Sylvia Garland's Broken Heart

by Helen Harris

  Her father Prem had announced recently, in an ill-judged attempt at broad-mindedness, “We will welcome this baby into our hearts even if he is as white as milk.” Smita grinned ruefully; poor Dad, he was another one who always meant well.

  Next to her, Jeremy stirred and muttered and returned her to the present. A flexible part-time arrangement? What was he thinking of? It couldn’t be that he was deliberately trying to make her feel like a bad mother, before the baby was even born. But that was the effect; how come he was all ready to make dramatic sacrifices and change his lifestyle and she wasn’t? It was something to do with his childhood, obviously. He wanted to compensate for all the absences and shortcomings of his own childhood by overdoing it with his own child. Whereas she who had had a near perfect childhood – doting parents, doting live-in grandparents, loads of cousins – had nothing to make up for.

  She felt almost sorry for Jeremy. It was true, she had thought this many times before; Sylvia must have been a truly terrible mother. When you listened to Jeremy talking about his childhood, which he didn’t often, it was one long list of things missing: absent parents, the loneliness of boarding school, no friends to hang out with in the holidays because his schoolfriends were half a world away, evenings spent alone in ex-pat villas while his parents partied, never any siblings. Here Smita had to pause for of course she had no siblings either. But in her case she could confidently claim that this was mainly for economic reasons; her immigrant parents had wanted to concentrate all their resources on doing their very best for just one child. It was true there was always something slightly murky about this topic at home which she had never got to the bottom of. But on the whole she bought her parents’ story; they had wanted to do their very best for Smita.

  Sylvia, on the other hand, had no such excuses. She and Roger had never been short of money, had never had to go without for Jeremy’s sake. Sylvia had lived a life of pointless pleasure while Smita’s mother had worked hard every day of her life. If what Sylvia had told Jeremy was true, that after his birth she had not been able to have any more children, that accounted for why he had no younger siblings. But what about the ten years before his birth? Smita had often puzzled about that time lapse and now she suddenly regretted that she didn’t have a better relationship with her mother-in-law so she could simply ask her about it.

  Just thinking about Sylvia made her all hot and bothered and she decided to get up and have a cold drink. It was already half past one; she was going to be exhausted tomorrow. But she had resolved, when she found out that she was pregnant, never to show any weakness at work – she knew that was crucial – so she would have to go in, however tired she felt. She made herself a cold drink, piled it high with ice and went to sit in the front room in the dark.

  Fuming about Sylvia was not going to induce sleep but she couldn’t help it. Sylvia had made the last two months pretty much a nightmare. Since she had made her idiotic move to Kensington, there seemed to have been a non-stop series of mini-crises, all of which had meant Jeremy rushing over to the other side of London to sort things out.

  The first crisis had blown up barely a week after her move; a pigeon had flown in through her open sitting-room windows – why had she left them so wide open? – and, try as she might, she couldn’t shoo it out again. The bird was panic-stricken, making a frightful mess and Sylvia was at her wit’s end. Jeremy had had to take a taxi all the way from the West End where he was in a meeting, stopping on the way to buy a broom since Sylvia apparently didn’t own one and then chase the wretched creature back out of the window, dressed in his office clothes. At least Sylvia had been perfectly sane on that occasion and apparently really grateful too.

  Then her furniture had finally arrived from Dubai and instead of simply having it all put into storage for the time being, as they had agreed, Sylvia had taken it into her head to go trekking down to the warehouse in Wapping to have a look at it. When she had actually seen it – apparently she had insisted on having a couple of boxes opened then and there – she had had a funny turn and someone from the removals company had called Jeremy at work and told him that his mother was creating an obstruction in a loading bay.

