Sylvia Garland's Broken Heart (21 page)

“How did you get into the building?” Jeremy asked. “You didn’t ring downstairs, did you?”

Sylvia reddened. “I do hope it wasn’t me; someone hadn’t properly closed the front door behind them. I just pushed it open.”

Jeremy was grateful that Smita, changing Anand two floors up, hadn’t heard this exchange; yet further evidence of his mother’s unreliability.

“Come in,” he said, more impatiently than he meant to. “You’re sure you don’t want a cup of tea or anything now you’ve had to traipse all the way back? When did you realise you didn’t have your bag with you?”

Sylvia snorted in exasperation. “Only when I got on the bus, would you believe? I needed my Oyster card to pay the fare and of course I realised I didn’t have it. I had to get off again. The driver wasn’t very nice about it either.”

Jeremy registered with surprise that his mother now had an Oyster card. She had managed that all on her own too. Six months ago, she was calling him every day to ask how to do the simplest things. So she
had
changed, she was making progress; she wasn’t, as Smita endlessly told him, utterly hopeless.

“Run up and get it for me, would you dear?” his mother chivvied him. “I don’t have time for tea or anything like that now. I’m running late for my lunch.”

As Jeremy ran upstairs, he caught sight of Smita looking down. As their eyes met, she ducked away and disappeared and he heard her crooning to Anand.

When he brought the bag – extraordinarily heavy, what on earth did she have in it? – back down, he said to his mother quietly, “Don’t give up hope. Smi and I are talking things over.”

His mother raised her eyebrows. “So I heard,” and she turned away abruptly and set off again down the stairs.

This time Jeremy and Smita’s argument raged for weeks. It carried on over Christmas in Leicester and into January when Smita went back to work. Galina turned out to be an excellent nanny; she arrived for work on time, she followed Smita’s instructions precisely and, after a few weeks, Anand stopped crying when she arrived in the morning.

In February, Jeremy had a few days’ leave to use up and, after some rather tense discussions with Smita, who didn’t want to disrupt Galina and Anand’s newly established routine, they told Galina to take time off and, for three intense days, Jeremy had his little boy all to himself.

He fed him, changed him, washed him, pleased that he could perform all these tasks just as skilfully as Smita. He spent long hours contemplating Anand’s every minute act: every wriggle, every smile, every small noise. He observed what seemed to him the beginnings of a distinct
personality; a shrewd, rather serious little boy who would in due course prefer Lego to fire engines and police cars.

After two days, he had to admit privately that he was feeling a bit cooped up. He had a whole list of things he had intended to do but the weather was foul and most of his ideas turned out to be impractical with a six-month-old baby in tow. On the third day, he decided to drive over to Kensington, despite the midweek congestion charge and spend the day with his mother.

He found her rather subdued. Her friend Ruth had had to go into hospital for an operation and she was fretting about her, it seemed to Jeremy, disproportionately.

“She’s well into her eighties, you know,” she told Jeremy as she stirred Anand’s freshly pureed vegetables, “and surgery at that age can be very dangerous.”

Jeremy worried that his mother couldn’t seem to remember exactly what vegetables she had cooked for Anand so he wouldn’t be able to give an accurate account of what he had eaten to Smita. Smita was keeping a diary of new foods as she introduced them so that she could straightaway identify any allergies. He decided he wouldn’t say anything; his mother had always been unimaginative about food, especially vegetables and he was sure she wouldn’t have included anything exotic.

After lunch, he had to nip out to move the car; it was parked in a bay with a two-hour time limit. His mother told him to move into a residents’ space and she gave him a Kensington and Chelsea visitor’s voucher, another sign of her new competence. The only trouble was that all the residents’ spaces seemed to be taken. Did no one in
Overmore Gardens go out to work, Jeremy thought irritably, as he drove twice slowly round the square.

It was only on the third time round that it struck him with horror that he had just done exactly what he had promised Smita he would never do; he had left Anand alone with his mother. Not only that; he was now stuck in the car with nowhere to park and no way of immediately dashing back up to correct his mistake. He began to sweat. Surely nothing could go wrong while he moved the car? Did Smita actually expect him to bring Anand down in his car seat – just when he was getting ready for his nap – and strap him in only to drive a few times round the block? That would be madness. Still he began to feel more and more worried especially when a woman driving a mammoth SUV stopped right in front of him and began to manoeuvre laboriously into a loading bay. When she finally managed it, Jeremy drew alongside her, put his window down and called, “What the hell d’you think you’re doing? That’s not even a parking place.”

