by Helen Harris
Sylvia tried desperately to think of something cheering to say. “Do you have any photos?” she asked brightly
“Oh, photos,” Mrs Rosenkranz said dismissively. “I have hundreds and hundreds of photos. And even videos. They send them on the computer nowadays. Imelda helps me to watch them. But you can’t talk to a photo, can you?” She shrugged. “Luckily, I still have my little brother who comes to see me from time to time. Little, I call him little, he’s almost seventy now, my baby brother. But he lives in Northwood. It’s a whole expedition to get here. Still, enough of me. Tell me, my dear, how you are planning to get settled here. Do you have a plan?”
“No,” Sylvia said weakly. “No, I don’t. And I think that may be the problem.”
Much later, back on her own in her silent flat, Sylvia was still aware of old Mrs Rosenkranz downstairs as if she were a light source, radiating through the floorboards. Sylvia had ended up staying for nearly two hours, far longer than she had intended to and by the end Imelda was standing in the corner chafing. Sylvia had somehow or other told Mrs Rosenkranz all sorts of things: about her garden in Delhi and how Smita was nothing like a real Indian; about the endless sunny tedium of ex-pat life in Dubai, from which her bird-watching forays to the lagoon with Nigel Palmer were her only escape and how hard it was to adjust to London’s low grey sky when, for years, you had been used to a faraway, clear blue one. She had learnt remarkably little about Mrs Rosenkranz, probably because she had spent so long blathering away about herself.
Trying to put together the few fragments of information which Mrs Rosenkranz had revealed, Sylvia wondered if the old lady had not been deliberately evasive. Was it normal to spend two hours talking to someone and leave, knowing so little about them? She had told Sylvia virtually nothing about her life before she moved to Overmore Gardens in 1972 even though Sylvia had been so forthcoming herself. Sylvia could recall all sorts of gaps and unspoken elements in their conversation which, if she had been in less of a state, she would have puzzled over. She wondered whether maybe something absolutely awful had once happened to Mrs Rosenkranz, something which you would not want to divulge on first acquaintance and which might make Sylvia’s ordinary everyday woes seem frankly rather humdrum.
A couple of days later, she met Mrs Rosenkranz and Imelda in the street and discovered one thing which the old lady had concealed from her. Imelda was pushing Mrs Rosenkranz along in a wheelchair; she couldn’t walk. Sylvia remembered that Imelda had done everything for her; handed round the tea things and cleared everything away. Mrs Rosenkranz hadn’t stood up when Sylvia arrived or when she left. But she had somehow managed to avoid spelling out that her legs didn’t actually work anymore.
Sylvia greeted them cheerily. She exclaimed, “Isn’t it a beautiful day again?” She saw Mrs Rosenkranz looking at her shrewdly to gauge how forced her cheerfulness really was.
“Where are you off to, my dear?” asked the old lady. She and Imelda were on their way back home from the doctor’s.
Sylvia answered untruthfully that she was off to Kensington High Street to join the library but, having told the lie, she did then feel obliged to make it come true a few days later. In actual fact, she was off on a wild goose chase to Hamleys, an utterly outrageous thing to do when her daughter-in-law was not yet even six months pregnant. But thinking about her grandson was the only thing which gave her any pleasure and planning for him seemed to be the only appealing activity. She had been seized by a sudden urge to see Dinky toys again and Hornby trains and Meccano. She had no idea if they were even manufactured anymore but she knew that if they were to be found anywhere, it would be at Hamleys. So she had abandoned a long, dithery, apologetic letter she was writing to Cynthia, trying to explain to her why she had taken so long to get in touch, seized her peach jacket which needed the cleaners badly and her bag and rushed headlong out of the flat.
There was an extraordinarily convenient bus, she had discovered, the number 9, still an old Routemaster, which went everywhere she had so far wanted to go: to Heather Bailey on Knightsbridge, to Fortnum’s for old times’ sake and, once, to Trafalgar Square.
