Balancing Act Read online

  And now there was this house. Cara had not yet had the conversation with Daniel about Susie’s house. Daniel had spent the last three years setting up the office team in the face of his mother-in-law’s opposition. She wanted what she had always known, she wanted what had always worked for her, and yet she could not resist the idea of growing the company, spreading the word, infiltrating more and more domestic lives with the captivation of her concept. Daniel was, Cara knew, on the very edge of his patience.

  ‘Why can’t she see,’ he’d demand, ‘that if she could only let go of the control of the details, she’d have far more effect and control in the end? Why can’t she see that?’

  Daniel wouldn’t like the house project. He’d be utterly exasperated by it. And there was no use asking Pa. Pa was lovely, sweet, but he’d never stood up to Ma over anything. As long as he had his music studio and his guitar and his illusion that his band, the Stone Gods, had once been up there with Pink Floyd, Pa was happy for Ma to do whatever she wanted. If Cara rang him and said, ‘What about this house in Barlaston?’ he’d say, ‘Oh, come on, angel, let her have it. It means a lot to her. And she’s earned it, hasn’t she?’

  Cara stopped by the whiteboard behind her own desk. It was covered in figures she had put up herself that morning in coloured markers. On Monday, her task would be to estimate how much the gifting of products – those personalized teapots that seemed to appeal to so many people for so many occasions – was driving sales, and to come up with a strategy for the next year to present to her mother.

  ‘My job,’ she’d said to a business journalist from a national newspaper recently, ‘is to nurture our core business while simultaneously introducing quality newness, until that newness becomes core.’

  A cottage in Barlaston was not core. And it was not quality newness. It was a distraction. An expensive, unnecessary, wilful distraction.

  She crossed to Daniel’s desk and stood looking down at him. He was beginning to thin very slightly on the crown of his head, she noticed. She could see his scalp, as pleasingly olive skinned as the rest of him, through his dark hair.

  ‘Dan,’ she said.

  He didn’t look up.

  He said, still staring at his screen, ‘I’m not really working any more, you know. I’m just stuck.’

  ‘Can I unstick you?’

  He leaned back a little. ‘What are you offering?’

  She perched on the edge of his desk so that she was half obscuring the computer screen. He glanced up at her inquiringly.

  ‘Ma’s latest,’ Cara said. And sighed, to let him know.

  ‘I needed the A500,’ Jeff said.

  Grace, who had programmed the satnav and balanced it behind the gearstick because Jeff didn’t like the suction marks it left if it was stuck to the windscreen, said nothing.

  He went on, ‘And then to hit the M6.’

  Grace looked out of the window. It was dark and wet, and there was a lot of traffic, and she was tired.

  Jeff said, ‘Are you listening?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Grace said. ‘Did you want a response?’

  ‘Would I have spoken in the first place if I hadn’t wanted a response?’

  Grace said, still looking out of the window, ‘I thought you were just thinking aloud. Seeing as how you have the satnav. And we are on the M6.’

  There was a brief pause, and then Jeff said with dangerous precision, ‘I cannot actually see the satnav. The fucking gears are in the way.’

  Grace breathed deeply a couple of times. Then she said, in as conversational a tone as she could manage, ‘Where would you like me to put it?’

  ‘Where I can bloody see it.’

  Grace reached down and moved the little screen up into the well on top of the dashboard. It immediately fell over.

  ‘Brilliant,’ Jeff said witheringly.

  ‘I could stick it on the windscreen …’

  ‘I hate it on the windscreen.’

  ‘I’ve run out of ideas,’ said Grace. ‘Do you have any?’

  Jeff let another silence fall and then announced, ‘I am driving.’

  ‘I offered to—’

  ‘You were late, Grace. You kept me waiting. We were half an hour late leaving. I sat outside that fucking factory for half an hour, waiting.’

  Grace turned her head and looked at him. His beautiful profile was outlined intermittently against the lights of passing cars. She said steadily, ‘I was working.’

