The Sugar Mother (24 page)

They sat together like characters in a Russian novel, Edwin thought, who never slept but prowled about all night creating problems and facing terrible truths in their nightclothes. Only the little dog, who had grown very quickly, slept on in his basket, twitching and uttering little growls from his dreams.

“It's normal to have a good cry,” Leila's mother said. “Crying won't hurt Junior,” she said. “If crying was bad for a unborn baby everybody would be born ill or deformed,” she said. Women were meant to weep while they were carrying. It was all part of nature.

Edwin thought about the ritual washings in literature discussed so often in his lectures and promised Leila he would be back very soon. As quickly as he could. When they went back to bed the long fingers of the first light pushing across the sky outside gave him a great longing to make love to her. He felt it might be an action which would be out of place and even harmful. Cecilia, though he did not want to think about her, would have known what was all right in the circumstances and what was not. Leila was calm and sleepy. He was grateful that she was not crying. Their bed seemed even more comfortable than usual and safe, as did his study and the whole house. Leila's mother, it seemed to him as he half-slept, kept watch. She kept his house in order.

 

E
dwin was at the airport early, well before his flight departure time. The others, the Honeywells, the Wellatons and the Fairfaxes, were all going to Bali for Christmas, to a hotel which promised, among other things, a Christmas dinner in traditional English style with English Christmas cards, a yule log and a visit from Santa. Santa, they were assured, spoke beautiful English. He was not quite white but he liked older people and was especially fond of English folk and English children.

Edwin, with his out-of-date overcoat over one arm, waited to see them off and to hand over small but expensive packages, gift-wrapped in shops, from himself and Cecilia. Cecilia had chosen them all before she left. He, in turn, would be burdened with fond phrases, messages for Cecilia, and similar little tinseled parcels would be pressed into his hands during the affectionate embracings at the exit gate for the flight to Bali.

Bali offered a great deal to visitors: faith healing, temple dancing, erotic carvings, duty-free shopping and “I've been to Bali” T-shirts.

 

In the silence—for it did seem very quiet even in all the crowds at the airport—after they had gone Edwin moved towards the place where he was supposed to push his luggage onto the weighing machine and ask for a nonsmoking seat. He did not feel his usual nervousness about flying. He did not even
think of it. He scarcely noticed the weight of his heavy coat, which was full-length instead of the fashionable short coat which most men, if they had coats, wore. It hung over his arm, causing some people to turn and look at the elegant and conspicuous fur collar.

He walked up and down among the people. He put down his case, picked it up and walked some more. He went out to the street and let someone open a taxi door for him.

“Missed the plane”: he would send a cable to Cecilia as soon as he could. He would get a refund, a partial one at least, on his ticket. Sitting back in the comfortable taxi, allowing himself to rest luxuriously, he worded his cable: “Missed the plane. Dreadfully disappointed. Letter following. E.” It seemed simple.

 

“
I
think I have found your Mozart piano concerto,” Daphne said to Edwin during the wonderful peacefulness while the baby slept. “The concerto you asked me about, remember? It was some months ago,” she continued, “the one in which you thought the pianist seems to start and then makes a mistake, he pauses and goes back and then forward as if to put right the mistake.”

Edwin said he remembered.

“It's number eight,” Daphne said, “number eight in C major,
C Dur
, the third movement, but it's not as you said. It's not the coming to the mistake and going back and playing over again to correct the mistake. It's not a putting right, not a fresh start—only something going on in the way it has been
going. It is the actual music; in the actual music, I should say; it is the way it was written—it's even more inevitable that way.” She went, as quietly as her heavy feet allowed, across to the bassinet. “He's still asleep,” she said in what was, for her, an attempt at a whisper.

“Ought we to pick him up?” Edwin crossed the room as if on a tightrope. “He's sleeping long after he should have been fed.” They stood at the side of the cradle watching the sleeping child.

“Leila's mother,” Edwin said, “always said if you looked at a sleeping baby it would wake up.”

“Doesn't seem to work,” Daphne said.

“She also said,” Edwin continued, “that he should have only little sleeps during the day to give him the idea of the long sleep during the night.”

“Good idea,” Daphne said in a low voice.