That had been a mistake of course; on a rainy day, she had decided precipitously – after hearing Roger strain to empty his bowels in the bathroom in the early morning – to get out of the house and go and take a look at Trafalgar Square again.
She had imagined that it would somehow anchor her here, to stand at the very heart of London and remind herself of the national monuments and their grandeur. Instead, she had endured a particularly unpleasant bus journey; damp, overcrowded and fuggy. Fortunately a noble-looking robed gentleman had got up to offer her his seat or she would have had to stand, swaying and stumbling along with everybody else, for the best part of an hour.
She found herself sitting beside a young pregnant Asian woman whose stomach was bare and elaborately tattooed. Sylvia did her best not to stare but her eyes kept sneaking down to the ink-blackened belly. Whatever was the young woman thinking of? For a start it was too damp to be going around undressed like that; she would catch her death. Her short citric green top ended where her stomach began and someone had, with an ink-filled needle, scored a complicated design of flowers and Oriental characters around her inverted navel. Which had come first, Sylvia wondered, the pregnancy or the tattoo? It must have been the tattoo surely for who would score ink deep into the skin inches away from a developing life? Yet the tattoo did not look at all distended or distorted as it surely would have if it had stretched along with the skin. So the young woman must in fact have gone along of her own free will and proffered her belly to the tattoo artist, asking him to brand it with his lurid design. Inwardly, Sylvia shook her head; really, it seemed there was no accounting for anything any more.
When she got to Trafalgar Square, there was of course no sensation of homecoming; the immense slope of the square was crowded with tourists, all photographing the pigeons in dozens of different languages and Sylvia felt quite out of place and almost foreign herself. She went to have a cup of coffee near Charing Cross before catching the bus all the way home again. She was given a waxed cardboard bucket of coffee, crushed ice and piled whipped cream in response to her request for an iced coffee and she barely managed a couple of inches before setting out wearily on the long and clammy ride back to Overmore Gardens.
On the bus to Hamleys, she thought about Smita and the way she was cloaking, disguising her pregnancy in sombre workaday shades of black and grey. Was that right, was that normal? In Sylvia’s day of course, it had been all flowery smocks and polka dots. She didn’t expect Smita to take to wearing smocks – she would look absurd – but shouldn’t she be just a bit jollier about her pregnancy? Sylvia acknowledged she would be horrified if Smita were to go around flaunting a bare tattooed belly like the young woman she had just seen. But couldn’t she be a bit gayer somehow? It occurred to Sylvia that it would be a good idea for her to buy a gift of some brightly coloured maternity wear for Smita.
Her trip to Hamleys turned out to be no more successful than her visit to Trafalgar Square. The entrance to the store was jammed with huge crowds of customers pushing their way in. Nobody spoke English. A line of cycle rickshaws was pulled up at the kerb waiting for customers and, astounded, Sylvia was reminded of Delhi long years ago.
As she struggled towards the doors of the shop, she watched a young woman dressed in a pink ballgown and pink bedroom slippers who was standing on a box at the entrance. On her head she was wearing a small crown made of padded pink and gold satin. In her hands she held incongruously two orange guns from which she was firing a continuous stream of bubbles at the crowd. Her facial expression was one of docile resignation to the indignity and she also appeared to be suffering from a heavy cold.
When Sylvia was finally jostled across the threshold into the shop, she was assailed by a great gust of heat and noise. The ground floor was a gaudy emporium of mass-produced identical teddy bears, all lined up in rows, an army of bears. The young people who worked
there, dressed in a uniform of red tops and black trousers, seemed to have been instructed to caper about as much as possible and to shout at the top of their voices like touts in a bazaar.
The boys’ department was, wouldn’t you know it, up on the fifth floor and Sylvia travelled up one escalator after another, past shouting shop assistants, toys with flashing lights, toys which made strident noises and, on every floor, families locked in dispute, children crying. Sylvia arrived at the fifth floor, tired out and horrified; was this what modern childhood was like?
