by Helen Harris
For that matter, had Roger been happy? As the years went by and Sylvia, with her horizons limited by her circumstances, grew more and more boring, prattling on about the house and the servants, her bizarre obsession with wildlife and, in spite of the swimming and the tennis, growing heavier and heavier? Poor Roger.
And why had they waited ten years to have a baby? So that Sylvia was in her mid-thirties when Jeremy was born and afterwards it was too late to have any more. Or at least that was what she had told Jeremy. Had she really had fertility problems? If so, she had certainly never said anything about it to Jeremy although, in that family, communication was virtually non-existent. Smita was always puzzled that Jeremy had never bothered to ask. Wasn’t it pretty odd to wait ten years to have children? Say there had been some sort of medical problem, not infertility, wasn’t it her right to know? What if for instance there had been a baby born with something terribly wrong with it who had died and it had all been hushed up, as people used to do in those days? Shouldn’t she be told?
Her anxiety brought her sharply back to the present. The morning was more than half gone and she had achieved nothing. My God, what was happening to her? Irritably, she pulled her mouse towards her and, with a brisk dip of her finger, brought her screen back to life. Seventeen new e-mails; her heart sank. She had a report to finish by the end of the week, meetings with clients that afternoon and the next morning and her in-tray was literally overflowing. She was losing her grip; that was what was happening.
At that moment, the strangest thing happened. Smita felt a faint flutter deep in her stomach. What was that? She sat back in her chair and placed her hand on her swelling stomach. She waited for a moment: nothing. She had imagined it. But, as she leant forward to take the contents of her in-tray in both hands and empty them on to her desk, she felt the fluttering sensation again, more strongly this time and she sat back sharply, wondering what on earth it was. Was something wrong? As she sat there, perfectly still, hoping that by not moving too much she could stop whatever inner upset was under way, it occurred to her that it might be the baby moving. No, surely not, wasn’t it too early? As if in response, she felt a third faint movement and this time because her hand was resting on her stomach she felt a subtle ripple pass under her hand. Smita was dumbstruck; oh my God, the baby was real.
She snatched for her mobile to call Jeremy but there was no answer. She checked her watch; of course, he was in his meeting, he would be in there until twelve. She had to tell someone but there was no way she could call her mother and tell her something like that in the middle of the office. Her mother would scream with delight, people would overhear, she would never hear the end of it. She looked around the room to see if there was anyone else she could confide in. Gemma? Sweet gay Mikey? What would she say? What might they say? And would they want to put their hands on her tummy to feel for themselves? Yuck. No, it would be wrong to tell anyone else something like that before Jeremy. She would just have to wait until noon. She should go outside and call him on the landing so no-one would overhear her being mumsy. She looked around the room again at all her colleagues working away, staring rapt at their screens, chattering excitedly into their phones and she felt a bit depressed that she didn’t really want to tell any of them what had just happened. She sat there for a while, feeling rather isolated and lonely, because of course the truth was she knew that none of them would really care.
Flat 3, 27 Overmore Gardens was not exactly Kensington. But then London in the early summer of 2004 – as Sylvia was fast discovering – was not exactly London either. Or at least not any version of London which Sylvia recognized.
Her move to Overmore Gardens had, predictably, triggered a frightful depression. As long as she stayed at the hotel, she could, to a certain extent, keep reality at bay. She could plough up and down the little swimming pool every day, greet the tremendously fat Middle Eastern man in his dressing gown in the lift, eat cardboard and ketchup sandwiches and pretend she was nowhere at all. She could pretend that Roger was still in Dubai rather than dead. Other than when she got into bed in the evenings and Roger was not there beside her and she knew he never would be again, she could pretend his absence was a perfectly benign, normal absence; he was away on a business trip, she was here on home leave on her own. It had been that way so often over the years. It was the easiest thing to create a cocoon of sweet illusion from which she was jolted several times a day, true but inside which she could cope.
