Sylvia Garland's Broken Heart

by Helen Harris

  At some point, the sky lightened and the traffic noise started up again outside but still Sylvia didn’t move. If during that lost time she thought at all, she thought that if she stayed perfectly still, didn’t move, didn’t eat, didn’t drink, she might actually fade away and that would be the best thing for everybody.

  But as the morning crept along, she became increasingly conscious of two things which contradicted her non-existence; she had pins and needles in her legs and she was really dreadfully thirsty. Eventually, the twin discomforts got the better of her and she hauled herself up out of the armchair and staggered to the bathroom. She was shocked when she saw herself in the bathroom mirror; she looked an absolute fright. But she also still looked pretty substantial despite her haggard expression and her wild hair. It would take forever for her actually to fade away.

  She plodded to the kitchen feeling light-headed and slightly giddy. What she needed desperately was a cup of tea.

  While the kettle was boiling, she caught sight of the packet of zoo biscuits, lying unopened on the kitchen table. She remembered her grandson and she felt most awfully guilty; how could she have forgotten all about him and been planning to fade away? He would need her; he would need a good, solid, reliable local grandmother to take him to the zoo and to the Natural History Museum, to matinees and maybe, when he was old enough, for bucket and spade holidays at the seaside. If Smita and Jeremy caught the slightest suggestion of fragility, of instability, they would never let her near him. She had to drink her tea, pull herself together and go out and buy some proper food. Never mind if she felt hollow, if it seemed that she was a perfectly empty Sylvia-shaped vessel going about her business. She could keep that feeling to herself; no one need know. What she ought to do was not sit slumped for hours and hours in the armchair but get washed and dressed and go out and grapple with London.

  About an hour later she opened the flat door, still feeling distinctly shaky and found an extremely small Filipino woman wearing a lime green top and fuchsia pink trousers standing outside on the landing apparently about to ring the bell. They both looked at each other in frank astonishment and then the Filipino woman recited the following improbable announcement. “Mrs Rosenkranz downstairs would like to meet you. When would you be free to come and have tea with her?”

  Sylvia hoped she still had a voice to reply. She cleared her throat and croaked, “Well, I couldn’t manage today.”

  “Tomorrow?” asked the Filipino woman.

  Sylvia said, “Um.”

  “Next day?” shot back the small figure who had obviously been instructed not to return without Sylvia’s acceptance.

  “What time?” Sylvia asked vaguely, playing for time.

  “Tea,” the woman snapped. “Four pm.”

  Sylvia looked down at her, marvelling through her wooziness that someone so small and delicate-looking could be so forceful and weakly she murmured, “Fine. Thank you.”

  “So,” the woman repeated firmly, “day after tomorrow. Four pm. Mrs Rosenkranz. Flat one.”

  “Yes,” Sylvia agreed faintly. “The day after tomorrow. I understand. Thank you so much.”

  The woman turned and stamped back downstairs, not bothering with any niceties and Sylvia locked the apartment, fumbling dreadfully with the keys and followed her downstairs.

  As the big front door fell shut behind her, it occurred to her to read the names beside the brass bells. In her deluded sleepless state, she half expected to find a Guildenstern there too. But of course there wasn’t; the other residents of 27 Overmore Gardens were: Martinez, Ho, Irani, Rosenkranz and Smith. Her own name plate was of course blank which was as it should be since she didn’t exist anymore. Mentally, she slapped herself on the wrist and, swaying slightly, set off for the Earls Court Road.

  Two minutes later, leaving the relative peace and quiet of Overmore Gardens, Sylvia could not have said which city in the world she was in if it had not been for the double-decker buses and the Underground signs. Earls Court Road swarmed with people of every colour and kind and all of them going about their business at the top of their voices. The road was choked with traffic: buses, taxis, vans, all inching forward bad-temperedly, hooting and abusing one another as uninhibitedly as in any Third World city. Sylvia stopped on the crowded pavement, teetering slightly and tried to make sense of the vivid, raucous maelstrom. How on earth could this be London?

