by Helen Harris
He camped out at his friend’s for a few weeks. Sometimes, at the weekend, he would grudgingly come and stay over with Sylvia and help her bad-temperedly with all the things she couldn’t manage to do with her leg in plaster. He refused to discuss Smita or the divorce and was generally as disagreeable as he could be. He only brought Anand with him once, in spite of Sylvia’s pleading.
At first, she was relieved to see that – so far – Anand didn’t seem greatly affected by his parents’ separation. He had just celebrated his third birthday and was more concerned to tell his grandmother about all his presents. Naisha had given him a toy doctor’s case. But when it was time to leave, which it seemed to be awfully quickly, Anand shocked them both by throwing a violent uncharacteristic tantrum. He flung himself on the floor, his entire little body rigid with rage and, drumming his feet furiously on the floor, he screamed, “I don’t want to go, let me stay, let me stay, let me stay.”
When Jeremy picked him up angrily and told him off, he fought with his father, drumming his fists furiously on Jeremy’s chest. “Put me down! Put me down! You’re hopeless.”
Jeremy looked shaken. He said embarrassedly to his mother, “I don’t know what’s got into him. He’s not usually like this.”
Sylvia said, “I know.” She gave Jeremy a meaningful look. “Poor little mite. His world’s been turned upside down.”
Jeremy flushed. “Thank you for that. That’s really helpful.”
Sylvia bridled. “Well, my dear, it’s glaringly obvious.”
She beckoned to Anand. “Come over here dear and sit on Grandma’s lap for a little bit and try and calm down.”
Anand trotted over obediently and sat sniffing on Sylvia’s lap even though it was rather awkward for both of them with the cast.
“Now, you know it’s wrong to shout at Daddy, don’t you?” Sylvia said soothingly. “And it’s wrong to hit him too. What’s happened isn’t Daddy’s fault.”
“Mum!” Jeremy interrupted warningly.
But Sylvia stopped him with a gesture. “Let’s talk,” she said gently to Anand, “about what we’re going to do the next time you come to visit Grandma.”
In due course, Jeremy rented a flat in a converted Victorian school in Kilburn. It was not at all suitable for a small child, with immense floor-to-ceiling windows and a perilous railed gallery and although Jeremy claimed it was actually in West Hampstead, Sylvia could tell straight away, when she was finally mobile enough to go and visit, that it was obviously Kilburn.
A nightmarish new period began. Since Jeremy and Smita seemed to be essentially not on speaking terms, all arrangements between them including everything to do with Anand had to be painfully and lengthily negotiated as if by two warring parties. It could take ten days to organise one paltry afternoon with Anand. Arrangements were constantly rescheduled or even worse cancelled. To Sylvia, it seemed as if life, always unpredictable, had suddenly become infinitely much more complicated; the probability of saying or doing the wrong thing, of putting her foot in it was abruptly multiplied tenfold and no one, not even Ruth seemed to have any advice on how to proceed.
One day, out of the blue, Naisha rang her. Sylvia was startled; she had assumed she had heard the last of Naisha. Now the links between their children were severed, what links could there possibly be between them? Besides, Naisha was the winning grandmother and Sylvia bitterly resented that, through no merit of her own, she got to see Anand as often as she liked. But Naisha had taken the initiative yet again and Sylvia felt wrong-footed and unsure how to act.
“Such a shame, isn’t it?” Naisha clucked over the phone. “Our generation would just grin and bear it, isn’t that right, Sylvia?” She surprised Sylvia with a naughty giggle. “These young people nowadays, I don’t know what they want.”
Sylvia made a non-committal but she hoped polite noise.
Naisha swept on. “But there is no reason for us to have a separation, is there, Sylvia dear? I think you and I should form a coalition of grandmothers, what do you say?”
Sylvia felt close to choking but she managed to answer gamely, “Why not?”
“Exactly,” Naisha continued. “Why not? I feel we should form a united front to make sure that whatever happens is in our grandson’s best interests.”
