The Sugar Mother (3 page)

He began to write a sketchy description of the people who had been at his lecture, the younger men who were now his colleagues. They all seemed to have round smiling faces, eternally healthy and boyish, retaining the sparkling, intelligent schoolboy eyes which must have captivated first their teachers and later the members of the appointments board. He sometimes wondered if they were vegetarians.

Once, recently, he had lent one of his books (he did not lend his books as a rule) to a younger colleague. The book was not returned immediately, as, apparently, others had wanted to consult it. When it did come back to him, a birthday card, used as a bookmark, fell out. The inscription
Happy Birthday Shithead from Nympho
had shocked him, and for some time after
wards, he found himself looking at the boyish faces in the staff tearoom, wondering which one of them had been addressed with such vulgarity, especially on the sacred occasion of a birthday.

There were young women too, some of them quite ferocious, coming into the department, late, with their small children. He had been surprised, in the face of fierce feminist demand, how easily these women burst into tears. He kept a box of tissues on his desk and, not knowing what to say, pushed it shyly forward. He was incapable in the presence of such displays of grief to do more than this.

“Give yourself a seven out of ten, dear, and buy yourself a new hat.” He had the sentence written out in readiness for an overwrought mature-age student but was unable to say it at the appropriate moment.

Seen from a little distance these people all looked alike to him. Their clothes were like a uniform of denim and Indian cotton. There were several beards and a great deal of hair. The hair, he thought, caused half-hidden eyes to be bewitching and treacherous. From their positions they made pronouncements in a language which was unfamiliar; a nightmare of fashionable and, to him, false scholarship. When he was not depressed and negative (one of their words) he, in a fair-minded way, was sure that they, in turn, would have their opinions of him. At times he tried to be agreeable and went down to the tearoom on purpose to try to follow discussion, nodding his head and smiling kindly. He knew and wrote all these things about himself and often read through what he had written previously. He felt this made him suitably humble.

He took up his pen again, having let it drop while his mind wandered.

A ragged cloak upon a stick…
. He wrote the quotation on a fresh page, following it with
a world of disorderly notions, picked out of his books, crowded his imagination
. It would come to him later who had said or written these.

The sound from outside came again. It was a soft tap-tapping on the lowest part of his window. The sill was quite high off
the ground. Someone knocking, unless he was very tall, would have to stretch to reach.

A sudden sweetness from the white rosebuds made him glance at them. A few of the buds were opening. The room was warm enough to bring on this sweet opening. The books lining the walls, together with his solid desk by the window, made the room rather like a fortress with double walls. The large bed covered with red rugs gave an impression of comfort. Again he heard the rustling and movement outside the window. He glanced quickly round his room. The warm rugs on the bed, the books and their brightly colored covers and the wisdom and entertainment in their contents, the masses of words expressing so much of human life, were an insulation.

Edwin stood up and, leaning over his desk, raised with difficulty, the wood being old and swollen, the bottom sash.

“We are locked out of our house,” a woman's voice said from the darkness immediately below. He leaned forward, his stomach resting on his lecture, and saw them, two women, squeezed together huddled in the narrowness of the service entrance. “We are your new neighbors,” the woman said, “next door.”

“Ah yes, of course! Page,” he said, “Edwin Page, allow me, let me help you,” his quiet voice and his words encapsulating a whole lifetime of that endless chivalry which makes men available for climbing up, and for penetrating and forcing ways through impossible cracks and apertures in order to enable forgetful or lost women to be rescued. “Just wait a moment, please,” he said. He put on his dressing gown, tying the magnificent cord carefully. He never liked to appear partly dressed. Quickly he smoothed his healthy bright hair and made his way through the front door across to the side of the house where the two women were.

