Sylvia Garland's Broken Heart (14 page)

Sylvia was drenched in sweat. She felt all trembly too and on the verge of tears. Why did things always seem to go wrong between her and those closest to her? It wasn’t only Cynthia although Cynthia was, everyone agreed, quite uniquely troublesome. It was also Jeremy, Smita, it used to happen all the time with her own mother and her own mother-in-law. Why even with Roger there had been crossed wires and fallings-out. Never for long though and, now that Roger was gone, she preferred not to think about their bad patches but to concentrate steadfastly on the happy times. What was the matter with her that she couldn’t seem to communicate smoothly with those around her? Why did life have to be like this?

Shakily, Sylvia gathered up her bits and pieces and set off again. Thank goodness for old Mrs Rosenkranz who was so easy to talk to.

As Sylvia walked towards the gates onto Kensington High Street through the lower reaches of the park, she
passed a young Indian woman pushing a baby in a pram. With a vivid spurt of happiness, Sylvia remembered her grandson-to-be. She had not thought about him for at least an hour. Impetuously, she stopped and blurted out to the startled young mother: “Oh, may I take a look at him? My daughter-in-law’s Indian too and she’s expecting her first baby in just a few weeks.”

The young woman looked taken aback. Grudgingly, she stopped and let Sylvia peer beneath the lightweight crocheted blanket which was shading the baby from the sun. “It’s a girl,” the young woman said sullenly. “Her name is Daisy.”

“Oh,” Sylvia said brightly. “Not an Indian name?”

The young woman frowned. “Why on earth would I give her an Indian name? She’s going to live her life here, isn’t she, not in India.”

Sylvia beamed at her conciliatingly to make up for what seemed to be yet another inexplicable faux pas. “It’s a very pretty name,” she said gushingly. “And she’s lovely.”

As she carried on her way, she reflected that what she had just said was in fact not true; Daisy was a common or garden name and the baby wasn’t lovely at all. She was a very hirsute baby actually with a surprising quantity of thick black hair and beetle brows. She frowned just like her sullen mother.

For the umpteenth time, Sylvia tried unsuccessfully to imagine what her grandson would look like but somehow she couldn’t manage it; Jeremy’s face but Smita’s colour, Smita’s face but Jeremy’s colour, how would it work? Puzzling over this conundrum, she made her tired way
back to Overmore Gardens. She thought of Smita and Jeremy lying on a beach in Sardinia, irresponsibly exposing the baby to the risks of air travel and gippy tummy. How very selfish they were. Well Smita of course only ever thought of Smita but surely Jeremy, who was in such a frightful tizz about the baby, should have known better. Smita had doubtless bullied him into going and he, spineless as he was, had given in to her. After all, it wasn’t as if they needed to get away to see the sun. Really, this heat was unnatural for England; she would need to have a bath before she went to see Mrs Rosenkranz.

Thinking about baths reminded her of toilets or rather their lamentable absence. The England she had left all those years ago had been plentifully supplied with public toilets where you could, literally, spend a penny. She remembered the ubiquitous reek of disinfectant, the worry that you might not have the right coin for the little brass box on the door, the occasional kindly soul who would in a principled way hold the door open for you as they left so you wouldn’t have to pay. What had happened to all the public toilets? What merciless bureaucracy had got rid of them all without a thought for those with weak bladders, especially older women who were prone to urge incontinence, for whom a dearth of toilets could have the most awful consequences? There was not a single toilet the whole length of Kensington High Street and hurrying in this heat was out of the question. She would just have to hope for the best.

Mrs Rosenkranz had invited Sylvia back to tea about a month after her first visit and then a fortnight after that
and then, without anything apparently having been said, it had somehow turned into every Thursday. So Sylvia, still adrift in a bafflingly transformed country, now had two fixed points in her week: Sunday lunch with Jeremy and Smita and Thursday tea with Ruth Rosenkranz. To Sylvia’s surprise, she and the old lady seemed to be in some unfathomable way kindred spirits. What was simply astonishing was that Ruth Rosenkranz, whom Sylvia found so very interesting and
different
with her Continental background, seemed, incomprehensibly, to feel exactly the same way about Sylvia.

