The Sugar Mother (27 page)

All this was, he knew, a method of not thinking the thought he had just previously banished. He knew himself well enough to know he was doing what he always did. He was taking a false way, a falsely intellectual way out. It was his habit to think of something else other than the immediate when the immediate, that he might not be the father of this baby, was too unpleasant.

He felt as if his chest would burst. He longed for fresh air. He wanted to escape into the pines and walk there. He wished, in a hopeless way, that he and Leila could be walking in the pines, in the dark, that they could be lost there together all night and he would protect her as he had the night she was lost. He wished he could walk endlessly in the pines knowing that they could be together forever.

Leila's mother gratefully stretched out her bandaged leg to allow Edwin to slip the footstool under it. And then she leaned forward while he placed the cushion, with the peacock design, in the small of her back. He thought he had never seen her looking so worn and tired, and though she blossomed as she became more comfortable, it was clear to him that she had suffered during the last few hours. There was an air about her as if she was depending on him, as if everything now depended on him, on his decision.

Daphne ate two pieces of the cake. “It seems to me,” she said as if with a new strength, “that a decision must be made. We must decide and act quickly. Cecilia's return is imminent!”

Edwin glanced at the clock and at Leila. With the now
contented child, seeming to be almost a part of her, she was falling asleep. He remembered all too clearly her wonderful childlike quality, the gift of sleep. It was enviable, this gift.

Leila's mother, looking lovingly across at Leila and the baby, said, “He's a beautiful child.” She sighed and studied the tea leaves first in her own cup and then in the others. “Not a thing,” she said, “in any of these.” Edwin wished for something. Anything. An assassin, without any conscience and without relatives, in the bottom of his cup. Someone who would hijack Cecilia's plane, insisting on Cuba or, better still, the North Pole.

“Perhaps you could”—Daphne spoke gently, as if she were patting a horse—“rent the house next door?” She glanced at Edwin. “It's empty again, I think.”

“Yes,” Leila's mother said, “it's been empty awhile; we've noticed it was empty—about three weeks, isn't it, Leila pet?” But Leila and her baby were asleep.

“Well,” Daphne said in her practical way, “if you rented the house and if the”—she paused—“if the Leila family all moved in there, you could decide when Cecilia's here, and when she's rested after the flight and everything, which house, Teddy, you'll live in, either here with Cecilia or next door with the Leila family.”

There was no anger or sarcasm in Daphne's tone. Edwin could see she was trying to help. She was offering him a choice. She was not trying in any way to dictate to him or to put forward moral standards, which he felt sure she had. “It's awfully late,” he began. “It's after midnight,” he said.

“We can't break in,” Leila's mother said. “It's burglarproof—we know! We'll never get in there. Remember?”

“Perhaps an hotel,” Edwin began once more. “If I took you all to—”

“It's never too late for people like agents,” Daphne interrupted, “and since they're packed it should not take long to move. Everything,” she said, “absolutely everything should be moved out of this house now. While you are moving,” she said, “I'll go orf to the airport. It takes oodles of time with customs
and everything. I'll meet Cecilia, the others will all be there…. You, Teddy, you must get it all in order here. You'll need to move the surprises,” she added, “both of them.”

Edwin, who did not handle dogs, moved Blackie a bit to one side with the toe of his shoe.

“You'd better phone the agent,” Daphne said.

“Wait on!” Leila's mother was rummaging in her large handbag. “I've got his after-hours somewhere in here. Yes,” she said, “here's his card.” Edwin stood up and, taking the card from her, reached for the phone.

“Wait on!” Leila's mother pulled a little bunch of keys from the depths of her bag. “My!” she said. “Is my face red! Here's the spares. Remember the night we locked ourselves out? Well, I never ever thought to give this set back. Here…”

“You've actually had the keys, then. All this time, then!” Daphne did not hide her annoyance.

The study phone was ringing.

“I'll get it,” Daphne said. “It's probably Paulette or Erica.”

