Sylvia Garland's Broken Heart Page 2

  “Darling,” Sylvia said, reddening at her audacity. “I’m afraid I’ve changed my mind. I’m not sure I want to come and live here after all.”

  Jeremy let out an exasperated exhalation and wrenched the trolley out of the line of people. “For Christ’s sake.”

  “Please don’t take it personally,” Sylvia continued hastily. “I started to wonder about what I was doing on the plane actually and I just think I may have rushed into this rather too soon.”

  Jeremy glared at her. “Is this to do with Smita?”

  “Goodness!” Sylvia lied, “no, not at all. It’s to do with me getting cold feet, can’t you see? I’m not sure I actually want to live in England again.”

  “So what exactly are you intending to do?” Jeremy demanded. He was getting red in the face too. “You’re not telling me you’re turning round and getting straight back on a plane to somewhere else, are you? Because that’s frankly ridiculous.”

  Sylvia wondered where she might catch a plane to; there must surely be some attractive destinations on the departure boards. She smiled placatingly at her son. “Please don’t get angry, dear,” she told him. “I think it’s probably for the best.”

  Jeremy looked as if he might lose his temper completely. But instead he reached out his hand and laid it on her arm. Soothingly, he said, “I don’t think you’re quite yourself at the moment, you know. You’ve been through a lot, you’ve been up all night. I think the right thing for you to do at this point would be to have a little break here in London. You don’t need to commit yourself to anything, you can think of it as a short-term thing for the moment. But please, just stay here for a while.”

  Sylvia looked at him gratefully. Contrary to her expectations, he had risen to the occasion and she decided she would express her gratitude by staying for a while. It would be as Jeremy said, a short-term move which would give her a chance to pull herself together a bit and work out where she really wanted to live.

  Outside the terminal building, they were shockingly engulfed in a squall of cold wind and rain which felt to Sylvia like an assault. She had temporarily forgotten that it could be so cold and she was astounded to see everyone around her stoically plodding ahead instead of running for cover. Jeremy did likewise so, when Sylvia stopped to find her jacket in her holdall, he left her behind. It was difficult to fight her way into the jacket in the wind and, as she was struggling, Jeremy turned round to see where she was and she realised from the look of alarm on his face that he feared she might have had second thoughts again and fled back into the terminal.

  She called, “Coming, coming” and started after him, the sleeves of her peach jacket which had looked cheerful when she bought it in Dubai but now looked, she feared, simply garish flapping brightly about her.

  Jeremy did not say much in the car park. She knew he was displeased with her and she thought it best to keep quiet.

  But as they were driving to the exit, Jeremy asked, too casually, “So what do you think of the new car?” And she exclaimed eagerly, “Oh my goodness, yes, it’s silver, isn’t it? And your old one was black.”

  Jeremy smiled wryly and Sylvia understood straight away that she had said the wrong thing; the new car must be much more modern and expensive than the old one but she had failed to notice. She thought with a pang that Jeremy’s father would certainly have noticed and complimented him on it right away. They would have discussed engines animatedly. She sat in disconsolate silence as they left the airport.

  Jeremy drove out onto the motorway, his expensive car accelerating impressively amid the morning traffic. Sylvia leaned back and sighed. She watched the ugly urban sprawl going by and tried to pretend their silence was companionable.

  Why was it, she wondered, that the approaches to London were so relentlessly dreary? She had driven into other cities – New Delhi, Riyadh – along wide avenues, past imposing monuments but London seemed simply not to care what newcomers thought of it.

  As Sylvia watched and struggled with her fatigue, the motorway rose up onto an elevated section and she remembered blearily that soon on the left-hand side she would see the familiar Lucozade advertisement which she had enjoyed seeing on her return for years. It was high up on the side of a tall building; it showed a brilliantly illuminated bottle of Lucozade pouring bright electric bubbles into a glass, filling it up again and again, perpetually. “Lucozade replaces lost energy” the slogan alongside it read. Sylvia, arriving back on home leave from Hong Kong or Delhi or Riyadh, would smile fondly at the Lucozade ad as if greeting a long-lost friend. But Jeremy’s expensive car sped past the place where the Lucozade ad should have been and Sylvia realised with a pang that it had gone, probably swept away because it was too simplistically old-fashioned in its message for today. Besides, she wondered, does anyone even drink Lucozade anymore? According to what she had heard from younger expats, nowadays something called Red Bull was all the rage. She turned to show Roger that the Lucozade ad had gone but of course Roger wasn’t there anymore either.

  Jeremy checked his watch for the hundredth time and tried to control his anger. Why on earth had he bothered to get to the airport on time, rushing away from Smita, leaving without breakfast? He could have predicted that his mother would be the last passenger off the flight from Dubai. They had been traipsing out for at least half an hour now, he recognised the airport security stickers on the bags but there was still no sign of his mother. What was she doing?

  Irritably, he imagined her plodding off the plane with her familiar flat-footed step, probably stopping for lengthy goodbyes to some member of the cabin crew whom she had befriended overnight while the poor wretch, at the end of an eight-hour flight, smiled through gritted teeth and longed to be off for a shower and some much-needed rest. Maybe the person delaying her was a fellow passenger, some extraordinary new bosom friend to whom she had poured out her woes over a night’s succession of gin and tonics. She would doubtless be in a pretty rough state when she emerged.

