Sylvia Garland's Broken Heart (33 page)

Anand looked terribly worried. “Will I be home in time for bed?”

Sylvia exclaimed, “Anand! How could you possibly be? Think of your holiday in America; how could you fly all the way to Florida and be home in time for bed? India’s even further.”

Anand threatened to start crying. “I don’t want to go such a long way away Grandma. When will we come home?”

Sylvia said soothingly, “It’ll be a little half term holiday dear. Like when you went skiing.” She told herself this wasn’t a lie; she was creeping up on the truth one step at a time, like Grandmother’s Footsteps.

Anand still frowned. “
When
will we tell them? They’ll think we’ve got lost.”

Sylvia reassured him. “I’ve left a message. Don’t worry darling.” The message was in an envelope on her kitchen table; Jeremy would only find it when he arrived to collect Anand some time after eight. By which time of course she and Anand would be somewhere over the Eastern Mediterranean, enjoying an airline meal with all the little compartments and heading East. She did feel distinctly uncomfortable when she imagined Jeremy ringing the bell and getting no answer. At first, he would be angry; he had had a long day and the least his mother could have done was to be at home and ready when he arrived to fetch Anand. He would let himself in crossly with his key and then he would find her note. Or maybe he would telephone her first on his way to her flat. He often did that; an impatient reminder that he was on his way, that he expected Anand to be dressed and ready, he had to be returned to his mother
by such and such a time. ‘Well,’ Sylvia thought triumphantly, ‘not tonight.’

She imagined Jeremy trying first her home phone and then her mobile and when neither answered, beginning to worry. She consoled herself; his worry would be short-lived. He would let himself in and call out, “Mum? Mum?” in case they were there but for some reason not answering the phone. Even in these undeniably dubious circumstances, Sylvia felt great pleasure as she imagined Jeremy calling out “Mum.” He had gone so many years without ever calling her that. Jeremy would find the note and his worry would give way to something worse. He would tear it open and read her heartfelt handwritten five page letter and he would swear abominably. With his heart in his boots, he would have to telephone Smita.

To assuage her guilt, Sylvia put her arm around Anand and gave him a consoling smile. “Really, everything will be fine.”

Anand still looked worried.

The long afternoon wore on. They made three trips to the toilets and one to a coffee shop. Sylvia read Anand two story books and unwrapped the first of the new games.

At one point, Anand looked her straight in the eye and said, “Mummy will be cross, you know.”

“Oh,” Sylvia said. “Do you think so?”

Nervously, she looked around the departure lounge. Even though there was realistically no possibility such a thing could happen, she half expected Smita to come charging across the lounge, calling her every name under the sun and scooping Anand up and carrying him away.
She cuddled him closer. “I think she’ll understand,” she said. “Eventually.”

A little while later, Anand said, “I want to telephone Mummy.”

Sylvia became alarmed; he wasn’t going to make a scene and attract attention in the middle of the airport, was he? “I haven’t got my mobile,” she said – which was true. “I didn’t think to bring it with me.”

Anand said, reaching into his bag, “I’ve got mine.”

“What?” Sylvia exclaimed in horror. “You have your
own
mobile phone Anand? I didn’t know that.”

Anand smirked. “Mummy said it was a good idea to have it for em-er-gencies. Is this an em-er-gency?”

“Certainly not,” Sylvia said crisply. She refrained from criticising Smita to Anand’s face but said instead, “You can’t possibly telephone her now dear. She’s at work and I’m sure she won’t want to be disturbed there, will she? She might be in some important meeting or something. You wouldn’t want her to get cross, would you?”

Anand sat glowering and fiddling with his phone.

“I know what,” Sylvia said briskly. “You can telephone her to say we’ve arrived safely as soon as we get to Delhi.”

Reluctantly, Anand put his phone back in his bag and said that he needed the toilet again.

At long last, coming up to half past five, their flight was called. Praise be, it seemed to be on time. Sylvia stood up stiffly and began to gather their scattered belongings. Taking Anand firmly by the hand, she set off on the interminable trek to their departure gate.