  Jeremy had found his mother in a terrible state; she was sitting on a little Chinese stool which he remembered from his parents’ living room, sobbing her heart out and talking nonsense. She looked, he said, like a bag lady with her possessions strewn on the ground around her. Her hair was a mess, her make-up was smudged and he was frankly embarrassed. Could Smita maybe have a quiet word with her, he asked afterwards, and take her to the hairdresser? Smita was initially horrified; there was no way, no way she could conceivably take Sylvia to the smart salon she went to. But when she thought over Jeremy’s request, she felt a certain mean satisfaction at the idea of telling Sylvia her roots were showing and maybe suggesting to her that at her age large quantities of blue or green eyeshadow were not advisable, especially if she was going to be breaking down and weeping all over the place.

  Smita knew she was being unkind but it was only tit for tat after Sylvia’s incredibly overbearing and insensitive gesture with the orange and yellow maternity clothes. A couple of weeks ago, she had arrived for Sunday lunch and, almost before she had sat down, she had given Smita a whole lecture on how pregnancy was a time of “mellow fruitfulness” – that had been her expression, “mellow fruitfulness” – and how it ought to be celebrated and made the most of “like a harvest festival”. From her bag, she had produced two gaudily wrapped packages, one of which had a blue balloon attached to it, and she had given them to Smita, beaming all over her face and saying, “I hope you enjoy wearing them, dear.”

  When Smita opened the packages, she had been outraged; the contents seemed a strident criticism of her whole personality. One package contained a tangerine-coloured maternity dress with a pattern of bright green pineapples and the other an immense pair of yellow maternity dungarees.

  Smita had given her mother-in-law a chilling look. “D’you think they’re really me?”

  “No,” Sylvia had virtually giggled. “No I don’t. But I wanted you to have a splash of colour in your wardrobe during these months. Not everything so dark and business-like.”

  Smita knew she had glared at Sylvia.

  Jeremy had intervened. “I think they look rather fun, Smi.”

  “Do you?” Smita had snapped at him. She had stood up, bundling the lurid clothes together. “Well, I appreciate the thought, Sylvia. But please don’t try and choose clothes for me again.”

  She had gone over to the kitchen, regretting the open-plan layout – not for the first time – because what she really needed was a door to slam behind her.

  Sylvia quavered, “You will at least try them on dear? They can be exchanged.”

  Smita heard Jeremy murmur, “Leave it, leave it.”

  Of course Smita hadn’t tried them on. She had acted deliberately hurt and distant throughout lunch and, as soon as Sylvia had left for her interminable double bus ride back to Kensington – well, serve her right – Smita had flipped. She had turned on Jeremy; how dare he, how dare he defend his mother when she had done something so unspeakably tactless and rude? It had turned into one of their worst rows ever and, just thinking about it now in the dark, Smita felt dreadfully depressed.

  The worst thing was their worry that Sylvia was actually losing her mind. Jeremy said that when he arrived at the warehouse in Wapping, Sylvia had been making no sense at all. She was crying, holding on her lap a cushion which seemed to have some special significance; she kept patting it and she was sobbing that even though Roger was dead, he was still there.

  “How can he be dead?” Jeremy said she was repeating, over and over again. “How can he? I can still hear him, I can still smell him. I can feel he’s there.” Over and over: “I can hear him in the flat, you know. Even though I know he’s not there; I can hear him.”

  Jeremy had persuaded her to get up, he had packed away the little stool and the cushion and all the stuff that
was scattered on the ground around her: Chinese fans and Indian carved wooden animals and an ornate oriental metal bird which had suffered a bent beak in transit. He didn’t think he could take her on the train in that state so he had ordered a ruinously expensive taxi and, for virtually the price of an airfare, he had taken her back to her flat and on the way he had said to her seriously that she should see a doctor.

  Of course she had taken offence. She had told Jeremy bitterly that no doctor could bring his father back, that all that was wrong with her was grief and although she wasn’t surprised that Jeremy didn’t understand that, frankly it didn’t make her think all that well of him.

  After that, they hadn’t spoken for several days, one of their periodic fraught stand-offs. But then, just last week, there had been the whole business with the Romanian cleaner who had turned out to be, in Sylvia’s words, “light-fingered” and Sylvia had phoned Jeremy again because she needed him to help sort out another fine mess of her own making.

  Smita sipped her drink and sighed. Sylvia was losing it, she was definitely losing it. They would have to be incredibly careful around her when the baby came.