  Over the past couple of weeks, she had watched a muted grey city from her hotel room and through the windows of a succession of cars and taxis. Now she found herself plunged into an Eastern bazaar. The day before she had not gone far; she had found a little Indian corner shop the minute she turned out of Overmore Gardens but today, mysteriously, the shop had disappeared. Had she maybe left the square in a different direction without noticing?

  She blundered along for a little while past poisonous-smelling take-away food outlets, mobile phone shops and coffee bars, until she came to a rather run-down-looking food store called the Bazak International Food Centre. It would have to do. She went inside and helped herself to a warped wire basket. She breathed in a smell of spices, cigarettes and sickly sweet perfume and immediately she was back in the Middle East. In a fuddled trance, she went around the shop. She had been intending to buy sliced bread for toast, Cheddar cheese and Marmite, scones maybe and a big bag of toffees for consolation. She was completely taken aback when she arrived at the till with a basket of pitta bread, olives, a plastic tub of hummus, stuffed vine leaves and a tray of sticky pastries wrapped in cling film. As far as she was aware, she hadn’t even seen any sliced bread or Cheddar or Marmite. For a confused moment, Sylvia worried whether she could pay in pounds.

  She made her shaky way back to Overmore Gardens with her two carrier bags emblazoned with the slogan of a Middle Eastern airline. The Indian shop had somehow reappeared at the corner. Sylvia remembered that he sold sliced bread and cheese. Well, it was too bad; she couldn’t carry any more now. She managed the front door of Number 27 and took a good look at the front door of Flat 1 as she went past. It looked much more solid than the front door of her own flat; panelled wood with a brass knocker and a brass peephole and a substantial well trodden doormat. Mrs Rosenkranz must have lived here for a long time.

  After she had put her shopping away and made another cup of tea, Sylvia saw that it was only half past eleven. She still had the rest of the day, all of the next day and most of the day after before her tea with Mrs Rosenkranz. During that time, she supposed that she would not speak to a soul. Jeremy was in a sulk and would not ring until the weekend. Again, she thought about ringing Cynthia. But now she most definitely wasn’t up to it; her ears were ringing and in the silence of the flat, she could hear the magnified beat of her own heart thumping erratically away. She was worn out. Ignoring the dubious pink bed cover, she lay down on the bed in the bigger of the two bedrooms and fell into an exhausted sleep.

  When she woke, it was half past four. She was not sure where she was nor what day it was. As she lay there, painfully reassembling her new reality, a most extraordinary thing happened; in the room next door, she heard Roger clear his throat. She didn’t move a fraction and waited for him to do it again. But he didn’t and all the rest of that day she waited in anguish for some sign of him. Late in the evening, when she was in the kitchen putting some pitta bread and olives on a plate to nibble in front of the television, she heard from the sitting room one of the deep, excessive grunts of exertion which Roger made as he levered himself out of a deep arm chair. But of course when she dashed to the living room doorway, scattering olives, there was no one there.

  All the emotions which she had managed to keep at bay in the hotel rose up and overwhelmed her. Roger had been part of her life, an immense and intrinsic part of her life, for close on forty years and his absence was as ghastly and palpable as a missing limb. He was gone but Sylvia could still feel his presence all the time.

  In the empty flat in Overmore Gardens, she now began disconcertingly to hear him too, eve
n though she knew perfectly well he wasn’t there. In the silence Roger started to make all those shockingly loud, manly noises which used to startle her when he was still alive; the grunts as he rose from his armchair, the resounding groans of exasperation as he read his newspaper or tried to open a recalcitrant tin or jar, the enormous sneezes and throat-clearings which exploded without warning, the unashamed bass farts. Although they usually turned out to be something else – a noise from the street or the pipes or wishful thinking – they still shocked Sylvia because, like the amputated limb, after all Roger wasn’t actually there.

