Sylvia Garland's Broken Heart by Helen Harris

grandson and she felt most awfully guilty; how could she have forgotten all about himand been planning to fade away? He would need her; he would need a good, solid, reliable
local
grandmother to take him to the zoo and to the Natural History Museum, to matinees and maybe, when he was old enough, for bucket and spade holidays at the seaside. If Smita and Jeremy caught the slightest suggestion of fragility, of instability, they would never let her near him. She had to drink her tea, pull herself together and go out and buy some proper food. Never mind if she felt hollow, if it seemed that she was a perfectly empty Sylvia-shaped vessel going about her business. She could keep that feeling to herself; no one need know. What she ought to do was not sit slumped for hours and hours in the armchair but get washed and dressed and go out and grapple with London.
    About an hour later she opened the flat door, still feeling distinctly shaky and found an extremely small Filipino woman wearing a lime green top and fuchsia pink trousers standing outside on the landing apparently about to ring the bell. They both looked at each other in frank astonishment and then the Filipino woman recited the following improbable announcement. “Mrs Rosenkranz downstairs would like to meet you. When would you be free to come and have tea with her?”
    Sylvia hoped she still had a voice to reply. She cleared her throat and croaked, “Well, I couldn’t manage today.”
    “Tomorrow?” asked the Filipino woman.
    Sylvia said, “Um.”
    “Next day?” shot back the small figure who had obviously been instructed not to return without Sylvia’s acceptance.
    “What time?” Sylvia asked vaguely, playing for time.
    “Tea,” the woman snapped. “Four pm.”
    Sylvia looked down at her, marvelling through her wooziness that someone so small and delicate-looking could be so forceful and weakly she murmured, “Fine. Thank you.”
    “So,” the woman repeated firmly, “day after tomorrow. Four pm. Mrs Rosenkranz. Flat one.”
    “Yes,” Sylvia agreed faintly. “The day after tomorrow. I understand. Thank you so much.”
    The woman turned and stamped back downstairs, not bothering with any niceties and Sylvia locked the apartment, fumbling dreadfully with the keys and followed her downstairs.
    As the big front door fell shut behind her, it occurred to her to read the names beside the brass bells. In her deluded sleepless state, she half expected to find a Guildenstern there too. But of course there wasn’t; the other residents of 27 Overmore Gardens were: Martinez, Ho, Irani, Rosenkranz and Smith. Her own name plate was of course blank which was as it should be since she didn’t exist anymore. Mentally, she slapped herself on the wrist and, swaying slightly, set off for the Earls Court Road.
    Two minutes later, leaving the relative peace and quiet of Overmore Gardens, Sylvia could not have said which city in the world she was in if it had not been for the double-decker buses and the Underground signs. Earls Court Road swarmed with people of every colour and kind and all of them going about their business at the top of their voices. The road was choked with traffic: buses,taxis, vans, all inching forward bad-temperedly, hooting and abusing one another as uninhibitedly as in any Third World city. Sylvia stopped on the crowded pavement, teetering slightly and tried to make sense of the vivid, raucous maelstrom. How on earth could this be London?
    Over the past couple of weeks, she had watched a muted grey city from her hotel room and through the windows of a succession of cars and taxis. Now she found herself plunged into an Eastern bazaar. The day before she had not gone far; she had found a little Indian corner shop the minute she turned out of Overmore Gardens but today, mysteriously, the shop had disappeared. Had she maybe left the square in a different direction without noticing?
    She blundered along for a little while past poisonous-smelling take-away