  Jeff said nothing. He was of the view that working for a family firm didn’t count as proper work in the same way that having a job outside one did. He said that there was always the safety net of capital and job security in a family firm. He often implied that working in a company founded by her own mother was some kind of cop out, which sometimes made Grace feel ashamed and apologetic and sometimes defiant. Jeff himself worked for a friend who ran a garden centre out near Trentham Gardens, something to do with maintaining their database. He didn’t like elaborating on it, for some reason, but he got a car out of it, at least, and they weren’t exactly onerous hours.

  Grace had never, somehow, been able to pin him down about the details of his life or upbringing. He had loomed up out of the mists of the internet, as it were, fully formed but ever elusive, always managing to avoid giving direct answers to any questions, but leaving Grace with the distinct impression that he required recompense for a bad start in life, for an inadequate, now discarded family, for having had to survive on his wits. And his looks. His looks had been her downfall, from the beginning. She had seen his picture on the dating website and gasped out loud, even though she was alone at the time. How could a man who looked like that be unattached for a single second? How could such a god happen to live under ten miles away? And, above all, how could he be remotely interested in her? But then, when they met in Hanley – just for a coffee, as advised by the agency – he had been headily demonstrative of that interest. He had been completely disarming. He still could be – and seemed to know instinctively when there was the need for it.

  As if reading her thoughts, Jeff put his left hand out and clasped Grace’s nearest one warmly. He said, ‘Let’s not fight. Let’s have a great weekend.’

  She squeezed his hand. Even without looking at it, she knew it was an elegant hand, long and strong like the rest of him. His hands were beguiling, just like his teeth were, and his eyelashes, and his thick, extraordinary hair.

  ‘I really want it to be a great weekend,’ she said, meaning it.

  He released her hand and put his own back on the steering wheel. ‘It will be.’

  ‘A nice hotel …’

  ‘Oh, we’re not staying in a hotel,’ Jeff said. ‘Not on my budget. Matt’s giving us his sofa.’

  ‘But I thought—’

  ‘You always think the five-star stuff, Grace. Of course you do. But this is a mate’s gig, babe, this is real, this is how ninety per cent of the population in this benighted country live.’

  Grace tried to feel as if her hand was still in his. She said, ‘I am fine with Matt’s sofa. Really. It’s nice of him to have us.’

  ‘You’ll like him.’

  ‘I’m sure I will.’

  ‘Amazing on drums. Awesome.’

  Grace swallowed. ‘That’s tomorrow night, isn’t it?’

  ‘Plus some jamming tonight. It’ll be like it used to be – impro and ideas till dawn.’

  Grace opened her mouth, and shut it again. Did he mean jamming and improvisation on drums in the same room as the sofa? She felt for her phone in her pocket.

  ‘Jeff?’

  ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘I’ve just got to make a quick call.’

  ‘This is Friday fucking night, babe! Can’t you even switch off work mode on a Friday night?’

  ‘It’s not work.’

  He said roughly, ‘What is it then?’

  ‘I have to ring my mother.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s … it’s a bit of a crisis. A sort of family crisis. I prom
ised my sister.’

  There was another silence. Taking it as assent, Grace began to dial Susie’s number. As she did so, Jeff indicated to the left and swerved the car to a sudden and dramatic halt on the hard shoulder.

  Grace stopped dialling. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Stopping the car.’

  ‘But why?’

  Jeff stared straight ahead. ‘I’m not having this.’

  ‘Not having what?’

  ‘I’m not having your bloody family all over our time together. Your bloody family, your fucking family firm. Honestly, Grace, when are you going to grow up and not be at their beck and call every minute of every bloody day?’

  Grace waited a moment and then she said inadequately, ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Well, what are you doing right now? Right now? When we are on our way to what should be our weekend away, in Edinburgh?’

  ‘But,’ Grace said levelly, ‘it’s something that can’t wait, which I promised my sister I’d talk to my mother about. It’s about a property. It’s about preventing a big unnecessary expenditure.’

  ‘It’s always about money, with your family.’

  ‘That is so not fair—’

  ‘It’s true!’ Jeff shouted.

  ‘I only want to make one phone call—’

  ‘To your fucking mother! Again!’

  Grace said, ‘Can we drive on?’

