The Sugar Mother (6 page)

Because of being disturbed, he had not followed his usual morning ritual. He thought about his violated bathroom and shuddered. When the telephone rang he thought it might be the agent. Leila's mother had said, before leaving with the washing, that she had left a message with the secretary, the agent not being in yet. She would wait at the house, she said, and not trouble Dr. Page with their presence a minute longer.

It was Cecilia. What was the time over there? she wanted to know. How was he? she wanted to know. Had he eaten the macaroni cheese? Yes, she was homesick as she always was. Yes, she was wanting to come straight home. She always felt like coming home, even before the plane took off. He heard her voice as plainly as if she were standing beside him. He almost put his hand out to touch her because of the sense of nearness. He tried to prolong the conversation, to hold on, somehow, to her voice. She wanted a quotation if he had something suitable. It was to match something in contemporary life, to sum up something about relationships. Yes, sexual. She was working on her paper during the journey. She was having a one-night stopover in London. Yes, the plane left midday tomorrow. Imagine, she wanted Edwin to imagine, after all this time what it was like to be back in London. She had forgotten the wet pavements and the smell of wet coats and wet shoes, the smell of wet people. So many people. Did he remember how many people? Crowds of people in the drizzling rain. No, not afraid coming down in the fog. Practically asleep then. He heard her laughing. She had upset a glass of Coke in her lap. Yes, in her lap. Cecilia laughing. Yes, it dried all right. She wrapped a British Airways blanket round
herself and she dried while she was flying over the white sands of Saudi Arabia. Yes, salmon pink in the sunrise, or was it sunset; she was confused. Yes, she was warm. Yes, mostly she slept during the flight. Yes, she was afraid of landing. Yes, the plane stood still, dizzy as always, standing on nothing. Yes, dipping from one side to the other and then dropping down and down. Yes, hovering and sinking and then dropping down, and yes, the back gardens, emerging from the fog, rushed to meet them as they always did. Her bag, stuffed under her lap, was drenched with Coca-Cola too. It was all a huge joke. Yes, she'd bought a bottle of whisky on the plane. No, not a good one, not the one he liked. The plane was enormous. Only one kind of whisky, only bought it because everyone else was buying it. Laughing. To drink at home in the wardrobe. Plane full of Indians, Eurasians and English. The stewards were mainly elderly; they needed new uniforms but were very kind. Yes, mainly men. She had never imagined the plane would be so big and so full of people. She had forgotten, she said, how many people there were in the world and how many different kinds. Did he remember Vorwickl? she wanted to know. Ilse Vorwickl? She was glad he remembered. She was meeting Vorwickl tomorrow and they were traveling together on to Canada. Vorwickl was now Frau Doktor in…Edwin missed the name. But the quotation—could he find one for her?—was to fit the idea and don't be horrified, she said—she began to laugh again—but I'm dealing with snatched sex across the corner of the kitchen table, the unwanted pregnancy, the repetitive nature of the event, from the woman's point of view, the man, unwashed, not even taking off his clothes nor hers and having one hand reaching into the fridge, groping. Yes, groping for a beer. She wanted, she said, something literary, some metaphor or an image which would say all this by implication so that her paper, while being truthful, need not be too horrible. Yes, a point—to make a point of something all too familiar. Perhaps, she said, Euripides, something from the chorus, it did not need to be the hero or the heroine. Edwin, racing in his mind along his book
shelves, promised to look. The next minute Cecilia was saying little words of farewell, fond conventional words, and with a click she was gone.

 

Leila's mother, who had come back into the house to strip the sheets off the spare bed, told Edwin that the agent had turned up with spare keys to let them into the house next door. She was, she said, going to wash the sheets and remake the bed nicely, and it was ever so good of him, she added, to have had the two of them to sleep the night. She would never be able to thank him enough, she said. “Leila would've come to say thank you,” Leila's mother went on explaining, “but she would eat those radishes. I said to her, ‘Leila,' I said, ‘they're not digestible,' but would she listen! She's fetched them straight up, pardon me for mentioning, but that's why she's not come back over to say thank you. Really, young people! They will not be told! Especially if there's a craving!”