Leila's mother leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. Edwin began to put the cups together on the tray. Daphne reappeared almost at once. “It's Cecilia,” she said. “She's in Cairo—with Vorwickl. The plane had to be diverted—some sort of trouble, I didn't quite…You'd better speak, Teddy. They'll be held up there for some time. Cairo of all places! How absolutely ghastly! It's miles away! They'll be done up! Completely and utterly done up.”

Edwin went to his study. The phone was lying on his bed. Daphne had left it as if sprawled on the red blanket. He went towards it, taking a long time, going right round the end of the bed. He did not want to pick it up. He had not realized till this moment how much he hated the telephone, this one in particular.

I know your surprise, Cecilia told him. Miss Hearnsted saw you walking with
her
along by the university holding hands. Miss Hearnsted told me she was passing in a taxi. She hardly ever takes a taxi and that day she did and she saw you. You were holding hands. A mere schoolgirl, Miss Hearnsted said,
and not at all the quality of the girls at St. Monica's. Miss Hearnsted said that you would say you were not holding hands but the whole thing is, she says, even if you said you were not holding hands you would have been wanting to hold hands—which is the same thing, isn't it. Of course that's the annoying part of it and I daresay it's also annoying that you didn't know that the others knew. It would have saved you all the trouble of keeping secret and you would have been able to enjoy yourself without all that worry. Everything would have been so much easier if Miss Hearnsted had told you about her seeing you. Miss Heller saw you too, once when Daphne was driving her to the bank. She, Miss Heller, said the girl was obviously pregnant. What did she get? I should say, I suppose, what did you get? Also they never answered the door. Once when Paulette and Erica called—even though you told them you didn't want visitors they called. And they knew someone was in because the TV was on, they heard it quite plain, and because they know you never watch TV in the afternoons they peeked in and when they peeked in—I know peek isn't a word I usually use but it suits here—when they peeked in the dining room window they could see them as plain as anything. They'd got themselves squeezed in under the dining room table hiding, the two of them, hiding. Yes, I said hiding and what's more the table had a cloth on it, a fringed cloth, and you know how I hate tablecloths, especially ones with fringes. And another thing—Evelyn Tranby saw you getting flowers, whole armfuls of them, from the university flower shop. You spent the earth, she said; she saw you choose an armful, positively every flower they had, and then you bolted straight out of the door. Put them on the account, Evelyn heard you say that. Since when have you had an account there? Romeo? Who has accounts at flower shops! I don't suppose you saw Evelyn but she saw you all right, you and your flowers. I suppose they were for
her
or
her mother
. And then there's Mr. Taylor at the bank. What's all this about inheritance and making arrangements to have your will put in order? Just who are these people who must be provided for? I'm to get used, am I, to the idea of not being
the one and only. That's rich. Me being reduced to being one of four beneficiaries. Mr. Taylor, the bank manager, I'd like to remind you, is
our
bank manager. You seem to forget that we're double income and always have been, and without being vulgar, you seem to forget, with regard to your apparent wealth and possessions, the pronoun is plural. Evelyn Tranby says you're hardly ever in the department these days. You still perving around the children's playground? Everyone in the department, they all know that you leave early and hang around the park. Perv…perv…

Cecilia had never used that word, would never use it, and in any case it wasn't true and it was not anything that Cecilia would think about him.
A world of disorderly notions…
He staggered, trying to ignore his own imagination. He must ignore the tirade which was all of his own making. He almost tripped as he leaned across the bed to pick up the receiver. He was—what was the word?—hallucinating, that was it. He must remember to write it down. It was not an illness but a manifestation of something more intangible. Guilt was too simple. It was something more than that. He held the receiver to his burning ear.

“Hullo,” he said, “hullo! Edwin here.” He repeated the greeting without enthusiasm. “Cecilia?” he said, wishing that he were not saying it. “Cecilia, is that you? Are you there? Cecilia?” He listened to the crackling sound and thought that, through it, he could hear a tinny complaining voice, like a wasp caught in an empty jam tin. Cecilia's? He thought he heard another voice. Vorwickl? “Vorwickl?” He strained to listen. It seemed to him that he heard a child crying in a distant place. The crackling was louder, deafening; he held the receiver away from his ear. His head, it seemed, was full of the sound of a baby crying. It was the kind of noise which stayed in the head. He had not known until this evening that children, babies, could cry for so long.

