Sylvia Garland's Broken Heart Read online

  Smita felt annoyed, not for the first time, that Jeremy seemed to be adjusting to prospective parenthood so much more quickly and easily than she was. It was all very well for him, she thought rancorously, as she changed into a loose grey tunic dress with a sober black top underneath; he had so much less to lose.

  She had noticed the reactions at work when she broke the news of her pregnancy – and they hadn’t all been congratulatory by any means. There had been some quickly concealed irritation from her boss at the inconvenience but also perceptible glee from certain of her colleagues as if, with her announcement, Smita the front runner had voluntarily sidelined herself. Of course Smita intended to return to work at the first possible opportunity. There was no way she would ever be a stay-at-home mother. But still she realised that, from now on, her single-minded dedication to the Gravington Babcock consultancy would be forever in doubt.

  So losing her figure was the last straw really. The thought of buying maternity clothes filled her with gloom. She had imagined that she would manage somehow by leaving her jackets unbuttoned and wearing things that were stretchy and loose. But she understood now how ridiculously unrealistic that was. She was only sixteen weeks and already her trousers wouldn’t do up. There were still five months of this humiliating experience to go and it was obvious that by October, even if she starved herself, she would be as big as a bus. She stood sullenly on the crowded Tube, feeling sorry for herself and resentful. At least she didn’t show yet; if some slightly younger and much slimmer girl stood up to offer Smita her seat, she would simply die.

  By the time she got to her desk, she was in such a black mood she could barely concentrate. Of course, in all the to-do over changing clothes, she had not had time to get any breakfast and now she felt guilty about that too. She was too disciplined normally to succumb to the ten thirty round of muffins and croissants but today when one of the secretaries called, “I’m going over to Starby’s. Does anyone fancy anything?” Smita answered “Me please” and of course the stupid girl seized on it and joked loudly, “Ooh, eating for two, are we?”

  Smita replied stonily, “A skinny decaf latte and a low-fat muffin please.” She was pleased to see the girl looking embarrassed as she collected Smita’s money.

  Smita ate the muffin and drank the coffee without enjoyment. How was it that so much seemed to be slipping out of her control suddenly? Over the past few months, there was an endless succession of things which hadn’t gone the way she wanted.

  It had all started of course with Roger’s sudden death and then her mother-in-law’s return to the UK. The timing had been simply gruesome. Smita had already suspected she might be pregnant for about ten days. But the awful shock of Roger’s completely unexpected death – while inspecting a building site in terrible heat – and then the gathering of the family for the funeral had made Smita put off a pregnancy test. She didn’t want her proud announcement to be overshadowed by everyone else’s sadness. She felt a secret last minute reluctance too. She had gone ahead with “trying for a baby” because it was what one did after a couple of years of marriage and everyone else – Jeremy, her parents – seemed so keen. But privately she was hoping it would take much longer than this to happen. So in a way it was good to have an excuse to put off finding out.

  But, the morning after the funeral, she could bear to wait no longer and she used the testing kit which had been lying ready in a drawer. It came up positive so quickly that she had no time to get nervous. She stared at the two inky blue lines in the little window and felt horrified. What had she done? She hadn’t even made up her mind yet if she wanted children.

  Hurriedly, she went to find Jeremy, knowing that his excitement and enthusiasm would be contagious. He was sitting at his desk, looking down at a great confusion of papers. “It’s amazing,” he said, without looking up, “how much there is to do when someone dies.”

  Smita said, “Turn around and look at me and, please, for a moment, don’t think about your father.”

  Jeremy spun his chair round and looked at Smita in disbelief. “Hang on a minute Smi, we only buried him yesterday. What’s that you’re holding?”

  Smita clasped her hands, one of which was still holding the pregnancy test wand, behind her back. “Concentrate,” she instructed him. “Promise me you’re not thinking about your father or the funeral or the cemetery or anything sad.”

  Jeremy raised his eyebrows. “This had better be good.”

