Sylvia Garland's Broken Heart (10 page)

Sylvia asked faintly, “Do I need to do it straight away? Is there any rush?”

“Well, you wouldn’t want someone else to get it, would you?” Freddy asked menacingly. “Not now you’ve fallen for it.”

“I wouldn’t say,” Sylvia answered slowly, “that I’ve exactly fallen for it. And I’m wondering if maybe I should let my son see it after all?”

“No
way
!” Freddy exclaimed. “You’re the one who’s going to be living here, Mrs Garland, not him! And after everything you’ve told me while we’ve been driving round these past two days, why
would
you? He’ll make you move
into one of those crap places in Belsize Park, you know he will.”

“You’re right,” Sylvia agreed reluctantly. “Very well then, lead on Macduff. I suppose I’ll sign.”

She did wonder, after she’d signed the papers at the agency and Freddy had whooped and called out something about champagne to a couple of her colleagues, whether she should have given more thought to the issue of furniture. Her own furniture, all her worldly goods in fact, were on a container ship on their way from Dubai. They were not due to arrive in London for another couple of weeks. She had supposed she would simply put them into storage when they arrived care of the removal company because there was no way she could squeeze the contents of a large company villa into a small London flat. It would take time and thought to work out what she should keep and what she should get rid of. She had been in no fit state to even think about that when she was packing up and leaving Dubai. If it hadn’t been for their friends, Nigel and Nikki Palmer, if they had not come round and held her hand and supervised the removal men, she would never have got through it. Dear Nigel and Nikki whom they had first met years ago in India and who had somehow turned up years later in Saudi and then again in Dubai, always following them around, Roger joked.

To tell the truth, Sylvia was frightened of the arrival of the furniture too; she was frightened of what might happen to her when she saw Roger’s empty armchair, when she smelt Roger’s soap and aftershave and Roger’s
sweat still haunting his possessions. She supposed the sea voyage might have blown it away but that would be even worse. So she was in no hurry to have her own things around her again. But she hadn’t really given much thought either to what it would feel like suddenly, at the age of sixty-two, to be back living in rented furnished accommodation again like a young thing of twenty.

She was sure it was that which had triggered her collapse. She had arrived at eleven o’clock on a sunny morning, as Freddy had promised, with her luggage from the hotel and her new set of house keys jangling in her bag. There were so many of them; she wondered how on earth she would get it straight. There was one for the street door, two for the flat door and a fourth grotesquely large one which she supposed must be the key to the square garden. A pity it looked like something out of the chamber of horrors.

Sylvia had a respite of a few over-excited hours after she let herself in when she still thought she might be alright. She opened all the windows, sat down looking out over the garden and determinedly made herself a little shopping list. There was nothing at all in the kitchen: not a single teabag, not a sugar lump. She went boldly out to the Earls Court Road and bought herself tea, sugar, milk and, for some reason she couldn’t rightly explain, a packet of brightly iced zoo biscuits. She made herself a strong cup of tea and called Jeremy to break the news. It was not an easy phone call – Jeremy was outraged at what she had done – and afterwards she decided to go down into the garden to recover. It was lovely but empty
on a Monday morning and as soon as the sun went in, Sylvia felt cold.

During the long afternoon, she unpacked her single suitcase, flinching at hanging her clothes in someone else’s wardrobe and debated again whether or not to telephone her sister Cynthia whom she hadn’t yet spoken to but she couldn’t make up her mind. She needed to be up to it to talk to Cynthia and, as the afternoon wore on, she felt less and less that she was.

When it began to get dark, Sylvia sensed herself disintegrating; her lacquer-hard self-control cracking into millions of tiny pieces. She was sitting in someone else’s armchair in someone else’s living room and she herself had disappeared entirely. She stayed like that, non-existent, all evening and all night, not drawing the curtains nor turning on the lights. She simply could not bear the thought of sleeping in someone else’s bed. Once or twice, she dimly remembered afterwards, she had got up to use someone else’s toilet but she had come back automatically to the armchair and lapsed into nothingness again. Strangely, throughout the interminable night, illuminated only by the sickly light of the street lamps in the square, she had not moaned or cried or wailed. It was not reticence, an awareness that she now had upstairs and downstairs neighbours. Crying or wailing would have been a protest; they would have meant she was resisting her fate. Whereas, instead, she had – briefly – succumbed to it. First, she had lost her husband of nearly forty years, she had lost her house and the warm climate and the far away sky she had grown used to. She had lost the familiar,
forlorn sound of the plover’s cry from the lagoons and the secret rustle of the garden irrigation system springing into life at night. Against her better judgement, she had come to this cold, grey city and she had promptly cut herself off from her son, the only link to life she had left here. She had cast herself adrift and, that night, she went under.