“Oh, Dr. Page, I am very much afraid,” Leila's mother said, crushing the smaller bushes and snapping little branches in her haste to leave the little path, “it is impossible to break into our house. As you know, we have only recently moved in. It's absolutely burglarproof: metal grilles, locks and bolts on the
doors and the windows. Oh!” she gasped. “I feel we are going to be a terrible nuisance. We have been going round and round the house, and you know how dark it is, trying to see if there was one teeny weakness, one teensie-weensie little place where we could break in like burglars.” In spite of being breathless she laughed and held her arm, fat in the sleeve of her fur coat, for Edwin to take. He helped her up onto the veranda of his own house. Still holding her arm, he led her to the front door. “We've been to the play,” she explained. “We joined the Theatre Club; I want Leila to meet nice people.” Her sharp heels pierced the soft old boards and then pitted the linoleum in the hall.

“There was this man in the play.” She looked up at Edwin. “Could be,” she said, “the spitting image of yourself if you had an Afro hairdo. He was handsome, wasn't he, Leila pet? Had all the women after him, didn't he, Leila? Quite the Dong Choon. A real heartbreak and a scream really. I enjoy a good laugh. Of course this was Russian; they're so morbid, as a rule, aren't they? It was just when the man—not the one with the Afro, the other one—when he gets run over on the railway line—how they do that on stage beats me—it was ever so real: it was then that I remembered seeing our keys on the kitchen table where I left them. I never picked them up! So near and yet so far!” She sighed.

Leila followed her mother. She looked pale and was dressed in what surely, Edwin thought, must be her best clothes. She had a fur coat too. Her handbag was white and purple. Cecilia, if she saw the bag, would hardly be able to conceal her mirth. She would shake with silent laughter and whisper somewhere, in the kitchen probably, that it was hideous and how could anyone bring themselves to buy it, and at the same time she would be sorry for having found the bag laughable. She would be sorry for the girl and she would try, in some way, to atone. Perhaps take the girl on one side and say something kind about her appearance and share some feminine secret with her so that the girl's face would light up with her smile, as only a plain girl's face can.

“So stupid of me,” Leila's mother was saying. “I am afraid we are disturbing you, Dr. Page; I don't know at all what we are going to do.”

“First of all,” Edwin said in his kindest manner, “you must sit down.” He leaned over to switch on the light. “Do come in.”

“Oh. No, no,” Leila's mother cried. “I don't want to disturb your household more than we have already. Your wife?” She glanced quickly at the closed door on the other side of the hall.

“My wife is not at home,” Edwin assured his unexpected guests. “Please do come and sit down.” As Leila's mother entered the room he could see reflecting in her eyes the cottage quality of the furnishings, disappointing after an expectation of a desirable wealth and fashion. He saw, perhaps for the first time, the haphazard collection of chairs—cane, chintz and colonial.

“Really, as if different women had chosen them all,” Daphne had said in her loud cheerful way more than once.

Edwin, still smiling, wondered whether he should quickly drag the dear little Regency sofa from Cecilia's room so that the present selection of chairs could benefit from the delicate blue velvet and the gilded woodwork. He saw Leila's mother recoil in a controlled way from the walls, which he knew, but had stopped noticing, were decorated with red cabbage roses nestling in vague foliage. “Lettuces”: often Daphne filled in pauses during conversations, startling those guests who had carelessly failed to pay homage to the ancient wallpaper. The bookshelves too, suddenly as they became victims of the scrutiny, appeared to be filled entirely with tattered worthless volumes. The standard lamp leaned, the silk shade was faded, scorched and frayed, and he saw, and again it was as if for the first time, how threadbare the carpet was.

“You don't have telly then?” Her glance had come full circle.

“In the other room.” Edwin moved as if to the door.

“Leila needs to pay a call,” Leila's mother said. She leaned back with a contented sigh in a chair which looked as if the wallpaper had spread.

“Sorry?” Edwin turned. “Oh, of course, this way. I'll show you where the light switch is. Down the passage, second door on left.” Gently he guided Leila, his fingertips hovering over her thick shoulders.

“Your wife's a doctor?” Leila's mother seemed to approve as Edwin, returning, picked up a small cushion designed and embroidered by himself during a convalescence once. “Peacocks,” he was about to explain at random, his nerves somewhat shattered by two female visitors in the middle of the night. “Peacocks,” he repeated in an almost apologetic way, searching for the best words to describe the Elizabethan motif in the elaborate design. But Leila's mother leaned forward. “Oh, thank you,” she said, “thank you ever so much; just slip it in the small of my back.” The peacocks disappeared, as if forever, as Leila's mother flattened them. “Our agent,” she said, “did explain we were next door to two doctors.”