“Leila, you know”—he felt a tightening in his throat and cleared it noisily—“Leila,” he said, “used to pick him up and play with him. She's left all these instructions.” He sifted through a little sheaf of pink and blue pages which were covered with the familiar round handwriting. At the sight of the sprawling words he felt his eyes fill with tears. “I'm going to sneeze.” He fumbled for his handkerchief and was able to bury his face in it for a few moments.

“It's awfully good of you, Daph,” he managed to say, “to come and give a hand like this.”

“What else could I do?” Daphne said. “Simply a baby needs more than one person, except when he's asleep. And you can't leave him alone in the house while you go out, and you do have to meet the plane. You can't let Cecilia arrive without any sort of preparation. I don't want to keep on about this, Teddy, but heaven knows how you are going to manage to tell Cecilia…”

Cecilia, he knew, would begin to talk, to chatter, as soon as they met. It would be impossible for him to tell her anything. He imagined himself putting a hand, a gloved hand would be best, over her pretty little mouth. “I must tell you, darling,
we've got a baby.” He looked at Daphne.

“I don't know,” he said. “I really don't know.”

It was not only the baby, the little boy, his child; it was Leila and her mother too. It was the sugar mother family. During the year, because of that impossible thing of having to tell someone something and being unable to, he had been living in two separate worlds, which now had to come together. He did not want to give up his new life, not at all. Plans made by people, from their ideas, often neglected, he supposed, their feelings. There was no planning possible for feelings, for the emotions, as they would be called in a tutorial discussion. It was never, or hardly ever, possible to anticipate how someone might feel. He had never imagined his present feelings as being a possibility.

“Everything looks wonderfully clean and neat.” Daphne glanced quickly round the room. “I suppose the whole house is absolutely in apple-pie order.” She seemed to be trying to save him from his thoughts, perhaps preventing him from pouring them out to her. Telling her that he no longer loved Cecilia, that he did not want Cecilia, would be unthinkable. He supposed she must know really and even understand. In spite of her lack of tact she had good manners and these would prevent questions.

“Yes, yes,” he said, “all in order.” He had been round the rooms himself and had seen everything restored to the proper places. Even Cecilia's spare room choice of bedside books had been lifted down from the top of the wardrobe and replaced on the bedside table. He reflected how neatly Leila's mother lived, and Leila too, out of their suitcases, everything (they did not have a great deal) folded in plastic bags. The only big things they had were their fur coats and these were, he discovered, quite expensive. They would need them once they were in London. He could hardly bear the thought. He understood again that Leila's mother, though he suspected that he was older than she was, made him feel young and safe. He thought now about her constant approval of him and how she was able to make him feel that what he thought and did was all for the
best. He knew that he loved Leila. He knew that he had encouraged her in her first feelings of love for him knowing that he should not. The whole delightful adventure of discovery was shadowed by guilt. It surprised him that at the age he was he had not been wiser and more thoughtful.

“All in order,” he said again. He was used to phrases, to using phrases, which disguised. “Leila and her mother,” he forced himself, “were up very early, all packed, sheets washed, beds made, everything cleared away except for…” He found he could not look towards his child.

“Except for…”—Daphne nodded in the direction of the cradle—“and his things.”

“Exactly,” Edwin said, unable to forget Leila's small, plump but capable hands folding the white diapers into the correct shape, nimbly slipping a liner into each one, so that they were ready to use. Because his little son kicked and wriggled it was almost impossible to put any clothing on him. Daphne would have to hold him still.

“The kitchen's perfect,” Daphne said, returning from a brief tour of inspection. “We must keep it that way for the next few hours.”

The next few hours. Edwin groaned somewhere inside. Cecilia would be stiff and aching; the last five hours of the long flight were always the worst. Compared with the sea voyage, air travel was barbaric; they had often agreed about this in comfortable moments of dinnertime conversation with Buffy and the others. He wished that Buffy and Paulette and the others had agreed not to come out to the airport. Though they all found the broken night troublesome, they insisted. Cecilia would expect them. She would expect them and would expect the party to go on till breakfast and later. She would want to unfasten the straps on her luggage and bring out her gifts, everything chosen especially for each person. It was as if he could hear in advance her exclamations and her laughter. He wished he could feel enthusiasm for her return. The great test for two people was whether they wanted to meet and, having met, whether they wanted—needed—to be together for the
rest of their lives. The final part of the test was: could they exist without each other, did they want a life each without the other?