  Smita produced the pregnancy test wand from behind her back and leapt into the air, flourishing it and crying, “Ta-dah! I’m pregnant!”

  She came to a standstill and waited for Jeremy’s reaction. But, for a few moments, he simply didn’t react; he sat motionless in his chair and stared at her with no perceptible emotion on his face at all.

  “Well?” Smita prompted him, hurt and uncomprehending. “Aren’t you going to say anything? Aren’t you pleased?”

  Jeremy stood up with a major effort as if he were ill or exhausted and came over to her without saying anything. He put his arms around her and held her silently until she pushed him away impatiently to look up into his face and ordered him, “Say something.” Then she saw he was crying.

  She was devastated; Jeremy never cried. He hadn’t even cried at his father’s funeral when she felt he really should have. It took only a second for Smita’s shock to turn to anger. “What’s the matter?” she demanded. “I thought you wanted me to have a baby?”

  Jeremy took her hands tenderly in both of his. “Smi, Smi, I’m incredibly happy,” he sobbed. “It’s just I’m incredibly sad too.”

  In that instant, Smita understood that nothing was going to turn out how she had intended. From the moment of her conception, her baby daughter was part of Jeremy’s and Sylvia’s and Roger’s story too and not, as she had fondly imagined for the past couple of years, exclusively her own. Later, when she had a chance to think the whole messy situation over, it made her feel – slightly – as if the minute being inside her was partly an alien; not totally her own flesh and blood but all sorts of other people’s relative too. She didn’t like this feeling which she suspected was unnatural and she worried that actually she was not cut out to be a mother at all.

  For the days before and after the funeral, Sylvia had stayed with her friend Heather Bailey in Knightsbridge. Thank goodness she wasn’t staying with them because, forgetting Sylvia’s grief-stricken state, Smita would have found it intolerable to have to share the first days of her pregnancy with her mother-in-law. Besides she wanted to be – quietly, tactfully – happy and how would that have been possible with Sylvia sobbing and hiccuping all over the place? To Smita’s dismay, Jeremy was pretty miserable himself which she hadn’t really anticipated – he and Roger had always had so little to do with each other, frankly – and even though he had risen to the occasion superbly after her announcement – once he had stopped crying – with flowers and a gift, he was still much more subdued than she would have wanted after such amazing news.

  So it had gone on; in due course, Sylvia had returned to Dubai, clutching her ninety-fourth gin and tonic, to pack up her life there and sort out her affairs. She hadn’t been back for a month when Jeremy told Smita, grim-faced, that his mother had decided to move back to London. Smita had been so outraged that for a few moments she could barely speak. How could this happen? How could he let this happen? Then she had started raging and crying and she had worked herself up into such a state that Jeremy had told her to calm down; it was bad for the baby.

  “Bad for the baby?” she had shouted indignantly. “It’s bad for the baby to have your mother announcing she’s coming to live here.” And she had run upstairs and flung herself face-down on their beautiful huge bed and wept.

  Jeremy had followed her, wretchedly unhappy, red in the face and perspiring. “Smi, listen to me, Smi” he pleaded. “I’ll deal with her. She’ll be my responsibility. And we’ll contain her; we’ll make sure she does everything on our terms.”

  Smita rolled ov
er and threw her husband a scornful look. “Contain her?” She had repeated sarcastically. “What are you talking about? You can no more contain your mother than the Niagara Falls.”

  She had been rather pleased with this pronouncement which had effectively silenced Jeremy.

  But it gave her no pleasure of course when she was proved utterly right the minute Sylvia stepped off the plane some six weeks later. They had everything worked out, they had talked about it for weeks; she would stay for two or three days in the hotel down the road, they would find her a convenient service apartment, make sure she didn’t rush into the purchase of some crackpot property for at least three months and then they would aim to have her settled somewhere within easy reach but off their backs before the baby arrived in October. But Sylvia, of course, had insisted on going her own sweet way and she had ridden roughshod over all their thoughtful plans.

