by Helen Harris
Jeremy’s first thought was that she must be drunk. To turn up like that, unannounced, in fancy dress and singing; surely it was the only explanation. But she didn’t seem drunk. She seemed in fact particularly focused. She took off her coat and handed it to Jeremy. “Hang it up dear,” she instructed him. “It’s a bit wet.” She then turned purposefully to Smita who was glaring at her, outraged but speechless and said kindly, “Let’s sit down dear and I’ll explain to you what I have in mind.”
Jeremy waited for Smita’s certain sharp response: “I was just on my way out actually” or “Sylvia, I’m really busy right now.” But Smita must have been too shocked to say anything because she followed Sylvia slowly up their glass stairs, a furious but silent figure.
As they entered the big front room, Anand, who was lying on the new sheepskin rug pumping his legs, made a sudden experimental sideways flip, almost a roll and at the sight of his mother and grandmother side by side in the doorway, he beamed with delight and gave a strangled little yelp of sheer happiness.
Smita and Sylvia couldn’t help turning to one another to exclaim over what he had just done.
Grudgingly, Smita offered her mother-in-law a cup of tea or coffee. But Sylvia turned down the offer and gestured determinedly towards the armchairs. “No, no, my dear,” she said, “Let’s get down to business straight away. There’s no time to be wasted.”
Jeremy hovered uncertainly in the open plan kitchen, making tea and coffee anyway and listened to his mother’s proposal in total disbelief.
“I’ve been thinking,” she began, the moment she was seated, “and what you two are about to do doesn’t make any sense at all to me.” She jiggled Anand, whom she had picked up, with Smita’s permission, on her knees. “You are about to hand this little chap over to a total stranger five days a week. You are going to pay that stranger a considerable sum of money to look after him. While, down the road, you have his grandmother, one of his grandmothers –”
“Kensington is not down the road,” Smita snapped.
Sylvia ploughed on: “One of his grandmothers, who is willing and able, who would love to do the job, who would not need to be paid. Maybe I couldn’t manage it five days a week, it’s true, but one or two – of course I could! Think how good it would be for Anand to be cared for by a close relative rather than a complete stranger. I would do all sorts of things with him which a nanny would never dream of. He’d have so much more fun with me, wouldn’t you sweetpea, wouldn’t you? Yes, of course you would! And if your mother should be able to come down from time to time, Smita, of course I would gladly, gladly let her have my days with Anand. They could be Anand’s ‘grandma days’, we could take it in turns, if Naisha wanted, if she was able. And think of all the money you would save. Thousands and thousands of pounds, I dare say. Please say yes, my dears, please; it makes such perfect sense.”
As if to show how well she would do the job, she propped Anand cosily onto her left shoulder and stood up and walked around the room, patting him lightly on the back and humming a nursery rhyme. She overdid it, accompanying her jolly “Tom-pom-pom” with a high-spirited little jig and as she came back towards the armchairs, she caught her foot on the edge of the sheepskin rug and nearly fell. Smita exclaimed and made a grab for Anand but luckily Sylvia managed to regain her balance enough to land very heavily sideways in the nearest armchair with Anand still safe in her arms.
“How on earth,” Smita hissed at her, “do you expect me to leave Anand with you all day? Look, you can’t manage to be with him for five minutes without something happening. How could you possibly have sole charge of him from morning till night? It’s a job for a fit active young person, not someone in their sixties. I don’t mean to be unkind. Maybe you could just about cope now while he’s a small baby but how would you manage in a year or so’s time when he’s an energetic toddler racing around? You haven’t thought this through at all. I mean, I understand you love him and you want to spend time with him and that’s sweet. But it doesn’t mean you can be his nanny. In fact, the whole thing’s completely silly, surely you can see that? I need someone as a nanny whom I can tell what to do and go off to work knowing that they’ll get on with it. Whereas, I’m sorry Sylvia, but you and I haven’t seen eye to eye on a number of issues to do with Anand and how do I know that, as soon as my back was turned, you wouldn’t just do your own thing and take no notice of what I want?”