She was greeted by a big green sign advertising something called “Alien Force”. She stood for a moment looking around uncertainly; she didn’t even know what the toys were. A young male shop assistant with his long hair done up in an elaborate chignon came over and offered to help her. But Sylvia dismissed him, rather brusquely she feared; she didn’t need help to choose a present for her own grandson. Trying to look more in control than she felt, she strolled around the floor, looking in bafflement at an endless array of incomprehensible toys. What were Transformers? White helmets labelled “Clone Trooper Voice Changer” and “Cyber Leader Voice Changer”? A weapon called an “Electron Phaser”? In one corner, there were a few toy cars but none which Sylvia knew or recognised.
After a few minutes, she left, seriously worried for her grandson’s future. On her way down, she noticed on the floor below a display of toy cars and red London buses which she had somehow missed on the way up. She stopped to look them over; nothing familiar, no Dinky toys. The cars all looked far larger and more garish than need be but still, feeling the need to buy something, now she had come all this way, Sylvia almost furtively bought a modest-sized double-decker bus. She knew it would be years before her grandson was old enough to play with it. She also worried that it was tempting fate to buy anything at all before the baby was safely born, although she was not normally superstitious. But she knew it would help her to have it in the cupboard. When things got too much, she could take it out and hold it and look at it and remind herself that life still held something good for her after all.
The shock of the boys’ floor remained undiminished. On the long bus ride back to Kensington, she fretted over it. With the birth of her grandson, she was about to enter a new alien territory in which she would be again a complete foreigner. And what about her little grandson? What sort of a world was he coming into? What on earth would his childhood be like?
The horror of the visit to Hamleys remained with her all the way back to Kensington High Street and she felt it was a punishment for the foolishness of the whole venture and the prematurity of her purchase that when she got back at last to Overmore Gardens, she discovered that she had left the carrier bag with the toy bus on the number 9.
Smita felt possessed. It was as if the little bean-shaped thing which she had studied in the pregnancy book Jeremy had rushed to buy had blown up massively and taken over her body. Her stomach was already incredibly distended and she simply could not understand how, between now and the beginning of October, it could get much bigger. Worse, the baby was pushing all her other organs out of the way so her bladder was squashed, she needed to go to the loo constantly and she couldn’t eat anything more than the smallest snack without getting terrible heartburn. It really got on her nerves that Jeremy was so delighted by her swelling, changing shape. He had, on one occasion, called her a “fertility goddess” although the savagery of her reaction guaranteed he wouldn’t do it again. It was actually becoming a bit of a problem that he seemed to find her even more than usually attractive because pregnancy was having quite the opposite effect on her. How could she be expected to have sex when she felt like such a great big unattractive blob? It worried her because she knew it was turning into yet another issue between them; like the pram in the hall, like his mother.
As well as feeling possessed, Smita felt she was being turned against her will into a different person. As far as she was concerned, there was no reason at all why she couldn’t have a baby and go on being Smita, the highly successful, incredibly focused, together professional person. She had observed enough other slightly older women apparently pulling it off; forging ahead in the workplace, determined, effective and apparently having their kids almost on the side. You might catch them occasionally slinking off shamefacedly to a school play or a sports day. But there was no doubt, it seemed to Smita, what came first for them; it was work and career and the children, the children were a sort of lovely extra which proved that they were complete rounded people. That was how she imagined herself in years to come; still highly successful, with a beautiful little girl who would be a credit to her but having risen right to the top at Gravington Babcock – or maybe having moved on somewhere else – but at any rate earning miles more than Jeremy and everyone around her marvelling at how brilliantly she juggled her roles.
Unhappily, most of the people around her seemed to have different ideas. The worst culprits were her parents who with one voice advocated stopping work at least until the child started school.
“But, mummy, you worked when I was little,” Smita protested.
