by Helen Harris
If Jeremy had to pick a single adjective to describe his parents, it would be half-hearted. They had had their only child in an offhand sort of way and then they had pretty much ignored him for the next eighteen years; that was how it seemed to him. Of course, as a young child, he had taken it all for granted, the solitary, rather anachronistic ex-pat childhood. But once he was sent away to boarding school in England aged just eleven, part and parcel of that upbringing, he had a chance to compare his childhood with other boys’ and to realise how deprived he had been.
During half term holidays, he would sometimes be invited to other boys’ houses as the holiday was too short to fly back to India or later to Saudi Arabia. In the home of his friend Alastair Woodward, he discovered childhood with siblings, a gentle diffident father who didn’t think his son was weedy and a jolly dishevelled mother who evidently didn’t find her children a bore. At Olly Glockner’s house, he met an astonishingly fat and hilariously funny father who didn’t care at all about success on the sports field, who was proud of Olly’s singing voice and his role as Lady Bracknell in the school play. Olly’s mother, also a character, who dressed incredibly strangely, served dinner late because she was lost in a book and the book was the faintly scandalous The Women’s Room. Eaten up with envy, Jeremy would sit at his friends’ crowded tables and learn about teasing, squabbling and family catchphrases. He observed how having brothers and sisters gave you a degree of freedom from your parents’ expectations; one sibling could be the sporty one, one the brainy one and one was allowed to be a freak.
Every long holiday, he would fly back to India, later to Saudi, feeling a notch more resentful each year, to a house which never really felt like his and to parents who scarcely paused in their round of socialising to acknowledge his return. By the time he reached sixteen, Jeremy understood, with rock-solid teenage certainty, that he had been cheated.
What he thought was his earliest memory was of his mother going out to a party. He was in the garden of their Delhi house, probably playing some solitary game in the benignly negligent care of his ayah. He would have been three or four. It was about to get dark any minute. In India, night fell very quickly and Jeremy was always scared of being caught in the wrong place when it got dark. He was playing close to the house and keeping a watchful eye on the encroaching shadows.
Suddenly a brilliant light came on upstairs in his parents’ bedroom and his mother stepped out onto the balcony. She was wearing a shimmering multi-coloured cocktail frock and as she called out “Good Night” and spread and folded her arms to mimic a hug, she looked like a wonderful exotic bird perched up on the balcony, calling into the dusk.
Jeremy must have cried out, stretched up his arms; he wanted a real hug, not a pretend one. His ayah scooped him up quickly before he ran inside and delayed his parents’ departure. Jeremy struggled. He didn’t want her bony arms around him; he wanted his mother’s plump, freckled, scented ones. So in desperation – because his ayah’s arms although bony were very strong – he bit her, as hard as he could, in her sinewy upper arm. His ayah screamed and dropped him and he ran into the house as fast as his legs could carry him.
But when he got upstairs to his parents’ bedroom, he didn’t get a motherly hug; he got a furious scolding – and a mighty spanking from his father who was up there too, struggling with his cufflinks, when Jeremy came running in. It was all right to speak peremptorily to servants; biting them was not.
With hindsight and listening to Smita complaining about the drudgery of caring for a small baby unaided, Jeremy could understand the appeal of his parents’ ex-pat lifestyle. If they had stayed in England, they would never have lived as well. His father, a civil engineer and his mother, his father’s former secretary, would have lived comfortable but never luxurious lives. They might have moved out of London to somewhere like Surrey, to the commuter belt, achieved a bigger house with a bigger garden which his mother would have fussed over. But they would never have experienced the elegance of their villa on the Peak in Hong Kong which his mother had gone on and on about for years after they left. They would never in their wildest dreams have had a house full of servants and while his mother might have done just as little with her life in Surrey, she would have had a lot less fun doing it.
