The Sugar Mother by Elizabeth Jolley

It was not only the baby, the little boy, his child; it was Leila and her mother too. It was the sugar mother family. During the year, because of that impossible thing of having to tell someone something and being unable to, he had been living in two separate worlds, which had now come together. He did not want to give up on his new life, not at all. Plans made by people, from their ideas, often neglected, he supposed, their feelings. There was no planning possible for feelings, for the emotions, as they would be called in a tutorial discussion. It was never, or hardly ever, possible to anticipate how someone might feel. He had never imagined his present feelings as being a possibility.

Edwin Page, a professor of literature living in a quiet Australian suburb, says goodbye to his wife Cecilia, a doctor who is leaving for a year to study in England and Canada. Not long after she heads to the airport, he hears a tapping at the window: his new next door neighbors, a taciturn young woman named Leila and her mother, have been locked out of their house. He lets them in and offers to let them stay the night--and then they never leave.

What are Leila and her crude, colorful mother up to? Jolley keeps them at a distance, but we sense that their objectives have something to do with a plan the mother invents: Edwin will impregnate Leila, then keep the resulting child. When his wife returns in a year, she'll have a surprise three-month-old, and the marriage will no longer be childless.  Leila will be the "sugar mother"--the mother's mistaken interpretation of the phrase "surrogate mother." This is, frankly and obviously, an insane thing to suggest. But Edwin embraces the plan wholeheartedly, his powers of reason having been warped by falling in love with Leila.  As the plan hurtles forward, he finds himself increasingly at odds with Cecilia, avoiding her phone calls, even unplugging the phone in the middle of a conversation, wanting desperately to avoid telling her what he knows he needs to tell her. He grows distant from their friends at home, tasked with keeping him company--as it turns out, they've always been swingers, so "company" has some novel and specific meanings--so that he begins to live a desperate double life.

Jolley is a weird writer. Like The Well, a novel about two women that throw a would-be thief into a well on their property, The Sugar Mother is exceedingly strange at a basic conceptual level. The fundamental idea of it--two women insinuate themselves into a stranger's home--sounds reasonable enough, but Jolley seems to have a talent for wrenching a plot like these just a little askew of reason. How can it be possible that the rational, stolid Edwin gets taken in by Leila's unpleasant mother, or Leila herself, who is as verbal and engaging as carpet? Love, maybe, or simple lust. The Sugar Mother, like The Well, is a portrait of an inner psychology of alienation and estrangement. The new life that Edwin enters into, gulled by his own feelings, is one that's less domestic than entirely internal; the romance he has with Leila is hardly real, rather a fantasy of his own compulsions.

What makes Leila's mother such a frightening character, I think, is the intimation that she has planned the whole thing, knowing just how Edwin--who she seems to have been studying from afar--will react to the insanity of the sugar mother plan. We spend the entire novel gripped with fear and anticipation: what will happen when Cecilia returns home, or finds out another way? Jolley rather cruelly keeps Cecilia from arriving until after the book's end; by that time--spoiler alert--Leila, her mother, and the baby have disappeared, having presumably got what they'd wanted for whatever mysterious reasons they had.