Edwin, with the half-smile of politeness still frozen on his face, went to his study. There was a sweet fragrance in the room. The white roses, the little Iceberg buds, had opened. Their perfection was enhanced, he thought as he bent over them, by a slight flaw. The delicately perfumed petals were beginning to turn brown along their crinkled edges. Of course he remembered Vorwickl, one of Cecilia's friends when she was a student. He had tried at one time to help her learn English. They had all tried. In desperation Edwin paraphrased, against his inclinations, one of Shakespeare's sonnets. Vorwickl's eyes, bulging behind her thick-lensed spectacles, were eager and intelligent. She grasped the meaning immediately, asking:

“Bot vy some many vorts und fourteen lines to tell soch a small ding!” Edwin, cursing the organizers of the English course, did not try to explain. He was dreading her reaction to the ballad which was included in the next exercise.

He hid in his study until there were no more sounds of other people in his house.

 

“
M
edievalism meets the Renaissance!” Daphne called as she strode towards Edwin. Prince, in a kind of mad ecstasy, bounded forward. The plantation resounded with his joyful barking.

“Heel! Prince!” Daphne bellowed. “Here, Prince! Heel!”

Edwin thought they could not know the full strength of her voice at St. Monica's.

“I was hoping you'd be having a walk,” Daphne said.

“I was hoping I'd find you too.” Edwin had more in his voice than mere good manners. He had hurried from the university and had not stopped in the little park to watch the children playing as he sometimes did. He wanted to be with Daphne and, because of this hurrying, was out of breath.

Walking in the pines was something they all did, Daphne, Cecilia and Edwin. Edwin jogged there too on the days when he particularly noticed his stomach. Now, because he was trying to think of Cecilia, he hoped that being with Daphne he would, in her forceful company, be able to discipline his mind. Daphne hurled a stick for Prince, who went after it willingly. She shivered as a cold wind rushed between the trees.

At all times of the day the pines had their own variation of color and atmosphere. In the mornings they were green in the misty sunshine, and the tufted grass, from a slight distance, sparkled with moisture and looked smooth, like a carpet, spreading over little slopes and rises between the trees. The pines, uniformly apart, all grew to the same height, though here and there one a little taller topped the others.

In an effort to recall and think about Cecilia he remembered the silver-backed hairbrush, a present from her on his last birthday. “Real bristle, not nylon,” Cecilia said. Unwrapping the brush from folds of white tissue paper, Edwin caught in his left hand a little piece of ornamental card which bore the statement
Anthrax Impossible
. Moving the card to his other hand, he stared at it. The possibility had never occurred to him. He looked up “anthrax” in the dictionary, his birthday egg getting cold. “‘Malignant boil. Disease of sheep and cattle.'” He read it aloud.

“Wear your wig then if you're worried,” Cecilia said, “and you can use the brush on that and observe it for symptoms.” She began to giggle. “Wig,” she said. “Nothing abnormal discovered.” She was helpless with mirth and upset her coffee.

They both possessed wigs for those occasions demanding change. The parties they went to, their social life as Cecilia called it, in italics, she said, consisted often of people who were not being themselves. Being someone else and not being themselves, they often threw off their clothes, or some of them, between two and three in the morning. They gave each other pet names and pretended relationships. They dressed themselves in Glad Wrap and said they were sure to get AIDS and stayed on for breakfast. Edwin's conclusions on the way home from these events were usually written up at great length in his notebook of the intangible. He intended one day to read this notebook, and the others, aloud to Cecilia or perhaps, later, to have them published and left as a gift to her.

Cecilia, whose own hair was bright and blond and curly, had a wig which was streaked with gray. “It's called pepper-and-salt,” she said, laughing, to Edwin when he protested. She declared the wig made her into a bird of prey. “I'm an eagle, a hawk, a falcon about to swoop. That's my new image.”

Edwin's wig was white-haired; the wispiness, he thought, made him look like a poet. “I'm a poet,” he said. The white hair enhanced his suntanned look.