  Looking back over the last few weeks as she sat at her desk, unable to concentrate on her work, Smita shuddered at the sheer chaotic unpredictability of it all. She had complained to her own mother on the phone that it was like having a rampaging rhino let loose in your life and her mother had giggled and then chided her for being uncharitable. Her own parents’ uncomplicated joy at her good news, accompanied in her father’s case by a great deal of praying, went a long way towards making up for all the death-related complications on Jeremy’s side. But nothing could really compensate for the massive black cloud of Sylvia’s presence in London.

  Smita could forgive Sylvia a number of things. After all, she was newly widowed and Smita would have to be pretty unfeeling not to make allowances. But even so, she found herself outraged by Sylvia’s doings every single day.

  Even though he had sworn he wouldn’t, Jeremy had gone and told his mother about the baby the day she arrived. Three days later, Sylvia had come round to have tea with Smita and, after hugging her uncomfortably close, she had spent the whole time telling her how simply marvellous it was for her, Sylvia, that this should have happened at this tragic juncture of her life.

  “Forget about me,” Smita had raged later at Jeremy, “and how awful it might be for me to have my pregnancy linked like that to someone’s death. Honestly, she went on as if the baby was just a replacement, a substitute for Roger.” She stopped when she saw Jeremy wince.

  What she didn’t tell him, because she wasn’t at all sure how he would react, was that the very worst part of the visit had come towards the end when Sylvia had taken it upon herself to tell Smita what a wonderful grandmother she would be and all the wonderful things she would do with the baby. ‘Well,’ Smita had thought to herself viciously, ‘forget it.’ There was no way, no way she was ever letting Sylvia go off anywhere with her baby. If Sylvia was lucky, if she behaved, she could sit the baby on her knee for a short while – but only if Smita or Jeremy were close at hand – and she could buy her presents. That was it. It made Smita quite angry in fact, recalling Jeremy’s stories of his own childhood and what a distant, uninvolved mother Sylvia had been. Now here she was, trying to make up for it by becoming much too involved with her granddaughter.

  Then there had been all that awful business with the hotel and Sylvia’s refusal to move into any of the perfectly nice flats which Jeremy had found for her. She had stayed at the hotel for three weeks, three weeks, running up enormous bills as if money were no object. And then she had virtually turned her back on them.

  When Smita remembered Sylvia’s offhand phone call, announcing that she had moved to Kensington, she still felt furious. Of all the thoughtless and hurtful things Sylvia had ever done, that was the worst. No, it wasn’t. Even back in Saudi, the first time Jeremy had taken Smita to visit his parents, the signs had been there. Of course, Smita had taken no notice then, she had given Sylvia the benefit of the doubt. Because, even though she had been privately pretty sure that she and Jeremy were going to get married, she had assumed that she would never have very much to do with her blundering rhinoceros of a mother-in-law. She lived in Riyadh after all.

  There had been that excursion to the old ruined city in the desert: she and Jeremy, Sylvia and Roger and those ghastly friends of theirs, Nikki and Nigel Palmer who had treated Smita as if she were someone really exotic, newly arrived from the Amazon rainforest. She was from Leicester, for Christ’s sake.

  Just as they were all getting ready to leave, in two cars, Sylvia had suggested, “Let’s do girls and boys, shall we?” And Nikki had exclaimed, “Ooh yes, let’s” and even though Smita had looked desperately at him, Jeremy had blushed but said nothing and, as a result, Smita had been stuck in one car with Sylvia and Nikki while Jeremy suffered separately with his father and Nigel. Of course it was petty, it was insignificant and it was not a long drive. But it showed Sylvia’s game so clearly; right from the start, she had weighed her own wishes against Smita’s and she had made sure that, thanks to Jeremy’s weakness, she won every time.

