The Sugar Mother (20 page)

Edwin wanted to go off to some remote place with Leila and, having her completely to himself, make love to her, not once or twice but all night long and the next day and the next night. It was not possible to be simply like an animal, a bull servicing a cow. He wanted to be with Leila to cherish her all day and every day. There was no such thing, he now discovered, as a once-for-all affair. Love was something hoped for and looked forward to and then hoped for again. And every time there was an indescribable renewal of reason and purpose, a restoring which was endlessly precious. Just thinking about Leila's plain round face—it was a little face—made him want her more. Her not knowing how to dress, how to make the most of her appearance, was endearing. He wondered, as he continued across the maidan, if he actually hated Cecilia. Hate was too strong a word. It was simply that if Cecilia were walking towards him now, across the grass, he would not want to meet her. He was glad that Paulette and Buffy were at
tennis. Paulette would be sympathetic, he knew, but both of them, after listening to him, would secretly be upset and horrified at his disturbing the domestic calm.

He wanted to find Leila and her mother. He wondered which shops they would be visiting. He, suddenly wishing to be shopping with them, thought he might look for them. The idea did not seem impossible.

In the car he knew he must write to Cecilia. If he did not, there was every chance that she, thinking there was something wrong, might come home. Her work was important to her and so was her life with him. He thought he could write a letter now, something along the lines of the importance of work and life, lives, their lives. He remembered too Buffy once saying something when they, Tuppy and Dippy, Buffy himself, of course, and Edwin, were having an early sundowner waiting for the girls (Dippy), the womenfolk (Buffy), to come back from a hen party (Tuppy) somewhere. Buffy had spoken about the awful realization that someone might regard you with real distaste and irritation and that there was a deep gratitude in that however awful a marriage was, faults, quite bad faults, were often overlooked or at best tolerated. Speaking for himself, he had said he was grateful and they had all, with replenished glasses, agreed with him. He drove straight home.

He went round the back of his house to go in through the kitchen. Near the door there was an enormous tree whose branches creaked and strained even in the slightest wind. Edwin liked to pause there listening to the sounds, which reminded him of the straining timbers of a great ship crossing one immense ocean after another. Whenever he stood in his garden beneath the creaking branches he thought of the incredible progress a ship, her rail moving gently up and persistently down, makes. He had never forgotten standing on the deck of the ship one evening during the first voyage and being overwhelmed with admiration at the sight of the massive construction and the complication of ropes and pulleys which were only a part of the whole plan.

The ship, rolling sometimes and trembling with the pulsing
of hidden, well-cared-for engines, had seemed steady in the ring of blue water. Voices were snatched and swallowed in the wind, and the spray, on both sides, pitted the waves. Like the rhythmic creaking and straining in the branches of the tree, the straining of the ship's timbers did not change. The sustained strength and movement of the ship increased desire. He could not now ignore the memory.

Thinking of the voyage and of the passengers, he remembered the bluebell woods of his childhood. It was the eagerness of the other passengers about their chance to travel, to see other places in the world, to live in these places and to start afresh in another country, which made him think of those people, whole families sometimes, making for the bluebell woods in early summer to pick flowers. Many of these people, leaving the industrial towns, set off early in the morning on bicycles.

The people on the ship had been like these others, like the bluebell pickers who spent whole days bending down in the misty blue fragrance, industriously gathering. The flowers had to be pulled, he remembered, not snapped off. He remembered too the bundles of flowers, their blue heads darkened with dying, their long slippery stalks gleaming white in the dusk on the backs of bicycles as the pickers pedaled homewards after a day of unaccustomed fresh air and the delight of being in the middle of a mass of flowers. On those days the quiet woods resounded with the voices of the people. The woods did not change. From one year to the next particular hollows and groups of trees and little paths remained. Gone from the memory, they were recaptured, when revisited, with the sharp pleasure of recognition and an incredible realization that these places of the land did not move away.