Moving to a flat on her own destroyed that illusion brutally. It wasn’t true, as Jeremy and Smita had accused her shrilly, that she had rushed into it. She had thought it over sensibly for at least a week before making her move. And anyway, once you found a flat that you liked the look of, you couldn’t dither, you had to make up your mind quickly or someone else would take it. Her new estate agent, a girl called Freddy who was incidentally a much nicer person than Gid, told her so repeatedly. It wasn’t that she had fallen for Overmore Gardens. To tell the truth, she didn’t particularly want to live anywhere. But she could just about imagine herself living there – something about the solid dark red brick facades and the way the filtered city light fell through the tall windows – and if Jeremy and Smita couldn’t understand that, well that was simply too bad.
It was all their fault that she had felt obliged to move out of the hotel so quickly anyway. They kept reminding her how expensive it was. Although why that should be any concern of theirs, she couldn’t honestly see. If she wanted to spend her money on comfort and anonymity, why shouldn’t she? Jeremy and Smita were both earning good salaries, they didn’t need her to count the pennies, did they, even with the baby coming. And the fact they were both so ready to interfere, to bully her – in her sorry state! – into doing what suited them had made her run a mile frankly. If this was how they were starting out then, when the novelty wore off, heaven help her.
She endured a series of sorry lunches and suppers at their flat. Since Smita’s pregnancy had been made public, she was acting like the queen bee and even though she was coldly polite to her mother-in-law, she managed to make it quite clear that she found her the most colossal nuisance. As for poor Jeremy, caught between the demands of his selfish wife and his duty to his newly widowed mother, you could see him squirm and suffer through every meal. It put Sylvia off her food frankly.
One night, shortly before she made her move, Jeremy and Smita had come close to having a row in front of her. Fortunately, it was nothing to do with her. But it alarmed her to see how tense and snappish they both were. She felt uncomfortable sitting with them and she knew that her clumsy attempt to change the subject by talking for far too long about the chick-rearing habits of the Emperor penguins had got on both their nerves.
“You said,” Smita had started it. “You said you would talk to the Castellinis about the bikes the last time they left them in the hall and you didn’t and now they’re there again, did you notice?”
Jeremy nodded wearily. “I know but I don’t think we can realistically complain about it now, do you?”
“Whatever do you mean?” Smita snapped.
“Well Smi,” Jeremy replied, grinning, a mistake Sylvia thought, “in six months’ time we’re going to have a pram standing in the hall round the clock, aren’t we?”
Smita looked aghast. “I’m not leaving my baby’s pram down in that hall, thank you very much,” she said quickly, though Sylvia could have sworn she looked so horrified because this perfectly obvious fact had not occurred to her. “It would get all dusty. Anyone could drop anything into it; it would be unhygienic.”
“So you’re planning to lug the pram up and down four flights of stairs every time you go in or out, are you?” Jeremy asked.
Smita looked uneasy but answered, “If need be.”
“You mean, if I’m not there to do it for you?” Jeremy asked. Sylvia was pleased to note he could be combative if need be.
“Maybe we could build a cupboard for it in the hall?” Smita suggested. “You know, like
a small shed thing we could just push it in and out of. With a lock.”
Jeremy laughed. “You’ve been bitching about the Castellinis’ grandchildren’s bikes ever since we moved in here and now you expect them to let us build a whacking great cupboard in the front hall? Come on.”
“Firstly,” Smita said icily, “I don’t think I’ve been ‘bitching’ and secondly, I can’t imagine your poor mother wants to sit here listening to this.”
She got up huffily and went over to the open-plan kitchen to make coffee and, while she was busy making it, Sylvia valiantly tried to overcome the awkwardness by launching into her tirade about the Emperor penguins.
No wonder she had decided to move away from them. It was best for everybody, she was sure. Well, it was certainly the best thing for her and she felt it was only fair that she put her own needs first at a time like this. The distance she was putting between herself and her coming grandson did trouble her. Of course it did. But she kept telling herself that the further away she was, the longer each visit would last when he came to her. Look at Smita’s mother up in Leicester; she would doubtless have him for whole weekends and for every holiday.