  Eventually Jeremy began to worry. Her flight had landed almost an hour ago. Surely she should be out by now? He left his prime spot by the railing at the front of the crowd and went to check the arrivals screen again. There was nothing about delays to baggage. Oh Christ, what had happened to her?

  He knew that friends had seen her off last night, waited with her at the check-in and only waved her off as she went through security. They had texted him to say she was on her way. But what if she hadn’t actually got on the flight? She might still be sitting in some sort of traumatised state in the international departure lounge in Dubai. How long would it take before someone noticed her?

  His father’s death had completely overwhelmed her. Jeremy had actually been taken aback by the intensity of her grief; the prolonged and public weeping, the howling, the constant prop of gin and tonics, the staggering. He had never given it much thought, he supposed, but he had expected a bit of a stiff upper lip. When had he ever seen any interaction between his parents to suggest otherwise?

  It was true he had been shocked himself by how profoundly his father’s death had shaken him. Considering they had never been close, considering Jeremy’s feelings about his father.

  He wondered if he should go and speak to someone from the airline. Or should he maybe call Smita and see if by any chance she had heard anything? No, if she had she would have called him and besides she mustn’t be worried. She was worked up enough already about his mother coming; he mustn’t add to her stress levels.

  As he ran through a checklist of gruesome possibilities, it dawned on him sickeningly just what he had let himself and Smita in for.

  Really, it made no sense that he should be standing here, waiting to welcome his mother and presumably to take responsibility for her. He had done his best to avoid her his entire adult life. But now, here he was waiting dutifully to meet her as if everything which had gone before, his childhood, her track record as his mother, had been completely different.

  He looked around him. Some of the other p
eople standing waiting were holding balloons and handmade banners and big bunches of flowers. They were craning forward, excitement and anticipation all over their faces. Every few minutes delighted cries would go up, small children would burrow forward under the railings and throw themselves onto some emerging passenger. Around him people were embracing and weeping. He wondered whether he was the only one waiting there who felt sick with apprehension. There was an East European guy standing alone a little way off who looked pretty edgy.

  Jeremy was distracted by the arrival of a large African family group, he couldn’t identify where they came from, tall, stately robed figures who proceeded to greet their waiting relatives by inclining their heads and solemnly touching foreheads. The waiting crowd fell silent as they watched the ritual. If only Jeremy’s reunion with his mother could be as low-key and dignified. But no, she would squawk and fumble and drop things, he would squirm like an adolescent and then later there would be Smita’s reaction to deal with too. It would all be horrible.

  Grimly, Jeremy went to the back of the crowd to check the arrivals screen one last time and when he turned round, his mother had finally appeared, lurching towards him looking desperate, pushing a trolley with a wonky, loudly squeaking wheel.

  As he made his way forward laboriously through the crowd, the weirdest thing happened. Suddenly, all the reunions with his mother from his childhood came back to him and he wasn’t thirty anymore but three or five or seven, running eagerly towards his lovely blonde mother and, however thrilled she acted to see him, he remembered how somehow she never seemed pleased enough.

  Smita looked down from her front window a dozen times but there was still no sign of the car. She supposed that at this point some women might have started to worry about motorway pile-ups but Smita immediately started to wonder what her mother-in-law might have done to delay them. The possibilities were of course endless; she might have lost something, started something, might have got herself into some sort of situation at passport control, with a porter, with another passenger. Whatever it was, no way would she have given a thought to all the delay and trouble she was causing them.

  Caught up in her own drama, she wouldn’t stop to think about Smita preparing a welcome lunch for her, however awful she was feeling, nor Jeremy standing waiting patiently for her while the price of the car park went up and up.

  Smita could have texted Jeremy of course to ask what the matter was but she didn’t like the idea of her mother-in-law getting involved in any form of communication between herself and Jeremy. His phone would beep and Jeremy would say innocently, “We’d better get a move on. Smita’s wondering where we are.”

  Sylvia would get all indignant and reply something like, “Well, we simply have to sort this out first, dear”, whatever it was, “Smita will simply have to wait.”

  Jeremy would go all red but of course he wouldn’t say anything. So, instead of understanding that Smita’s question had been prompted by concern, anxiety, Sylvia would straightaway assume that Smita was being bossy and demanding and she would deliberately do everything even more slowly than usual. Whereas, in actual fact, Smita had gone to a lot of trouble for her. She had taken the day off work, got up much earlier than she wanted to do the shopping and now she was settling down to prepare a full-scale Indian lunch because that was what Sylvia liked best even though she, Smita, couldn’t stand Indian cooking because it was so time-consuming and so unhealthy. The renewed realisation that her mother-in-law was coming to London to live made Smita suddenly feel even sicker than she already did. She laid down the sharp knife with which she was chopping herbs and made herself a cup of peppermint tea. She carried it across the big open-plan front room, sat down carefully on the new cream couch and stared miserably out of the window.