“Only one at present. For the time being. I am deserted.” Edwin gave a little shrug of dejection and matched it with a suitable grimace of mock sorrow.

“Aw, that's a shame. Fancy anyone leaving a lovely home like this.” The cracks in the ceiling seemed to grin as Edwin turned away from Leila's mother's attempt to praise the room with a critical glance. “P'raps she's bored,” she said, “needs a change. Change is as good as a feast, so they say. P'raps she's been working herself too hard. A woman needs…” She seemed to be sucking a tooth as if extracting the last shred of something, a lamb chop perhaps; meat did stick in the teeth. He began to brood on teeth. He should, he knew, make an appointment with the dentist.

“Any kiddies?” Leila's mother was speaking. “I suppose if you have children,” she continued, “they'd all be up and away, but then again”—she smiled in a comfortable way at him—“there's sometimes a late little littly pattering around the place.” She paused as if listening for these little feet somewhere in the distance.

“No,” Edwin said, leaving the idea about telephoning the dentist. No one would be in the office at midnight. All the same it was something he could get done during Cecilia's absence.
“Unfortunately, no,” he added sadly, knowing that Leila's mother would expect a degree of regret.

“Aw well, what will be will be, as I always say.” She nodded wisely. “They seem to go in these days for sugared mothers, don't they?”

“Sorry?” Edwin paused. “Ah!” he said. “Surrogate.” He laughed in his most charming way. “Not sugared,” he said, “surrogate.”

“Yes,” Leila's mother said, “that's the word. With no family”—she pronounced it “farmily”—“a woman can be very lonesome.”

“Ah no.” Edwin smoothed the silver richness of his hair with the palms of his hands, first one temple and then the other. He was surprised that he was suddenly nervous. The woman, in her vulgar curiosity, seemed sinister. “No, no,” he said with the extra charm he used in the face of what he felt to be vulgar, “she is not at all lonely, not in the least. Her work is tremendously important to her. She has gone—”

“Aw, fancy!” Leila's mother, not listening, stretched out a well-bandaged leg. The bandage was very obvious beneath a bright flesh-colored stocking.

“She”—he paused—“my wife is—her work is obstetrics and gynecology.” He felt he must explain, and at the same time it seemed to him that he was actually apologizing for Cecilia's vagrancy.

Cecilia would know about leg bandages of course and would, in the circumstances, be concerned and might even ask a sympathetic question or even two. He wondered whether to mention this now even though her concern was mainly for those fruitful women whose legs might become, at any moment, a part of their interesting condition.

Leila's mother tried again. “All the same,” she said, “it must be dull for Dr. Page—I mean, no farmily. Always other people's kiddies—not the same as having your own.”

“Cecilia,” Edwin corrected gently, having no difficulty or embarrassment with his wife's name. Patients often used her first name, perhaps those of the higher income bracket….

“It must be dull for Dr. Sissilly.” Leila's mother was not to be stopped. “I mean it's always the same old story; childbirth is so repetitive.” Her sigh was laden with all the long-drawn-out hours of labor, first and second stage, from Eve onwards. With a weary look she lifted the bandaged leg onto the small stool which Edwin, with courteous attention, placed in front of her.

“Not really,” he said. “You see, Cecilia really feels the individuality, the special light, she calls it, which surrounds every newborn baby. Every birth is an event, a miracle.” He bent his handsome head kindly towards his visitor. “Every time,” he said, “she comes home radiant.” He paused, and as his visitors seemed to be waiting for him to continue, he, aware of being nervous and pompous, said, “I often see this radiance give way to a wonderful calm expression, an
exquisite tenderness and purity
. I'm afraid I'm quoting now; it's a bad habit of mine. But do you, by any chance, know Hans Memling,
The Virgin and Child
, or Albrecht Dürer? They can and do explain far more satisfactorily…”