Her mother replied, “I had no choice, did I? I needed to work full time. We couldn’t have managed all we did on your father’s salary alone. Do you think I wouldn’t rather have stayed at home with my child?” Smita wondered. And then the killer argument: “Besides, we had Dadeema and Dadajee to look after you while we were at work. If you hadn’t moved so far away, I could do the same for you.”
That infuriated Smita; it was such a blatant guilt trip. She knew her mother had no intention at all of stopping work to look after her grandchild. She had only had one child herself and she lived and breathed glasses. There was no way she would ever give up the optician’s even if Smita and Jeremy lived next door. She just wanted Smita to feel bad.
Jeremy in his own way was nearly as aggravating. One evening over dinner, which he had made, he asked Smita quite casually, as if the whole thing were a foregone conclusion, how good Gravington Babcock was about part-time working. Smita nearly choked.
“What on earth makes you think I’ll be going part time?” she exclaimed. This was intolerable; first her parents, now Jeremy.
“Well, I suppose I assumed you might want to once the baby was here,” Jeremy answered still perfectly casually, forking up food as if there were nothing at all infuriating about what he was saying.
Smita breathed deeply. Jeremy meant well. That was the trouble; Jeremy always meant well. But he was also an idiot if he didn’t realise that, after everything Smita had achieved, she was not going to abandon it all just because of a baby.
She pushed her plate away, not having eaten very much. She did appreciate the efforts Jeremy had been making lately to cook dinner when he was the first one home. But he wasn’t the greatest of cooks frankly and her heartburn was always much worse after his dinners. Now the imminent confrontation added to her discomfort.
As mildly as she could, given that she felt like screaming at him, she answered, “Well no, after my maternity leave, I intend to go back to work full-time and hire a nanny. I’m amazed you should imagine anything different.”
Jeremy flushed. “You must do what’s right for you, of course Smi. It’s just, it’s only, I’ve read, isn’t it actually better for the child to have its mother there for the first two or three years?”
Smita glared at him. “Whoever wrote that was certainly a man: one. Two: it’s not really an option in my line of work, as you perfectly well know, to drop out for two or three years and then expect to get your job back when you choose to show up. Maybe the Beeb has some sort of super-enlightened policy on paternity leave; you should check it out.”
“I have,” Jeremy answered evenly. “In fact, I was wondering about some sort of flexible part-time arrangement myself.”
Smita looked at him, aghast. “You’re not serious?”
Jeremy nodded. “I’m perfectly serious. I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot; I want our child to be brought up as mu
ch as possible by her parents and not by a string of nannies.”
Smita was momentarily speechless. Since when had she become public property; her body, her baby, her choices suddenly everyone else’s business? It was intolerable. She scowled at Jeremy. “Fine,” she snapped. “Fine. But you’ll have to become a house husband then. If we can still manage financially. Because there’s no way, no way I’m going to be cutting down at all.”
That night, again, they hardly spoke when they went to bed. Jeremy made to caress Smita’s monstrous tummy; she endured it briefly and then quickly rolled away. It felt all wrong.
Jeremy seemed to fall asleep quite quickly but Smita lay awake for hours with all her furies and frustrations churning round in her head. Well, being pregnant suited some women and didn’t suit others; it wasn’t her fault if she happened to be one of those whom it didn’t. In fact, it was quite wrong of Jeremy to insist and make her feel inadequate. She hated being pregnant. She counted on her fingers how many weeks she still had left; over two and a half months, it seemed forever. Two and a half months of being immense, of feeling fat and unattractive and suffering a string of embarrassing, slightly revolting ailments. The child inside her squirmed as though she too were cross and uncomfortable. Smita laid her hand on the small squirming body under her skin in an attempt at prenatal discipline. What was that she could feel inside; a head, a bottom, an angrily arched little back? She wondered if her developing daughter was having a foetal tantrum and she held her hand down firmly, hoping to show her right away who was in charge here. The baby only wriggled harder. It occurred to Smita that there was something really scary, horror movie scary about not knowing anything about the person inside her; whom she would look like, what her personality might be, even exactly what colour her skin would be.