Sylvia could not say exactly why she found this pronouncement so alarming. What was going to happen? What did Naisha know which she didn’t? She stammered, “Of course Anand must come first.” But even as she said it, she knew, with dreadful certainty, that her view of Anand’s best interests and Naisha’s could not possibly coincide and that whatever Naisha was lobbying for was most probably not in Sylvia’s interests at all.
She fast forwarded a few years and imagined Anand, brought up exclusively by Smita and Naisha, a joyless, bespectacled teenager forced to study monotonously for medicine or pharmacy or dentistry with no leisure pursuits other than vicariously violent computer games. She felt herself suddenly capable of desperate acts for that wasn’t what she had in mind for Anand at all.
“So we are of one mind,” Naisha concluded happily. “I knew that you and I would see eye to eye, Sylvia. One of these days we really must have lunch together, don’t you agree?”
“That would be lovely,” Sylvia said faintly.
“Lovely,” Naisha repeated firmly. “Just as soon as our busy lives will let us, isn’t that right?”
That had been over a year ago but they still hadn’t had lunch, praise be. Instead, Naisha had gradually taken a greater and greater role in Anand’s life and on the rare, rationed afternoons which Sylvia got to spend with him, she noticed increasing signs of Naisha’s influence: Anand would arrive dressed in ghastly little brand name tracksuits with matching baseball caps and T-shirts printed with the latest Disney characters. He talked solemnly about going to Kumon maths and the importance of eating certain herbs and spices for good health. Sylvia’s blood boiled. She fought back with chocolate eclairs and never-ending stories and games, outings to the puppet theatre and the zoo. But Smita and Naisha had the upper hand now and, frankly, there was very little Sylvia could do.
She plotted. She invented ever more ingenious ways to retain Anand’s affection. She stopped short of criticising Smita, obviously, but you could get a long way with implication.
“Your daddy never went to Kumon maths, you know.”
“Lucky Daddy. What did he do when he was three and three quarters?”
“We lived in India then. Does your other grandma ever talk to you about India? It’s always hot there. He used to play out in the garden a lot.”
“I like playing out in your big garden too – so long as it’s not too hot – or too cold or too wet or too windy or too muddy.”
Once Sylvia asked Anand whether his Mummy ever planned to take him to India.
But Anand answered, “No, Mummy doesn’t approve of India. She says it’s dirty and messy. I think she and my other grandma are planning to take me to Disneyland one day.”
Sylvia raged that all the important decisions in Anand’s life were being taken without her. He would be starting school next September and the choice of school, a pushy prep school in Hampstead with a nasty coloured uniform, had been made even without her knowledge. She feared she was being edged out. Apart from the loss of Anand which was unthinkable, she could not begin to imagine what her own life would be without him. But there was no point in raising the issue with Jeremy; he was constantly eaten up with anguish about his own exclusion from his son’s life.
In the spring, Sylvia had to face up to an obligation which she would have done anything to avoid. For the third time since her return to England, she received a card inviting her to an exhibition of her sister Cynthia’s paintings. She didn’t like Cynthia’s paintings; they were nervous, scratchy sort of canvases on which the branches of trees clawed at the sky in torment and contorted figures battled unseen demons. Of course she liked spending time with Cynthia even less. The first time Cynthia had invited her down to Lewes for one o
f her shows had been soon after Sylvia’s arrival in London and she had said she felt too shaky to make the journey. The second time, she had blessedly had her leg in plaster. This time she could not come up with any more excuses.
Part of the problem, if she was honest, was that she felt out of place amid Cynthia’s arty friends. Sylvia would be the first to admit; she didn’t have an artistic or creative bone in her body. Cynthia had always been the clever, arty one, pouring scorn on her plodding younger sister. Cynthia had always disapproved of Roger too whom she considered boorish and vulgar. Blessedly, she had never heard what Roger had to say about her. As she got older, Sylvia found Cynthia’s condescension ever harder to bear. What was wrong with being normal?
It was true that, in recent years, Cynthia was enjoying a certain vogue; her uneasy paintings perhaps chimed with the unsettled times. Sylvia occasionally saw Cynthia written up in the papers. She was apparently well-known for the curious trait that most of her paintings were painted exclusively in the colours of a bruise. Her new exhibition wasn’t in Lewes either; it was at quite a well-known gallery in the West End. Sylvia quailed as she imagined Cynthia’s friends – Piers and Gavin and that ghastly Mahonia – posing amid the paintings, all being frightfully pretentious and looking down their noses at the plodding sister.