Sylvia flushed. “Fashions change in childcare,” she answered evasively. “It doesn’t mean that the old ways are necessarily no good.” She added coyly, “My son turned out alright, didn’t he?”
Jeremy and Smita exchanged glances across the room. Smita’s was one of scarcely contained fury, Jeremy’s was pleading.
“Let’s not go there,” Smita said crisply. “There’s really no point us discussing it anymore, Sylvia. I appreciate you mean well, really I do. But there’s no way, no way you can be Anand’s nanny. I’m sorry.”
Jeremy, watching from the kitchen, feared his mother might cry again, showering Anand with her tears. He had winced repeatedly while Smita was speaking; he thought she was being unnecessarily hard on his mother. Was there really no room for compromise here; couldn’t she be granted a regular afternoon or two, if not a whole day? Smita hadn’t seen his mother taking care of Anand during his visits to her flat. She had no idea how competent Sylvia could be.
Sylvia didn’t cry. She looked down fixedly at Anand on her lap and there was something in what Jeremy could see of her expression which scared him inexplicably; sadness but also an unbudgeable resolve. Anand began to wriggle, looking up into his grandmother’s face and making nearly musical “Da-da-da” noises.
In response, Sylvia began to jiggle her knees – perfectly nimbly – and sang to him, “Ride a cock hoss, to Banbury Crorss” while Anand gurgled with pleasure.
Jeremy stole a look at Smita. Surely she would melt a little in response to this tableau; the devoted grandmother and the blissfully happy grandchild. But Smita had a wry curdled expression on her face and her mind, Jeremy knew, was made up.
He asked his mother, “Would you like to have brunch with us?” But before she could answer, Smita stood up and intervened. “But we were going shopping. Have you forgotten or are you trying to get out of it?”
Sylvia stood up too. She kissed Anand lingeringly on the top of his downy head and she replied, “No, no, I can’t stay anyway, thank you, Jeremy dear. I’m invited to lunch with Ruth Rosenkranz. She has a special guest coming.”
“Who?” asked Smita.
Sylvia seemed not to hear her. She deposited Anand carefully back onto the sheepskin rug, where he at once began to wail and asked for her coat.
While Smita was getting it, Jeremy asked his mother quietly, “Are you alright?”
She nodded bravely. With Smita’s help, she got her heavy coat back on, over the frilly white apron which she was still wearing. As an afterthought, she tried to take the apron off inside her coat and became distressingly entangled. After some stilted goodbyes, half covered by Anand’s crying, she left and, the minute she had gone, Smita rounded on Jeremy.
“You set her up to this,” she shouted. “Didn’t you?”
Jeremy was holding Anand by now, trying unsuccessfully to soothe him and he answered unnaturally softly, “Of course not. Why on earth would I do that?”
Smita burst into tears of fury. “I can’t believe you did this,” she sobbed. It’s like a betrayal. How could you? How could you?”
Jeremy still spoke incongruously softly, jiggling Anand and patting his back. “But I’m telling you Smi: I didn’t. It’s all her idea. Why would I set her up to suggest something you were clearly going to veto?”
“Because,” Smita shrieked, “because ever since Anand was born, you’ve been ganging up with her against me. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about; all those long visits to her flat, all her tips and tricks for dealing with babies you keep passing on to me, the steady drip-drip message that
a baby should be cared for by its mother, that going back to work is a selfish, harmful thing to do. D’you think I’m deaf and blind to what’s going on here?”
“Smita,” Jeremy interjected desperately. “You’re wrong. Nothing like that is going on, nothing.”
Smita ignored him. “For years, for years you’ve been telling me what a disastrous mother she was, how remote, how uninvolved. And now I’m expected to believe that, overnight, she’s somehow turned into this perfect caring figure? Don’t be ridiculous!”
“She has changed,” Jeremy said, still in the same low controlled voice. “She’s not a perfect caring figure – by any means – but she has changed and I think you could give her a chance. If you didn’t have such a closed mind about her.”
