Read The Sugar Mother for Free Online Page B

clothes, he thought. He liked to hear their excited voices.
    Suddenly, like the symptoms of an illness, the bitterness returned. He trembled as he thought again of the way in which he had been introduced by his colleague before giving his lecture. It was as if he had achieved nothing in the last thirty years. The bitterness was like a symptom which comes at intervals, growing in intensity, as a pain grows, and fading as a pain fades. Always it left him worn out and depressed. Cecilia, when he spoke of it to her, had said not to keep thinking about upsetting things. “Think of something else,” she interrupted his complaining. “What shall we have for dinner? I’m starving,” she said. And he felt ashamed because he saw himself on these occasions as small-headed and with the petulant mouth of a disagreeable child.
    Cecilia loved food. He could hardly bear watching her eat broccoli. “Pass the butter,” she asked him, with her mouth full, and spreading the melting mass with her fork, she positively stuffed herself. He was afraid she would burst something, she ate so much. But she never did and she remained slender whereas he, picking and choosing and being careful, was bulging horribly in places where he wanted to be neat and flat.
    He thought the water had stopped. They must have finished in the bathroom. He stood uneasily in the middle of his study, failing to feel protected by the extra wall provided by his books and journals. There is no greater annoyance than being annoyed with oneself. He wished that he had never invited them, this Leila and her mother. But what could he have done in circumstances like these? He opened his door a crack. The hall was deserted. The light was still on, for him presumably. There was no sound from the room opposite. Not even a murmur of voices as the two women might quite expectedly have comforted each other with the better memories of the day and the hopes for tomorrow. He set off along the hall. He would not be able to sleep; he would not even contemplate sleep. A warm shower would be relaxing. It was almost as if Cecilia was prescribing a shower, a long warm shower. He saw Leila coming out of the bathroom. He was too far along the hall to turn back. He saw that her blouse was unbuttoned. She gave a shy half-smile and slid by him sideways; her full youthful breasts, pinkly innocent, moved slightly in the opening of her garment.
    â€œGood night,” Edwin said and pretended to be looking along the hall for a cat to catch and push out of the kitchen door. Leila, without attempting to pull her clothes together, disappeared into the guest room.
    Edwin, deeply moved by the sight, the glimpse of the girlishpink body, unseen, he thought, by anyone except herself and her mother and, now, him, stopped at the door of the bathroom. Voluminous undergarments hung dripping from the shower curtain rail. He turned abruptly and fled from Leila’s mother’s washing.
    The pink mounds which were Leila were sweetly inviting. He searched along his shelves for poems which would recall what he had just seen. It was a hardship not to be able to use his own bathroom. He, in spite of this, became quite excited as he sat down at his desk with John Donne and Goethe.
    Â 
    â€œ A nyone for tennis?” Somewhere, as if in his dream, Edwin thought he heard Daphne calling. It was hardly light. He realized he had been asleep, still partly dressed and in his dressing gown. He sat, full of sleep, on the edge of his bed. “Anyone for tennis?” It was Daphne, immediately outside and below his open window. Usually he closed his window. He remembered now why it was open. Daphne must have come down the side of the house. “Three times round the oval and a jog-jog-jog through the pines,” she bellowed pleasantly. “I promised Cecilia”—she lowered her voice as Edwin leaned over his desk towards her—“I promised Cecilia,” she said, “that