‘Ah, fun,’ Jeremy thought bitterly. Fun had always been his parents’ guiding principle. They had had years and years of it: parties, picnics, trips, games. They had always been off somewhere having fun while Jeremy was growing up. Had anyone else had as absent parents as he had? For Jeremy had understood at a young age that he was not part of the fun, that his presence was in fact incompatible with fun.
Another bad memory came back to him; he was a little older this time, maybe five or six and he was woken one warm night by the sounds of one of his parents’ endless succession of parties. He could hear a lady’s high-pitched shrieks of laughter and, as he woke up completely, he recognised that they were his mother’s. He got up and went out onto the long landing, looking for her. To his surprise, the hoots of laughter weren’t coming from downstairs where the party was going on but from the guest bedroom next door to his. That was why they had woken him up. He went running in, gladly calling, “Mummy, Mummy!” and he found his mother inside sharing a joke with a man who was laughing so much he had fallen flat on his back on the bed. Jeremy couldn’t see who the man was because the light was off. His mother was furious. She leapt up off the bed and shouted at Jeremy – very red in the face – to go back to bed. She shouted at him, “You’re spoiling my party!”
Jeremy was a teenager before he understood what that was all about. By then, he had spied enough other instances of his parents’ private fun to work out what was going on. Along with the lavish lifestyle and the warmer climate, his parents had embraced the swinging ex-pat scene. Free and easy, far from home, you could get away with things there you would never have dreamt of in Surrey.
Even all these years later, sitting holding his little Anand, Jeremy still felt hurt by that memory. What sort of mother would shout at her child that he was spoiling her party? He worried for a minute that Smita might. But of course there was no comparison between his mother and Smita. Smita was suffering from the inevitable difficulties of adjustment; from pursuing a full-time and highly successful career to having to deal with nappies and bottles and endless piles of washing. Whereas, before Jeremy was born, his mother had done simply nothing. That must have been the trouble really; she had enjoyed years and years of utter idleness before little Jeremy had come along to spoil it. She had grown used to the heavenly selfishness of the unemployed ex-pat wife: coffee mornings, tennis, swimming, a bit of voluntary work maybe but not much. She had never forgiven Jeremy, the little pain, for threatening to put a stop to it.
He hadn’t managed to though, had he? The fun had carried on uninterruptedly over his head throughout his childhood and, not knowing any better, he had adored his lovely blonde mother from afar. If anyone had been the villain when he was young, it was his father; his father who bellowed and spanked and always wanted him to be bigger and stronger than he was, his father whom he had caught out in extra-marital fun and games far more explicitly than his mother.
Jeremy must have been no more than five or six when he took it into his head to hide under the dining table on a night when his parents had guests for dinner. Everyone must have assumed he was tucked up in bed; no one came looking for him. It was a great game to start off with; matching the legs and feet to the voices overhead. His parents were of course the easiest to identify. Besides they sat in their usual places: his father, in heavy lace ups even at dinner, at the head of the table and his mother, in strappy silver sandals with crimson nail polish on her toes, at the foot. So why had his father somehow undone the laces on his big right shoe and stuck his foot in its great lozenge-patterned sock up the tight skirt of the woman sitting to his left? Jeremy had observed the manoeuvrings of his father’s foot for some time, mystified and repelled. His mother’s feet were squarely planted on
the parquet floor, nowhere near her neighbours’. His father’s foot was burrowing up and up between the lady’s legs. It must have been horribly ticklish for her; why didn’t she make him stop? Jeremy slid on his bottom to the far end of the table, as far away from the burrowing foot as possible and as close as he could get to the familiarity of his mother’s silver sandals. He must have scooted a bit too far or maybe his mother had shifted her feet because he collided with them and overhead his mother let out a startled squawk.
He was discovered amid much laughter. His mother kept repeating, “I thought it was a stray cat who’d sneaked in.”
It seemed at first that Jeremy wasn’t going to be told off all that seriously because everyone thought it was so screamingly funny. But once the fuss had died down, his father stood up with a face like thunder. He must have spent those first few minutes struggling back into his shoe.