“Vorwickl?” he asked in a self-conscious voice, but now there was nothing to hear, not even the crackling. He stood bending forward slightly, his back aching as it often did; he
held the receiver close to his ear now and waited. He recalled Vorwickl's large white arm. The first time he met her she had asked him to help her.

“I haf, as you say, wounded mein selluf.” She pronounced “wounded” as if for winding a clock, “wound.” He, restraining himself from a correction, took the small bottle of iodine and the tiny brush she offered. Rolling up her sleeve, she presented him with her large elbow, on which was the painful-looking graze. “Pleess to paint,” she urged. At the time, Edwin, unable to stand the smallest sight of blood, flinched at her pain, noticing that she made not the slightest movement of wincing. Later he said to Cecilia that Vorwickl had just the muscles for delivering babies and Cecilia, laughing, had said that the doctors did not need muscles because the mothers had them.

“They do all that side of it,” she said then. That evening they spent the time soothing Cecilia's mother, who was distressed because of all the simply awful things spilling from Vorwickl's enormous cabin trunk: a human skull, some huge forceps, a thing which Vorwickl said was a Body Brush, a tennis racquet—Cecilia's mother was particularly upset by the racquet.

“Feel the weight of it,” she moaned. “It could be a man's!” Still trying to hear either Cecilia or Vorwickl, Edwin thought of the female smell of Vorwickl. He thought he could smell it now, and afraid that he was really ill, he put down the receiver. He began to shiver and to wonder where he had put the thermometer.

“Cut off.” Still shivering, he sat down in the other room, grateful for once for the cabbage roses. He could feel the sweat gathering on his forehead. He leaned forward to put his head down, pretending to retie a shoelace. The made-up pictures, wrestled from him by Leila's mother, crowded in on him. Cecilia, somewhere in the mountains in a white room with thin white billowing curtains, weeping after her abortion, sorry, miscarriage, her thin hands clutching at him for comfort, it being all for the best really, the whole thing bundled, a small uneven bundle in a piece of white sheet, in the gnarled
hands of a knowing nun…He knew really that Leila's mother had not made him tell these things, make them up and tell them. Something inside him felt the need to provide Leila's mother with what she was, or might be, wanting. He had during the last months provided a great deal, if providing was what was being considered. Vorwickl, when she was young, enjoyed being provided for. It was as if she had to eat and eat to replenish the years which were lean with convent life. He supposed she still enjoyed eating. Like Cecilia, Vorwickl had loved food. He remembered clearly the way in which she, Vorwickl, attacked a plate of spinach and eggs. She held her knife and fork firmly but with a certain restraint as if they were surgical instruments. She held them pointing downwards and took the food in a delicate way from the tip of the fork as soup is taken, in Europe, from the tip of the long oval-shaped spoon. She never sat at meals with her hands in her lap, but always had, as if in readiness, both fists on the table.

“All right now, Teddy?” He heard, as if from a distance, the anxiety in Daphne's voice. She was leaning over him, her large face close to his face. He looked straight into her worried brown eyes.

“Perfectly, thank you,” he said. “Must have got up too quickly—that sort of thing, you know.” He heard his voice, low and muttering, offering explanations. He stood up.

Leila's mother was still lying back in her chair with her eyes closed. Edwin sat down again because he needed to.

“Blithering idiot!” Using one of Buffy's ways of reprimanding himself, he tried to grin at Daphne.

“We'd better move everything into the other house,” she said in her most matter-of-fact way. It was possible, Edwin knew, to know exactly how Daphne would behave in the middle of a collapsed tent during an all-night gale.

“Oh Lord!” He could hear her voice and he could imagine her heaving her great strength and height against the sodden canvas. “Grab the pole!” He knew how she would tell the others what to do. She was always expected to accompany the
girls from St. Monica's when they were at a school camp, banished with very plain food to remote and wildly beautiful places for literature and drama. It was thought, Daphne had explained once, that she enjoyed these camps so much that she was not paid for being there.