But the dread is only momentary. For all that the Prologue opens with a toast to ‘The Old Country’, the novel is not in the least inhibited by its commission.

It’s difficult of course to envisage the prose fictional analogue to a Poet Laureate’s ceremonial illusions. Still, whatever you might expect in novel commissioned for the Bicentenary, Sugar Mother docs not evidently provide. I do not even recall the occurrence of the word Australia, though the action is clearly set here. The place is defined by what it is not (not England, not Home: all the major characters are English expatriates), by awareness of absence and otherness.

In its fantastic way, the novel is a triumph of good faith, playing its variations on themes much at issue in Bicentennial celebrations: notably, the construction and interpretation of heritage, whether genetic or cultural; and the ways in which people, especially migrants, make sense of themselves and their surroundings. Elizabeth Jolley’s subject in this book, as in so much of her previous writing, is possession, in all its senses.

Forget the Bicentennial for a bit. Start with the title, and its play on ‘sugar daddy . . . Colloq. a rich middle-aged or old man who lavishes money and gifts on a young woman or boy in return lor sexual favours or companionship’ (Macquarie Dictionary). Though the term is not used, there is a sugar daddy in the novel, Edwin Page, the ‘comfortably well off’ university lecturer (rising 54), on whom the narrative centres. He is manipulated into the sugar daddy role by Leila’s mother and Leila, newly-ar­rived tenants of the house next door, who move in on him — quite literally— after his wife Cecilia, a gynaecologist, takes off for a year of conferences and study leave in England and Canada.

Edwin is sugar daddy to Leila’s sugar mother — the term coined by her mother:

‘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’.

Edwin derives authority from the right word, and the apt quotation. However his book-learning is no match for the knowingness of Leila’s mother. Before’ long she has persuaded him into an arrangement whereby Leila will bear him a child to be brought up as his and Cecilia’s. The persuasion is easy since he has become infatuated with Leila, whom he sees as childlike and innocent, and he is readily seduced by her mother’s superlatively womanly display of culinary and other domestic skills.

The construction of Edwin as sugar daddy deconstructs some of his fondest illusions, especially the image of himself as a contented member of a childless double income family. His resentments and insecurities and vulnerabilities emerge increasingly with the birth of the child (a boy, naturally) and the imminence of Cecilia’s return home. His fascina­tion with children, whether in the form of representations of the Christ-child, or kids in the playground past which he daily walks, takes on the disturbing quality of obsession, the more so when information about his own origins begins to add up. By the end there is an open question whether his dissatisfaction with Cecilia, named for a Christian virgin martyr, is that she provides him with neither the satisfactions of womanliness nor of childishness. Cecilia is never seen in the novel, and another question open at the end concerns the nature of her relationship with her female travelling companion, the German doctor Vorwickl.

Mozart is played, one of the characters is a jolly hockey-sticks mistress at St. Monica’s girls’ school. Altogether. Sugar Mother is recognisably of a piece with Elizabeth Jolley’s previous published work — though I have to say I like it better than some of its predecessors, mainly because it is less arch and more adroit. It makes a striking companion piece to The Well. Edwin’s yearning for the gratification of progency counterpointing Hester Harper’s appropriation of the orphan sixteen-year-old Katherine. Both novels deal very severely with men, but in neither is the ruthlessness of the female of the species a pretty sight.

The congruence of this territory of obsession and deception with that explored by Elizabeth Jolley in earlier writing will be apparent. It is territory staked out also by such English novelists as Barbara Pym and Beryl Bainbridge, who quite matter-of-factly exhibit the horrors of everyday life. Pym and Bainbridge, however, more consistently adhere to the conventions of realistic fiction than does Jolley. While Sugar Mother is not as ostentatious as some of Jolley’s work in contemplation of and commentary on its own fictional processes, it does insist on the realities of story telling, and on the power of writing and reading.

Through all of this, Elizabeth Jolley resists solemnity. Such resistance is hard to demonstrate suc­cinctly, but take the name of the maternity unit where Cecilia works, the Mary and Joseph; or the dog Prince, always referred to as he, who produces a litter of puppies. The term whimsical has often been used to diminish Elizabeth Jolley’s achievement. It seems to me rather to definie it, with some precision: she sports, seriously; requiring recognition of whimsy as a traditional and sophisticated literary kind.

Sugar Mother proceeds with a seeming immunity to fear of ridicule which contributes to its success in naturalising what in other texts and contexts might appear just preposterous. Certainly if any other text produced as a contribution to the Bicentennial celebrations generates as much wicked pleasure as Sugar Mother, in all its ramifications, docs for me, 1988 may not be so heavy a year after all.