  Four o’clock on Thursday afternoon came round at last. The ghost of Sylvia Garland crept down the stairs to the ground floor, clutching a small bunch of sorry flowers purchased that morning on the Earls Court Road. If asked, Sylvia would not have been able to give an account of how she had spent the past two days. She knew she had slept more than once during the day and had been up a good deal at night. She had, to her brief but intense delight, observed urban foxes playing in the square garden in the small hours. She had made more lists: lists of everything and everyone she would need to create the semblance of a life for herself here. But the lists lay discarded around the sitting room. Some of the items on them might be straightforward enough to acquire. Others might take years or prove simply impossible: a circle of like-minded female friends, a birdwatching companion.

  She had done her level best not to go off the deep end again. She had washed, dressed and forced down small regular meals. Although she could not find the consoling food she craved on Earls Court Road – Heinz tomato soup, Ambrosia creamed rice, Bourbon biscuits – it seemed easier to find okra there than frozen peas, pomegranates more likely than prunes.

  She tried not to be led astray by Roger’s noises. It was perfectly obvious that they were an illusion of some sort, produced by either her hearing or the plumbing. She resisted the attractive but nonsensical notion that Roger’s presence was somehow haunting Flat 3, 27 Overmore Gardens. If Roger was going to haunt anywhere, she thought, surprising herself by her sudden rancour, it would probably be a certain flat in Pimlico, once inhabited by a Miss PeeJay Clarke.

  Sylvia had not given much thought to Mrs Rosenkranz. She was too preoccupied by her own troubles and by the looming prospect of Sunday lunch in Belsize Park with a very angry Jeremy and Smita. It was only when the time came to spruce herself up and venture downstairs that she began to wonder who her downstairs neighbour actually was.

  The door to Flat 1 was answered promptly by the little Filipino woman who didn’t look particularly friendly or welcoming. She led Sylvia briskly down a narrow hallway into a sitting room which bore a close resemblance to Sylvia’s except this one was excessively furnished and overfilled with so much clutter that Sylvia was straightaway worried she would bump into something or knock something over.

  In the midst of all the furniture sat a very old white-haired lady in a high-backed sage green chair. She greeted Sylvia with a sweet smile of welcome and said to her “Come in my dear, come in. Welcome to Overmore Gardens!” and it seemed to Sylvia she could detect just the trace of a German accent.

  Sylvia fumbled her way forward through the furniture, thinking about bulls and china shops. She took the old lady gingerly by the hand and shook it delicately for, close-up, she looked very frail.

  “Lovely to meet you,” Sylvia said loudly and clearly. “I’m Sylvia Garland, I’m your new upstairs neighbour.”

  “I know my dear,” Mrs Rosenkranz replied brightly. “I know. Your estate agent told Imelda and Imelda told me. And I was absolutely tickled because, do you realise, we share the same name?” She giggled naughtily and Sylvia looked at her blankly, unable to work out the joke.

  “Rosenkranz means a garland of roses,” the old lady explained, beaming. “You know as in ‘ring-a-ring of roses’” – she sang it – “so when I heard a Mrs Garland was moving in upstairs, I laughed and laughed. What next, I thought, a Guirlande or a Girlanda on the top floor?”

  “Goodness,” Sylvia said faintly. “You do speak a lot of languages, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” Mrs Rosenkranz said simply. “I do.” She moved on quickly. “So tell me, my dear, where are you from?”

  Sylvia was rather taken aback by the question since that was precisely what she was about to ask Mrs Rosenkranz.

  Before she could answer, the Filipino maid, whom she now understood to be Imelda, came back in and asked bluntly, “Tea?”

  It seemed to Sylvia a pained expression passed briefly across Mrs Rosenkranz’s face but she answered courteously, “Yes please Imelda, that would be very nice.” She turned back to Sylvia and asked her eagerly, “So tell me.”