Smita yelled back at him. “She was a disastrous mother and I’ve got no doubt she’ll turn out to be a disastrous grandmother too. Look at what nearly happened just now; she nearly fell headlong with Anand in her arms. It could have been awful. Don’t you dare, don’t you dare leave her alone with Anand or something terrible will happen, you wait and see. Now give him to me since you obviously can’t manage to get him quiet.”
She snatched Anand who immediately stopped crying as if a switch had been flicked and strode out of the room.
One floor down, their doorbell rang. “You get it,” Smita called. “He needs changing.”
Sylvia stood at the front door, looking apologetic. “I’m awfully sorry,” she whispered, as if she had heard their raised voices on the way up. “I seem to have left my handbag.”
“How did you get into the building?” Jeremy asked. “You didn’t ring downstairs, did you?”
Sylvia reddened. “I do hope it wasn’t me; someone hadn’t properly closed the front door behind them. I just pushed it open.”
Jeremy was grateful that Smita, changing Anand two floors up, hadn’t heard this exchange; yet further evidence of his mother’s unreliability.
“Come in,” he said, more impatiently than he meant to. “You’re sure you don’t want a cup of tea or anything now you’ve had to traipse all the way back? When did you realise you didn’t have your bag with you?”
Sylvia snorted in exasperation. “Only when I got on the bus, would you believe? I needed my Oyster card to pay the fare and of course I realised I didn’t have it. I had to get off again. The driver wasn’t very nice about it either.”
Jeremy registered with surprise that his mother now had an Oyster card. She had managed that all on her own too. Six months ago, she was calling him every day to ask how to do the simplest things. So she had changed, she was making progress; she wasn’t, as Smita endlessly told him, utterly hopeless.
“Run up and get it for me, would you dear?” his mother chivvied him. “I don’t have time for tea or anything like that now. I’m running late for my lunch.”
As Jeremy ran upstairs, he caught sight of Smita looking down. As their eyes met, she ducked away and disappeared and he heard her crooning to Anand.
When he brought the bag – extraordinarily heavy, what on earth did she have in it? – back down, he said to his mother quietly, “Don’t give up hope. Smi and I are talking things over.”
His mother raised her eyebrows. “So I heard,” and she turned away abruptly and set off again down the stairs.
This time Jeremy and Smita’s argument raged for weeks. It carried on over Christmas in Leicester and into January when Smita went back to work. Galina turned out to be an excellent nanny; she arrived for work on time, she followed Smita’s instructions precisely and, after a few weeks, Anand stopped crying when she arrived in the morning.
In February, Jeremy had a few days’ leave to use up and, after some rather tense discussions with Smita, who didn’t want to disrupt Galina and Anand’s newly established routine, they told Galina to take time off and, for three intense days, Jeremy had his little boy all to himself.
He fed him, changed him, washed him, pleased that he could perform all these tasks just as skilfully as Smita. He spent long hours contemplating Anand’s every minute act: every wriggle, every smile, every small noise. He observed what seemed to him the beginnings of a distinct personality; a shrewd, rather serious little boy who would in due course prefer Lego to fire engines and police cars.
After two days, he had to admit privately that he was feeling a bit cooped up. He had a whole list of things he had intended to do but the weather was foul and most of his ideas turned out to be impractical with a six-month-old baby in tow. On the third day, he decided to drive over to Kensington, despite the midweek congestion charge and spend the day with his mother.
He found her rather subdued. Her friend Ruth had had to go into hospital for an operation and she was fretting about her, it seemed to Jeremy, disproportionately.
“She’s well into her eighties, you know,” she told Jeremy as she stirred Anand’s freshly pureed vegetables, “and surgery at that age can be very dangerous.”
Jeremy worried that his mother couldn’t seem to remember exactly what vegetables she had cooked for Anand so he wouldn’t be able to give an accurate account of what he had eaten to Smita. Smita was keeping a diary of new foods as she introduced them so that she could straightaway identify any allergies. He decided he wouldn’t say anything; his mother had always been unimaginative about food, especially vegetables and he was sure she wouldn’t have included anything exotic.
