Free Sylvia Garland's Broken Heart by Helen Harris Page A

“Smi, listen to me, Smi” he pleaded. “
I’ll
deal with her. She’ll be
my
responsibility. And we’ll
contain
her; we’ll make sure she does everything on our terms.”
    Smita rolled over and threw her husband a scornful look. “Contain her?” She had repeated sarcastically. “What are you talking about? You can no more contain your mother than the Niagara Falls.”
    She had been rather pleased with this pronouncement which had effectively silenced Jeremy.
    But it gave her no pleasure of course when she was proved utterly right the minute Sylvia stepped off the plane some six weeks later. They had everything worked out, they had talked about it for weeks; she would stay for two or three days in the hotel down the road, they would find her a convenient service apartment, make sure she didn’t rush into the purchase of some crackpot property for at least three months and then they would aim to have her settled somewhere within easy reach but off their backs before the baby arrived in October. But Sylvia, of course, had insisted on going her own sweet way and she had ridden roughshod over all their thoughtful plans.
    Looking back over the last few weeks as she sat at her desk, unable to concentrate on her work, Smita shuddered at the sheer chaotic unpredictability of it all. She had complained to her own mother on the phone that it was like having a rampaging rhino let loose in your life andher mother had giggled and then chided her for being uncharitable. Her own parents’ uncomplicated joy at her good news, accompanied in her father’s case by a great deal of praying, went a long way towards making up for all the death-related complications on Jeremy’s side. But nothing could really compensate for the massive black cloud of Sylvia’s presence in London.
    Smita could forgive Sylvia a number of things. After all, she was newly widowed and Smita would have to be pretty unfeeling not to make allowances. But even so, she found herself outraged by Sylvia’s doings every single day.
    Even though he had sworn he wouldn’t, Jeremy had gone and told his mother about the baby the day she arrived. Three days later, Sylvia had come round to have tea with Smita and, after hugging her uncomfortably close, she had spent the whole time telling her how simply marvellous it was for
her
, Sylvia, that this should have happened at this tragic juncture of her life.
    “Forget about
me
,” Smita had raged later at Jeremy, “and how awful it might be for
me
to have my pregnancy linked like that to someone’s death. Honestly, she went on as if the baby was just a replacement, a substitute for Roger.” She stopped when she saw Jeremy wince.
    What she didn’t tell him, because she wasn’t at all sure how he would react, was that the very
worst
part of the visit had come towards the end when Sylvia had taken it upon herself to tell Smita what a wonderful grandmother she would be and all the wonderful things she would do with the baby. ‘Well,’ Smita had thought to herself viciously, ‘forget it.’ There was no way, no
way
she was everletting Sylvia go off anywhere with
her
baby. If Sylvia was lucky, if she behaved, she could sit the baby on her knee for a short while – but only if Smita or Jeremy were close at hand – and she could buy her presents. That was
it
. It made Smita quite angry in fact, recalling Jeremy’s stories of his own childhood and what a distant, uninvolved mother Sylvia had been. Now here she was, trying to make up for it by becoming much
too
involved with her granddaughter.
    Then there had been all that awful business with the hotel and Sylvia’s refusal to move into any of the perfectly nice flats which Jeremy had found for her. She had stayed at the hotel for three weeks, three
weeks
, running up enormous bills as if money were no object. And then she had virtually turned her back on them.
    When Smita remembered Sylvia’s offhand phone call, announcing that she had moved to Kensington, she still