  Sylvia had not for a moment intended to pour all her troubles into Mrs Rosenkranz’s aged lap. It was quite the wrong way round when Mrs Rosenkranz was visibly a very old person living on her own who had probably invited Sylvia down at least partly for company and maybe in the hope of future neighbourly acts. But the combination of Sylvia’s grief and the previous days spent without talking to anyone was too much for her and as she opened her mouth to answer, her eyes filled with tears.

  “This is rather a difficult time for me, I’m afraid,” she began bravely, scrabbling urgently for a hanky in her bag. “I mean, this seems a very nice building in a very nice street. But, you see, I’m not really meant to be here.”

  She wiped her tears and blew her nose thoroughly. She hoped she hadn’t perturbed old Mrs Rosenkranz. But Mrs Rosenkranz looked if anything pleased. “Nor am I,” she answered enigmatically.

  Sylvia, naturally, had no idea what she meant. She even wondered, for a moment, if Mrs Rosenkranz was alright in the head. She pulled herself together and explained shakily, “I haven’t lived in England for thirty-five years, you see. My husband and I lived overseas; first in Hong Kong, then for a long time in India, then more recently in Saudi Arabia and in Dubai.”

  Mrs Rosenkranz clasped her papery old hands and exclaimed, “How marvellous! India! Hong Kong! What stories you must have.”

  Sylvia knew that it would be polite, at this point, to oblige with an anecdote or two: a little local colour, some camels and junks. But something seemed to be taking place over which she had no control; something prompted by the gentle, cushioned atmosphere of Mrs Rosenkranz’s living room and by old Mrs Rosenkranz herself, sitting so small and wizened in the depths of her great green armchair. Sylvia couldn’t stop herself.

  “My husband died in January,” she blurted out. “Suddenly. I had to move back here on my own. My son – and his wife – live in Belsize Park. They wanted me to live near them but I – we –” she faltered again, fearing more tears and as she did battle with her emotions, Imelda returned pushing a laden tea trolley and scowling.

  Mrs Rosenkranz leant forward and whispered, “I am so sorry, my dear.” She instructed Imelda where to park the trolley but let her pour the tea and hand out the cups. On the trolley were a Battenberg cake, iced biscuits and cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off.

  After Imelda had done her duty, she left the room again and Sylvia gamely tried to make up for her outburst by enthusing about the cucumber sandwiches.

  Mrs Rosenkranz took no notice. “I gave up believing in a higher power a long time ago,” she said firmly. “But it is hard not to imagine that you and I have been brought together.”

  Sylvia shifted uncomfortably in her seat. Again, she wondered whether the old lady was quite right in the head. She waited for an explanation but none was forthcoming.

  Instead Mrs Rosenkranz leant forward and said consolingly, “At least you are fortunate to have a son living in the same city. Any grandchildren?”

  Sylvia brightened. “Well, none yet,” she said eagerly, “but there’s one on the way.”

  “Wonderful!” exclaimed Mrs Rosenkranz, clasping her hands again. “Wonderful. So, if all goes well, you will soon have a little family here. That will be marvellous for you.”

  Sylvia asked, rather clumsily, she f
eared, “Do you have any family close by?”

  Mrs Rosenkranz’s face fell. “Alas no,” she answered. “That is why I have to rely on Imelda. I have a son and a daughter. But they both live a long way away; my son lives in New York and my daughter lives – somewhere else. I have five grandchildren but I only see them very rarely I’m afraid.”

  Sylvia felt a complicated pang of guilt and fear. She could always move back to North London when the lease on this flat expired.

  “Do they come and stay with you sometimes?” she asked.

  “Only very occasionally,” Mrs Rosenkranz replied sadly. “My son and my daughter-in-law are both very busy and they only get very short holidays in America, you know. My daughter has a fear of flying and she cannot bear to put her children on a plane. I used to go and visit them but with time it gets more and more difficult.” She sighed.