Certainly, she had taken the little boy into account when she chose her flat. Overmore Gardens was a garden square and even though, within two minutes of leaving it, you were on the Earls Court Road which was crowded and squalid, the square itself looked respectable and safe. If she took the flat there, Freddy the estate agent explained to her excitedly, she would be given the key to the garden in the square and on a sunny afternoon she could sit out there and meet her neighbours and it would be lovely. Sylvia peered through the railings at the garden: a well-mown lawn, gravel paths, lilac. Deep in the greenery she spotted a flash of colour and, after craning awkwardly through the gate, she saw that it was a little children’s playground with swings and a see-saw and a climbing frame.
“Oh,” she exclaimed to Freddy. “Perfect.”
Freddy flashed a ready smile. “Lovely, innit?”
“No,” Sylvia explained. “No, I mean the little playground. I’m expecting my first grandchild, you see.”
Freddy squealed, “Oo-ooh!” She clutched Sylvia’s arm, half sharing her excitement and half steering her over the road to Number 27. “Well, he’ll love it here.”
The houses around the square were red brick Victorian mansion blocks. They looked like houses but actually they were all divided up into flats with six or eight brass bells at each front door. Each front door had a stained glass pane over it and each entrance had a porch with two great big pillars on either side, grand but grimy.
These were the sort of London homes which Sylvia remembered and, even though she still had trouble imagining herself living anywhere without Roger, she could just about imagine herself living here. Before going up the front steps, Sylvia already knew what the layout of the flat would probably be and what the stairwell would smell of – and she was right. She felt considerably cheered by this. Overmore Gardens could never be more than a staging post; it could never be home because, having moved around so much, Roger had long ago become her home. But she felt she could survive here. Unlike the pastel nonsense of Belsize Park with its transient population of generations of refugees, in Overmore Gardens Sylvia imagined she might eventually settle down – after a fashion. She might really get to know her neighbours and sit chatting with them in the square garden in the sunshine.
The flat was pretty much as she expected with a view of the garden square from the sitting room at the front and a view of other people’s back gardens from the two bedrooms at the back. It was on the first floor, which would be nice and easy with a baby or a toddler. The front hall was more than wide enough for a pram. Sylvia looked around carefully inside for dangers to a small child but couldn’t see any.
She walked around the flat for quite a while longer, trying hard to imagine living there, while Freddy fidgeted impatiently behind her. It was not too far for her friend Heather Bailey to come over occasionally from Knightsbridge. But when all was said and done, she knew she was going to be dreadfully lonely here. She went over to the front window, trying to ignore Freddy’s fidgeting and looked down at the garden in the square again.
At just that moment, a woman of about Sylvia’s age, she assumed a grandmother, was unlocking the gate to let a little boy in red trousers and a green hooded top into the garden. She locked the gate carefully behind her – well done, Sylvia thought – and followed the child hastily as he ran full tilt towards the playground. When they reached the swings, he turned to his grandmother pleadingly, his arms extended, and she bent and lifted him tenderly into a swing. First gently and then more vigorously, she began to push him. The little boy held on tight with both hands, threw his head back and laughed and laughed.
Sylvia turned to Freddy and, surprising herself by how firm and decisive she sounded, she said, “I’ll take it.”
Freddy squealed with delight. “Ooh Mrs Garland, you’ve made my week! My month in fact. Yay!” She rang someone on her mobile and started screeching excitedly about deals and contests and bonuses and someone being neck and neck with someone else. When she had finished, she turned to Sylvia and said, “Let’s dash back to the office and you can sign on it right away. Yay!”
Sylvia asked faintly, “Do I need to do it straight away? Is there any rush?”
“Well, you wouldn’t want someone else to get it, would you?” Freddy asked menacingly. “Not now you’ve fallen for it.”
“I wouldn’t say,” Sylvia answered slowly, “that I’ve exactly fallen for it. And I’m wondering if maybe I should let my son see it after all?”
“No way!” Freddy exclaimed. “You’re the one who’s going to be living here, Mrs Garland, not him! And after everything you’ve told me while we’ve been driving round these past two days, why would you? He’ll make you move into one of those crap places in Belsize Park, you know he will.”
