Sylvia Garland's Broken Heart (4 page)

In the car on the way to the hotel, Sylvia apologized to Jeremy. “I’m sorry I wasn’t the life and soul of the party. All this has rather knocked the stuffing out of me, you know.”

“It’s OK,” Jeremy answered, without looking at her. “No one expects you to be bubbly at a time like this.”

He negotiated an apparently nonsensical junction in silence. Outside the window, a blurred city slipped past.

After another pause, Sylvia added, “I’m sorry Smita’s not feeling well. I hope she gets over it quickly.”

Jeremy seemed to be giving her a strange look.

“It’s not anything serious, is it?” she asked in alarm.

Jeremy appeared to be having difficulty controlling his
emotions. He was sweating profusely – although maybe it was just all the curry he had stowed away at lunch.

“Honestly,” he said, apparently indignantly, “have you really not got a clue what’s the matter with Smi?”

“No,” Sylvia replied in genuine bewilderment. “No, I haven’t.”

Jeremy went extremely red in the face and Sylvia wondered how on earth she had angered him this time. She was so tired, her mind was in so many different places that at first she didn’t really take it in when Jeremy exclaimed, “Can’t you guess? She’s
pregnant
!”

“Ah,” said Sylvia. A moment later, she jolted wide awake and cried, “Jeremy! That’s marvellous news. Congratulations!”

If Jeremy hadn’t been driving, of course Sylvia could have hugged him or at least given his arm a good squeeze. As it was, she had to limit herself to a cascade of exclamations and questions. But it was too late; however much she exclaimed and however many eager questions she fired at him, she already knew that Jeremy would never ever forgive her for that first pause when she hadn’t been listening properly. He wouldn’t accept that it was due to fatigue and distraction; he would believe that it was because deep down she didn’t like Smita. She didn’t like Smita and consequently she wasn’t really all that thrilled that they were having a baby because it would surely cement their marriage.

So Sylvia jabbered away, being as overjoyed and effusive as she could manage in her exhausted state, while sneaking sideways looks at Jeremy’s quizzical expression
and finally she said the one thing which must surely make Jeremy feel sorry for her, “Oh, isn’t it such a shame that your father isn’t here to hear the news? He would have been so thrilled.”

To which Jeremy responded, turning deftly onto the forecourt of an immense hotel, “It’s a great shame. He would have made such a wonderful grandfather.”

Did Sylvia hear a reproach? She busied herself gathering her belongings and decided, if it was a reproach, that
she
would not hear it. How could Jeremy possibly know what sort of a grandmother she would make? Goodness, a grandmother; she had not really thought about that before.

She hobbled into the hotel lobby behind Jeremy, feeling suddenly indescribably old. Her feet and ankles were still swollen from the flight and her shoes hurt. While Jeremy dealt with the details of her booking, she sat down in a deep leather armchair, her head reeling. It was all too much, frankly; first, she had without any warning become a widow and now, equally suddenly, she had been told she was going to become a grandmother. She felt she was losing all sense of who she actually was. She was sitting in an anonymous hotel whose name she didn’t even know in a city where she had no wish to be and outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of the lobby, instead of the English spring which she had happily anticipated, it seemed to be the bleak midwinter.

“Are you ok?” Jeremy asked, stooping over her.

She must have closed her eyes for a moment. “I’m fine,” she replied resolutely, “just tired.”

She struggled to get to her feet out of the enveloping depths of the armchair and Jeremy had to offer her a hand and help haul her up.

They did not speak in the lift because they had to share it with a tremendously fat Middle Eastern-looking man in a white towelling bathrobe. He filled the lift with the potent reek of chlorine and Sylvia drew a little passing comfort from this sign that somewhere in the hotel there was a swimming pool – and maybe a sauna too – warmth and another element into which she could escape. All her life, she had used swimming as an escape from all sorts of things.

Jeremy unlocked the door to her room and instructed her how everything worked – the curtains, the television, the minibar – as if she had become completely incapable. Then he said rather awkwardly, “Ok, well I’d better be getting back. I don’t want Smi to have to do all the washing up. Now you have a good rest, won’t you. I’ll give you a ring in the morning and we’ll take things from there.”

Only then, as he was on the point of leaving, did it occur to Sylvia to ask, “How far along is she Jeremy? When is the baby due?”

And, pink and pleased in spite of himself, Jeremy answered proudly, “Nearly ten weeks. The baby’s due in October.”

Sylvia started. “Ten weeks?” she repeated. “But that’s exactly when –” her voice broke off.

Jeremy looked uncomfortable. “I know. Dad. The timing was really weird. Quite hard on Smi actually. We found out the day after the funeral.”

Sylvia dabbed at her eyes with a handy hotel tissue. “Well it’s marvellous news anyway,” she mumbled, “Marvellous. I’m so pleased for both of you. Please make sure to tell Smita I said so.” She was frankly sobbing now and she knew she was due another wooden embrace from her son and another staccato little pat on the back. When it came, she responded by squeezing his other hand energetically. Then she pulled herself together and said bravely, “Now run along Jeremy. Smita needs you.”

The hotel room was silent and still. It was on the cold side too but Jeremy hadn’t shown her how to turn up the heating. Bed was the place to be. Why in Dubai it would be nearly bedtime. She would feel a lot better tucked up in bed; she would shut her eyes and shut out London. Sleep would do her the world of good.

It was in Hong Kong that Sylvia had first discovered the secret pleasures of the siesta although of course in those early years of married life sleep had nothing to do with it. Sometimes, on the steamiest days, Roger would nip home from the office on the pretext of a business meeting or a long lunch with a client. In broad daylight and with the thermometer showing simply unbelievable temperatures, they would sneak into their huge bedroom with the rotating fans, away from their snooping maid and close the blinds. In the sultry half-darkness, they would get up to things they would never have dreamt of in London. Most days of course, Roger couldn’t get away from work; he really did have business meetings or long lunches with clients. Or so he told Sylvia.