“Excuse us for a moment,” he said, far too seriously and he led Jeremy out of the room by the hand, holding him not fondly but too tightly like a victorious soldier leading a captive.
Upstairs in Jeremy’s bedroom, there was the usual telling off, the usual spanking, even more furious than usual. In the middle of it, Jeremy shouted out, “I saw. You had your foot up a lady’s skirt.”
His father stopped spanking to scoff. “What nonsense. I did no such thing.”
“Oh yes you did,” Jeremy cried. “I saw.”
His father laughed. “How could you possibly tell whose foot was whose, you little silly? If anyone was playing footsie under the table, it would have been Nigel Palmer.”
“Your foot,” Jeremy insisted. “Your socks.”
“Didn’t you notice?” his father retorted. “Nigel and I are wearing the same socks.”
Jeremy had forgotten all about that incident, gladly, buried it deep along with all the other upsetting memories until Anand was born. Then it had swum disconcertingly back to the surface like the murky remnants of a crime from the bottom of a pond.
He tried to tell Smita what was troubling him but she didn’t really get it. Maybe it was because the baby was a boy; nothing similar seemed to be happening to her. Or maybe it was because her childhood had been so straightforwardly happy; she had been the adored, spoilt princess of the all-providing Indian household. Her doting grandparents had substituted for her parents when they were out at work. She had never been without at least two close relatives waiting on her hand and foot. It still showed, Jeremy thought resentfully. Smita simply couldn’t understand how Anand’s arrival had triggered all this maudlin soul-searching.
“For goodness sake,” she snapped at Jeremy. “Why are you digging that up all over again? It’s finished, done with. Our little boy is a brand new chapter, aren’t you sweetie?” And she bounced the baby on her lap, his short towelling-clad legs splayed out stiff and straight: “A brand new chapter!”
But Jeremy knew that wasn’t true. He sensed that everything about himself as a father had been formed by those unhappy childhood years. Even if his main motivation was to escape from them, above all not to repeat them, they were still there, they were part of who he was and he was terrified that he would somehow, in spite of himself, transmit all that misery, that inadequacy to Anand. It troubled him so much that some nights he couldn’t sleep. He worried that he didn’t have it in him to be a really great father. He would get up to give Anand his bottle to Smita’s amazed gratitude. Smita had no such worries. For her, motherhood was just another job. She never doubted her competence – and she was very competent – although Jeremy kept wishing she would enjoy it a little more. Already, when Anand was barely two months old, she was talking eagerly about hiring a nanny and going back to work.
That broke Jeremy’s heart; he couldn’t stand the thought of some uninterested Polish nanny caring for his son. It would surely be history repeating itself; a child, whose parents were too busy leading their own lives to bring him up, being raised by servants. Most days, he would have dearly liked to give up his job to care for Anand full-time himself but obviously that wasn’t financially practical. He felt angry with Smita for refusing even to consider going part-time as so many women did.
Having his mother around didn’t help of course. The birth of her grandson seemed to have had a peculiar effect on her too. Having practically turned her back on them with her eccentric move to Kensington, since Anand’s arrival they had trouble keeping her away. She was always ringing up, asking to come over and sometimes even turning up unannounced – all the way from Kensington – which drove Smita up the wall.
It made Jeremy feel rather cynical frankly. Here was a woman who had been a virtually useless mother, who had never shown the slightest interest in her own son’s doings, becoming so sentimentally maternal towards her grandson. He wondered how genuine it was; if it wasn’t some sort of complicated, competitive attempt to show Smita up. Smita certainly resented her mother-in-law’s continual busybodying visits no end and she complained to Jeremy about it constantly.
“Can’t you do something about her?” she begged. “Can’t you stop her coming round all the time? Can’t we go back to just Sunday lunches?”