At some point, the sky lightened and the traffic noise started up again outside but still Sylvia didn’t move. If during that lost time she thought at all, she thought that if she stayed perfectly still, didn’t move, didn’t eat, didn’t drink, she might actually fade away and that would be the best thing for everybody.

But as the morning crept along, she became increasingly conscious of two things which contradicted her non-existence; she had pins and needles in her legs and she was really dreadfully thirsty. Eventually, the twin discomforts got the better of her and she hauled herself up out of the armchair and staggered to the bathroom. She was shocked when she saw herself in the bathroom mirror; she looked an absolute fright. But she also still looked pretty substantial despite her haggard expression and her wild hair. It would take forever for her actually to fade away.

She plodded to the kitchen feeling light-headed and slightly giddy. What she needed desperately was a cup of tea.

While the kettle was boiling, she caught sight of the packet of zoo biscuits, lying unopened on the kitchen table. She remembered her grandson and she felt most awfully guilty; how could she have forgotten all about him
and been planning to fade away? He would need her; he would need a good, solid, reliable
local
grandmother to take him to the zoo and to the Natural History Museum, to matinees and maybe, when he was old enough, for bucket and spade holidays at the seaside. If Smita and Jeremy caught the slightest suggestion of fragility, of instability, they would never let her near him. She had to drink her tea, pull herself together and go out and buy some proper food. Never mind if she felt hollow, if it seemed that she was a perfectly empty Sylvia-shaped vessel going about her business. She could keep that feeling to herself; no one need know. What she ought to do was not sit slumped for hours and hours in the armchair but get washed and dressed and go out and grapple with London.

About an hour later she opened the flat door, still feeling distinctly shaky and found an extremely small Filipino woman wearing a lime green top and fuchsia pink trousers standing outside on the landing apparently about to ring the bell. They both looked at each other in frank astonishment and then the Filipino woman recited the following improbable announcement. “Mrs Rosenkranz downstairs would like to meet you. When would you be free to come and have tea with her?”

Sylvia hoped she still had a voice to reply. She cleared her throat and croaked, “Well, I couldn’t manage today.”

“Tomorrow?” asked the Filipino woman.

Sylvia said, “Um.”

“Next day?” shot back the small figure who had obviously been instructed not to return without Sylvia’s acceptance.

“What time?” Sylvia asked vaguely, playing for time.

“Tea,” the woman snapped. “Four pm.”

Sylvia looked down at her, marvelling through her wooziness that someone so small and delicate-looking could be so forceful and weakly she murmured, “Fine. Thank you.”

“So,” the woman repeated firmly, “day after tomorrow. Four pm. Mrs Rosenkranz. Flat one.”

“Yes,” Sylvia agreed faintly. “The day after tomorrow. I understand. Thank you so much.”

The woman turned and stamped back downstairs, not bothering with any niceties and Sylvia locked the apartment, fumbling dreadfully with the keys and followed her downstairs.

As the big front door fell shut behind her, it occurred to her to read the names beside the brass bells. In her deluded sleepless state, she half expected to find a Guildenstern there too. But of course there wasn’t; the other residents of 27 Overmore Gardens were: Martinez, Ho, Irani, Rosenkranz and Smith. Her own name plate was of course blank which was as it should be since she didn’t exist anymore. Mentally, she slapped herself on the wrist and, swaying slightly, set off for the Earls Court Road.