  Jeff folded his arms. ‘No, we cannot. Not till this is sorted.’

  ‘Until my phone call is sorted?’

  ‘Until,’ Jeff said, hunching down in his seat with folded arms, ‘your priorities are sorted.’

  Grace said nothing. She was shaking slightly, and the traffic thundering past only feet from them was making the car shake too.

  Jeff said, staring straight ahead, ‘It’s been like this all along. You fit me into bits and pieces of your life when your fucking family doesn’t need you to do something for them. All I ever get is what’s left over. They come first, last and in between, you’re just their plaything, they can do whatever they like with you, because little baby Grace can’t do without her toys and her family have the power to take all those toys away in a nanosecond if she’s naughty. I am absolutely fucking sick of coming way, way after all your family!’

  Grace slipped her phone back into her pocket and gripped it like a talisman. She said, ‘How far to Manchester, do you think?’

  Jeff grunted. ‘I have no idea. Forty minutes, maybe.’

  ‘Then would you drop me off there?’ Grace said. ‘Drop me off in Manchester, and I’ll get a train back to Stoke.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Parlour House stood end on to the lane. It was built of softly coloured old brick, with a central door under a small pedimented porch, a white-painted window either side and three on the floor above. It had a reproduction coachman’s lantern beside the front door – That’s going, Susie thought – and an oval black iron plaque screwed to the end wall which faced the lane, with THE PARLOUR HOUSE embossed on it in white. There was a wicket gate, a brick garden wall, a square of rough grass and a yew tree. It was, to Susie’s eyes, deeply and uncomplicatedly satisfactory.

  It was also empty. The owner, tiring of waiting for a buyer at the house’s initial and unrealistic price, had given up trying to sell it occupied, and had gone to live in a bungalow near her daughter in the New Forest. She had left behind pink carpets, a fretworked fitted kitchen and the coachman’s lantern. She had not, the agent said, been a Staffordshire woman, but had come up to the Potteries when her late husband had got a job with one of the local companies making hotel ware, and had subsequently been marooned in Barlaston by his death only two years into retirement.

  ‘I was born in Barlaston,’ Susie said to the agent.

  The agent smiled at her. ‘Moran isn’t a very local name.’

  ‘It’s my married name,’ Susie said. ‘I was born a Snape.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the agent, who had been born in a suburb of Birmingham.

  ‘Barlaston was full of Snapes. And then I married a Moran.’

  The agent glazed over slightly. He had thought, judging by Susie’s jeans and boots and hair, that she was going to be one of his classier and more entertaining clients. But she was behaving more like the kind of people who researched their genealogy on the internet. He didn’t actually care where she came from or what she was called. He just wanted her to accept the reduced asking price, pay her deposit and get the sodding house off his books. The owner was a pain, ringing up from Lyndhurst umpteen times a week and demanding to know why he wasn’t presenting her with a fat cheque. He made an effort. ‘Barlaston must have been lovely back then.’

  ‘It’s lovely now,’ Susie said indignantly.

  He thought of the shop front in Barlaston’s tired little shopping parade which read RETIREMENT PLANNING LIMITED and said gallantly, ‘Well, if you were born here …’

  ‘It’s a gorgeous village,’ Susie said. ‘It was a very deliberate choice of Wedgwood to move their factory out here. For the workers.’

  The agent said nothing. He had stupidly handed the Parlour House keys to Susie, so he couldn’t even jingle them in a jolly way and suggest that they get a move on.

  As if she’d read his mind, Susie shifted the keys in her hand so that she was holding the main one ready. ‘Tell you what,’ she said. ‘You have my name and number, and I can hardly nick a whole house, can I? Leave me to look round it again on my own and I’ll drop the keys back at your office.’

  He hesitated. ‘If you’re sure …’

  ‘More than sure. In fact, I can’t decide with you hovering. If you want to have any chance of a sale, your only hope is to leave me to think on my own.’ She eyed him shrewdly. ‘You want a sale?’

  ‘Mrs Moran, I … Yes.’