The flowers, he knew now but did not think of then, were being taken back to places where there were no gardens, only streets of narrow houses where whitened front doorsteps were at street level, their doors opening straight onto the pavements. Behind the houses, which were all joined together, were only narrow yards and alleys paved with blue bricks.

Perhaps Leila's mother and her father had, when they were young, come home with their arms damp and laden with bluebells. Perhaps they, like others, had made the long journey by ship with all kinds of hopes. Disappointment, he knew, came in different forms. Who was to know what disappointment really was, since it was not possible to know, in the first place, the secret hopes which might never have been realized?

Not all people were the same. He had been amazed that Cecilia's mother, after making the long journey when she came to visit them, in spite of her contribution to a further understanding of the Wasp, was completely unchanged. It was as though she had crossed the world without any of its strangeness making any impact.

As Cecilia was, as usual, at the Mary and Joseph, Edwin had gone alone to the ship to meet his mother-in-law. Particular memories from his own journey came back to him vividly as he stood on the wharf watching the berthing. It seemed to him that the great ship was swollen with a mysterious knowledge and her movements, as she approached, were portly. He remembered from his own voyage the strange sensation of being in his cabin alone one evening and hearing faintly through the wall, from a radio, he supposed, some Arabian music. It was a thin monotonous wailing music, climbing at times to peaks of intense emotion. His imagination stirred then towards the lives of a remote people. Though he was in the cabin fetching something for Cecilia, he stayed listening to the music and trying to envisage a life as it would be if lived somewhere on the lower slopes of empty mountains in the squat little blocks of cement which he had seen and which, he presumed, were houses. What would it be like, he wondered then, to enter such a house through a doorless square hole and then to sit inside, with only a narrow shaft of light from the glassless slit which was the window to relieve the unchanging gloom within? Later he had watched an Arab's flexible thin fingers as he, with competence, counted bank notes. The man had gold-painted teeth and very fine eyes. The eyes, he
thought, were expressive and yet revealed nothing for the curiosity of the traveler.

Cecilia's mother's main comment was disappointingly that because of the dried milk on board, she had not had a nice cup of tea since she left home. Edwin, somehow having wished for some additional, even if quite small, insight into the ways of the suddenly remembered Arabs, promised her tea, wondering whether he should make it with tap water or with the water he fetched daily, then, in an assortment of containers, from the spring. Neither, he knew, would taste right to start with.

On that first evening Cecilia's mother had asked him to lift Cecilia's sewing machine down from the top of the wardrobe. She began at once to make nightdresses for Cecilia from the Swiss cotton she had brought, folded in tissue paper, in her luggage. Cecilia, staying at home for the evening for once, agreed with her mother that ruffles at the neck and at the wrists would be pretty.

It was strange to be remembering the bluebell woods. Lilac and bluebells: he had forgotten about them till now. What was it that Cecilia's mother had invented—a garlic-scented tablecloth? Of course Cecilia was always making things up. She had said it was to boost the cottage industries in the suburbs of the English Midlands. But he did know that Cecilia's mother had had a species, some sort of beetle, named after her, and for this he respected her. Sitting that night in an easy chair, one of the ones covered in cabbage chintz, he contemplated his lecture notes, partly prepared. He paused then on the idea that quite trivial things in human life can be dramatic and that a person without conventional covering can be absolutely alone at moments of self-discovery. These moments, if accepted, could lead to escape. He wanted to relate this to ordinary situations in literature and to the ways in which prose took on the special distinction of poetry. He, instead of continuing with his notes, heard again the softness of the English voice, the voice of his mother-in-law, and this caused him to recall, in a whole series
of images, the promise of a fine day in summer in the early morning mist and the endless calling of the cuckoo and the busy chirping of sparrows. He had forgotten about sparrows and he had forgotten the extraordinary excitement of not knowing how the day would develop. That sunshine mattered so much seemed hardly credible now. But he remembered clearly being aware of the intense disappointment evident in people on holiday when there were showers of rain. Irritable women snapped at apologetic men, who tried to hold umbrellas to shield them as they darted on angry heels across the cobbles.

