by Helen Harris
Sylvia thought over what Mrs Rosenkranz had said, meanwhile helping herself pensively to a third little sliver of ginger cake. It was true, it was only a sense of obligation which kept the Sunday lunches going; neither she nor Jeremy and Smita really enjoyed them. In fact, it would serve them right, having left her on her own for two Sundays in a row while they were away on holiday, if on the third Sundays she was unavailable. She finished the last of her cake.
“Maybe you’re right,” she said slowly.
“Good!” exclaimed Mrs Rosenkranz. “That’s the spirit. You will see; you will all appreciate each other much more if you see each other when you choose, not just according to the calendar.”
Sylvia thought miserably that if Smita could choose, she would most probably never see her mother-in-law at all. Jeremy’s feelings she preferred not to probe. “I expect I’ll get into trouble though,” she said dubiously.
“Never mind!” declared Mrs Rosenkranz. “So you’ll go along with flowers for your daughter-in-law the Sunday after. I have told Siggy so much about you when we speak on the phone; he is longing to meet you.”
Sylvia wondered afterwards if she hadn’t made another dreadful mistake. Of course Jeremy and Smita would be cross with her and, as for the seventy-year-old little brother, how entertaining would he be?
Smita’s maternity leave began in the second week of September, a month before the baby was due. Her colleagues at Gravington Babcock took her out to lunch and presented her jokily with a very large Mothercare voucher which annoyed her as she intended to shop in much more upmarket baby shops than that.
It felt strange waking up in the morning and not having work to go to. Jeremy told her to make the most of these last lazy days as he headed out to work. Apart from their short break in Sardinia, which had not worked out quite as well as Smita had hoped, this was the last rest she would get before the baby came. But Smita had the longest list of things she wanted to get through and so she carried on getting up bright and early and working her way through her tasks. She had only managed two or three of them – selecting and reserving a pretty Moses basket and a pram and booking appointments for the following week for a hair cut, a manicure and a pedicure – when she woke early on the third or fourth day with a low backache which kept coming and going and feeling generally so unwell that she didn’t think she could manage anything. She felt incredibly frustrated. It was awful to waste even a moment when time was so short. It was also not like her at all to have to take things easy or to lie around in bed. Once the morning sickness had passed, she had sailed through the whole pregnancy without major problems and without a single day off work. She had pretty much hated it – lumbering around like an elephant – but she had got on with it. Now, as she lay waiting for the alarm clock to go off and for Jeremy to wake up and make her a cup of tea, she seethed at the thought of a wasted day. She had been planning to go to her anti-natal yoga class, to shop for baby clothes and then to research waiting lists for nursery schools. Maybe if she rested for an hour or two, her back would improve. She must have overdone it, rearranging furniture yesterday. She was completely unprepared for Jeremy’s reaction when he woke up and she told him how she felt.
“Christ!” he exclaimed, scrambling urgently out of bed. “Maybe the baby’s coming.” He caught his foot in the sheet and stubbed his toe. “Ow, shit, ow.”
“For God’s sake, calm down,” Smita told him sternly. “It can’t possibly be the baby; it’s nearly a month too early.”
“It can!” Jeremy insisted, hopping around, holding his foot. “It absolutely can! Don’t you remember what they said at the class: up to a month beforehand is perfectly ok.”
Smita started to feel a bit scared. She was also irritated that Jeremy seemed to have been a better student at the ante-natal classes than she had. “For Pete’s sake stop hopping around like that,” she told him sharply. “I’m sure it’s not the baby. You couldn’t get me a cup of tea, could you?”
To her dismay, instead of going red in the face but controlling himself and doing her bidding, Jeremy ignored her. “You’re in denial,” he said forcefully. “It said in one of the books that at the beginning women often don’t recognize that they’re in labour.”
“I’m not in labour!” Smita nearly shouted. “I’ve got backache.” She sat up. “If you won’t make me a cup of tea, I’ll have to go and make one myself.”