The woman looked down at him and, without a word, made an obscene gesture with one expensively gloved finger.

Jeremy drove forward, fuming and probably not paying enough attention because on the corner of the Earls Court Road he crashed into a van coming far too fast around the corner and he realised that he had driven out of the square down a side street which was one way in the opposite direction. Both he and the van driver jumped out and began shouting, the van driver angrily and abusively and Jeremy desperately. “My little boy’s on his own with
my mother, she’s not reliable, he shouldn’t be left, this is an emergency!”

Luckily the damage was fairly minor: lights and bumpers. The van driver gave him the name and address of a company which Jeremy was pretty sure were false. He claimed not to know anything about insurance: “You’ll have to ask the boss about that.” Jeremy was so desperate by now – his heart was pounding, he was pouring sweat – he didn’t really care. He scrawled down his own details for the van driver and got frantically back into the car. The van driver made him reverse all the way back, impatiently hooting and gesturing. As he drove past Jeremy at the end of the narrow street, he yelled tauntingly “Wanker!”

Shaking, Jeremy drove round the square one more time and finally, when he was close to tears, he spotted a place in a side street. As he pulled into it, his phone beeped with a text message; it was his mother. For the second it took to open the message, Jeremy felt faint. But it read: “Where are you?! Don’t ring bell. He’s asleep. I’ll watch from window.”

Jeremy read and reread the message in disbelief; since when did his mother send text messages? He had had the greatest difficulty persuading her to accept a mobile phone when she moved to Kensington back in May. She had protested that she didn’t want a phone, didn’t need one, wouldn’t know how to use it, anyway had no one to call. Yet here she was, nine months later, competently texting.

As he hurried back up the south side of the square, he could see her at her living room window, waving cheerily; semaphoring extravagantly with her arms across the
square. As he crossed the road, she left the window and, by the time he reached the street door, she was already buzzing him in energetically via the entryphone.

He bounded up the stairs. His mother was standing at her open front door with her finger to her lips. “Ssh. He’s fast asleep. Whatever took you so long? You’ve been an age.”

For the first time in over twenty years, Jeremy felt the urge to fall on his mother and hug her. He resisted it of course but, briefly, the urge had been there.

“Trouble finding a place,” he mumbled. He barged past her, averting his face and through the small hallway into the spare bedroom where he found Anand sound asleep, hugging the small peppermint green elephant.

His mother followed him in and stood behind him, proudly contemplating the sleeping infant. “Bless him,” she murmured. “Now come and have a cup of tea, won’t you?”

In the evening, of course Jeremy had to tell Smita about the accident; there was no way he could get the car repaired without her finding out and anyway she noticed the broken light and the dented bumper as she passed the parked car on her way in. She came up screaming, “Oh my God, what happened? Is Anand ok?”

“We’re
both
fine thank you,” Jeremy answered frostily. “Don’t worry, it was nothing really; just a small bump while I was getting a parking place.”

“You broke a light while you were
parking
?” Smita asked incredulously. “But that must have been an awful bump. Did Anand cry?”

Suddenly Jeremy felt furious; why should he have to lie, why should he have to go along with Smita’s absurd neurotic rules? “Luckily he wasn’t in the car,” he said, glaring at her, “because, fortunately, I left him upstairs with my mother while I moved the car.”

“You
what
?” Smita exclaimed.

“You
heard
,” Jeremy said, flushing. “And thank God I did because otherwise he
would
have been in the car when I had my little smash. Would you have preferred that?”

Smita threw her work bag down in the nearest armchair and faced him, her fists on her hips. “That’s not the point,” she yelled.

Jeremy didn’t answer. He turned away. He had been through enough already today. As Smita’s voice rose behind him, he wondered when arguing had become their usual form of communication.

In the morning, Anand’s nappies were bright green and Smita asked indignantly what Sylvia had given him for lunch. When Jeremy said he couldn’t remember, Smita rang Sylvia, waking her at seven thirty am, and demanded to know.

Jeremy could hear Smita shouting from the bathroom where he had taken Anand to clean him up. “Okra!” She shouted. “What were you
thinking
? How could you give him
okra
? Babies shouldn’t have okra before at least a year. Why did you do it, Sylvia? It’s absolutely
crazy
! Why?”