Daphne, coming back once more into the room after more restless wanderings in the rest of the house, said she had never seen the bathroom so clean. “I hardly dared go to the loo,” she said.

At school, Cecilia once told Edwin, they all had, on a certain day, usually a Sunday before church, to clean the school. “Every one of us had to do something,” she said. “We had to notice,” she explained, “something during the week which was not clean and then go for that thing, either to clean or to tidy or to weed, you know, getting plantains out of the tennis courts or sorting out bookshelves and gramophone records in the common rooms, whatever it was we had noticed.” It, the untidy or the dirty thing, had to be written down on a piece of paper, Edwin remembered, and then the mistress on duty, either the gym mistress or the sewing teacher, went round the whole place examining and ticking off on her list all the things as she inspected them.

“Of course,” Cecilia said, “we all thought the lavatories were awful, quite disgusting sometimes.” But it was Daphne, she went on to say, who, with a great brush and a mop and a bucket, cleaned them. It was like Cecilia, Edwin thought now, wondering why all this was crowding his mind so painfully, to clean something which already looked nice. She had always, she told him, polished one of the urns or one of the sports trophies in the front hall of the school. He easily imagined her standing, a pretty schoolgirl, beside her chosen polished silver. Because she was fair and dainty she always looked clean. Standing in the middle of the room, hesitating before waking his sleeping child, he faced an awful truth. Perhaps it was too awful to write in his neglected books of the body (the intangible, though it could be the external and the internal as well). He could hardly bear to acknowledge it but he was comparing the sweet freshness of the whole of Leila's young and well-washed body with something which had, over the years, only
the appearance of being fresh. Such things were never discussed, were in fact unmentionable, and he was ashamed of his thought.

He stood uncertain still, at the side of the cradle where the baby slept. The child's face, rounded now and flushed slightly, was completely serene and at rest. The mouth was closed as if resolutely. Leila's mother had been pleased that he slept with his mouth closed. “He's breathing through his little nose as he should.” Ever to find the fond remark, she kept thinking of favorable things to say, one of them being how like his daddy the little boy was. An exact likeness. But Edwin searched the little features, either animated when crying, or in repose, for Leila's face. “His hair is dark like yours,” he said to Leila once when the eager tiny head was pressing into her full breast. “Babies never keep their first hair,” Leila's mother said then. “He'll most likely be fair; see how fair-skinned he is, like yourself.”

The child had not been fed since Leila and her mother left. They had got him used (Leila's mother's words) to the bottle. Leila would have to endure her breasts for a time. She was all bandaged, poulticed with cabbage leaves. Everything would come right but meanwhile she would have to endure. Thinking about her pain, Edwin felt he could not bear it. He felt angry with Cecilia for being on her way home earlier than she was meant to be. He knew too that it would be as impossible if she had kept to her original plan. He knew he was to blame if anyone could be blamed. Leila's mother had said repeatedly, “Not to worry, Dr. Page. Just don't you worry, Dr. Page.” He was frantic with worry over Leila. He walked to and fro on the thin carpet. They would be at the airport, Leila and her mother, the little sugar mother family, robbed of one whole part of themselves. Their plane would be leaving some time before the arrival of Cecilia's. He hated the airport in advance. He would have to be there among all the vacuous faces, the selfish faces of travelers and their selfish friends and relatives, all coming and going, insensitive to his suffering. He would walk where only a short time earlier Leila, overdressed, and
her mother, also overdressed, would have walked. About to be reunited with Cecilia, he would be thinking that he would never see Leila again. And even worse, as he looked at the child, however much he and Cecilia wanted him and cared for him, the baby was not going to have his own sweet mother. He was not at all sure how much Cecilia would want him in any case. He could not help wondering what Cecilia would find to laugh about as she went through the rooms of her house. She often laughed at quite surprising things, things which he did not find amusing.