Sylvia considered asking Jeremy to accompany her. Maybe he might even agree to bring Anand along? It was true a private view at a gallery wouldn’t be much fun for a four year old. But it would broaden the little boy’s horizons. Sylvia doubted if Naisha ever did anything as time-wasting as taking Anand to an art gallery. She acknowledged that having Anand with her would be a most marvellous diversion too. Cynthia had never met her great-nephew, although she had been sent plenty of photographs and she would surely have to be less alarming in the presence of a small child. But Sylvia knew there was no point; Jeremy would refuse to come along himself, she had heard his opinion of Cynthia often enough over the years and he would certainly not let little Anand be subjected to her either. So, in the end, Sylvia had to go on her own, on an incongruously lovely spring evening, dressed in what she hoped were sufficiently arty clothes.
She got to the gallery rather late. There was some sort of a mix-up with the buses; all the passengers had to get off at Marble Arch and change onto another bus and, as they were in the process of doing so, Sylvia realised that she had forgotten her handbag on the first bus and had to plunge back through the throng of passengers grumpily transferring from one bus to another to retrieve it. She recognised her bag over the shoulder of a rather odd-looking person, neither exactly male nor female who said, when Sylvia hailed him, that he was taking the bag to the lost property office. Sylvia thanked him gratefully. As she settled onto the second bus with her bag safely on her knees, she reflected how true it was that you should never judge a person solely by their appearance.
The gallery looked very full through the huge plate glass window with her sister’s name scrawled across it in violet. But Sylvia didn’t want to be seen loitering outside as if she didn’t dare come in. So she heaved the heavy door open and entered the gallery bravely where a supercilious young woman checked her name on a list. Sylvia looked around and didn’t recognise anyone. Even the unutterable Mahonia would at least have been a familiar face. But Cynthia was obviously moving in new circles nowadays. By the look of it, this was a much younger, more fashionable crowd than her friends down in Lewes. The room was full of outlandish haircuts, eye-catching clothes and preposterous spectacles. Sylvia felt an unexpected pang of envy. She liked to think of Cynthia as unworldly, hobnobbing exclusively with ageing artistic folk. But here Cynthia seemed to be surrounded by rather jolly young people and to be the object of their adulation too.
Sylvia wished intensely that she had been able to bring Anand along. Looking around, she acknowledged that he would most probably not have enjoyed himself that much. But she could have compensated him with a sticky treat. Anand would have been her trump card. Paint what you like, wear what you like; none of you has somebody like this to hold your hand.
In the distance, she heard Cynthia’s carrying voice, identifiable amid dozens. A few moments later, someone in the crowd shifted sufficiently for Sylvia to catch sight of her sister. She was dressed entirely in lurid green, including her tights and shoes. Glimpsed between the shifting groups, she looked almost more plant than person; a tall thin green sheaf sticking up sharply in their midst.
Reluctantly, Sylvia began to make her way towards her, repeating, “Excuse me, oh, excuse me” as she squirmed forward. People turned to look at her and then looked quickly away as if her appearance were embarrassingly eccentric whereas, in fact, her artiest outfit was a plain lilac linen suit which she had livened up with her favourite enamelled hoopoe brooch. Finally, Cynthia saw her and her face fell.
“Oh, you’re here,” she said, sounding disappointed. “I assumed you weren’t coming.”
“Why?” Sylvia asked. “I never said I wasn’t coming.”
“You never said you were coming,” Cynthia snapped. “You didn’t RSVP and you’ve never bothered to come before.”
“I couldn’t come before,” Sylvia said defensively. “I had my leg in plaster, if you remember, and the time before that I – wasn’t well.”
Cynthia shrugged. “You’re breathtakingly late,” she went on, “even for you.”
“I’m sorry,” Sylvia began. “There was a problem with the buses.”
But Cynthia cut her off with a haughty wave. “Oh Syl,” she said, “spare me the tedious details please.”
