Sylvia Garland's Broken Heart (24 page)

Sylvia tried to remember which nanny it was; Galina had left after six months because she and Smita hadn’t seen eye to eye. She had been replaced by Eva who had lasted less than a month and Eva had just been succeeded by – was it Anna or Agnes?

Abruptly, she asked, “I didn’t know Smita was in New York?”

Jeremy answered briefly. “She had to leave a couple of days early. Something came up.”

“Will you be needing
me
?” Sylvia asked eagerly.

She heard Jeremy sigh. “Well, I’m stuck here for now,” he said, “unless Agnieszka shows up. But I doubt you can even get here, you know; apparently the whole city’s come to a standstill. Only emergency vehicles can get through.”

Sylvia imagined herself walking heroically all the way to Belsize Park but thought better of it. She said, “I’ll come the minute I can.”

But Jeremy said sternly, “No, stay at home until we’re absolutely sure this thing’s over.”

Sylvia asked, horrified, “You mean there might be more bombs?”

“Well,” Jeremy said, “have you heard about the bus?”

Of course Sylvia hadn’t and when Jeremy told her that
a double-decker bus had been blown up in Tavistock Square, it seemed to Sylvia that her lifelong image of London had been blown sky high too and she had to sit down suddenly as the colours began to drain from everything.

Late that night, as she was finally slipping into an uneasy sleep, her telephone rang and she jolted awake. It was Cynthia.

“So you’re still alive,” her sister began sarcastically. “Did it not occur to you at any point today that I might be worried about you? Did it not cross your mind at all to ring and let me know you were alright? I suppose you thought I couldn’t care less? Is that it? You imagined that if you had been blown to pieces, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid?”

There was something about Cynthia’s grating, rancorous voice which had the same effect on Sylvia as chalk being scraped down a blackboard and she cringed under her covers.

“No Cyn, no,” she tried to answer but Cynthia was in full spate and wouldn’t listen to her stammered self-defence.

“Do you know I saw you on a stretcher on the television?” Cynthia nearly shrieked. “You were dead. You had a grey blanket pulled over your face and you were being carried by two ambulance men. It was ghastly.”

“What are you talking about?” Sylvia exclaimed, wide awake now and horrified. “It wasn’t me, obviously. Whatever made you think it was?”

“Not wishful thinking,” Cynthia retorted. “If that’s
what you’re implying. It was your feet, if you must know. I saw your feet sticking out from under the blanket. They were blue but I could tell they were yours; I’d recognise them anywhere.”

Sylvia curled up her toes instinctively under the covers. “What’s so remarkable about my feet?”

Cynthia cackled. “Oh go on, Syl. Don’t pretend you don’t know; you’ve always had the most misshapen toes. You used to get teased about them when you were little.”

Sylvia wiggled one of her feet out from under the covers and stared at it; were her toes so very misshapen? As she considered her foot unhappily, Cynthia carried on, “That’s what sticks in my throat, Syl.
I
can still recognise your feet on television after all these years but I know
you
would never in a million years recognise mine. Or any other part of my body for that matter. Because you’ve blotted me out, Syl, that’s what you’ve done, you’ve blotted me out of your life completely.”

“We saw each other at Christmas,” Sylvia said faintly.

“Oh and I should be grateful for that, I suppose,” Cynthia retorted sarcastically. “Lady Bountiful comes down to Lewes at last for Christmas dinner with her sister but just happens to mention that the only reason she has come is because her son and daughter-in-law and darling little grandson are up in Leicester having Christmas with
her
parents and so otherwise she would be all alone in London.”

“I never said that was the only reason I had come,” Sylvia began.

But Cynthia snapped, “Oh spare me the hypocrisy,
please. You may think I don’t care about you anymore but the bottom line is I still do, Syl, I care a great deal but you,
clearly
, couldn’t care less about me.”

Sylvia blurted out, “Oh stuff and nonsense, Cyn. They weren’t my feet anyway. And my toes really
aren’t
that misshapen.”

Cynthia gave a harsh laugh. “You don’t change, do you?” she remarked and she hung up without saying goodbye.

Ruth’s advice about Jeremy’s threatened redundancy took Sylvia by surprise. She consulted her the very next time they had tea together, having spent the intervening days fretting over her son’s predicament.

Ruth’s advice had nothing to do with Jeremy or Smita for that matter either. It had to do with Sylvia herself and she was shocked to realise that she could be at fault here too, even before she had done anything at all.

“You must not become too deeply involved in their lives,” Ruth warned. “It is tempting, I know, when one only wants to help and one’s own life is sometimes rather – quiet. But it is a mistake, Sylvia dear, maybe even a grave mistake. You must let them solve their problems themselves. Don’t go rushing in with unasked for advice and suggestions. They won’t thank you for it and they may resent it deeply. Be content with your lovely little golden grandson and leave everything else well alone.”

“But if his father loses his job it will have a bad effect on Anand too,” Sylvia argued. “And besides, Jeremy and
Smita aren’t getting on that well already, if you ask me and if Jeremy is going to be unemployed, then surely things will only go from bad to worse.”

Ruth looked alarmed. “If there is already conflict between them, how do you think
your
intervention will improve matters? How did you get on with
your
mother-in-law? How would you have liked to have her involved in
your
marital ups and downs?”