“You’re right,” Sylvia agreed reluctantly. “Very well then, lead on Macduff. I suppose I’ll sign.”
She did wonder, after she’d signed the papers at the agency and Freddy had whooped and called out something about champagne to a couple of her colleagues, whether she should have given more thought to the issue of furniture. Her own furniture, all her worldly goods in fact, were on a container ship on their way from Dubai. They were not due to arrive in London for another couple of weeks. She had supposed she would simply put them into storage when they arrived care of the removal company because there was no way she could squeeze the contents of a large company villa into a small London flat. It would take time and thought to work out what she should keep and what she should get rid of. She had been in no fit state to even think about that when she was packing up and leaving Dubai. If it hadn’t been for their friends, Nigel and Nikki Palmer, if they had not come round and held her hand and supervised the removal men, she would never have got through it. Dear Nigel and Nikki whom they had first met years ago in India and who had somehow turned up years later in Saudi and then again in Dubai, always following them around, Roger joked.
To tell the truth, Sylvia was frightened of the arrival of the furniture too; she was frightened of what might happen to her when she saw Roger’s empty armchair, when she smelt Roger’s soap and aftershave and Roger’s sweat still haunting his possessions. She supposed the sea voyage might have blown it away but that would be even worse. So she was in no hurry to have her own things around her again. But she hadn’t really given much thought either to what it would feel like suddenly, at the age of sixty-two, to be back living in rented furnished accommodation again like a young thing of twenty.
She was sure it was that which had triggered her collapse. She had arrived at eleven o’clock on a sunny morning, as Freddy had promised, with her luggage from the hotel and her new set of house keys jangling in her bag. There were so many of them; she wondered how on earth she would get it straight. There was one for the street door, two for the flat door and a fourth grotesquely large
one which she supposed must be the key to the square garden. A pity it looked like something out of the chamber of horrors.
Sylvia had a respite of a few over-excited hours after she let herself in when she still thought she might be alright. She opened all the windows, sat down looking out over the garden and determinedly made herself a little shopping list. There was nothing at all in the kitchen: not a single teabag, not a sugar lump. She went boldly out to the Earls Court Road and bought herself tea, sugar, milk and, for some reason she couldn’t rightly explain, a packet of brightly iced zoo biscuits. She made herself a strong cup of tea and called Jeremy to break the news. It was not an easy phone call – Jeremy was outraged at what she had done – and afterwards she decided to go down into the garden to recover. It was lovely but empty on a Monday morning and as soon as the sun went in, Sylvia felt cold.
During the long afternoon, she unpacked her single suitcase, flinching at hanging her clothes in someone else’s wardrobe and debated again whether or not to telephone her sister Cynthia whom she hadn’t yet spoken to but she couldn’t make up her mind. She needed to be up to it to talk to Cynthia and, as the afternoon wore on, she felt less and less that she was.
When it began to get dark, Sylvia sensed herself disintegrating; her lacquer-hard self-control cracking into millions of tiny pieces. She was sitting in someone else’s armchair in someone else’s living room and she herself had disappeared entirely. She stayed like that, non-existent, all evening and all night, not drawing the curtains nor turning on the lights. She simply could not bear the thought of sleeping in someone else’s bed. Once or twice, she dimly remembered afterwards, she had got up to use someone else’s toilet but she had come back automatically to the armchair and lapsed into nothingness again. Strangely, throughout the interminable night, illuminated only by the sickly light of the street lamps in the square, she had not moaned or cried or wailed. It was not reticence, an awareness that she now had upstairs and downstairs neighbours. Crying or wailing would have been a protest; they would have meant she was resisting her fate. Whereas, instead, she had – briefly – succumbed to it. First, she had lost her husband of nearly forty years, she had lost her house and the warm climate and the far away sky she had grown used to. She had lost the familiar, forlorn sound of the plover’s cry from the lagoons and the secret rustle of the garden irrigation system springing into life at night. Against her better judgement, she had come to this cold, grey city and she had promptly cut herself off from her son, the only link to life she had left here. She had cast herself adrift and, that night, she went under.