She swung her legs over the side of the bed, stood up and had to catch hold of the wall. Her back really hurt terribly. “Look,” she snapped, “could you please just stop lecturing me and bring me a cup of tea?”
Jeremy came round to her side of the bed. He stooped over her and there was an expression on his face which silenced her; he was scared.
“I’ll make you a cup of tea,” he said firmly, “quickly. And then we’re going straight to the hospital.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Smita protested. “It’s a waste of everybody’s time. You’re just panicking. That’s what men do.”
Jeremy did not answer. He pulled on some random clothes, without showering, brought her a cup of not very nice tea and then stood resolutely waiting in silence while she got herself ready.
Smita could barely make it down the stairs. She kept having to stop and pant, she was not sure why, and although Jeremy was doing his best to hide his alarm, she could see it in his eyes and it infuriated her. Luckily, they made it out of the front door without meeting the Castellinis.
In the car, despite her pain, Smita kept up a resentful running commentary on Jeremy’s panic, his fussiness, his foolishness and Jeremy, bloody typically, kept his eyes on the road and said nothing.
They got to the hospital soon after eight. Smita, still subjecting Jeremy to a series of angry glances and pursed lips, was examined by a midwife who confirmed, to her horror, that she was in the early stages of labour.
“But don’t worry,” the midwife reassured Smita. “Your baby’s quite big enough already even if he’s decided to come a little bit early. He’ll be ok.”
“Forget the baby!” Smita felt like shouting. “What about me?”
She could hardly bear to look Jeremy in the face as she was taken away to the labour ward in a wheelchair. The midwife had told them that it would still be several hours, “a long way to go”, before the baby was born and Jeremy had plenty of time to go home and get Smita’s ready-packed suitcase which she had adamantly refused to bring with her. As Jeremy hurried towards the way out, a slightly stooping, unkempt figure, trying not to run until he had left the building, Smita had a last absurd image of herself running for the exit.
Her baby was born finally – but still nearly a month too early – just before midnight. The intervening day was an abyss of pain, terror and total humiliation which Smita knew already she would never repeat. She sent Jeremy out of the room at some point after the pethidine but before the epidural because his anxious reassurance and his sweaty stroking were getting on her nerves. Besides she wanted to punish him for having been right and excluding him from this all-important event was the cruellest thing she could think of.
But even that didn’t begin to repay him for the agony and the embarrassment, the horrible humiliation of the whole experience. The midwives persuaded her to let Jeremy back in for the actual birth, cautioning her that it might have a bad effect on his bonding with the baby if he was excluded. They didn’t know how besotted Jeremy was with the whole idea of the baby, much more than she was to tell the truth.
He came back in sheepishly, grinning at her and saying, “Hi Smi,” as if nothing at all out of the ordinary were happening. Smita tried to act cold and distant towards him but, under the circumstances, it wasn’t really possible. In any case, when the climactic moment at last arrived, when the baby emerged fully, was dabbed down and laid in Smita’s apprehensive arms, of course she forgot about everything else. She and Jeremy were united as never before in the miraculous stunned moment of beholding their child.
A perceptible amount of time w
ent by before Smita had another shock. Maybe the midwife had said something but she had missed it. Adjusting the white towel around the baby a fraction, she saw in utter disbelief, as if a cosmic mistake had been made, that her daughter was a boy.
If Roger had lived long enough to find out that he had a grandson the colour of an acorn, Sylvia could only too well imagine what he might have said. For a start, Roger would certainly not have described the little boy as the colour of an acorn or even nut brown which sounded healthy and ruddy and sporty. He would most probably have said that the baby was swarthy, one of the words which Jeremy and Smita had banned and in any case an absurd manly word to use about a tiny infant. If he was struggling not to offend, which was always a struggle for Roger, he might self-consciously have called him “café au lait” which Sylvia thought was probably even worse; it suggested something diluted and watered down.