Sylvia was not used to being considered interesting. Every week, the old lady questioned her avidly about her life abroad. She was interested in every little detail and sometimes, frankly, in the strangest things. Hong Kong: how many of the Chinese spoke English and how many of the English spoke Chinese? (Not many.) Was it true that in the colonial past the British had put up signs forbidding entry to certain places expressly to the Chinese and dogs? Were any of the signs still to be seen? Did they keep them in museums as a shameful memory or had they all been destroyed? Delhi: could Sylvia please explain the Indian caste system? (Not really.) On what was it based exactly and what symbols did they use to identify those on the bottom rung, the untouchables? Did they have to wear anything in particular to mark them out? Mrs Rosenkranz had apparently never travelled much beyond Europe and she found Sylvia’s ex-pat experiences fascinating. Which was in a way a pity because Sylvia would have loved to ask her about the big unspoken gaps in her life story but she
was so busy chattering away about trips to the silver market in Delhi where you bought jewellery by weight like meat or fish and the scandalous antics of the younger expats in Dubai that there was never any time. Sometimes Sylvia wondered if the old lady was doing it on purpose.

Sylvia had managed to establish that Mrs Rosenkranz had been born in Berlin which of course explained the trace of an accent. She had come to England in somewhat unclear circumstances in the late Thirties and then there was a long silent gap until the early Fifties when she was newly married to Mr Rosenkranz who, despite his name, came from Sheffield and they were living in Maida Vale. From this time on, she spoke relatively freely about her life until another blank period in the early Eighties when her daughter had got married and something to do with the marriage had upset her so deeply that she could not speak about it. Well, Sylvia could certainly identify with that.

Whatever topic they lighted on, they always had plenty to say. In fact, Imelda had taken to going out on Thursday afternoons and leaving Sylvia in charge of the tea which made it easier to let their hair down. Although of course the truth was that Sylvia was letting her hair down much more than Mrs Rosenkranz.

Lying in the bath before her visit, Sylvia recalled that last time they had talked a lot about her years in India. She had described her house in Lodhi Colony and her beautiful garden and a particularly happy excursion to Naini Tal. Mrs Rosenkranz had listened, apparently enchanted.

Next door, Roger began to hum tunelessly: tum-pom-pom,
pom-teedee-pom. After three months in the flat, Sylvia no longer started when she heard him. She lay in the bath and listened wistfully as the water cooled refreshingly about her and she went downstairs on the dot of four, feeling curiously comforted.

Mrs Rosenkranz seemed in good spirits too, despite the heat which was oppressive in her stuffy flat. It struck Sylvia as she made the tea in the airless kitchen that she could perhaps wheel the old lady up to the park one day; it would be a slog but there was that ramp for the front steps and you could certainly get a wheelchair into the new black cabs. Maybe she should experiment with somewhere nearer at hand first? A vision came to mind of the two of them sitting in the roof gardens of Derry and Tom on a sunny day, listening to the sound of the fountains gently splashing and both enjoying a strawberry ice cream. Goodness, Sylvia hadn’t thought of the roof gardens for years but she could still see them ever so clearly; colonnades, flower beds and palm trees and that startling illusion of a Spanish summer holiday. She wondered if they were even still there. Well, she would have to find out and, if they were and not turned in the meantime into something monstrous, she would invite her new friend to come along with her to visit them. Excited by her idea, Sylvia added the teapot to Imelda’s perfectly prepared trolley and wheeled it into the sitting room.

Mrs Rosenkranz looked up at her brightly. “I have an invitation for you,” she said, smiling.

Sylvia giggled. “Great minds think alike.”

“Meaning?” asked Mrs Rosenkranz.

Sylvia beamed. “I have an invitation for
you
.”

“For
me
?” exclaimed Mrs Rosenkranz. “An invitation for me? But I can’t get up the stairs to your apartment, my dear, not unless you and Imelda carry me there.”

