Sylvia Garland's Broken Heart (13 page)

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.

Sylvia could not believe her ears. She had brought a library book with her to the park – not that she was really up to reading yet – and she held it open on her knees and every now and then she turned the page to give the impression she was reading but she was actually simultaneously riveted and revolted by the girls’ conversation.

They were comparing the attractions of various men of their acquaintance, maybe colleagues at work.

“Well, I think he’s fit,” said Girl One. “And he’s got a lovely bum too.”

“Yuk,” Girl Two replied loudly. “I’d never go with him. Have you seen his
teeth
?”

“What’s wrong with his teeth?” Girl One asked, indignantly.

Girl Two shuddered. “They’re all in the wrong place and he don’t clean them that often either.”

“You mean he’s got bad breath?” asked Girl One. “You been that close?”

“No-oh!” exclaimed Girl Two. “I wouldn’t. I told you; kiss him and I’d be gagging. You don’t need to get that close to notice.”

Girl Three, who had lain quietly up to this point, piped up, “The one I fancy is Mark.”

“He don’t half fancy
hisself
,” Girl One replied quickly.

“Yeah,” added Girl Two. “He’s so up himself.”

After a moment, Girl Three said proudly, “He’s asked me out.”

Her companions both sat up and screeched. “Oh-my-God!
Shut up!
Are you going to go?”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“’Cos you know what’ll happen, that’s why,” said Girl Two menacingly. “You remember him and Zara?”

“Zara’s a slag,” said Girl Three.

“Well, if you don’t mind everyone hearing afterwards how rubbish you were in bed and what your boobs look like close-up,” Girl One jeered. “That’s what he did to Zara. That’s why she left.”

Girl Three was silent for a moment. Then she answered, “I’m not Zara.”

“No,” Girl Two told her loyally, “You’re not. But still. I wouldn’t go with him, no
way
.”

“Ooh yes, you would,” Girl Three said sharply. “If you was
asked
.”

A sulky silence followed this exchange until Girl One, who seemed to be the ringleader, exclaimed, “I’m dying for an i c. Anyone come with me to get one?”

Girl Two sat up. “I’ll come with you.”

They both got up, put on some – but not enough – of their clothes and walked towards the cafe, leaving Girl Two alone on the grass, her legs splayed, beginning to burn.

Sylvia’s gaze wandered. Nearby lay a couple of
indeterminate colour and origin; Sylvia supposed they were what she had recently been told to call “mixed race”.

Jeremy and Smita had had a go at her one Sunday lunchtime on account of her outdated vocabulary on this topic. It was funny though; Jeremy had been far more exercised on the subject than Smita. Bossily, they had banned from Sylvia’s vocabulary a number of perfectly harmless expressions which she and Roger had used unthinkingly for years: “coloured”, “dusky”, “swarthy”, “touch of the tar brush” and so on. Instead, they instructed her prissily, there was a new set of approved terms for all the different shades of humanity and her old-fashioned vocabulary had apparently become deeply offensive. There were also new names for people who were handicapped and an absurd complicated one which she couldn’t remember right now for people who were backward.

Sylvia had found the whole thing frankly ridiculous and had said so. Smita had shrugged but Jeremy had got very red in the face and told her if she wasn’t careful, she would end up being called a racist. Sylvia was outraged and she had told Jeremy that in that case he had better make a “Colour by Numbers” chart for her with all the right names for the right shades since otherwise she would never be able to remember such nonsense. She hadn’t meant to upset him of course but afterwards he had got into one of his states and had barely spoken to her for the rest of her visit.

The couple on the grass, whom before Jeremy and Smita’s lecture Sylvia would probably have called “café au lait”, shocked her even more than the plump girls. They
appeared to be at an advanced stage of foreplay; lying almost on top of one another in full view of all the people including a number of small children. The man had his hand inside the young woman’s blouse and, even worse, it seemed to Sylvia, the young woman had her hand inside the young man’s trousers. They were undulating embarrassingly. Sylvia looked away. But all across the lawn similar scenes were being played out, indifferently interspersed with family groups, fat mothers with fat children – when had everyone put on so much weight? – and here and there a solitary oddbod like herself gawping at the spectacle. A few outsized pigeons, approximately the size of small hens, waddled here and there among the people, pecking indiscriminately at their litter.

Suddenly, Sylvia felt disgusted. Thank goodness she would have to leave soon anyway; it was nearly time for her tea with Mrs Rosenkranz. As she stood up, Cynthia’s letter, which she was using as a bookmark, fell out onto the ground. She stooped to pick it up and as she stood straight again, her tiredness suddenly overwhelmed her and the letter, ridiculously, seemed to weigh a ton. She sat back down heavily. She shouldn’t of course, it would only upset her, but she felt compelled to re-read the letter for the umpteenth time, making herself endure the lash of Cynthia’s tongue all over again like rubbing salt into an open wound.

“Dear Syl,” it read in Cynthia’s furious jagged handwriting. “I don’t know how you expect me to feel frankly. You move back to London without informing me or consulting me. You wait almost Three Months to deign
to tell me that you are here. Then you invite me to come up to London for
Lunch
?! Yet again, your arrogance takes my breath away. Or rather, it would if I were at all surprised by it. Coming as it does, after years of such abusive behaviour, of course it doesn’t surprise me one bit. But let me tell you, I won’t be coming up to London, not for lunch or dinner or breakfast for that matter either and here is the reason why; I made a major effort when your husband died. You may not have noticed but I did. Putting aside my own feelings towards Roger, I dropped everything and prepared to fly out to Dubai, a place which, as you know, does not agree with me, so as to be with you in your Hour of Need. But just as I was about to leave the house – in fact I had already made arrangements for a neighbour to feed the cat – I received a curt phone call from Jeremy telling me in the coldest of terms that I was Not Wanted. You chose to interpret my absence at Roger’s funeral as a slap in the face but, in fact, although a slap in the face would have been perfectly justified, the Truth of the Matter is that I was kept away by illness (a flare-up of trigeminal neuralgia) and had to stay at home on Doctor’s Orders. My letter of condolences (sent 7.2.04) went unanswered. I have heard nothing from you since until I received your bizarre and wounding letter last week, informing me tersely that you are now living temporarily in Kensington, awaiting the birth of your first grandchild. Frankly, I do not know what you want of me Syl. You reject me cruelly Time and Time Again and then you expect me to come running when it suits you. Well, no, Syl, I’m not playing. If you sincerely want to see me and let Bygones
be Bygones, which I doubt, then you will have to come down to Lewes and visit me. You have never been to see me here although I have been living in Lewes as a well-respected member of the Artists’ Colony for more than twenty years now, exhibiting my work annually and regularly receiving favourable reviews in a number of prestigious art periodicals. I realise that Roger no doubt preferred the fleshpots of the metropolis to Lewes and that probably made it difficult for you to come. But you have no excuses now and I shall expect to see you here before the summer is out. Otherwise you may as well consider all communication between us At an End. As ever, Cyn.”