The Sugar Mother (2 page)

Certain passages in Edwin's books of the body were modeled directly on the writings of this self-absorbed, self-preserving scholar. The Renaissance period, he was sure, was not far removed from his own life. This thought often provided consolation.

 

He surprised himself leaning over the kitchen table rereading the newspaper as if he had never seen it or any other newspaper before.

Resisting the temptation to sit with his freshly soaked senna pods in front of the television to watch a film described as a movie looking into the innermost thoughts of a middle-aged, happily married man who has an affair with a fifteen-year-old girl, he went into his study and read Plutarch's essay “Advice on Marriage” in the same gulping way as he had eaten his egg. He put the book aside, knowing that he was not noticing what he was reading. He thought of Cecilia and the long journey she must make. He had no idea where she was by now. Perhaps she was at this very moment, during a far-off and unbelievable sunrise, flying over the sugared peaks of some distant mountains. She would be looking down into an amazing pink light beneath which bandits, lying in wait for poverty-stricken peasants, would leap upon them as they patiently tried to grub a
living from impossible rocky and desolate slopes. Of course she would not be able to see any such gruesome scenes from that height. She was still, he thought, several hours from the fogbound descent into London. He knew the feelings of real fear it was possible to experience during what seems like an entirely blind landing. He could remember very well the sensation of being held hovering, at thirty thousand feet, before the plane begins to lose height. Suddenly, from the impenetrable thickness of the fog, hidden perils begin to appear, steeples and towers and tall blocks of buildings, the roofs of innocent dwellings, and then the even more innocent and simple back gardens where a man might be mowing his lawn or a child might be playing with her doll. Cecilia had written to him once, “how fear can seize you somewhere in the throat, in the head and in the heart, that it is possible to be completely afraid.” It was unlike Cecilia, who, outwardly, never showed any fear. She was never frightened, but she knew about fear and did not belittle his. He hoped she would not be afraid landing in England. She would have to land again, quite soon after being in England, in Canada. There would be many such landings. Thinking about her, as he often did, he renewed his feelings of reverence for the way in which she took lives, one after the other, in her hands. He knew how she held them, these lives. He often imagined her hands, capable in rubber gloves, cradling the tiny bodies and the little limbs. He could imagine each tiny head having to be steadied as it rolled on its stalk-like wrinkled neck. She held these lives in the palm of her own strong hand. She had an intimate knowledge of human life, of birth and death and of illness and cure. This knowledge was combined with a hygienic and, he thought, a clinical prettiness. Edwin, liking a certain antiseptic fragrance which hung about her, once asked, “What's that smell?” She explained it was a special liquid soap they had to use. He discovered quite soon, though he did not want to think this, that it had a masking quality. He discovered too, quite early on, that her own appearance mattered very much to her. To look young was all-important.

His curiosity about the things she knew was no less now. From the beginning he wanted her to tell him about the human body. Where is the prostate gland, he wanted to know, after seeing an advertisement for pills. He could never hear enough. Oh, you're being so morbid, she said then, laughing and putting a long-drawn-out emphasis on the word “morbid.” Tell me, he often asked, about Vorwickl. Perhaps he was teasing, he tried to make it sound like teasing, this questioning about a friend of hers, an ugly woman, he thought privately, but clever, a colleague as deeply involved as Cecilia was herself. What did you and Vorwickl do together and how? What was it like? He took the chance when she was in a good mood and provocative. There's nothing to tell; she had a way of laughing as if there was. Of course he knew really there could be nothing to tell about Vorwickl. She was stout and wore, even then, years ago, thick-lensed spectacles, and her hair was drawn back into a heavy unbecoming bun. With all his ideas about his own knowledge of how a woman could improve herself, make the best of herself, it was impossible to apply any of these ideas to Vorwickl.

They would be meeting soon. He could envisage them, as able as ever to make the best of a dreary hotel room somewhere during one of the pauses in the tremendous journey. They would just talk, he supposed. After so many years there would be a great deal to say. Vorwickl had the power of speech and Cecilia of laughter.

