by Helen Harris
After lunch, they went down into the garden square and, while Anand napped, they wheeled him in his pram up and down the garden paths. In the weak winter sunshine, Jeremy noticed that his mother had lost her year round tan. She looked rather pale and weary and Jeremy felt a passing pang of guilt that he had been so taken up with Smita and the baby in recent months that he had not paid her much attention. It was less than a year since his father had died; he should have given her more support.
“How are you?” he asked, perhaps a bit abruptly and he saw his mother immediately look wary, as if it might be a trick question.
“I’m fine thank you Jeremy,” she answered briskly, increasing her pace a little, as if her fitness might be under scrutiny.
Jeremy persisted: “I mean in yourself. How are you – adjusting?”
His mother’s face fell. He saw a shadow pass across it. But she replied bravely, “I’m ever so much better now this little chap has come along to keep me company.”
Jeremy winced inwardly. He understood how impossibly difficult it was going to be to keep his mother and Anand apart, the way Smita wanted, the way he had thought he wanted too, although today suddenly he was no longer so sure.
Over tea, for the first time, his mother raised the subject of Anand’s colour. She did it in her characteristically insensitive way; Anand was lying on the play mat, waving his arms and legs vaguely like a sea anemone and, gesturing at him, Sylvia asked Jeremy point blank, “What colour would you say he was?”
Jeremy answered reprovingly, “He’s mixed race.”
“Oh don’t be such a prig, Jeremy,” his mother laughed. “Mixed race isn’t a colour. I mean, what exact shade would you say he was: beige, coffee?”
“I haven’t really thought about it,” Jeremy lied. He had thought about it a good deal actually; how his little boy could look so apparently totally Indian and yet be so utterly his son. Smita insisted the baby had Jeremy’s mouth and chin but he couldn’t really see it yet.
“But you must have,” Sylvia insisted. “Don’t pretend you can’t see he’s a different colour.”
“Smita’s a different colour too,” Jeremy replied coldly. “I don’t think about that on a daily basis either.”
“It’s not rose-coloured glasses you’re wearing Jeremy but blinkers,” his mother told him briskly. “Honestly, I really don’t see what’s wrong with talking about his colour. It’s not as if I’ve got anything against it, is it? I think he’s the most gorgeous colour. I would call it fudge.”
“You make him sound like something edible,” Jeremy replied irritably.
Sylvia giggled. “Oh but he is!”
She got down onto her knees beside the playmat and Jeremy noticed how stiffly she moved these days. Of course she had nowhere to go swimming anymore. He felt another pang; Smita could so easily have taken her to her sports club where there was a beautiful pool.
Conciliatingly he said, as his mother pretended to nibble Anand’s toes, “I suppose you could say he was golden.”
His mother let out a cry of delight. “My golden boy! How priceless. Do you know your father once won £500 on a horse called My Golden Boy at Happy Valley? For ages after that, people kept calling him ‘My Golden Boy’ because of his winnings.”
Anand suddenly flinched and Jeremy realised that tears were falling onto him from Sylvia’s bowed face.
“Hey,” he said, half-jokingly, “don’t get him all wet.”
Sylvia scrabbled for a hanky in her sleeve. “No, no, that wouldn’t do at all.”
She shook a lurid rattle energetically over the baby to distract him. For a few moments, they sat in silence, watching Anand’s reactions to the toy. Then, in an unsubtle attempt to deflect Jeremy’s attention away from herself, Sylvia asked, “Have you and Smita discussed at all how you’re going to include both bits of his background in his upbringing?”
She meant well, Jeremy knew that, but still he felt the familiar surge of anger even though her face was still tear-stained, she was still sniffing. Why did she have to be so clumsy, so heavy-handed? Her attitudes were laughably old-fashioned – and why did she have to create problems where nowadays none existed?
“What exactly do you mean?” he asked sullenly, a teenage boy all over again.
“Well, for example, will you take him to church at Christmas or to the temple at Diwali?” Sylvia asked, “and will Smita make sure he learns some Gujerati so he can be in touch with his roots?”