“It’s not to my
flat
,” Sylvia said quickly. “I’ve thought of somewhere
much
nicer. And with a lift too.”

Unfortunately, Mrs Rosenkranz had no idea whether the roof gardens were still there either but that didn’t stop the two of them reminiscing about the gardens at some length as they drank their tea and Mrs Rosenkranz said that if the gardens still existed, she would accept Sylvia’s invitation with the greatest pleasure.

Almost as an afterthought, towards the end of the afternoon, she said coyly to Sylvia, “I haven’t yet told you about
my
invitation for you.”

Sylvia smiled politely. What could an eighty-something year old offer to rival Derry and Tom?

The old lady announced, “Siggy, my little brother, is coming from Northwood to visit me. Not this coming Sunday, but the one after. Would you care to join us for lunch?”

Sylvia felt a bump of disappointment. “Oh,” she said. “I can’t.”

The old lady frowned. “Why not?”

“I have lunch with Jeremy and Smita every Sunday,” Sylvia said forlornly. “They’d never forgive me if I didn’t come.”

“Really?” exclaimed Mrs Rosenkranz. “Are you sure? Maybe they might enjoy a Sunday on their own for a
change? Maybe your daughter-in-law might be glad not to have to cook for once in her condition?”

Sylvia thought over what Mrs Rosenkranz had said, meanwhile helping herself pensively to a third little sliver of ginger cake. It was true, it was only a sense of obligation which kept the Sunday lunches going; neither she nor Jeremy and Smita really enjoyed them. In fact, it would serve them right, having left her on her own for two Sundays in a row while they were away on holiday, if on the third Sundays she was unavailable. She finished the last of her cake.

“Maybe you’re right,” she said slowly.

“Good!” exclaimed Mrs Rosenkranz. “That’s the spirit. You will see; you will all appreciate each other much more if you see each other when you choose, not just according to the calendar.”

Sylvia thought miserably that if Smita could choose, she would most probably never see her mother-in-law at all. Jeremy’s feelings she preferred not to probe. “I expect I’ll get into trouble though,” she said dubiously.

“Never mind!” declared Mrs Rosenkranz. “So you’ll go along with flowers for your daughter-in-law the Sunday after. I have told Siggy so much about you when we speak on the phone; he is longing to meet you.”

Sylvia wondered afterwards if she hadn’t made another dreadful mistake. Of course Jeremy and Smita would be cross with her and, as for the seventy-year-old little brother, how entertaining would he be?

Smita’s maternity leave began in the second week of September, a month before the baby was due. Her colleagues at Gravington Babcock took her out to lunch and presented her jokily with a very large Mothercare voucher which annoyed her as she intended to shop in much more upmarket baby shops than that.

It felt strange waking up in the morning and not having work to go to. Jeremy told her to make the most of these last lazy days as he headed out to work. Apart from their short break in Sardinia, which had not worked out quite as well as Smita had hoped, this was the last rest she would get before the baby came. But Smita had the longest list of things she wanted to get through and so she carried on getting up bright and early and working her way through her tasks. She had only managed two or three of them – selecting and reserving a pretty Moses basket and a pram and booking appointments for the following week for a hair cut, a manicure and a pedicure – when she woke early on the third or fourth day with a low backache which kept coming and going and feeling generally so unwell that she didn’t think she could manage anything. She felt incredibly frustrated. It was awful to waste even a moment when time was so short. It was also not like her at all to have to take things easy or to lie around in bed. Once the morning sickness had passed, she had sailed through the whole pregnancy without major problems and without a single day off work. She had pretty much hated it – lumbering around like an elephant – but she had got on with it. Now, as she lay waiting for the alarm clock to go off and for Jeremy to wake up and make her a cup of tea, she seethed
at the thought of a wasted day. She had been planning to go to her anti-natal yoga class, to shop for baby clothes and then to research waiting lists for nursery schools. Maybe if she rested for an hour or two, her back would improve. She must have overdone it, rearranging furniture yesterday. She was completely unprepared for Jeremy’s reaction when he woke up and she told him how she felt.