  Suddenly, from their bedroom, Smita heard Jeremy call: “Smita?” It was an anguished, high-pitched, rather unmanly cry.

  She answered. “I’m here. What is it?” She heard Jeremy, half-asleep, mumbling something.

  She called, “I can’t hear you.”

  For a moment, she stayed sitting on the sofa waiting, then, impatiently, she stood up and made her way back upstairs. She supposed she ought to get back to bed anyway. As she climbed the stairs heavily, the glass steps were refreshingly cool under her bare feet. She stood at the foot of the big bed and repeated bossily, “What is it?”

  Jeremy moaned theatrically. “I had the most awful nightmare. I dreamt you’d left me.”

  Smita laughed. “In this condition?”

  Jeremy reached out to her with both hands. “Come here, let me feel you.”

  Gingerly, Smita lowered herself onto the bed. “Honestly, Jeremy, it’s past two.”

  “Where were you?” Jeremy asked beseechingly. “Where were you? I woke up and you weren’t there.” He enfolded her in his arms; he was warm, sleep-smelling and he snuggled against her tenderly, cautiously.

  Smita answered. “I couldn’t sleep. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

  “I know,” Jeremy said drowsily. “I understand. It must be hard for you adjusting; scary. But just promise me you won’t ever –”

  “Ever what?”

  “Ever leave me. Ever.”

  Smita laughed. “Ever’s a long time.”

  In the dark, Jeremy’s hand reached down between her legs, reminding her of what she was denying him. Smita stiffened slightly but all Jeremy did was grip her thigh teasingly, squeezing the flesh tighter and tighter. “Go on. Say it.”

  “Ever,” Smita repeated. “I won’t ever leave you. If that’s what you want. Now let go of my leg and let’s try and get some sleep.”

  Jeremy appeared to fall back asleep immediately as if he hadn’t actually been fully awake.

  Smita lay there a little longer, feeling calmer.

  It occurred to her that maybe what they needed was a last baby-free holiday together. There was still just time; she could fly for another few weeks, she thought. Work would be a problem. A week’s leave at short notice; no one would be pleased. But she had just finished a massive report for them and surely they would understand? Well, too bad; they would have to and if need be, dear obliging Dr Levy would write her a note saying she needed a week’s rest. Which she did.

  She imagined where they might go; somewhere luxurious and sunny of course, somewhere Mediterranean maybe, not too far away but far enough to sound attractive. Somewhere with good doctors and hospitals, just in case. She thought her way pleasurably around different destinations and she imagined herself and Jeremy enjoying a tourist brochure idyll; walks hand in hand along pristine beaches, sipping cocktails – well, at least long drinks – watching the sun set, romance restored. In her mind’s eye, she was somehow slim too.

  Of course Sylvia would sulk. Left on her own in London, abandoned she would doubtless say, by her selfish son and daughter-in-law, what awful calamity would she come up with to spoil their holiday? Smita set her jaw. They were going to have this holiday, Sylvia or no Sylvia. Jeremy was owed loads of leave, he had been talking about taking some to do up the baby’s room. This was far more important. They would go away together somewhere beautiful and forget all about the stresses and strains of recent months. For a few days, she could hopefully try and forget all about the baby too.

  London at the height of summer was a rum place, Sylvia decided. Although she had returned to England on visits every year, somehow she had failed to see all the changes. Well, the changing population; you could hardly fail to notice that. When she and Roger had left for Hong Kong in 1969, black and Indian faces were still a relative rarity, at least in the parts of London which they frequented. Over the years, of course she had noticed that there were more and more of them. But she was rather glad of it actually; given the long and intensely happy period which she and Roger had spent in India, it helped her to feel at home here when she came back on leave. Besides, they all tended to be so much jollier than English people anyway.