“Why on earth should we take him to church or to the temple,” Jeremy exclaimed, “when we never go to either ourselves? It would be complete hypocrisy. And Smita can’t even speak Gujerati herself; she can just about understand it but that’s pretty much it. What would be the point?”
Sylvia sighed. “It just seems such a pity for it all to be lost. You’ve given him an Indian name, haven’t you? Shouldn’t you give him some Indian culture too? Otherwise he’ll be – cut adrift.”
“You’re making him out to be far more different than he actually is,” Jeremy said impatiently. “Haven’t you noticed? London is full of kids who look just like Anand, who are called Dev or Sunil or Ramesh but they’re all more or less completely English. You’re doing just what you always do with Smita, you know and it drives her mad; making her out to be so terribly different and exotic when she was actually born and brought up in Leicester. I wish you wouldn’t do it.”
Sylvia looked strangely stubborn. “I just want what’s best for Anand,” she said quaveringly and Jeremy couldn’t be sure whether she was still feeling emotional because of talking about his father or whether she really felt so strongly about preserving her grandson’s tenuous links with India.
He remembered her arrival at the hospital on the day Anand was born, clutching that huge gaudy Indian mobile which Smita had refused point-blank to hang over the baby’s cot. He hadn’t given the gift much thought at the time – too much else to think about – but now he understood what his mother had been driving at. Oh, Smita was so right; she was preposterous. She was just trying to reconnect with her own long-lost halcyon days in India, regardless of the passage of time, regardless of what Smita’s own family might want.
“I’m sure you do,” he said coldly. “We all do.” He looked at his watch. “I really should be getting going, you know or he’ll get hungry and start screaming on the way home.”
“You can give him his next bottle here,” Sylvia said eagerly. “I’ve got one made.”
“No,” Jeremy said firmly. “No. I promised Smita I’d give him his bath and put him to bed at the normal time. She’s very keen on establishing a good routine right from the start.”
“Well, she’s right of course,” Sylvia agreed. “But you could make a little exception just once, couldn’t you?”
She tickled Anand lovingly under the chin and he gave her an ecstatic smile.
“Oh!” Sylvia gasped. “Did you see that?”
Jeremy couldn’t help smiling too. Anand had only started to smile a couple of weeks earlier and, every time he did, there still seemed something extraordinary about it like a double rainbow or a shooting star.
He said a little more kindly, “No, no, we really have to go now otherwise we’ll get stuck in traffic and Anand will give me hell.”
Together, they packed up the baby’s considerable collection of stuff.
“Now I’ve seen how straightforward it is to come over here with him, maybe we can do it more often,” he added conciliatingly.
Sylvia clasped her hands. “Oh please!”
On the way downstairs – his mother came with him to help with all the stuff – she asked whether Jeremy had time to stop for five minutes to show Anand to her downstairs neighbour. Of course he couldn’t say yes; the five minutes would surely turn into thirty and he would have to crawl all the way back in Saturday night traffic. But he couldn’t help feeling a passing curiosity about this neighbour who seemed to be playing an increasingly important part in his mother’s newly widowed life.
As he fixed the car seat into place and arranged Anand’s stuff in the back, his mother stood forlornly on the pavement and cooed at Anand. “Bye bye sweetpea. You’re gorgeous, whatever colour they’d call you in the paint box.”
Jeremy felt himself flush with annoyance all over again. “You simply must stop saying things like that before you seriously upset someone,” he told her crossly.
They ended up parting rather coldly, despite the happier interludes of the visit. The minute Jeremy closed the car door and drove off, the strangest thing happened; Anand stiffened in anger and straight away began to scream. It was as if he was protesting at their departure. It took Jeremy over an hour to drive home with Anand screaming nerve-janglingly all the way until, somewhere past Paddington, he irritatingly fell fast asleep which would of course play havoc with his routine.