How odd it felt to be having a siesta with cold rain
lashing at the window. As soon as Sylvia lay down, she felt wretched; the hotel bed seemed huge and she felt unutterably alone in it. She could almost feel a howl beginning deep within her. She did hope that she wasn’t going to start that frightful wailing again as she had when they first brought her the news in Dubai. She had no idea she could make a noise like that. It was a noise straight off the television; the sound of Arab women mourning their lost loved ones at a funeral. Sylvia had not even realised straight away that the noise was coming from her. How mortifying it would be if, in spite of herself, she started to make that noise again here. People would come running down the hotel corridor, they would bang on her door. If she didn’t answer, they might let themselves in with a skeleton key and, seeing the state she was in, they would doubtless summon Jeremy. She would be in trouble again.

She wrenched her mind away from Roger and firmly she thought of her grandchild. Conceived in January, revealed in February, he would be born in October. There was not even a shadow of doubt in Sylvia’s mind that he would be a boy. The extraordinary timing, that he should first make his presence known in the same week in which his grandfather was laid to rest, could not be mere coincidence. Not that Sylvia was the least bit believing. While she might have had mindless inclinations towards church when she was young, all those years she had lived in India and in the Middle East, seeing the ravages of religion close-up had thoroughly put her off it. You simply could not witness everything which she had witnessed during her sixty-two years and still go on believing in a
God. But the timing of her grandson’s conception seemed to send a signal; one way or another, the little boy was coming to take his grandfather’s place. Here she was, on the verge of howling one minute and counting on her fingers to calculate the time of his arrival the next. Sylvia shivered with excitement – and a little bit with cold from the chilly sheets.

So not everything was over. Until now, when she tried to look ahead, she could only foresee lessening, withering. She had imagined this next, last stage of her life would be terribly bleak and would require great bravery. Yet here was something completely unexpected which had already – ten weeks after Roger’s death – filled her with a great rush of excitement and anticipation.

Sylvia had never given much thought to being a grandmother, never having been – if the truth were told – all that motherly. But now that it was going to happen, she understood what a marvellous thing it would be. All the thoughts which she knew she would have later – about how English the little boy might look and how Indian and about Smita’s suitability as a mother – she pushed to one side and focused only on the imagined child. She could not see him at all clearly but she could see herself taking him to the zoo in Regent’s Park and to the dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, all the same things in fact which she had found such a crashing bore when she had first done them years ago while home on leave with Jeremy. What was striking – and baffling – was that, this time round, she felt thrilled at the prospect of doing them. She would need to keep a close eye on
Smita and Jeremy of course; they would neither of them make ideal parents. Their flat was nightmarishly unsuitable for a small child too with all those sheer drops and all that glass. Sylvia thought her way around it, making a painstaking inventory of all the things she would have to tell Smita to change. It was a long list and it grew rather boring after a while.

When she woke up, it was night time. For the first few seconds, she had no idea where in the world she was or what sort of time it might be. The luminous digital alarm clock showed 20:20. But Sylvia felt wide awake and adventurous as if it were already morning. She knew that Roger was dead but, for a moment, the disorientation distracted her from her grief. She looked out at all the little lonely lights of the city twinkling in the dark – she hadn’t drawn the curtains – and she wondered what on earth she was going to do here. Then she remembered she was going to have a grandson.

Feeling remarkably business-like, she got up. She drew the curtains, competently, as Jeremy had shown her. Then she began to rummage in her suitcase for her costume and rubber flip-flops which she never travelled without. Of course, they were buried right at the bottom; she had not foreseen that she would want to go swimming her first cold evening in London. But she did urgently, knowing that as soon as she pushed away from the side and began to propel herself slowly and steadily through the water, everything would immediately seem a lot less dreadful.

The hotel corridors and the lift were empty. She supposed that everyone was having dinner. She hadn’t
thought yet what she would do about dinner; she certainly wasn’t going to sit alone in the restaurant. But first she would have her swim; she would think about dinner afterwards. There was a small plaque next to the ground floor button in the lift which said “Leisure Complex” and Sylvia headed there.

She supposed she had expected a Dubai-style pool, vast and lavish and she was rather shocked by what she found. A somnolent Polish teenager in a less than fresh tracksuit was lounging at the reception desk of the “leisure complex”. He greeted her by reciting sleepily a welcome obviously memorized from a training manual and handed her a towel and a token to use a locker. She descended a narrow flight of stairs into a basement region which stank of chlorine and rubber. She changed in a distinctly disagreeable changing room, reproaching herself for not having thought of getting changed upstairs in her room. Then she plodded back up the basement stairs and pushed open the door to the pool.

Why, it was minuscule and made even smaller by a sloping shelf at the shallow end so that the first few feet were not even deep enough to swim in. For a moment, Sylvia wondered whether it was worth getting in at all. But she longed for the buoyancy of the water, the release which swimming always granted her and so she waded in down the sloping tiled shelf holding firmly onto the handrail. Jeremy and Smita would never forgive her a broken limb at this stage.

As soon as the water was deep enough, she kicked her legs out behind her and she was off. The water was warm
but not too warm and chlorinated but not excessively so. Once she adjusted to the short lanes – twelve strokes and back, twelve strokes and back – the swimming gave her the same pleasure which it always did. She was no longer Sylvia Garland, newly widowed and alone in a city which she had not lived in for thirty-five years. Her mind emptied of all her preoccupations and focused narrowly, repetitively on twelve strokes and back, twelve strokes and back, her fingers held together, scooping the water, her shoulders obedient and synchronised, her hips and knees flexing, no longer perfectly these days but in unison.