On his desk there was a small blue vase crammed with white rosebuds. Moisture, like tears, glistened on the dark green leaves and on the full lip and curve of the plump little jar. Cecilia said it was a jug really and disgracefully potbellied. She had put the roses there. It was the last thing she did before leaving. While they were waiting for her taxi she had exclaimed, with an excited joy, that she had been so busy she had never noticed the Iceberg. The light from the veranda caressed the rosebush. Cecilia ran indoors then for the kitchen scissors. “To remind you of me.” She laughed, and with quick nimble fingers she made the little arrangement. As if he
needed to be reminded. He pressed the rosebuds gently between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the cool softness of the tightly closed and layered petals. They did remind him of Cecilia. It was their small, neat prettiness, tightly closed. He fancied too that the green and white would have been a choice of colors in the Elizabethan court, one of his chosen areas of study. The colors soothed him. Iceberg roses; she said she loved them. While he was fetching a light coat for himself, she said he was to stay at home and look at the roses and not come to the airport. “There's no need,” she said. “So many people there, no chance to talk.” All the others would be there. She would rather say goodbye like this, at home with the roses. He remembered other times, when, surrounded by kind and well-meaning friends, he had tried to say one last thing to her before she boarded the plane. It had not been possible. He knew too, from his own travelings, that she was already, in her mind, part of the way on her journey. She knew he would understand, she said; she would rather go off on her own. The taxi came quite soon.

Planes crashed or broke up on takeoff, he thought as he sat alone by his desk; they did not often crash on landing.

He stared at the silent flowers.

 

T
here are two types of novels
, Edwin wrote, bending over his desk,
those which end with the characters getting married and living happily ever after and those which start with the characters married and living unhappily
. Not sure whether this was his own remark, he put it
in inverted commas and followed it with a quotation from Euripides, from Jason in despair and in self-justification.

He hoped the quotation would interest the students. Four-thirty was a bad time for a lecture. They wanted to get away to their work; many of them worked in the evenings. He suspected they worked all night. Nine o'clock in the morning was a bad time for a lecture for this same reason. Perhaps there were no good times for lectures now. Sometimes he wanted to blame someone. The Tranby woman and her friend and colleague Bushby, or was it Burton? What did either of them know about the Elizabethan court. He felt they were waiting for him to retire. Probably they wanted to replace him with a computer. Tranby had no feeling for the Elizabethans. She positively scoffed at his idea of green and white. How did he know for certain? she once asked in the staff tearoom. The room was in the basement. He had tried to get up the stairs too quickly that time. Had he a quotation, Tranby wanted to know behind him on the stairs, to support his statement? Her angora twin set close behind him had caused him to hurry more. He could hardly breathe. Watch the old ticker, gran'pa; he was sure he was not imagining her words. How did he know for certain, she kept on behind him, what the colors were? Was he sure, she wanted to know, or was it simply a romantic and fanciful idea from the imagination of an aging man? Both Tranby and Burton, or was it Bushby, should in his opinion have been got rid of years ago. That was his private opinion. He never spoke to either of them if he could help it. He was unable to understand, when he thought about it, how everyone else seemed to like them both so much.

As he tried to think of the next point to make in his lecture, he was aware of a rustling sound outside his uncurtained window. He raised his head and listened. All was quiet as it usually
was at midnight. He tried to concentrate on the pages in front of him. He had stopped for the time being, wishing that Cecilia had not gone away. He would miss her later and keep on missing her. As a rule he was still in his study writing and waiting when she came in late from the hospital. She would perch on his knee and pour whisky without measuring it, and she would begin to tell him things. She needed, he knew, to tell him everything, especially what people had said and what she had said to them. He would wait now, he knew, by the telephone at times when she could not possibly phone. He would forget what the time would be in Toronto, Montreal, London, Paris, Vienna and Rome. All the same, he would wait expecting her to call, reverse charge.