As she tried to imagine Roger’s reaction to the arrival of his half-Indian grandson, something she did a great deal in the first weeks of the little boy’s life, she had a thought which felt at the time like a dreadful betrayal; maybe it was not such a sad thing after all that Roger was no longer with them. She didn’t mean it of course. She dismissed the thought as just another of those nonsensical notions which kept disturbingly crossing her mind these days. Such as: what might the baby have looked like if Jeremy had ended up getting married to Martha, his Chinese girlfriend at university? Or: if Jeremy and Smita had another child, would it be the same colour as this one or might they have different shades of children?
She missed Roger, sometimes desperately; on days when she didn’t hear him humming in the bathroom or clearing his throat. She missed having him there to discuss the baby with too; whether his ears were Jeremy’s or Smita’s and whether his baby behaviour reminded one at all of his father’s, the kind of detail one could really only discuss properly with a close family member. Sylvia did not have many of those left.
But, at the same time, there was no denying that Roger’s absence liberated her from his considerations of lineage, the rupture of family tradition, mixed and muddled heritage and yes, regrettably, skin colour. For Roger cared about all those things, cared deeply and Sylvia was sure he would be raising an eyebrow on high. Not that Sylvia herself never thought about those things; she was not that modern. Before her grandson was born, she had worried about them a good deal in fact, as well as whether her daughter-in-law would make a worthy mother. But now that the little boy was so astonishingly here, not having Roger there did make it much easier for Sylvia to forget all about those things. There was no one to mention them, no one to care about such suddenly irrelevant issues.
The instant Sylvia saw the baby in the hospital, all those worries remarkably dissipated and she thought with delight, “Why, he’s just the colour of an acorn!” The image, with its accompanying suggestion of ancient woodland, made him seem immediately utterly English. It was something to do with the little crocheted skullcap he was wearing and his dear little nut brown face peeping out snugly from underneath it which reminded Sylvia straightaway of an acorn in its cup.
That magical September morning, when she cradled him in her arms for the first time, a wonderful, warm, snuffling, frankly brown miracle, she wanted so terribly to hold him out to Roger and show him that, look, their grandchild was a wonder beyond all comprehension and whatever dear shade he was, he was self-evidently a Garland through and through.
Smita had insisted on a private hospital. Sylvia had mixed feelings about private hospitals. Despite her years abroad, during which she had been treated for various run-of-the-mill ailments by a succession of private doctors whom she had paid with fistfuls of local cash, she had kept a nostalgic fondness for the NHS. But the birth of her first grandchild was an entirely different matter and, on this unique occasion, she was prepared to defer quietly to Smita’s wishes.
Still, when she arrived at the hospital at nine o’clock in the morning, as soon as she could get there after Jeremy’s incoherent phone call, she found it frankly extravagant. In fact, she was not sure at first that it was the hospital at all because, although it seemed to be the right address, the liveried flunky on the front steps, the immense and tasteless flower arrangements in the front hall and the theatrically made up receptionist all seemed more like a grand hotel than a hospital. There were no nurses in evidence, no doctors, no medical equipment, even no hospital smell, just some cloyingly scented air freshener which doubtless went under the name of “Spring Meadow” or “Summer Pasture” and which made Sylvia sneeze far too loudly in the stillness.
She took the upholstered lift up to the third floor as directed, without passing anyone who looked in the least medical or anyone who looked remotely ill either. At the third floor reception desk, she was greeted by a buxom young East European nurse whose heavy Slav accent and plait of ash blonde hair wound round her head made her seem as if she too was playing a part.
“Well khello,” she greeted Sylvia after she had given Smita’s name. She smiled excessively. “You must be the grandmother.”
“Yes,” Sylvia answered eagerly. “I am.”
She wondered briefly about the other grandmother, the dreaded Naisha, who must even now be on the motorway on her way down from Leicester. If the baby hadn’t taken them all unawares by coming nearly a month early, Naisha would already have been here of course, staying with Smita and Jeremy, taking charge of everything. Smita had it all planned, she had informed Sylvia firmly a few weeks back and there had been no place for Sylvia in her plans.