Two minutes later, leaving the relative peace and quiet of Overmore Gardens, Sylvia could not have said which city in the world she was in if it had not been for the double-decker buses and the Underground signs. Earls Court Road swarmed with people of every colour and kind and all of them going about their business at the top of their voices. The road was choked with traffic: buses,
taxis, vans, all inching forward bad-temperedly, hooting and abusing one another as uninhibitedly as in any Third World city. Sylvia stopped on the crowded pavement, teetering slightly and tried to make sense of the vivid, raucous maelstrom. How on earth could this be London?

Over the past couple of weeks, she had watched a muted grey city from her hotel room and through the windows of a succession of cars and taxis. Now she found herself plunged into an Eastern bazaar. The day before she had not gone far; she had found a little Indian corner shop the minute she turned out of Overmore Gardens but today, mysteriously, the shop had disappeared. Had she maybe left the square in a different direction without noticing?

She blundered along for a little while past poisonous-smelling take-away food outlets, mobile phone shops and coffee bars, until she came to a rather run-down-looking food store called the Bazak International Food Centre. It would have to do. She went inside and helped herself to a warped wire basket. She breathed in a smell of spices, cigarettes and sickly sweet perfume and immediately she was back in the Middle East. In a fuddled trance, she went around the shop. She had been intending to buy sliced bread for toast, Cheddar cheese and Marmite, scones maybe and a big bag of toffees for consolation. She was completely taken aback when she arrived at the till with a basket of pitta bread, olives, a plastic tub of hummus, stuffed vine leaves and a tray of sticky pastries wrapped in cling film. As far as she was aware, she hadn’t even seen any sliced bread or Cheddar or Marmite. For a confused
moment, Sylvia worried whether she could pay in pounds.

She made her shaky way back to Overmore Gardens with her two carrier bags emblazoned with the slogan of a Middle Eastern airline. The Indian shop had somehow reappeared at the corner. Sylvia remembered that he sold sliced bread and cheese. Well, it was too bad; she couldn’t carry any more now. She managed the front door of Number 27 and took a good look at the front door of Flat 1 as she went past. It looked much more solid than the front door of her own flat; panelled wood with a brass knocker and a brass peephole and a substantial well trodden doormat. Mrs Rosenkranz must have lived here for a long time.

After she had put her shopping away and made another cup of tea, Sylvia saw that it was only half past eleven. She still had the rest of the day, all of the next day and most of the day after before her tea with Mrs Rosenkranz. During that time, she supposed that she would not speak to a soul. Jeremy was in a sulk and would not ring until the weekend. Again, she thought about ringing Cynthia. But now she most definitely wasn’t up to it; her ears were ringing and in the silence of the flat, she could hear the magnified beat of her own heart thumping erratically away. She was worn out. Ignoring the dubious pink bed cover, she lay down on the bed in the bigger of the two bedrooms and fell into an exhausted sleep.

When she woke, it was half past four. She was not sure where she was nor what day it was. As she lay there, painfully reassembling her new reality, a most extraordinary thing happened; in the room next door, she
heard Roger clear his throat. She didn’t move a fraction and waited for him to do it again. But he didn’t and all the rest of that day she waited in anguish for some sign of him. Late in the evening, when she was in the kitchen putting some pitta bread and olives on a plate to nibble in front of the television, she heard from the sitting room one of the deep, excessive grunts of exertion which Roger made as he levered himself out of a deep arm chair. But of course when she dashed to the living room doorway, scattering olives, there was no one there.

All the emotions which she had managed to keep at bay in the hotel rose up and overwhelmed her. Roger had been part of her life, an immense and intrinsic part of her life, for close on forty years and his absence was as ghastly and palpable as a missing limb. He was gone but Sylvia could still feel his presence all the time.

In the empty flat in Overmore Gardens, she now began disconcertingly to hear him too, even though she knew perfectly well he wasn’t there. In the silence Roger started to make all those shockingly loud, manly noises which used to startle her when he was still alive; the grunts as he rose from his armchair, the resounding groans of exasperation as he read his newspaper or tried to open a recalcitrant tin or jar, the enormous sneezes and throat-clearings which exploded without warning, the unashamed bass farts. Although they usually turned out to be something else – a noise from the street or the pipes or wishful thinking – they still shocked Sylvia because, like the amputated limb, after all Roger wasn’t actually there.