  Little by little, with the passage of the years, Sylvia had noticed she felt less and less at home in England, as if she didn’t really belong here anymore. She had always supposed it was because she had got out of the habit of England. She had become a sort of foreigner herself. She had always tried her best to fit in wherever it was she was living – “going native” they used to call it – although you weren’t supposed to use words like that anymore. She had forgotten how to fit in in London. When she came home on leave, her friends would tease her for her unfamiliarity with all the latest trends. Once someone had even asked her where her accent was from. She had assumed that the change was mainly in herself and she hadn’t really registered how much the country had changed too.

  How could she have been so unobservant? Well, one obvious reason was where she had spent the bulk of her time when she was home on leave: for years, her visits had been centred on Jeremy’s boarding school in the Oxfordshire countryside and that was a time warp, if ever there was one. Her trips had been timed to coincide with parent-teacher evenings, school plays, sports days (although poor Jeremy had never shone at sports days.) The school strived to present an unchanging, gilded version of England especially for all the overseas parents: the Hong Kong Chinese, the wealthy Nigerians. The boys wore blazers and straw boaters in summer, they used all the old-fashioned slang of “prep” and “tuck” and they had no contact at all with the local people in the nearby market towns. If that was all you saw, you could certainly be forgiven for thinking, like in the Rupert Brooke poem, that there was “honey still for tea”.

  But of course that wasn’t all Sylvia had seen. She had nipped up to London regularly for shopping trips and matinees, get-togethers with old friends, check-ups at the doctors. How come she had never noticed how much the country was changing from one year to the next? She supposed she had been cushioned; she had stayed in hotels, hadn’t she, travelled by taxi and she had stuck to the same old places.

  After Jeremy left school, there had been a period of several rather dreadful years when her visits had centred mainly on her mother’s nursing home in Bournemouth. Time had certainly stood still there as it did in her poor mother’s mind where “that dreadful Harold Wilson” was still Prime Minister and Sylvia was still living in Chelsea and working as a secretary. Her mother had always disapproved of Roger; no wonder she had written Sylvia’s marriage out of her memory. Jeremy had contrived to make those visits even more forlorn than need be by travelling endlessly throughout his university vacations and somehow always managing to be out of the country when his mother came. Sylvia felt a momentary pang of extreme bitterness as she remembered that period. Well, nothing had really changed, had it; it
was late July, summer holiday time and Jeremy and Smita were away, doubtless having a whale of a time in Sardinia while she was on her own in sweltering London.

  Take the climate for instance; how come she had never noticed that the weather in England had changed so dramatically since her youth? When had it ever been this hot? The truth was in recent years she had not come back nearly as often. Jeremy and Smita preferred to take their holidays in Dubai. Sylvia supposed too that if you lived in Dubai or in Saudi, however hot it got in England, it was always going to seem relatively cool, wasn’t it?

  Still that was what struck her now as she grappled with her first globally warmed summer in London; how much the weather had changed and, perhaps as a consequence of that, how much people’s behaviour had changed too. It was no longer anything like the country which she remembered.

  One boiling afternoon towards the end of July, Sylvia sat in Holland Park and watched the virtually naked people lying on the grass in front of her. She simply could not believe how little they were wearing and what some of them were doing in full public view. She wondered if, now the weather was warmer, standards had slipped and what she was seeing was a more relaxed, easy-going sort of country. But in no hot country she had ever lived in had she witnessed scenes like those which she was now viewing in horrified disbelief on the crowded wilting lawn. This wasn’t a country at ease with either the weather or itself; this was a country which had no idea how to behave in hot weather and which had collectively lost its head. Peering censoriously from the shadows, where she was sharing a bench with a negligent East European nanny chattering on a mobile phone while her small charges got sunburnt and a woman cloaked from head to foot in a black abaya, Sylvia tutted to herself.

  Almost at her feet, three fat young women were sunbathing in their scanty underwear. Maybe they had been released from a nearby office; they had the round shoulders and spreading rears of office workers. Though when she was their age, Sylvia had been nowhere near as fat. After spending some time covering one another in glistening white sun cream which emphasised both their paleness and their inflated contours, they were lying side by side on their backs, visibly turning pink, talking at the top of their voices with their eyes shut – as if that afforded them some imaginary degree of privacy. They were talking about sex.