Jeremy felt exhausted by the time he got home and completely conflicted too. On the answering machine, he found a message which was his mother warbling a bedtime lullaby for Anand. Jeremy felt entrapped in contradictions; she was appalling, she was insufferable but she adored his son with a selfless, spectacular love, comparable only to his own and Smita’s.
When Smita came home, thrilled by her day out, he was not as receptive as he should have been. She had had her hair done, it fell stiff and glossy to her shoulders, so deeply black it was almost blue, and she had had some sort of treatment to her face too; it looked artificially uniform and smooth, her eyebrows shaped into unnaturally perfect peaks.
Jeremy noticed that she didn’t seem that upset that Anand was already fast asleep whereas he was sure that he would have felt disappointed and cheated if he had come in from work to find he had missed out on his evening with Anand.
Smita put on her new clothes to show him. She twirled in front of him, showing off her regained figure. At one point, she paused to slap the small pout of baby tummy that was still visible and declared, “I’ve just got to get rid of this and then I’ll be good to go.”
Jeremy admired her new clothes absent-mindedly. An inadmissable thought formed in his mind to do with his mother’s substantial frame. Wasn’t a mother meant to be a rounded, nurturing figure? And wasn’t Smita’s fierce insistence on returning as quickly as possible to her pre-pregnancy shape slightly unnatural?
He couldn’t sleep again that night. He was troubled by the day’s revelations about his mother and by the sheer impossibility of reconciling his lifelong image of her with this new kneeling, kissing, besotted grandmother. And how on earth would he ever convince Smita of the transformation?
He thought back to the sleepless nights of his childhood during which it had seemed that neither the night nor his childhood would ever come to an end. His mother had always taken his insomnia personally as if he was staying awake deliberately to vex her. For years and years, Jeremy had read at night inside his mosquito net instead of sleeping. Outside, in the lantern-lit garden, his parents’ cocktail guests cackled and brayed. Jeremy was not allowed to spoil their party. So inside, in his bedroom, entirely enclosed by the secrecy of his mosquito net, he escaped into his reading.
He escaped to a country called England although it bore almost no resemblance to the place where he and his parents went on holiday nor to the country he discovered when he was sent away to boarding school a few years later. It was an England which existed only between the covers of old-fashioned children’s books, the sort of books which, amazingly, they still had in the early Eighties on the shelves of the Delhi Children’s Library. His mother thought it was a hoot that he came home with all her old favourites: Enid Nesbitt and Gillian Avery. His father wanted him to choose more manly reading; he recommended Biggles and Arthur Ransome. He was indignant that Jeremy preferred women writers.
Jeremy was fascinated by the relations between siblings – in most of the books, there were at least four – the rivalry, the traditional roles allotted to each one, from the eldest through to the youngest and the recurring misfit whose only role was that of odd one out. Jeremy wished desperately that he had brothers and sisters, at least just one. He hated his parents for not giving him any. As far as he was concerned, it was just meanness on their part. They found him boring and a nuisance; why on earth would they want to have two or three boring nuisances? But for other children, he invented the story of a sister, born long before him, who had died when she was little. Her name was Arabella. He told his friends that mentioning her upset his parents so badly that they must never ever do so.
When Anand woke at three, Jeremy got up to feed and change him. Smita mumbled in the dark, “God, you’re amazing.” Jeremy relished her praise but he couldn’t help thinking that Smita hadn’t spent time with Anand since early yesterday morning; didn’t she want to get up and be with him?
As he settled Anand back to sleep, he heard himself humming his mother’s lullaby. How ironic it was that, hardly ever having been the least bit motherly towards her own son, his mother now seemed to be metamorphosing into an exemplary grandmother. Smita of course would be deeply suspicious and, for all he knew, she was right to be. He thought with sudden rancour that he would take Smita’s opinions a lot more seriously if she showed signs of being a more committed mother herself. Instead, all she talked about, all she thought about apparently, was going back to work. Her Pilates and her draconian diet were so that she would look her best when she returned to Gravington Babcock. She loved Anand to bits of course; that wasn’t in doubt. But Anand had his place in her scheme of things and there was no way she was going to let him turn her world upside down. She spoke pityingly of the women in her mother and baby group who intended to stay at home with their children. Many of them, she said witheringly, were still in their maternity clothes three and six months after giving birth.
