Sylvia Garland's Broken Heart (17 page)

At this, Sylvia’s shame was complete for hadn’t Naisha behaved impeccably, said and done exactly the right thing while she, Sylvia, was still debating whether or not to send a card?

She responded to Naisha’s question rather more firmly than she actually felt. “Absolutely,” she agreed. “Absolutely.”

Naisha clucked. “We are truly blessed,” she sighed happily. “I am only so sorry that poor Roger did not live to see this day.” Then, disconcertingly briskly, she added, “Well, must rush. Lots of phone calls to make. Bye Sylvia dear. Looking forward to seeing you at the naming ceremony.”

Sylvia sat perfectly still in her sitting room for about an hour after Naisha’s phone call. Outside in the square, the sun was starting to set and the dark red brick mansions of Overmore Gardens seemed to be glowing. So many powerful emotions were surging through her, she feared that if she moved too suddenly, they might overflow and
she might start to weep or howl or laugh hysterically like a mad woman. She needed to pull herself together if she was not to have another slip-up.

Her first act of responsibility towards her grandson was to eat a sensible supper. She went into the kitchen which, she noticed, was getting into rather a state. The truth was that, all those years abroad, she had always had someone to help her keep the kitchen tidy. But now, since that frightful business with the Romanian cleaner whom she had accused of stealing things, she had nobody. The thing was that, later on, she had found all the different things which she had thought were stolen. She had managed in her muddledom to misplace them but she had never confessed to Jeremy and Smita. Now she felt too guilty to hire another cleaner.

But there was one cupboard which was beautifully tidy: at the end of the kitchen there was an empty unit which she had been filling up over the past few weeks with supplies of baby formula, bottles, a sterilizing machine and jars and jars of baby food. She opened the cupboard and gloated over her prudent supplies. Straight away, she began to feel much better.

For days after the birth, Sylvia stayed in a state of elation, as if some parallel hormonal event were happening in her own body. She rang Jeremy so many times on his mobile the first two days that he ended up snapping at her. Of course, Naisha had now arrived and taken over; he had his mother-in-law to deal with too. But Sylvia still could not resist ringing; she had to know every development, every last little detail. She could think of
nothing but the baby. When Smita went home from hospital – far too early in Sylvia’s opinion, after barely two days – Sylvia could ring their home number freely since the only person who answered was Naisha and she loved to broadcast the latest details from her privileged position.

“He is feeding well,” she reported excitedly. “Sleeping so-so. He cries a lot; he obviously needs to exercise his lungs.” She chuckled. “And he has such
strong
lungs, Sylvia dear.”

At night, Sylvia woke every two or three hours as if she herself had a newborn baby to feed. She imagined the night-time scene in Jeremy and Smita’s apartment on the other side of London; the high-pitched cry rising in the darkness, Smita climbing wearily out of bed, taking the baby out of the bedroom so as not to disturb Jeremy and settling with him at her breast in the big front room, Naisha bringing her daughter tea and snacks.

Sylvia was outraged when she discovered, on her first visit to their flat, that Smita was not breastfeeding the baby at all. It wasn’t that she couldn’t (like Nikki Palmer, say, who had no milk.) She was flatly refusing to; she said she found it disgusting and degrading and, to Sylvia’s chagrin, Naisha took her side, saying the baby got a much more nutritious feed from the bottle anyway. The only one who seemed upset by this development was Jeremy but it was already clear that nobody was listening to him.

Sylvia sat with the little boy on her lap – he still had no name, they were still arguing – and she wished she could hire a wet nurse for him like in the olden days. It was only on her way home that a huge advantage occurred
to her; if the baby was bottle-fed, he wasn’t dependent on his mother, was he? He could be anywhere, with anyone competent to feed him. As soon as she got home, she washed her hands and got out the sterilizer. All evening, she practised sterilizing bottles and making up the formula until she had it to a T. It came back to her surprisingly quickly.

Naisha was staying down in London for ten days. Sylvia knew she would not get a look in until Naisha had gone. But once she was, she would prevail on Smita, who was naturally exhausted, to let her take the baby for a night or two so Smita could sleep through. She knew it was a long shot but she was determined.

In the meantime, she tried to keep her feet on the ground in her giddy sleepless state by being a good neighbour to Ruth Rosenkranz, wheeling her out into the garden square and sitting there with her through the lovely Indian summer afternoons with a flask of iced tea and generations of baby stories.

Ruth kept promising that her baby brother would come to Sunday lunch again, after he had cancelled so suddenly the last time. Although Sylvia was, frankly, not that interested in the baby brother, she had found his excuse intriguing; he was marooned on the Isle of Wight. Sylvia wondered how on earth anyone could manage to be marooned on the Isle of Wight when there were ferries steaming to and fro to Southampton so regularly. She wondered why Ruth didn’t seem to realize that the excuse must be a smokescreen. Was there some sibling difficulty between them; Ruth much keener on keeping things going
than Siggy? But she spoke of him so dotingly, her adored baby brother whom, given their age difference and other circumstances, she had virtually brought up herself. Surely he must appreciate and adore his big sister too? Or maybe he found her bossy, intrusive, perhaps judgemental about the life he led?

One afternoon, she wrote a card to her sister Cynthia, informing her of the baby’s safe arrival and explaining that, now he had arrived, so much earlier than expected, she would unfortunately have to postpone her planned September visit to Lewes. “PS,” she added, “no name as yet!”

Then Jeremy called her, the first time he had done so since the day of the birth, and told her that they had finally chosen a name. “We’re calling him Anand,” he announced proudly. “It means happiness.”

The birth of his son caused Jeremy to relive his childhood in an unexpectedly vivid way. For years he had systematically avoided thinking about it. But now all sorts of memories came crowding back, unwelcome, unhappy, forcing him to experience all over again as an adult episodes which he had already suffered through uncomprehendingly as a child.

