Free The Sugar Mother by Elizabeth Jolley

it—‘She’s Queen Victoria.’ Well, it’s funny, isn’t it—I mean Queen Victoria, dead all these years and not even a relation. You must miss a lot not having kiddies of your own. Dr. Sissilly must in her most secret heart wish for a little boy or girl just like you. All of us ladies are mothers in our real true hearts….”
    Edwin, waking suddenly, seemed to be hearing Leila’s mother still as he heard her, filled with roast dinner, over the coffee cups. His own replies came back to him, word for word, his pillow suddenly uncomfortable and something about the bed making him turn over, trying to put aside the words he’d said. Yes, he’d said, he agreed they, he and Cecilia, did miss awfully having children, expanding, children led to pets andsports and parties and hobbies—all sorts of things and places and holidays one would never have thought of. It was so sad, he explained during Leila’s mother’s third glass of port, Cecilia having three abortions—miscarriages. Quickly he changed from the more technical to the popular, thinking that he saw Leila’s mother stiffen slightly at the implications carried in the word “abortion.”
    â€œAw! Lorst three little ones; that is sad, very sad!” Leila’s mother squinted at the ruby liquid. “Goodness, I am clucky this evening.” She rustled and settled more comfortably in the nest of cushions Edwin had made for her. “Funny thing—I seem to hear a baby crying in this house,” she said. “I wonder if the tea leaves would tell me something tomorrow. Remind me, Leila: tea leaves in the morning.” She sighed. “Nursery ready three times.” She shook her head. “Children,” she said, “they’re like teeth, all trouble. Trouble coming, trouble while you’ve got them and trouble when they go. But for all that who’d be without them!”
    He thought Leila was smiling at him during this conversation. She was turning the pages of a magazine and gazing, with her head on one side, at pictures of royal wedding dresses. “Beautiful Brides”: Edwin read the heading; it was upside down for him. He thought Leila glanced at him several times with quick little shy smiles. To enter a conspiracy he returned the smiles, but each time Leila seemed to be turning another page, absorbed afresh in a world of white lace and demure expressions. Now he was not certain if her smile was for him or simply for the happiness of the queens and princesses on the thick pages. Leila’s mother, her mind clearly on blue and pink cradles, was having her own smiles over real or imagined little bodies and limbs—dressed of course in pretty clothes. She enjoyed, she said, just talking about baby clothes.
    Edwin turned over again, in that curious restlessness which accompanies the self-torture of going over things said in conversations and the wish, later, to be able to unsay them. While talking to Leila’s mother it was not difficult to imagine Cecilia, delicate and thin-fingered, crying and crying in a hospital bed,not at the Mary and Joseph, of course, but in a place somewhere in the mountains, near Zurich or not far from Vienna, so that a world-famous obstetrician could be in attendance. While talking to Leila’s mother he had imagined easily the way in which Cecilia, hot with an unforeseen complicating infection, would have put her small but capable hands into his. The first time and the second time in similar circumstances, but the third perhaps different, perhaps in a hospice run by an obscure order of nuns on the outskirts of Budapest, where they, he and Cecilia, would have been on holiday, the confinement coming upon them before time—not full term, he corrected himself. This time, no crying and no tears, only something like a pretense of not minding. That it was better this way. The whole sad thing bundled up in a small sheet and carried away