The small group of people gathered around Cynthia watched this exchange with faint amusement. As if abruptly aware of her audience, Cynthia turned to them and announced, “My sibling, Sylvia.”
Sylvia felt herself beginning to flush. This was simply ghastly; she should never have come. She smiled foolishly at the onlookers – three extremely thin women of varying ages all with extraordinary haircuts and a quite ridiculously effeminate young man – and waited for Cynthia to introduce them but she didn’t. She said disdainfully, “Well, take a look at my paintings Syl and let me know what you think of them.” She laughed and turned away.
Sylvia plunged towards the back of the gallery where there was a table with drinks. She helped herself to a glass of Buck’s Fizz and downed it in one go. Feeling at a loss with nothing in her hands, she took another one and began to move slowly along the walls.
One of the thin women from Cynthia’s entourage appeared next to her and introduced herself: “Chloe Butt, Art Review.”
Sylvia smiled embarrassedly. She took a gulp of her drink to fortify herself against whatever was coming.
The woman smiled back, wolfishly. “May I ask you a few questions?” She peered at Sylvia’s glass. “That’s looking a bit empty. May I get you a refill?”
Sylvia tried to make her escape while Chloe Butt was at the bar but she pursued Sylvia and caught up with her at the far end of the room, holding out another very full glass of Buck’s Fizz. Her expression, Sylvia thought, was like the wicked stranger offering a child a sweet in a story. But that didn’t stop Sylvia fortifying herself some more with another almighty gulp.
“So tell me,” Chloe Butt began and Sylvia was alarmed to see her taking out some sort of little hand-held computer, “would you say you and your sister were close?”
Sylvia laughed a bit too loudly. “What do you think? Did it look like that to you?”
Chloe Butt asked, “Would you say your relationship was conflictual?”
Sylvia laughed again, this time a little wildly. She took another slug of her drink and, as she searched for an adjective artistically to describe her relationship with Cynthia, she realised that she was not tongue-tied anymore; the Buck’s Fizz had loosened her tongue and made her in fact extraordinarily eloquent.
Travelling back to Maida Vale on the bus afterwards, she kept giggling naughtily as she remembered Chloe Butt’s pretentious questions and her own outspoken answers. She had told
Chloe Butt all about their childhood rivalry: the pinches and the hair-pulling, the spit in favourite puddings, the stolen dolls. She had told her about the time Cynthia believed that Sylvia had thrown her first high heels into a pond and then pretended it had been an accident and how Cynthia had virtually set fire to Sylvia’s first perm. She had told her about the adder.
The paintings from the exhibition kept careering past her, inducing vertigo with the motion of the bus: dizzy puce and mauve canvases full of torment. Only one stood out. Chloe Butt had pointed it out to her: a wretched-looking, bedraggled lilac bird cupped in a pair of protective but pecked hands – and hadn’t that one been called “Sylvia”?
It was only when she got off the bus on the corner of Sutherland Avenue and the cool of the evening revived her a little that Sylvia began to wonder queasily if maybe she had not gone a little too far. Cynthia was her flesh and blood after all and, besides, her revenge would be terrible. She must ring Chloe Butt first thing in the morning, she had her card in her bag, didn’t she and tell her not to print a word of it.
She was distracted from this worry by the unexpected message she found on her answering machine. She had feared, when she saw the red message light flashing, that it would be some problem involving Jeremy and Anand. But she didn’t recognise the voice on the recording and she had to press “replay” and listen to the message all over again before she realised, in her befuddled state, who the voice must be and why he was calling her.
“Good evening,” the voice began politely. “This is a message for Mrs Sylvia Garland.” The caller had a cultured, beautifully enunciated male voice. “My name is Siggy Greenborough. I’m calling you on behalf of my sister Ruth who is seriously ill in hospital. Could you please call me as soon as possible on 078 something, something something something zero? Thank you so much. Goodbye.”
Sylvia lurched for the replay button to listen to the message again and to take down Siggy’s number. But in her haste, she accidentally pressed the wrong button and a few moments later she discovered to her horror that she had erased the message completely.
