feel happier and more able to enjoy his newfound life if he straightened things out with Cecilia. With their attitudes towards freedom and individuality, the preservation of the individual within the accepted status of the couple (Cecilia's own words), why
should this straightening present such difficulties? Christmas in England seemed pleasantly remote. He dismissed, as quickly as possible, Cecilia's mother and her sitting room lined with Christmas cards. Her festivity was manifest in the lighting of a fire in the cleaned grate in the front room, where the Christmas tree reappeared, year after year, in the same corner. Perhaps he should go and see Buffy. Some sort of strategic support was necessary, something conventional and military, with rules and acceptable ways of looking at the unacceptable. In simple terms all he had done was to father a child for adoption because Cecilia had not produced one. He had not expected his action to bring about the consequences he was experiencing.

Buffy had his own ways of dealing with the unconventional. Largely he would ignore it. He had phrases. They all had useful phrases but Buffy had the most. Perhaps if he called on Buffy it would be possible to reduce the problem. Discussion sometimes made things simple. And perhaps Buffy would know the best way to break the news; it would be called carrying dispatches to Cecilia. Buffy's language was useful in times of indecision.

Buffy's house was solid and double fronted, with a low veranda which had cement-covered brick pillars. Because of the deep veranda it was a cool house, freezing in winter; Paulette often shivered. Cane furniture, in hospitable arrangements, was plentiful in the shaded places.

The whole of the front garden was given over to grass, a wide smooth flat lawn, a replica on a small scale of the Anglo-Indian parade ground, the maidan. Buffy sat every afternoon with his sundowner, usually whisky with a dash of the tap, overlooking his lawn. Edwin often thought it was possible that in the smell of the freshly mown and watered grass, Buffy saw and heard the horses as he used to see and hear them. Perhaps, unseen by other eyes, there was, every day for Buffy, a series of remembered colorful parades followed every time by the thud and click as the horses thundered to and fro, their hooves throwing up fragments of soft earth and grass, bringing back
to him the remembered sounds of the smacking of polo sticks against each other and on the ball. It was very possible that in the last glowing light from the sun, the maidan seemed wider and more inviting and the grass more fragrant, stirring memories from the days of the regiment. Often Edwin had wished for memories of this well-ordered kind. Retired early from duties in India because of the end of British rule, and a widower earlier than expected because India did things to your health, Buffy had clock golf on his maidan, a poor substitute, though he never said so, for the pleasure of riding the well-kept horses.

It was soon clear that Buffy and Paulette were not at home. Of course the car was not there; he should have seen that straight away instead of prowling to and fro on the dark varnished boards. He gave up trying to peer through the fly screens into the darkened rooms. It was tennis club day, he should have remembered; he should have been there: the numbers would be uneven. He had forgotten about tennis and about the club.

It was the Fairfax dinner party evening. He was supposed to go there. He told Leila's mother at breakfast he would not be in for dinner. They, of course, since he would be out, did not need to go to a long film or a play. The Fairfaxes owned several daughters, beautiful, graceful girls who knew exactly how to do their hair. They knew exactly how untidy it was possible to be to add to their beauty. They had mastered the wisps of the chignon and the maddening fringe to accompany the ponytail. They knew the colors which suited them and set them off deliciously against the subdued furnishings of the Fairfax lounge. The girls were charming and ornamental at the dinner table and afterwards, perched on the solid arms of the club-style chairs, they enchanted the guests with apparently naïve and innocent anecdotes. They handed coffee and chocolates and a particularly pleasant ginger sweet, which they made themselves, to every guest in turn. Naturally Dippy and Ida were very proud of them. One of the Fairfax girls was a student of Daphne's, she could never remember which one,
she confessed to Edwin, who told her he did not think it mattered since they wore each other's dresses and were always changing their hair.

“But, Teddy, it does matter; she's writing about Cordelia's mother,” Daphne said, pausing in the middle of the pines, “King Lear's wife,” she said, “a feminist approach to the two endings of
King Lear
. You know, a conflation of texts.” She sighed.

“I should have thought Lear's wife would have been well before the play,” Edwin said, “not at the end. Surely she's hardly necessary for the plot.”

“I know,” Daphne said, “but it gets more and more difficult to find subjects. And I really must sort out which of those gels is actually doing the work. I suppose,” she added thoughtfully, “Shakespeare, he has done this, the ending, as well as he can.”

Edwin thought about the Fairfax girls. He would be proud too, so would Cecilia, of their child. He dismissed the dug-out garden hut and replaced it with a dolls' house. He would make a dolls' house with painted doors and windows and a trellis of paper roses. There were endless possibilities. A daughter like Leila would be sweet. Cecilia, he felt, would impose herself sufficiently on the child for people to declare they could see a likeness, but Edwin would cherish the Leila baby forever in his heart, for the child would be sweet like her sweet mother. It could never be like Cecilia. This much was certain. He wished, as he strolled across Buffy's maidan, that he did not have to think of Cecilia so often. When he was with Leila's mother it all seemed so simple. It was the other people in his life who made complications.

One of the rules, an unspoken rule in their set, which preserved friendship perhaps more than anything, was that they did not drop in on each other. They telephoned and they gave and accepted invitations. They lunched or dined by arrangement; even the summer Sunday mornings in the sea together were not casual. They took turns to invite—even to the beach. All the same Edwin had become afraid that someone, or all of them, would call at his house in an unexpected moment of
affection to see how he was. When he thought about this during the night he tried to think of ways of explaining the presence of the little Leila family. Ms. Tranby, a recurring nightmare, might come at any time. She did not have the breeding to know about or keep to their rules. She might simply out of curiosity visit him and, horrors, Miss Bushby might accompany her. Perhaps he would be able to introduce Leila as his niece, but then Leila's mother would have to be his sister. Accustomed to being an only child, he was upset by the idea of a sister. Immediately there was a disgusting fleshy claim. He shuddered. And then if other details had to be released about what should be a perfectly natural idea, the birth of the child, then wouldn't that suggest, in lightly breathed words, incest? He had never used the word, never spoken it aloud, and now it was on his doorstep, in a sense, put there by himself. Buffy, in wise moments, often spoke about not bringing a catastrophe home. As a young man, he once explained, he, with his parents' unspoken approval, experimented with the housemaids with the understanding that a cradle would never be planted at his mother's feet.