In the sounds of the discussion on the suitable length for nightdresses Edwin remembered places and streets which had long been missing from his memory. He seemed to see again rows of distinguished terrace houses, the kind of houses he might have wished for once, even envying their owners at times. He saw too, vividly, the substantial house in which Cecilia had been reared. He realized then that though bored, he was comforted by the gentle conversation. Memory followed memory: the stillness of willow trees mourning along soft green riverbanks, the smell of river water and the smell of the deep grass of the water meadows where enormous cows, straying close to the field paths, waited to be herded for milking. He remembered a small shop in a private house where the front-room window had a display of dolls and dolls' house furniture.

“You don't want dolls at your age.” He remembered the anxiety in his mother's voice. “Have some of Miss Benson's fudge instead.”

Cecilia's mother's house was bunched and frilled with curtains, valances and eiderdown covers in material patterned with oak apples and acorns and unrecognizable small green leaves. The hawthorn perhaps. The little leaves they called bread and cheese and ate with pretended pleasure, pretending to be gypsies. All at once he was thinking of cow parsley, purple thistles, nettles and the dock leaves so close to the nettles, a remedy for stings. There were graves, grass covered
with groundsel growing at the edges in a walled cemetery. It was curious how the sound of a voice could recall clearly these things which he had not seen or thought of for so long. Though the home-sewn fullness of her house, brought with her in the sound of her voice, made him feel as if he would choke at the time, he remembered, he almost felt fond, briefly, of his mother-in-law.

Perhaps Leila's mother, perhaps her presence, implied certain images, but because of what he was pursuing now with Leila, he had not noticed them in the same way. Cecilia's mother, he supposed, had wanted them to have a child. He remembered thinking then, that evening, that he had heard her, in a voice lowered for Cecilia alone, between hysterical bouts on the sewing machine, saying, “No little surprise on the way?” His own mother, if she had lived, of course, would have waited patiently for a little replica of himself. Women, he reflected that evening, as they got older wanted to be grandmothers.

 

They had put a deposit on a pram and on a crib and on a baby bath. Edwin was shown the list with all the prices. The kitchen table was piled up with their shopping. “Three dozen nappies and these two soft white baby towels,” Leila's mother said. She said she was going to sew the crib sheets herself and they had not bought a mattress for the crib because they wanted his opinion.

“Hair, flock or foam?” Leila's mother said. Edwin, close to Leila at last, did not have an opinion. “What do you think?” he asked Leila, looking as if he considered the question deeply. Leila had no special opinion either.

“Hair's best,” Leila's mother said, “but a lot go for foam.” She folded wrapping paper. “That's for the crib mattress, that's for later,” she added. “You'll need a bassinet to start off with, of course.”

“Oh yes, of course,” Edwin said. He had drawn Leila's arm through his and was caressing her hand, feeling her skin with
his as if he needed and could take nourishment from it.

“We haven't nearly finished the shopping yet,” Leila's mother said as she filled the kettle. “There's other things to get and Leila's needing some clothes, she's getting big. She'll need”—Leila's mother lowered her voice—“she'll need some good nursing bras and I'll run up some little cottons for her.”

“Oh yes, yes, of course.” Edwin lowered his voice to match Leila's mother's. He was stroking the soft skin of Leila's forearm. He could not help stroking her. He was shameless and put his face close to her arm to breathe in as much of her as he could.

Leila's mother poured tea. “As I see it,” she said, watching the golden steam from the teapot with approval, “there's a bit of a problem with the dressing room, using it as a nursery, I mean.” She handed teacups across the table to Edwin and to Leila. “It's all cupboards,” she said, “it's more like a walk-in 'robe. I don't know but it'll inconvenience Dr. Sissilly having Junior and all his caboodle in there.” She stirred the teapot as she added more hot water. “I was having a little look-see, I wondered if some of the cupboards could be cleared, but they are packed! Dr. Sissilly”—Leila's mother drew breath—“Dr. Sissilly's got a hundred and fifty pair of shoes in there.”