Free Sylvia Garland's Broken Heart by Helen Harris

disbelief. “Hang on a minute Smi, we only buried him yesterday. What’s that you’re holding?”
    Smita clasped her hands, one of which was still holding the pregnancy test wand, behind her back. “Concentrate,” she instructed him. “Promise me you’re not thinking about your father or the funeral or the cemetery or anything sad.”
    Jeremy raised his eyebrows. “This had better be good.”
    Smita produced the pregnancy test wand from behind her back and leapt into the air, flourishing it and crying, “Ta-dah! I’m pregnant!”
    She came to a standstill and waited for Jeremy’s reaction. But, for a few moments, he simply didn’t react; he sat motionless in his chair and stared at her with no perceptible emotion on his face at all.
    “Well?” Smita prompted him, hurt and uncomprehending. “Aren’t you going to say anything? Aren’t you
pleased
?”
    Jeremy stood up with a major effort as if he were ill or exhausted and came over to her without saying anything. He put his arms around her and held her silently until she pushed him away impatiently to look up into his face and ordered him, “Say
something
.” Then she saw he was crying.
    She was devastated; Jeremy never cried. He hadn’t even cried at his father’s funeral when she felt he really should have. It took only a second for Smita’s shock to turn to anger. “What’s the matter?” she demanded. “I thought you wanted me to have a baby?”
    Jeremy took her hands tenderly in both of his. “Smi, Smi, I’m incredibly happy,” he sobbed. “It’s just I’m incredibly sad too.”
    In that instant, Smita understood that nothing was going to turn out how she had intended. From the moment of her conception, her baby daughter was part of Jeremy’s and Sylvia’s and Roger’s story too and not, as she had fondly imagined for the past couple of years, exclusively her own. Later, when she had a chance to think the whole messy situation over, it made her feel – slightly – as if the minute being inside her was partly an alien; not totally her own flesh and blood but all sorts of other people’s relative too. She didn’t like this feeling which shesuspected was unnatural and she worried that actually she was not cut out to be a mother at all.
    For the days before and after the funeral, Sylvia had stayed with her friend Heather Bailey in Knightsbridge. Thank goodness she wasn’t staying with them because, forgetting Sylvia’s grief-stricken state, Smita would have found it intolerable to have to share the first days of her pregnancy with her mother-in-law. Besides she wanted to be – quietly, tactfully – happy and how would that have been possible with Sylvia sobbing and hiccuping all over the place? To Smita’s dismay, Jeremy was pretty miserable himself which she hadn’t really anticipated – he and Roger had always had so little to do with each other, frankly – and even though he had risen to the occasion superbly after her announcement – once he had stopped crying – with flowers and a gift, he was still much more subdued than she would have wanted after such amazing news.
    So it had gone on; in due course, Sylvia had returned to Dubai, clutching her ninety-fourth gin and tonic, to pack up her life there and sort out her affairs. She hadn’t been back for a month when Jeremy told Smita, grim-faced, that his mother had decided to move back to London. Smita had been so outraged that for a few moments she could barely speak. How could this happen? How could
he
let this happen? Then she had started raging and crying and she had worked herself up into such a state that Jeremy had told her to calm down; it was bad for the baby.
    “Bad for the baby?” she had shouted indignantly. “It’s bad for the baby to have your mother announcing she’scoming to live here.” And she had run upstairs and flung herself face-down on their beautiful huge bed and wept.
    Jeremy had followed her, wretchedly unhappy, red in the face and perspiring.