Jeremy dabbed Anand gently clean. Anand pumped his legs in the water and gurgled. “Grandma meant no harm,” Jeremy murmured softly. “Did she? Did she?”

It struck him how easy and natural it felt to call his mother “Grandma” even though he had not been able to call her “Mum” for years.

S
YLVIA AND
A
NAND
stood perfectly still in front of the giant aquarium and waited for the biggest of the sea turtles to swim past again. It seemed to spend its days steadily circling the huge tank as if on a purposeful private mission. Despite its bulk, it swooped gracefully through the water, regally ignoring the other sea creatures and its expression, although morose, seemed to be both dignified and determined.

Anand exclaimed, “Here she comes!” and Sylvia watched the turtle swoop towards them again, its flippers extended backwards like a pair of wings, its scaly face looking weary and wise. Sylvia was pleased that Anand was not the sort of child who waved or pulled faces at a passing sea turtle – there were plenty of them about – or, even worse, shouted out names or banged on the glass. He stood perfectly quietly, only clutching excitedly at Sylvia’s hand each time the turtle reappeared. How she loved the feel of his small hand in hers.

It was only when the turtle had swum out of view
again, powering up towards the top of the tank, that it occurred to Sylvia to ask Anand, “Why do you think it’s a ‘she’, dear?”

Anand looked puzzled. “Isn’t it?”

“Well,” Sylvia answered thoughtfully. “Of course it
may
be but it’s hard to tell with a turtle, isn’t it? Why do
you
think it’s a ‘she’?”

Anand paused. “She
looks
like a lady turtle.”

“
Does
she?” Sylvia asked dubiously. “I’ll have to take a closer look the next time she comes past.”

They waited again in companionable silence.

“There!” Anand exclaimed, turning triumphantly to his grandmother as the turtle reappeared. “You can see
now
, can’t you?”

“Well,” Sylvia said slowly, “to be honest, I can’t really dear but if you say so, then I dare say she is.”

“She
is
,” Anand insisted. He looked up at his grandmother somewhat coyly. “She looks like you.”

Sylvia scrutinised the turtle’s small greenish head as it swam past for the umpteenth time. The comparison wasn’t flattering but better, she supposed, than a galumphing farmyard animal.

“Well,” she ventured, “it’s true, I used to love swimming.”

Anand exclaimed, “Why don’t you ever come swimming with
me
?”

Sylvia briefly imagined Smita’s horror at this suggestion. “That’s an idea,” she answered vaguely. “Who do you go swimming with, darling?”

“My swimming teacher,” Anand answered glumly.
“He’s called Kev. He’s not very nice. I’d far rather go with you, Grandma.”

“We’ll have to think about it,” Sylvia said evasively. “See what Mummy and Daddy have to say. Now tell me, do any of the other creatures in the aquarium or the fish look like anyone else you know?”

This game kept them both happy for a remarkably long time. Anand found a splodgy fish which looked like his art teacher and a creeping snail which reminded him of his friend Jonathan. Of course, Sylvia could not share with him her discovery that a pink sea anemone waving its fleshy legs in the air reminded her no end of a certain Miss PeeJay Clarke.

Afterwards, they had a quick look in the gift shop but Anand said he didn’t like plastic turtles and fish, only real ones. Sylvia had a chuckle over a furry stingray; whatever next? They went and sat on a bench beside the river for a little while and talked about this and that while both enjoying ice creams. The weather, in May, was barely warm enough for ice cream but they felt like it anyway. Anand was not actually supposed to have ice cream but Sylvia frequently flouted Smita’s ridiculous petty rules; what was childhood, for heaven’s sake, without ice cream? Anand had chocolate and Sylvia had strawberry.

Sylvia recalled that it was she who had given Anand his first taste of ice cream on a spring day just like this, it must have been three years ago, sitting in the cafe in Regents Park. She could still remember the look of shock on his little face when she fed him that first spoonful of Cornish vanilla. He had recoiled from the cold but then,
almost immediately, a look of dawning delight had come over his face and he had opened his mouth eagerly for more. Sylvia had been breaking Smita’s rules then too but, really, what did Smita’s rules matter? When Smita had shown herself, over the past four years, to be such a hard-hearted person?

When Sylvia looked at her watch, it was half past four and she couldn’t believe how the time had flown.

“I’m afraid we need to be on our way,” she said sadly to Anand. “Daddy is expecting you home for supper by six.”