Joining the long queue of passengers lining up to have their boarding passes checked, Sylvia’s heart leapt up; here she was, on her way back to India, after all these years. Around her, passengers in saris and chappal sandals, passengers with sleekly oiled hair and dark liquid eyes, passengers with enormous amounts of hand luggage (surely forbidden?) were shuffling forward happily, excited at the prospect of their destination. She sneaked a look down at Anand’s frowning face. Oh, he would come round to it.

Ahead of them, she could see there was heavy security at the gate, hardly surprising in these sorry times. Two men and a woman in dark blue uniform, like policemen but not quite policemen, were standing next to the airline staff who were checking the boarding passes. They were watching the queue of passengers with grave expressions. Really, Sylvia thought, what good did that do? They weren’t checking bags or searching passengers; they were simply standing there looking sternly up and down the line. Well, she supposed it might just possibly deter some opportunist.

The queue inched forward terribly slowly. She worried that Anand was going to demand to go to the toilet yet again and they would lose their place in the queue.

Finally, they reached the gate. Sylvia fished for their boarding passes in her handbag and, after a moment’s sheer terror, retrieved them and handed them over.

“Mrs Garland,” said one of the men in dark blue uniform, “would you and your grandson please come with us for a few moments?”

“Why?” Sylvia exclaimed. “We don’t want to miss our flight.”

The three uniformed officials seemed to be surrounding her. The woman was concentrating on Anand, smiling down at him with a business-like smile and saying, “Come along now, little fella.”

Sylvia was proud to see Anand smartly put both his hands behind his back so the lady couldn’t take hold of one of them.

“We just need to ask you a few quick questions,” the pseudo-policeman said blandly. “It’ll only take a few minutes, that’s all.”

They led Sylvia and Anand some way back down the long corridor they had walked to the departure gate, through a pair of swing doors marked Staff Only and into a small windowless white room where Jeremy and Smita were sitting waiting, not speaking and both deathly pale.

Anand gave a great cry of joy and, letting go of Sylvia’s hand which he had pointedly taken in preference to the uniformed woman’s, rushed towards them.

Sylvia stopped dead in the doorway. She could not begin to understand how this calamity had come about but she knew the game was up and that, for her, everything was over.

Smita was at her desk, googling Thanksgiving traditions when her mobile rang. She and Anand were going to spend Thanksgiving with Abi’s parents, the first time she would meet them. Even though she knew it would be
Thanksgiving with a Gujarati twist, she still wanted to be well up on things, not to appear unsophisticated or out of her depth. At first, she wasn’t concentrating properly, she thought the call was a wrong number. A woman was ringing her from Air India; what on earth? Her mind was too full of her future to focus seriously on anything else. It had been that way for weeks now, for months.

Ever since they had come back from Florida in the summer, Smita had been totally taken up with this amazing second chance which life had given her: a new life in New York with an unbelievably wonderful new husband, a perfect job and a brilliant future for Anand too. The small blemishes in the big picture – the annoying little diva who would be her stepdaughter, her mother’s ridiculous reluctance to leave Leicester for long periods of time – could all be dealt with. Now, at last, she had a real happy ending in her sights and nothing was going to get in her way.

The woman from Air India had the most irritating officious manner. “Would you please confirm,” she was repeating bossily, “that you are Mrs Smita Mehta?”

Smita snapped, “I’m at work. Why are you calling me?”

But then, in sheer horror, she understood that the woman was telling her something completely inconceivable: a Mrs Sylvia Garland, she was saying in her bossy little voice, had just checked in for the eighteen hundred hours flight to New Delhi together with her son Anand and, she wanted to know, did this woman have Smita’s permission to take the child out of the country?

Smita was aware she screamed. Cara, her PA, who was
eating sushi at her desk, nearly jumped out of her skin and all across the room, heads bobbed up from screens and conversations stopped dead.

“No!” Smita yelled, “No, she doesn’t. You must stop her. She’s completely mad.”