He heard the rustling sound outside the window again. Earlier there had been a moon but now heavy clouds made the night black. The rustling was once more followed by silence. He listened, trying to follow Jason's lament with a good sentence, and knowing that his concentration was disturbed, he allowed himself some bitterness. Part of Cecilia's conference was to be an investigation of infertility. Was it ever mentioned (he sat back in thought) and talked about (he began a lecture in his head), this game, this archness and evasion (the lecture was not for his students), this flirtatious sighing and flickering of the eyelids and the endless talking about “making love”? Some people even called it rape when they did not mean rape. Is this one of the causes of the problem? How many people (he warmed to the subject), how many people playing and pretending, changing partners, even with their lawful partner, how many of them would be fertile if they did the thing properly? He flinched at the words “the thing.” Cecilia played all too well this game; she had all the mannerisms. He was sure she would not contribute to the conference from her own experience. Dippy Fairfax had once said something about this very subject and they had all hooted at him. Edwin included. Remembering this he stopped composing; it was pointless anyway.

One bitterness led to another. Bitterness is destructive and
hard to control. With fragile honesty he knew he was feeding bitterness. A few weeks earlier he had delivered a guest lecture. The invitation to be one of three guest speakers had pleased him. A former colleague, ignoring his later research and writing and his notable prize, introduced him with a quotation from an article, his first, published in a journal current thirty years ago and now no longer in existence. This introduction was a shock (he wondered if Tranby had written it) and it took a great deal of energy to try to make a joke about the youthful article, suggesting that since it had been out of print for so many years it could now be considered rare and therefore could be offered for sale in aid of a favorite charity. It should be possible, he told his audience, to ask a favorable sum for an original copy. Trying to hide the indignation which trembled in his voice and at the backs of his knees, he had given the lecture unable to help noticing an exchange of what seemed to him supercilious looks between younger members in the auditorium. Thinking about these people now, at his desk at home, he reflected that he did not even know their names or the subjects in which they specialized. Allowing his thoughts to become more and more wasteful, he dwelled on his performance. He was afraid that his lecture, from which he had left out a part because of the lengthy introduction, may not have made sense. While he listened to the ramblings of his onetime colleague, his energy had ebbed. He had felt then that all his prepared work was worthless and that it was conceited of him to have accepted the invitation to speak. He felt too that the audience were really waiting for their promised refreshments and that it was up to him to be as brief as possible.

Tormenting himself, he thought it would be sweet to be able to ask someone now for mercy and relaxation, for pity and for soothing words, as if he could be at the receiving end of a beautifully composed and well-performed mass. These thoughts and the accompanying swelling ache in his throat, which made him gulp painfully several times, alarmed him.

I must be ill, he told himself. Surely I am not, at my age,
crying somewhere inside. He reached for his books of the body; his hand hovered over the intangible.

There was another rustling sound in the blackness outside his window. He was feeling quite sick: the stale egg and that awful pepper; he could taste them still. He heard the sound again and a tapping of soft fleshy fingers on the lower part of his window. He rose slightly in his chair and peered at the glass, which only presented a reflection of himself and a part of his room. The house was sheltered by trees and bushes. A little path, frequented only by girls chasing runaway dogs and the man who read the meter, went down that side of the house. Beyond the uneven and sometimes flowering hedge there was a similar little path and then the next house formed a dark, solid shape which at times, as he made his notes in the evenings, seemed very close to him. No one, he thought, would be on the little path at this hour. He leaned back in his chair and opened the notebook of the intangible. One of the later entries, written one night when Cecilia had been called back to the Mary and Joseph, encompassed a vision of old age. The vision offered four alternatives, all with brief and honest, quite courageous descriptions. They were all possibilities, Edwin felt, for himself. His own old age, which came nearer every day, carried these possibilities: Alzheimer's disease, Ménière's, Parkinson's and Paget's. He turned to a fresh page.