Anand scowled. “I don’t want to go to Daddy’s,” he protested. “I don’t
like
staying at Daddy’s. I want to go home to Mummy’s. Why don’t you ever collect me from Mummy’s? Then,
afterwards
, I could go back
there
.”

Sylvia looked down helplessly into Anand’s scowling face. How could she begin to explain to him the complications which surrounded their afternoons together?

Ever since the Separation, it had become terribly difficult for Sylvia to spend time with her grandson, let alone speak to him on the phone and it seemed to her that in recent months it had got even harder. Smita’s disapproval of Sylvia had hardened since the Separation into frank animosity. She didn’t want her little boy to have anything to do with her ex-mother-in-law now, as she saw it, he didn’t have to. Except that Sylvia wasn’t yet her ex-mother-in-law because Jeremy and Smita hadn’t yet managed to get divorced and, even if she were, nothing could conceivably stop Sylvia from seeing Anand anyway.

Whatever obstacles Smita put in her way, Sylvia knew she would ride roughshod over them. She would not even hesitate to resort to illegality if need be. She had never felt this strongly about anything. She had always been rather a conventional, law-abiding person. But she had never before confronted a situation which was so patently nonsensical; a benevolent grandmother being denied access to her grandchild, her only grandchild, by his wicked mother. The word “wicked” wasn’t too strong either for wasn’t Smita the one responsible for the break-up, the one who, through her actions, had made poor little Anand the child of a broken home?

Jeremy was blameless – except in so far as being a doormat and a pushover, he had let Smita get away with everything. It was Smita who had gone back to work the minute she could, abandoning Anand to a series of nannies. Jeremy and Sylvia had both been desperately unhappy about that but Smita, apparently, couldn’t care less. She had coldly rejected Sylvia’s offer to look after Anand instead.

Six months after returning to work, Smita had taken on a new role which involved regular trips to the US. She had been away for Anand’s first birthday; she had sung “Happy Birthday” to him over the phone from New York. When Sylvia had happened to mention what a pity it was to miss one’s child’s first birthday, Smita had practically bitten her head off, retorting that Anand was too little even to know it was his birthday, he wouldn’t be able to remember it when he was older and, anyway, they had had a big party the following weekend, hadn’t they, where they
had taken loads of pictures which he could look at in years to come.

When Smita was away, Jeremy was left to juggle his own important job and the baby single-handedly. To Sylvia’s surprise, he didn’t actually seem to mind that much. She couldn’t in her wildest dreams imagine Roger putting up with that situation for more than twenty minutes.

It was at that juncture that Sylvia reluctantly decided to leave her flat in Overmore Gardens. The year’s lease was already up. In late 2005, she moved with a heavy heart to Maida Vale. It was a compromise which allowed her both to be closer at hand to help look after Anand when Smita was away and not too far from Kensington to keep up her visits to dear Ruth. Wasn’t Maida Vale always a compromise?

Her flat on Sutherland Avenue was frankly gloomy but it had one huge advantage, beside which the garden square paled into insignificance. It backed onto an immense triangle of unbuilt land which formed a hidden private park between three apparently undistinguished streets. For Anand, it would be paradise. For his sake, Sylvia was prepared to put up with the many drawbacks of the move: the distance from Kensington, from Ruth and Heather and all her old haunts, the pervasive gloom of Maida Vale which hung over the anonymous streets like a head cold, the bore of having to find her way around a new neighbourhood, find new shops, new nodding acquaintances and new ways of passing the days.

Roger’s noises did not follow her to the new flat which
formed another break with her past. Sylvia missed Roger’s noises ridiculously, considering what a nuisance they had often been; her flat on Sutherland Avenue was deathly quiet.

She made no effort to get to know her new neighbours, convinced that none of them could conceivably be a replacement for dear Ruth and they returned her indifference. It seemed for a while that she would settle into a pitiful sort of part-life: long weeks of meaningless mere existence interspersed with glorious weeks in which, with Jeremy’s connivance, she saw Anand every day.

He had become the most enchanting toddler imaginable; he had walked at eleven months, taking his new skill very seriously and refusing from then on either to sit in the pushchair or to be carried.