One weekend in early November, Jeremy experimented with having sole charge of Anand for an entire day. Smita was desperate to go out with her girlfriends who had organised a day of shopping, lunch and a visit to a beauty salon, so desperate that she was prepared to leave Anand with Jeremy all day and even for him to drive Anand all the way to Overmore Gardens to spend some time with Sylvia. The truth was that Smita’s own mother had not lived up to her word; having assured them countless times before Anand was born that she would be down from Leicester every weekend if she was needed, she had only managed to make it once, blaming the demands of her business which seemed to be particularly pressing. Sylvia, with her unexpected excess of grandmotherly feelings, had stepped gladly into the gap left by Naisha.
Jeremy hadn’t been to his mother’s flat for nearly three months and he was completely taken aback by what he found there. The drive from Belsize Park went smoothly, Anand slept obligingly all the way, Jeremy found a parking spot relatively easily and he pressed the intercom and climbed the stairs to the first floor, feeling almost jaunty, swinging Anand in his car seat in one hand and a holdall crammed full of baby supplies in the other. He was looking forward to hearing his mother crow over how much Anand had grown in the five days since she had last seen him, over how increasingly wonderful he was in every way.
His mother greeted them ecstatically. She cooed so noisily over Anand that she woke him up and then she could hardly wait to snatch him up from the car seat and parade him in her arms around her big front room. “This is where Grandma Sylvia lives,” she trilled, “yes it is, yes it is.”
Jeremy followed his mother in and he could barely believe his eyes. The living room was as full of baby things as if there were really a baby living there: one of those bouncy baby seats which Smita thought were so dangerous, an Early Learning Centre play mat with mirrors and bells and a whole spread of brightly coloured baby toys. In the kitchen there was a steriliser and a row of prepared baby bottles in the fridge which his mother proudly showed him and in the second bedroom a brand new cot complete with a suffocating frilly cot bumper. The room had been transformed into a picture perfect nursery, better than anything Anand had at home where Smita tried to keep clutter to a minimum. There were nursery rhyme stencils all around the walls, a baby changing table and an extraordinary quantity of cuddly toys. Again, Smita would have freaked out because of all the fluff and Jeremy was grateful that she wasn’t there.
“Isn’t this rather over the top?” he asked coldly. “Just for a visit?”
“Oh Jem,” Sylvia exclaimed. “I’m hoping this will be the first of many visits.” She carried Anand into the spare bedroom turned nursery and crowed, “This will be your room, Anand, yes it will.”
“But still,” Jeremy persisted severely. “Haven’t you got an awful lot of stuff? Realistically, he’s never going to be here
for more than a few hours, is he?”
“Why ever not?” Sylvia retorted. “I’m hoping that when you and Smita get a little more used to things, you’ll agree to leave him with me overnight sometimes, for the odd weekend maybe. I mean, it’s obvious we’re not going to be seeing as much of Naisha as Smita was hoping. In any case, Anand will be much better off here with me than left with some babysitter, you know. Plus it’ll be a lot cheaper.” She nuzzled Anand’s tummy with the trunk of a small peppermint green elephant. “Besides, we’ll have such fun together, won’t we, Anand, yes, we will!”
Seeing her doting on the baby, Jeremy didn’t have the heart to tell her that there was no way that Smita would ever agree to her having him overnight. A weekend would be out of the question.
But as the day went on, Jeremy caught himself wondering more than once if his mother would really be as disastrous with Anand as Smita claimed. Surely, for all her eccentricities, she would be better than a hired babysitter, wouldn’t she? At least she really loved Anand, didn’t she?
He observed her deftly changing the baby’s nappy, laughing in delight at the modern convenience of sticky tapes and scented wipes. She tickled the soles of Anand’s feet and he gurgled with pleasure. She warmed his midday bottle to just the right temperature in the microwave and shook it heartily to avoid hot spots. It was true she spouted a load of nonsense while she was about it but on basic care he couldn’t fault her. Besides, no Polish nanny would ever call Anand “sweet pea” nor bounce him so lovingly on her knee, warbling, “Ride a cock hoss, To Banbury Crorss, To see a fine lady upon a white hoss.”