Sylvia was aghast at the idea of a comparison between herself and Daphne Garland whom she had loathed with every fibre of her being for twenty-eight years. Roger’s mother had thought Sylvia a flighty young woman and when she turned out to be apparently unable to produce grandchildren year after year into the bargain, she had urged Roger to divorce her. She had even turned a blind eye to Roger’s indiscretions, believing that Sylvia’s shortcomings justified them and maybe even hoping for a welcome little accident along the way.

Mechanically finishing her second slice of coffee and walnut cake in silence, Sylvia considered Ruth’s advice.

In the end, she just said lamely, “Maybe you’re right.”

She poured them both another cup of tea and, as she drank hers, she reflected that if she did nothing, as Ruth advised, then at least neither Smita nor Jeremy could blame her for whatever happened. That in itself would be welcome.

In the end, there was no need for her to intervene anyway because things turned out much better than expected; Jeremy’s contract was terminated in the spring of 2006 but, less than two months later, he was offered a
new job by another department of the BBC, doing similar work apparently and with a slightly higher salary too.

Relations between Jeremy and Smita were not, Sylvia observed, particularly badly affected. Rather than lording it over her unemployed husband, as Sylvia had feared, Smita was terribly grateful to Jeremy for doing the bulk of the childcare and she joked that he did it so happily he would make a perfect house husband.

Anand’s second birthday was celebrated with a big family party. He had a small but intensely noisy tea party on the day itself, Jeremy reported, with a handful of other two year olds. It had been a nightmare apparently, in their stylish apartment, even though Smita had some time back compromised with aesthetics by fixing stair gates on the stairs and putting away most of their valuable breakable things.

Sylvia was not invited to the two year olds’ tea party even though she would have loved to come. She had not met any of Anand’s playmates and she would have dearly liked to take stock of them; to judge how suitable they were and to observe how Anand interacted with them. But Smita had made it clear that this event was for accompanying mothers and nannies only – and Jeremy of course with the camera – and Sylvia was more than welcome to come along to the family get-together the following weekend.

Sylvia swallowed her disappointment and cheated Smita by organising her own little birthday picnic for
Anand ahead of time in the Sutherland Avenue gardens. There was a pair of two-year-old Chinese twins, rather pleasingly called Ming and Ling, who played regularly in the gardens and Sylvia invited their Australian nanny to bring them over to her big tartan picnic rug and share jelly and cake and join in a ragged rendition of “Happy Birthday”. So she got in first with the birthday celebrations and felt secretly smug when Jeremy reported that Anand had not enjoyed the singing of “Happy Birthday” at their tea party and had covered his ears. He had done nothing of the sort at Sylvia’s.

The adult party was rather an ordeal for Sylvia and, if it hadn’t been for Anand’s shining presence, really she would not have enjoyed it at all. For a start, Prem, by far her favourite member of Smita’s family, was missing. His absence drew Sylvia into enforced proximity with Naisha who seemed at her most overbearing; she appeared in charge of the proceedings, to an extent which visibly annoyed her daughter and she kept rushing to and fro, loudly issuing instructions to all and sundry.

When she finally sat down in the centre of the big sofa, she insisted on having Anand on her lap – even though you could tell he was reluctant – and feeding him a stream of choice titbits with her perfectly manicured fingers. Jeremy was grumpy – not surprisingly – but of course he was grumpiest of all with his mother.

Worst of all, Anand didn’t even seem that interested in Sylvia. Maybe it wasn’t all that surprising with so many less familiar people there, all of them vying for Anand’s attention and some of them wearing eye-catching
shimmering saris and lots of glittering jewellery. But Sylvia still felt jilted and jealous; surely her bond with Anand was special enough for him to single her out in a crowd and show them all that
she
was the favourite grandmother?

Naisha seemed supremely unconcerned when Sylvia enquired after Prem. He hadn’t been feeling too well for the past few weeks, she explained casually and hadn’t felt up to making the trip to London. The doctor had sent him for a few tests but the results weren’t back yet. She made it sound like a big fuss over nothing, as if Prem were just malingering in the time-honoured male way.

So Sylvia was shocked and horrified to hear from Jeremy barely ten days later that poor dear Prem had been diagnosed with cancer, a particularly nasty and very likely fatal form of cancer with a long and complicated name. Smita was devastated apparently although Naisha seemed to be bearing up.

Prem’s decline was swift and awful. Although he stepped up his visits to the temple even further and adopted a frankly crackpot raw food regime, the disease continued its cruel progress. By Christmas, the writing was on the wall and when Sylvia travelled up to Leicester in the New Year to see Prem, possibly for the last time, she found him a shadow even of his former grey self. She had hesitated whether or not to go but Ruth said it was the right thing to do and so, one cold and especially unpleasant January morning, she boarded a train at King’s Cross, bolstered by a railway cup of tea and a hot bacon sandwich.

Naisha met her effusively at the station, her vigour and
talkativeness apparently undiminished by her husband’s illness. She drove Sylvia to their home where Prem was languishing in a reclining chair, attended by a number of relatives who kept popping in and out, bringing Tupperware boxes of home cooked food.

“I haven’t had to cook for weeks,” Naisha observed happily as she served Sylvia a delicious lunch entirely out of Tupperware boxes. Poor Prem barely ate and barely spoke either although he gave Sylvia a number of sad saintly smiles.

Naisha drove her back to the station in the late afternoon. She thanked Sylvia warmly for making the journey and hugged and kissed her excessively. Sylvia supposed that they were both equally glad to see the back of each other.