  She was so proud of their beautiful minimalist penthouse in one of the best parts of Belsize Park. Their builders had worked on it for a year before they moved in to transform it from the top half of a tall Victorian house into the striking ultra-modern space it was now. She and Jeremy had spent the best part of another year working to finish it off and furnish it. It was intolerably cruel that just when everything was finally almost ready and they were about to embark on a brand new phase of their life, her mother-in-law should come along to spoil it. Because Smita had no doubt at all that was what Sylvia was going to do. Not intentionally, of course; Sylvia was, God damn her, a good woman who just couldn’t help doing the wrong thing at every step. She would blunder into their beautifully organized lives and, with the best will in the world, she would wreak havoc. She always did.

  Whatever the circumstances, she had the capacity somehow always to put her foot in it. When she first saw Smita’s new kitchen for example, with its clean lines and post-industrial look, she had giggled and said it reminded her of her school science lab. Now that was obviously a totally trivial, insignificant thing but it had rankled and, ever since, Smita had rarely entered her kitchen without remembering it.

  Then there were the wretched flowers; every year, for the past three years since they had got married, Sylvia had sent Smita a bouquet on her birthday. “How sweet,” her friends said. “How lucky you are to have such a lovely mother-in-law.” But what they didn’t seem to grasp was that the flowers always came on the wrong day somehow or they were flowers which Smita didn’t like or to which she was allergic. Of course she knew that Sylvia hadn’t done it on purpose; the flowers were ordered online from Dubai. Jeremy told her she was being unreasonable; his mother meant well and how could she be expected to know Smita’s taste in flowers? Smita had to display the bouquets prominently or Jeremy would have taken offence but every year she would glare as she passed the vase, a heavily scented reminder of her mother-in-law in her front room.

  Now it was going to be her mother-in-law herself and, for the zillionth time, Smita felt it was more than she could bear. Especially with the other change that was on the way. How could she be expected to cope with the extra responsibility of having her recently widowed mother-in-law living around the corner?

  If it had only happened the other way round; if it had been Sylvia who had gone first and not Roger, how much easier that would have been. Well, for Smita of course, not for poor Jeremy, whose relations with his father had always been even worse.

  Although frankly his relations with both his parents had always been something of a puzzle to Smita. Her relations with her own parents, her mother, Naisha, and her father, Prem, were so much more straightforward somehow; she loved them, they drove her mad, they loved her, she drove them mad but, at the end of the day, they all took it completely for granted that they were a non-negotiable part of one another’s lives and they would no more try to distance themselves from one another than they would try to do without food or clothes or shelter. Jeremy called Smita’s family “claustrophobic”. But Smita had trouble recognizing Jeremy’s relations with his parents as family relationships at all.

  For a start, they had lived on different continents most of the time since Jeremy had been sent away to boarding school at the age of eleven. When they met, they were cold and distant and formal with one another. Jeremy and his father shook hands, never hugged. In some respects they didn’t even know one another all that well. If Smita asked Jeremy before a visit, “Does your Dad like fish?” or “Would your mother prefer tickets to the theatre or the ballet, do you think?” he would look blank. Smita knew exactly how much coriander her father liked in his favourite dish. Jeremy only spoke to his parents every few weeks, if that, and when they were all together, they always seemed strained and awkward.

  But at least Roger could be good fun, when he was in the right mood, with a drink in his hand and he definitely had a soft spot for his feisty daughter-in-law. Smita wouldn’t have minded nearly as much if it had been Roger, recently widowed, coming back to live out his days close to his only son. Except that would never have happened because, if it had been Roger coming back, he would have gone to live in the country somewhere, in a village with a nice
pub. He would have bought a large and shambling dog to keep him company and he would hardly have bothered them at all. Who knows, he might even have taken up with some merry widow in the village and started out on a whole new chapter of life. Whereas Sylvia –

  Smita heaved a huge sigh and abandoned her peppermint tea. She stood up and went over to the big window again and there were Jeremy and Sylvia down in the street below, busy unloading Sylvia’s luggage from the boot of the car and apparently already in the middle of some fractious disagreement. Why on earth had they brought the luggage here instead of leaving it at the hotel first? Had there been some awful last-minute change of plan? Smita panicked; she wasn’t having Sylvia staying here. No way.

  As she watched Jeremy and Sylvia, wondering what on earth was going on, Sylvia suddenly looked up and saw Smita’s face at the window and gave a great, enthusiastic wide wave with both arms as if they were dear long-lost friends or as if she were signalling to a taxiing aircraft. Smita waved back, just a little, with one hand and, straight away, Sylvia plunged back into the boot again as if she had been rebuffed.

  Smita retreated from the window. Now she felt sicker than she had all day. She simply could not face what was about to happen. But there was nothing at all she could do about it either, now that her final wicked prayer for a plane crash had gone unanswered.

  The intercom buzzed. Smita walked over and lifted the receiver and when she exclaimed, “Hello!” Jeremy’s voice answered rather shortly, “Hi, we’re here.”

  Smita dashed to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face. Never let Sylvia see her looking less than her best. She gave a last quick look around her apartment, saw that it was looking beautiful and went downstairs to hold the front door open welcomingly.