“More like the head of my old department,” Cecilia said, looking closely at herself in the mirror. “Remember old Stirrups?”

Often Edwin grumbled about his thickening bulging waist.

“A corset is what you need.” Cecilia poked at his flesh with capable fingers. That was why he liked the bathroom to himself. Sometimes he forgot the little corset and left it hanging on the back of the door. Cecilia had something also; she called it a merry widow. She did not wear it often.

The pines always reflected something different. He forgot about their fragrance until it surrounded him on hot days. When it was hot, and a small scented wind caressed him gently, he did not remember the rain dripping through the branches at other times of the year.

The wind, rushing, sighed and seemed to moan in the dark tops of the trees. Daphne's face was quite red. Their feet seemed to sink and rise as they walked on the yielding pine-needled ground. Raindrops, left from a recent downfall, hung above them and fell in scattering little showers from time to time. The plantation was deserted.

“Father was awfully foolish about Miss Heller, you know,” Daphne said as they walked side by side where the path widened between the stiff black trees. Because of the delicate nature of the subject, she dropped her voice. She slackened her speed. Edwin was glad to adjust his step to hers.

“I don't talk about this as a rule,” she said.

“Of course not,” Edwin replied in the voice he kept for occasions which required tact and tenderness.

“It's all over and done with now, but it was a very painful thing. I don't mean that Father meant to deceive me, but anything like this does deceive someone. It was because he did not want to hurt me, I quite see that. He simply never said anything. He never told me and I had to”—her voice seemed to give way—“I had to make certain discoveries for myself,” she added.

Edwin cleared his throat. He had not intended an emotional conversation. He realized he should not have expected to escape from Daphne's feelings when he, after trying to think and talk about Cecilia, began to tell Daphne about Leila.

“I find I can't get her out of my mind.” He wanted to talk about Leila but was surprised at his own words, wishing to
check them and to go on saying them at the same time. There were so many things he wanted to say about Leila. It had been a shock to realize that for a few days he had forgotten to examine himself for blemishes and symptoms, though he had taken trouble with his hair and eyebrows. The dry patch on his shin, for example: he had not made any further notes on it. He was not even sure, as he walked, whether he still had the patch of dry skin. He had no idea whether the condition was spreading. His book of the body was absolutely neglected.

“It isn't,” Daphne was saying, “that Miss Heller wasn't awfully kind or that she wasn't a good housekeeper. You remember what she was like, of course?”

Edwin did remember a faded, grayish woman who sat, with quiet patience, at old Dr. Hockley's bedside during his final illness. Miss Heller had blossomed, if it could be described like that, into a very different Miss Heller now. He thought Daphne was crying. He had not meant to upset her. Glancing quickly at her, he saw that she brushed her cheek with the back of her yellow string glove.

“The wind,” she said as if to explain the tears. “It's getting dark; we must be turning back.”

“Of course,” Edwin said quickly. “I must explain it is all because of how Leila feels towards me: it is entirely…” He looked at Daphne, wondering if she would understand. “She is unawakened; it is a presexual feeling she has for me. Perhaps she is looking for a father figure…I don't know.” He paused, knowing he was falling into despicable jargon, one of the many phrases Cecilia used and mocked. Phrases which could be used to dismiss someone else's relationship could not be applied to Leila. The word “relationship” was not even correct.

“I understand,” Daphne said. “I do understand.” He was grateful for her fervor.

“For three days,” he said, “Leila…” He paused, awkward with the name, knowing that he was self-conscious. “Leila,” he went on, “has been coming with all sorts of reasons for coming. The first day was because the oven in their house was hopeless and could they put a cake in my oven. It was all mixed and in
the tin; naturally I said yes. It's a terrific cake; it's taken Leila's mother three days to ice it. ‘It'll be a lovely cake,' Leila said to me. ‘It takes Mother three whole days to ice this kind of cake.'”

They walked in silence as if they were both occupied with an unspeakable vision of this troublesome cake. “And then,” Edwin said, “they wanted to invite me to a meal because I had been so kind to them, and as my oven was the better one, Leila's mother asked if she could prepare the meal in my kitchen.”