The woman was saying something bureaucratic in her automaton’s voice, something about security procedures and rules for detaining people who were not bona fide passengers but Smita screamed over her, “Stop her! Do you hear me? You’ve absolutely
got
to stop her. She’s a danger to the child.” And then she screamed, for good measure, “She may be a danger to the aircraft too.”

Still shouting into her phone, she leapt up and grabbed her coat and bag. Before running out of the office, some remainder of her usual self made her stop and close the Thanksgiving article on the screen.

“Cara,” she panted at her gaping PA, “I’m sorry but I have to run somewhere. There’s a major major emergency.”

She ran out of the office. She knew people were staring and wondering. They would pump Cara, who was a chatterbox at the best of times, for a full account of what Smita had screamed down the phone. To her surprise, Smita couldn’t care less.

She stood on the pavement outside the Gravington Babcock building and nothing in the world mattered anymore apart from Anand. Her phone had cut out in the stairwell and when she tried to call the Air India woman back, it turned out she was ringing from a withheld number. Terror took hold of Smita. Her head was
spinning. She could hardly think. How had this
happened
? Anand was spending the day with
Jeremy
, it had been agreed. Nothing had been said about Anand seeing Sylvia. Was this a conspiracy? The Air India clerk had not said anything about it but was Jeremy at the airport too?

Smita tried to call Jeremy but his phone went straight to voicemail. Why was she ringing him? She was wasting valuable time; she had to get to the airport as quickly as possible. She checked her watch; it was quarter to three and the flight would leave at six. There was still time. She mustn’t totally panic and lose her head. A taxi would get her to the airport by four, worst case scenario by four thirty, before the rush hour traffic anyway. She would run straight to the Air India checkin desks, she would make the biggest scene of her life. They were responsible of course; they had let Sylvia and Anand check in for the flight. If they had suspicions, why hadn’t they called her
first
? Now Sylvia and Anand were through passport control and of course Smita didn’t have her passport with her. Would she even be able to go after them? Should she go home and get her passport quickly first – just in case? No, that would only lose valuable time; it was in completely the wrong direction. She had to get to the airport as quickly as she could and, once she was there, she would solve things somehow. She would involve the police if need be. This was a kidnapping after all, a
crime
. Sylvia should end up in prison. She would never ever be allowed to see her grandson again.

Shaking with fear and fury, on the verge of tears, Smita
stepped out into the street to hail a taxi. Fortunately, there were always loads of them round here.

She said to the driver, “I need to get to Heathrow as quickly as possible please.”

He appeared unconcerned – as if distraught women with no luggage asked him to get them to Heathrow as quickly as possible every day of the week. “Which terminal?” he asked.

Smita panicked. Of course she had no idea. “Air India,” she said. “The Delhi flight. Which one would that be?”

The driver shrugged. “Not a clue, love. There’s hundreds of flights. We can’t possibly keep track of them all. Check your ticket.”

“I haven’t got a ticket,” Smita snapped. “I’m going to meet someone.”

She leant forward. In an instant, she was her usual self again. She pointed at his radio. “Ask your controller.”

The driver checked his rear view mirror and leant forward and said, “Air India. Delhi. Someone tell me which terminal?”

A babble of voices responded, “Three.”

The driver said to Smita, “You’ll know for next time.”

She sat back in her seat and looked out of the window and ignored him. For a moment, she considered telling him what was happening to her; how her little five-year-old son was being kidnapped and, if he didn’t get her to the airport in time, her little boy would be whisked away to India, of all places, by his lunatic grandmother. But she was embarrassed; it was a horrible humiliating feeling to be at the centre of a soap opera. Feeling even more
embarrassed, she thought of Abi. She was sure nothing so luridly out of control had ever happened to him. Everything in Abi’s life seemed so beautifully organised; his divorce had been smooth and amicable, his ex-wife was apparently reasonable, she conveniently already had a new partner herself and she had agreed with no fuss to Alisha coming to Florida with her father to meet Smita. There was no crazy ex-mother-in-law waiting in the wings to wreak havoc.