  Then there had been that horrible incident right before the wedding when Sylvia had suddenly taken it into her head to warn Jeremy off Smita, belatedly to raise the subject of ‘cultural differences’. Jeremy had only told Smita about it long afterwards, as if he had been worried that it might scare her off. It didn’t scare her but it did harden her heart against Sylvia and it also made her wonder apprehensively what Sylvia might have in store for her, having failed on that all-important issue to make Jeremy do what she wanted.

  What she turned out to have in store were insincere good deeds, Girl Guidey English doing her duty by her daughter-in-law and, even though Smita should probably have been grateful – it could have been so very much worse – she resented every insincere good deed, every dutiful charade. While in time she had grown quite fond of boozy old Roger, as far as she was concerned, Sylvia could never ever make good.

  So really Smita should not have been at all surprised by Sylvia’s move. It was utterly in character; high-handed, inconsiderate, impervious to other people’s feelings. But still it had shocked her. After all that they had done for her, after all the time poor Jeremy had spent traipsing around apartments with her, without a word to either of them, she had suddenly gone off on her own and signed a year’s lease on a flat off Kensington High Street. It was so mean. Now Jeremy was going to have to waste hours and days travelling to and fro across London to visit her. If he went at the weekend, then their weekends would be spoilt; if he went in the week, he would be worn out. There was no way she was going to go; if Sylvia wanted to see her, let her make the effort.

  And what were they supposed to do when the baby came? Put her in her little car seat and drive, doubtless with the baby screaming her head off, halfway across London and back? When Smita’s own mother had already said, several times, that she would come down from Leicester every single weekend that she could to help out with the baby? No way. By her selfish move, Sylvia had simply reduced her likely involvement in her granddaughter’s life. And, who knew, maybe she had actually done it on purpose? She had never been that interested in her own son when he was small, had she? What if all this fuss about the marvellous timing of her first grandchild’s arrival was just another goody-goody charade?

  When they had asked her, in bewilderment, why on earth she had moved so far away from them, she had replied that it was because she had been young and happy in Kensington and she wanted to live there again. But, according to Jeremy, his parents had lived in Chelsea when they were first married, not in Kensington, so what sense did that make? And, besides, given that Roger was now dead and that Sylvia was grieving, wouldn’t it have been better to try and make a fresh start somewhere completely new?

  In any case, Smita was not sure she bought Sylvia’s version of their happily ever after marriage. From what she had observed over the past five years or so, Sylvia and Roger’s marriage fell far short of the dream ticket in several respects. Sylvia had only been twenty-two when they got married; what kind of a choice could she have made? It would have been a choice born of convention; getting married young was what
nice girls did back then. They didn’t go to university or get high-powered jobs in management consultancy – which must explain Sylvia’s jealousy of Smita, of course. Smita was young and attractive, successful and smart, she was slim too; no wonder Sylvia had it in for her. Sylvia hadn’t had any of Smita’s opportunities. She had gone straight from school to a secretarial course, she had done a couple of lowly typing and coffee-making jobs; while doing the second or third one, she had met Roger, her boss and that had been that.

  A few years later, Roger’s career had taken them off to Hong Kong and then, for the rest of her adult life, Sylvia had been an ex-pat wife, a jolly good ex-pat wife who kept a lovely home and threw great parties and did her bit of voluntary work. But that was it; she had never properly worked again, she had moved from country to country, wherever Roger’s work had taken them and, apart from swimming and tennis and coffee mornings, she had had no life of her own at all. How could she have been happy with that?

  True, Roger must have been good-looking when he was young – before he put on weight – and fun too. In the beginning, they probably loved each other. But Roger was a ladies’ man. How long had he been content with his young, goody-goody wife? Smita had often observed him chatting up attractive women. She had been on the receiving end of his charms once or twice herself. Even in later life, when he had grown heavy and red-faced, Roger was still a handsome man. There must have been other women, must have; on business trips, when Sylvia was back in England on her long home leaves, visiting Jeremy at boarding school. Maybe Sylvia, with her English stiff upper lip, had chosen to turn a blind eye, told herself that all men were basically beasts, what could you expect? But had she been happy? That Smita found hard to believe.