Sylvia had naughtily upstaged Smita by buying Anand his first pair of shoes. When Smita had protested – “Honestly, Sylvia, are there no
limits
?” – Sylvia had answered innocently that, now he could walk, Anand needed shoes. But Smita had subjected her to one of her know-all speeches about the developing foot and how essential it was for the child to walk around without shoes for at least six weeks to master the mechanics of walking. Sylvia’s premature purchase had most probably done untold damage to Anand’s gait. The shoes which Sylvia had bought disappeared and when, two months later, Anand was finally allowed shoes, Smita claimed his feet had gone up a size and she bought him a new pair instead. Sylvia regretted the robust little navy toecaps and the
sturdy buckle and straps of the original pair. In their place, Smita bought him some ungainly-looking miniature trainers with lurid flashes of colour and unattractive Velcro straps.

Anand spoke his first word, Sylvia believed, in her kitchen. He was sitting in the high chair – without that absurd restraining harness which Smita insisted on – and Sylvia was at the cooker, with her back turned, when it seemed to her she heard him say behind her, “Yum yum.” She whipped round and exclaimed, “Did you say something dear?” And, looking thoroughly pleased with himself, Anand had repeated, loud and clear, “Yum yum!”

Sylvia had cried out in delight, dropping a wooden spoon in her excitement but Anand had been so thrilled by the noise which Sylvia had made and by the loud sound of the wooden spoon hitting the tiled floor that he had not said it again.

Still Sylvia knew it had happened. She did not tell Jeremy and Smita but hugged her secret to herself. She knew that Smita would not believe her in any case; for weeks she had been claiming, absurdly, that Anand was already saying, “Mum, Mum.” Sylvia knew the truth.

She did feel guilty, from time to time, about the strain all these arrangements made behind Smita’s back must be putting on Jeremy. It wasn’t right after all, was it, that Smita had no idea about the time Anand spent with his grandmother – or all the forbidden foods he ate there – while she was away in America. Still, whose fault was it that these arrangements had to be kept secret anyway? If only Smita were more easy-going, less rigid and neurotic,
above all less
spiteful
, she would no doubt acknowledge the fundamental importance for Anand of spending time with his paternal grandmother. Especially,
especially
since there was no longer a paternal grandfather.

Yet, despite these perfectly valid arguments, Sylvia still felt uncomfortable whenever she stopped to imagine all the machinations that must be involved on Jeremy’s part. What, for instance, did he tell the nanny when she was repeatedly given the day off? And what did he tell the nanny to tell Smita? Sylvia preferred not to question Jeremy too closely about these delicate issues for fear of provoking one of his outbursts. But she was profoundly uncomfortable with the idea, obvious when you stopped to think about it, that she herself might be contributing to the increasingly fraught relations between Jeremy and Smita.

Yet, when all was said and done, what else was she to do? She could not tolerate even the idea of seeing less of Anand, of having her hours with him rationed even further or, worse, shared with his squabbling parents. Sylvia had realised, to her amazement, that her feelings for this little golden boy were nothing short of passion. The illicit hours which she managed to spend with him were an idyll which sustained her through all the dreary days before and after. Since Roger’s death, Sylvia had coped. She had not fallen apart in public – other than in the immediate aftermath which was allowed – she had not been found wandering in a distressed state or inappropriately dressed, she had not been caught deep in conversation with someone who wasn’t there. But that
was, frankly, as far as it went. Her days consisted of absence and emptiness and it was only the twin talismans of “Buck up” and “Righty-ho” which kept her head above water.

Anand’s arrival had transformed everything, not straight away but gradually over the weeks and months. Sylvia had identified the excitement she felt before seeing the baby, her racing heart and sweaty palms, for what it was. She had never expected to feel this way about her grandchild; she wooed him with gifts and songs and games, she was transfixed in the beam of his smile. Her feelings towards Jeremy softened too for wasn’t this the first considerate thing he had done in years?

In Saudi and Dubai, Sylvia had been surrounded by couples of her generation grumbling that their inconsiderate offspring weren’t having children. Even when they weren’t selfish and produced children, there could still be heartache. Look at Heather Bailey’s wretched daughter, a do-gooding aid worker who had gone and got married to an Ethiopian – nothing wrong with that, no doubt – but she had selfishly decided to settle in Addis Ababa and perversely to bring her children up speaking Amharic as their mother tongue. Poor Heather shed tears when she talked to Sylvia about it. Sylvia knew – on this score – she had been lucky. Moving to Maida Vale was a small price to pay for the time she got to spend with Anand. She no longer heard Roger yawning mightily in the next room or groaning in disgust at the morning paper. But she heard the sounds of Anand cooing and burbling, waking from his nap with a high pitched expectant cry.