As she walked down the immaculate corridor, Sylvia could not help briefly imagining the baby she was about to meet as a little accomplice. Smugly, she thought of Naisha and Prem racing to get here; Prem probably driving and Naisha next to him in the front passenger seat urging him to drive faster and better. She would be dressed, doubtless, in one of her smart polyester pant suits and clutching in Sylvia’s imagination a little attaché case of cut-price spectacles. But Sylvia quickly scolded herself for snobbery and malice. What nonsense; Naisha’s heart would be beating just as fast as hers was this morning and she would be bringing not her latest line in diamanté reading glasses but baby clothes and flowers and cries of joy and tears of pride.
As she reached the door of Smita’s room, Sylvia suddenly worried that Naisha had beaten her to it and was already sitting there, enthroned beside her fruitful daughter’s bed, in gloating charge of the proceedings. It was only just nine o’clock; surely Naisha could not have got there already? Outside the door of the room, Sylvia paused and listened; if Naisha were inside, she would be audible outside, effusing, exclaiming and issuing orders to the lot of them, especially to her husband, the downtrodden Prem. Sylvia could not hear a thing. She breathed a discreet sigh of relief and after one last unendurable moment of anticipation, she knocked and opened the door a chink.
The room was suffused with a peach light. For a moment, Sylvia thought that all the lights must have peach-coloured bulbs. But then she realized that the whole room and everything in it – the walls, the floor, the curtains, the sheets and blankets and the washbasin – were all peach-coloured and it looked simply frightful.
In the middle of all that peach colour lay Smita, propped up on at least three pillows, looking miraculously groomed, with her glossy dark hair brushed and her make up flawless. To one side, at a disadvantage in the peach light, stood Jeremy, looking exhausted and somewhat seedy. In the furthest corner, almost incidental – another small entity in Smita’s retinue rather than the new centre of the world – stood a see-through plastic cot and in the cot Sylvia could see a small shape, breathing and present.
“Darlings!” she exclaimed, stopping at the foot of Smita’s bed, not sure how to proceed and not wanting, at this highly-charged peach moment, to do the wrong thing. “Show him to me.”
Smita smiled graciously. She beckoned imperiously to Jeremy. “So show him to your mother” and Jeremy, grinning foolishly and fumbling, carefully lifted the little shape up from th
e plastic cot and held him out to Sylvia.
She took his slight warm weight into her arms, not much, a couple of bags of sugar, no more and yet the entire world. She looked down at her grandson in breathless wonder.
To tell the truth, she had not known exactly what to expect of this moment. Would a partly Indian baby still feel completely like her grandchild? She had been secretly apprehensive that she might not feel what she ought to. Although she had shared her apprehension with Ruth Rosenkranz who had simply laughed.
Sylvia remembered still, thirty years ago, the disappointment she had felt when Jeremy had been laid in her arms; who was this, was this what all the fuss had been about? That feeling had eventually passed of course, to be replaced by a degree of maternal fondness and pride. But the feelings which she had experienced back then were nothing, she realised incredulously, compared to the rush of sheer elation which she felt now. For a start, today she was not exhausted by labour as she had been back then. This baby had landed in her arms weighing no more than his own small body weight, not with the leaden burden, the ball and chain of motherhood attached to him. Because of his visible difference, there was in the first instance none of that possessive petty cataloguing which she remembered so tediously with her own son; Roger’s eyes, Grandpa Neville’s nose, someone else’s hands, the baby ultimately only the sum of its parts, a descendant. This baby was a brand new adventure and Sylvia, confronted with his reality, his exquisite wriggling reality, was so excited she could barely breathe.
She took in the baby’s wavering unfocused brown eyes, newly arrived from another dimension, his puffy little cheeks and his shrewd mouth. The few strands of hair which emerged from under the skullcap were glossy black like Smita’s and his black brows seemed unusually well defined for a newborn. He looked to Sylvia like a diminutive Eastern sage and as she gazed down at him, lovestruck, she imagined that in the years to come this little boy would teach her far more than he would ever learn from her.