  ‘Then scoot,’ she said. She glanced at him. Bad skin. Worse suit. She put her hand on the wicket gate and said dismissively, ‘The keys will be through your door by lunchtime.’

  Susie supposed, as she stood in the small, damp-smelling front room, that when her great-grandfather worked in this building, the whole ground floor would have been the dairy – stone-floored, slate-shelved, with a pump somewhere central and a long gutter for the water and waste to run away, and a milky, cleanish, sourish smell in the air that you could never get rid of. It would have been cold and draughty, clanking with churns, and the dairymaids would have worked bare-armed with chapped hands and their hair tied up in nets. She’d be respectful of that legacy, she thought. She’d empty out this warren of gimcrack little rooms and turn the ground floor back into a single space, with the steep stairs rising unrailed out of the centre, and a solid fuel cooker and a wood-burning stove, and families of jugs on the windowsills. Maybe rag rugs on the floors – modern rag rugs in bright colours. Waxed stone floors, with modern heating pipes underneath so that when you came down to make tea in the morning and let the dog out and the cat in, and you noticed that the yew tree in the garden was spangled with new spiders’ webs—

  Stop, Susie thought. Stop there. The girls do not want me to buy this house. Daniel does not want me to buy this house. Leo has not expressed an opinion, and Jasper, as usual, has said if you really want it, doll, you go right ahead and buy it. Neither of which is a satisfactory response in any way, because all Leo and Jasper mean is that they’d like to side with the girls and Daniel, but they don’t quite dare. Even so, I hear them. I hear what they don’t say as loudly as what the others do say. Even Grace, who I think had been crying when she rang, although she insisted she was fine. I thought she was going to Edinburgh, but she seems to have changed her mind. And she wouldn’t come this morning. I wanted her to come with me to the Parlour House, but she wouldn’t. She said I had to make up my own mind on my own. She said that’s what I’ve always done. I suppose I have. Only child, absent parents. No, correction: only child, hopeless parents, as well as absent. It teaches you to know what you need. What you want. And I, standing here on a Saturday morning with the winter sun
shining on the dirty windows of the building where my great-grandfather worked most of his life, want this.

  Susie went slowly up the stairs, a narrow cottage staircase, the walls marked with faint rectangles where pictures once hung. The upstairs rooms were what her grandmother would have called poky – a favourite criticism from a woman whose husband installed her in a large and solid Edwardian house in Barlaston, which he had designed in imitation of one of the Wedgwood family houses, right down to the flying stone staircase in the portentous central hall and the proliferation of red and blue Turkey carpets.

  Susie had loved that house. It was her childhood home, after all, as her grandparents had brought her up. Her grandmother had been born in a back-to-back in Burslem, and had found herself transported to become the mistress of Oak View, in Barlaston, well south of the six towns and the pits and the pots of her growing up. She’d met Susie’s grandfather when he’d interviewed her to be an apprentice fettler for his newly opened pot bank in Hanley. She’d left school on the Friday, and her mother had found her a job at Snape’s pottery on the following Monday. Young Mr Snape chose all his own staff in those days, liking as he did to know everything about everyone who worked for him. And he’d looked at Jean McGrath, and imagined the silica dust that was so difficult to extract from the fettling shop in the factory getting into her unquestionably precious lungs and causing the horrors of emphysema, that infamous potters’ rot, and had decided then and there that he had other ideas for her.

  Susie had adored her grandfather. He had known even as a boy that his spirit could not bear to follow his father into agriculture. He apprenticed himself to Royal Doulton, working his way swiftly up the ranks, trading on the side as he went – local coal, local barge transport along the canals, imported china clay, imported pit props, machinery imported from Germany to make porcelain, from Birmingham to make flatware. By the time he was thirty, he was able to open his own pot bank in Hanley, making pottery spongeware. By the time he was forty, he was married to Jean McGrath, and had installed his wife and infant son in a house built in careful imitation of a previous age. And by the time he was seventy, the market for spongeware had dwindled to almost nothing, and the no longer infant son had abandoned his parents, his native country and his only child to take off with that child’s eternally adolescent mother to live a carefree, barefoot and unabashedly addled life on the island of Lamu.