Jeremy worried. He worried that he and Smita had quite different visions of Anand’s childhood. With a lurch of panic, he wondered whether he would ever manage to persuade Smita to have a second child.
Some time in mid-November, Smita announced that she wanted to go up to Leicester for Christmas. She wanted to show Anand off to all the aunties and uncles and cousins who hadn’t yet seen him. It would be restful to stay at her parents where she wouldn’t have to lift a finger.
Jeremy was horrified. “But we can’t do that Smi,” he said. “How can we leave my mother alone in London her first Christmas on her own?”
Smita scowled. “Why can’t she go and spend Christmas with her dotty sister whom she never sees? Or get plastered with Heather Bailey? Or she could spend it with her downstairs neighbour she’s suddenly so obsessed with.”
Jeremy felt himself reddening ridiculously. “Christmas is meant to be a time you spend with your family,” he said lamely.
“Exactly,” Smita said smartly. “Exactly. And that is why I want to spend Anand’s first Christmas with my family. Besides,” she added resentfully, “your mother gets to see Anand all the time. We can hardly keep her away. My parents haven’t seen him for weeks.”
She ended the argument by switching on the television and Jeremy made a fool of himself by leaping up and switching it off again. He hardly ever shouted at Smita but he shouted at her now: “Why do you always have to treat her so horribly, Smi? Tell me, what has she ever done to you?”
When Smita began to interview nannies, it felt to Jeremy like a continuation of their argument even though he knew it wasn’t. Of course Smita had every right to resume her career, not to throw away everything she had worked so hard for. But did she always have to get her own way?
As he heard her on the phone to agencies, busily discussing her requirements – Monday to Friday, 8 am to 6:30 pm – he felt wretched. He started to worry about ghastly accidents, about neglect and abuse; Anand lying in his cot, unstimulated, hour after hour, Anand harmed in undefined, unspeakable ways, Anand hurt.
None of the first applicants were anywhere near suitable. Smita agreed with him. But a second round of interviews yielded a capable young Bulgarian woman whom Smita thought would do. The you
ng woman, her name was Galina, looked curiously like Smita, a slightly shorter, broader version of Smita, with utterly black hair parted in the middle and a business-like manner. She stated very plainly in the interview that being a nanny was not her long-term goal. She was studying to become an accountant in the evenings, at weekends and the nanny job would just be to fund her studies.
“I like that,” Smita said to Jeremy afterwards. “I like the fact she’s an intelligent person, with goals of her own. I wouldn’t want Anand to be cared for by a moron.”
Jeremy imagined Galina’s capable but uncaring hands handling Anand and he felt utterly miserable. But he knew there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. It was like the first vaccination which had marked Anand’s perfect body. This was the first flaw to mar his vision of Anand’s perfect childhood.
Jeremy supposed that he must have talked about his concerns to his mother. But he was sure that he had not said anything which might have encouraged her to do what she did next.
Three days after Galina’s interview, while Smita was checking up on her references and debating how long before her own return to work Galina should start, their doorbell rang, relatively early on a Saturday morning and Sylvia’s voice trilled through the intercom, “Yoo-hoo! It’s Mary Poppins!”
She seemed to take forever coming up the four flights of stairs, they could hear her huffing and puffing – and thank goodness Mrs Castellini hadn’t chosen that moment to stick her head out of her front door or they would doubtless have been waiting all morning. They were totally shocked when Sylvia finally made it to their front door, out of breath but grinning, unbuttoned her heavy winter coat to reveal a frilly white apron and launched into a breathless but jaunty version of “Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” She even produced a little silver spoon from her pocket which she waved about theatrically. She then kissed them both resoundingly and announced excitedly, “I’ve come about the job.”