He had anticipated nothing but joy from Anand’s arrival – ok, hard work and broken nights – but basically a life-changing happiness, like everyone said. He felt fortunate to become a father at a time when fathers were encouraged to take part in their children’s upbringing;
when they were expected to change nappies and push prams and show emotion. Jeremy intended to do all those things and he was looking forward to it no end. He was utterly unprepared for the crush of distressing memories which sometimes threatened to overwhelm him in the first few months of his little boy’s life. He knew that new mothers could get post-natal depression (and Smita seemed to for a while). But there was nothing comparable mentioned in the books about new fathers. Jeremy wasn’t depressed exactly; most of the time he was perfectly happy. Yet as he sat cradling Anand in his arms, frequently, instead of gazing down at him, he found himself contemplating long-forgotten scenes of misery from his own childhood which seemed to have returned to haunt him. He would hold his baby closer as if it were himself he was trying to protect.

He hated having to go to work and being separated from Anand five days a week. He was jealous of Smita for having him to herself all day and disapproving that she didn’t seem to enjoy it more. At the weekend, he would do everything he could to have Anand to himself. He would take him out early on Saturday and Sunday mornings to let Smita sleep in. As he pushed him in his pram through the deserted misty streets, Jeremy would gaze down at the little chap, snug in his hat and hood and covers; he would imagine Anand’s future childhood and compare it inevitably with his own. If there was one thing he wanted for Anand at this stage, it was that he should look back on his childhood with greater happiness than Jeremy looked back on his.

If Jeremy had to pick a single adjective to describe his parents, it would be half-hearted. They had had their only child in an offhand sort of way and then they had pretty much ignored him for the next eighteen years; that was how it seemed to him. Of course, as a young child, he had taken it all for granted, the solitary, rather anachronistic ex-pat childhood. But once he was sent away to boarding school in England aged just eleven, part and parcel of that upbringing, he had a chance to compare his childhood with other boys’ and to realise how deprived he had been.

During half term holidays, he would sometimes be invited to other boys’ houses as the holiday was too short to fly back to India or later to Saudi Arabia. In the home of his friend Alastair Woodward, he discovered childhood with siblings, a gentle diffident father who didn’t think his son was weedy and a jolly dishevelled mother who evidently didn’t find her children a bore. At Olly Glockner’s house, he met an astonishingly fat and hilariously funny father who didn’t care at all about success on the sports field, who was proud of Olly’s singing voice and his role as Lady Bracknell in the school play. Olly’s mother, also a character, who dressed incredibly strangely, served dinner late because she was lost in a book and the book was the faintly scandalous
The Women’s Room
. Eaten up with envy, Jeremy would sit at his friends’ crowded tables and learn about teasing, squabbling and family catchphrases. He observed how having brothers and sisters gave you a degree of freedom from your parents’ expectations; one sibling could be the sporty one, one the brainy one and one was allowed to be a freak.

Every long holiday, he would fly back to India, later to Saudi, feeling a notch more resentful each year, to a house which never really felt like his and to parents who scarcely paused in their round of socialising to acknowledge his return. By the time he reached sixteen, Jeremy understood, with rock-solid teenage certainty, that he had been cheated.

What he thought was his earliest memory was of his mother going out to a party. He was in the garden of their Delhi house, probably playing some solitary game in the benignly negligent care of his ayah. He would have been three or four. It was about to get dark any minute. In India, night fell very quickly and Jeremy was always scared of being caught in the wrong place when it got dark. He was playing close to the house and keeping a watchful eye on the encroaching shadows.

Suddenly a brilliant light came on upstairs in his parents’ bedroom and his mother stepped out onto the balcony. She was wearing a shimmering multi-coloured cocktail frock and as she called out “Good Night” and spread and folded her arms to mimic a hug, she looked like a wonderful exotic bird perched up on the balcony, calling into the dusk.

Jeremy must have cried out, stretched up his arms; he wanted a real hug, not a pretend one. His ayah scooped him up quickly before he ran inside and delayed his parents’ departure. Jeremy struggled. He didn’t want her bony arms around him; he wanted his mother’s plump, freckled, scented ones. So in desperation – because his ayah’s arms although bony were very strong – he bit her,
as hard as he could, in her sinewy upper arm. His ayah screamed and dropped him and he ran into the house as fast as his legs could carry him.

But when he got upstairs to his parents’ bedroom, he didn’t get a motherly hug; he got a furious scolding – and a mighty spanking from his father who was up there too, struggling with his cufflinks, when Jeremy came running in. It was all right to speak peremptorily to servants; biting them was not.

With hindsight and listening to Smita complaining about the drudgery of caring for a small baby unaided, Jeremy could understand the appeal of his parents’ ex-pat lifestyle. If they had stayed in England, they would never have lived as well. His father, a civil engineer and his mother, his father’s former secretary, would have lived comfortable but never luxurious lives. They might have moved out of London to somewhere like Surrey, to the commuter belt, achieved a bigger house with a bigger garden which his mother would have fussed over. But they would never have experienced the elegance of their villa on the Peak in Hong Kong which his mother had gone on and on about for years after they left. They would never in their wildest dreams have had a house full of servants and while his mother might have done just as little with her life in Surrey, she would have had a lot less fun doing it.

‘Ah, fun,’ Jeremy thought bitterly. Fun had always been his parents’ guiding principle. They had had years and years of it: parties, picnics, trips, games. They had always been off somewhere having fun while Jeremy was growing
up. Had anyone else had as absent parents as he had? For Jeremy had understood at a young age that he was not part of the fun, that his presence was in fact incompatible with fun.