After lunch, he had to nip out to move the car; it was parked in a bay with a two-hour time limit. His mother told him to move into a residents’ space and she gave him a Kensington and Chelsea visitor’s voucher, another sign of her new competence. The only trouble was that all the residents’ spaces seemed to be taken. Did no one in Overmore Gardens go out to work, Jeremy thought irritably, as he drove twice slowly round the square.
It was only on the third time round that it struck him with horror that he had just done exactly what he had promised Smita he would never do; he had left Anand alone with his mother. Not only that; he was now stuck in the car with nowhere to park and no way of immediately dashing back up to correct his mistake. He began to sweat. Surely nothing could go wrong while he moved the car? Did Smita actually expect him to bring Anand down in his car seat – just when he was getting ready for his nap – and strap him in only to drive a few times round the block? That would be madness. Still he began to feel more and more worried especially when a woman driving a mammoth SUV stopped right in front of him and began to manoeuvre laboriously into a loading bay. When she finally managed it, Jeremy drew alongside her, put his window down and called, “What the hell d’you think you’re doing? That’s not even a parking place.”
The woman looked down at him and, without a word, made an obscene gesture with one expensively gloved finger.
Jeremy drove forward, fuming and probably not paying enough attention because on the corner of the Earls Court Road he crashed into a van coming far too fast around the corner and he realised that he had driven out of the square down a side street which was one way in the opposite direction. Both he and the van driver jumped out and began shouting, the van driver angrily and abusively and Jeremy desperately. “My little boy’s on his own with my mother, she’s not reliable, he shouldn’t be left, this is an emergency!”
Luckily the damage was fairly minor: lights and bumpers. The van driver gave him the name and address of a company which Jeremy was pretty sure were false. He claimed not to know anything about insurance: “You’ll have to ask the boss about that.” Jeremy was so desperate by now – his heart was pounding, he was pouring sweat – he didn’t really care. He scrawled down his own details for the van driver and got frantically back into the car. The van driver made him reverse all the way back, impatiently hooting and gesturing. As he drove past Jeremy at the end of the narrow street, he yelled tauntingly “Wanker!”
Shaking, Jeremy drove round the square one more time and finally, when he was close to tears, he spotted a place in a side street. As he pulled into it, his phone beeped
with a text message; it was his mother. For the second it took to open the message, Jeremy felt faint. But it read: “Where are you?! Don’t ring bell. He’s asleep. I’ll watch from window.”
Jeremy read and reread the message in disbelief; since when did his mother send text messages? He had had the greatest difficulty persuading her to accept a mobile phone when she moved to Kensington back in May. She had protested that she didn’t want a phone, didn’t need one, wouldn’t know how to use it, anyway had no one to call. Yet here she was, nine months later, competently texting.
As he hurried back up the south side of the square, he could see her at her living room window, waving cheerily; semaphoring extravagantly with her arms across the square. As he crossed the road, she left the window and, by the time he reached the street door, she was already buzzing him in energetically via the entryphone.
He bounded up the stairs. His mother was standing at her open front door with her finger to her lips. “Ssh. He’s fast asleep. Whatever took you so long? You’ve been an age.”
For the first time in over twenty years, Jeremy felt the urge to fall on his mother and hug her. He resisted it of course but, briefly, the urge had been there.
“Trouble finding a place,” he mumbled. He barged past her, averting his face and through the small hallway into the spare bedroom where he found Anand sound asleep, hugging the small peppermint green elephant.
His mother followed him in and stood behind him, proudly contemplating the sleeping infant. “Bless him,” she murmured. “Now come and have a cup of tea, won’t you?”
In the evening, of course Jeremy had to tell Smita about the accident; there was no way he could get the car repaired without her finding out and anyway she noticed the broken light and the dented bumper as she passed the parked car on her way in. She came up screaming, “Oh my God, what happened? Is Anand ok?”
