Balancing Act Read online

  Susie never went to Lamu. She was asked to go, in the vague, indifferent way her parents always suggested anything, but she refused. She liked the anachronistic routines of Oak View, which went on steadily, even after her grandfather had failed to revive his business with tissue printing on eighteenth-century shapes and had sold Snape’s factory to a firm that made cheap commercial ware for modest familyhotel chains and the new motorway cafés. Her grandfather was, she saw, a trader at heart, more than an entrepreneur. He continued to deal in the commodities he knew, eternally on the telephone, with rolls of used notes in his pockets, secured with elastic bands.

  He was a Methodist, her grandfather, as her grandmother had become, but that didn’t stop him from sending Susie to school at St Dominic’s in Stone, where she was one of only a handful of girls who weren’t Catholic. His values remained the sturdy, aspirational, paternalistic values of his own young manhood, and his only grandchild was going to profit from his success, if he had anything to do with it. He never mentioned his only son, and if the subject ever came up between Susie and her grandmother, Jean would say, ‘Well, there must have been bad genes among the good genes in the McGraths, and your poor father inherited all of them.’

  Susie had once asked if her grandparents ever shared what must have been a fierce and abiding disappointment in their only child, and her grandmother, sealing jars of hot marmalade with discs of waxed paper, had simply said, ‘That’s not for you to ask, pet, ever.’

  After St Dominic’s, Susie had gone to art school in Liverpool, to study photography. She had rapturously embraced the flower power of the seventies, returning to Oak View with friends in tow who wore half-cured embroidered Afghan sheepskin coats and Schubert spectacles. Her grandparents had regarded these students in their loon pants and vast-sleeved shirts, the boys with hair as long and riotously curly as the girls, as if they were creatures from another planet, but their otherness had been no reason not to feed them with pies and porridge, and put them to sleep under Yorkshire wool blankets and Paisley quilts. Marijuana smoking was banished to the garden and there was little alcohol in the house beyond her grandfather’s whisky decanter and the treacly sherry used to soak sponges in trifles, but Susie couldn’t help noticing that her friends angled for invitations to Oak View, and her grandparents, in their turn, regarded their visitors with the benevolence usually reserved for abandoned dogs.

  So there was a lot of explaining to do to a lot of people when Susie decided, halfway through her second year, that she disliked photography, was tired of education and educational establishments, and wanted to roll up her sleeves, and start.

  ‘Start what, exactly?’ her grandfather said.

  ‘A business. Like you.’

  He regarded her matter-of-factly, and said, ‘I failed at business.’

  ‘Well, you had to give up the pottery.’

  ‘I’m a dealer. I’m a trader. I’m lucky that I’m not on a market stall, hustling. I couldn’t run a business. I couldn’t get the spirit of it right. I couldn’t believe in what I was making.’

  Susie waited a moment. She wound a long lock of her hair round her finger, and inspected the ends. Then she said, ‘I could, though.’

  ‘Could you, now?’

  ‘I could. I could revive your old business.’

  ‘Too late.’

  ‘No, it isn’t.’

  ‘Nobody wants spongeware.’

  Susie said, ‘People want home life, though.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘They would like to have the kinds of kitchens and home lives where spongeware is just right. Handmade, but not as ritzy or formal as bone china. Accessible. Approachable. Pretty. Kitchen-table china you could eat your crumpets off.’

  Her grandfather watched her for a while. Then he said, ‘I’m not buying that factory back for you.’

  Susie put her chin up. ‘I’m not asking.’

  He grunted. ‘What’s your plan then?’

  ‘I’m going to London.’

  He grinned. ‘Of course you are. What else would you do at twenty?’

  ‘But I’ll be back. I’ll be back before I’m thirty.’

  He put a hand out and brushed her cheek. ‘I’ll be dead by then.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be back long before you’re dead.’

  ‘I’ll be worth something to you, dead.’

  She said soberly, ‘I don’t want to think about that.’

  ‘No good not being realistic.’

  She dropped her hair and looked directly at him.

  ‘And there’s something else to tell you and Grandma. I’ve met someone. He’s studying industrial design, but that’s not where his heart is. His heart’s in music. He plays the guitar in a group. He’s called Jasper Moran.’

  Susie and Jasper set up their joss-stick-scented first home in a London basement, in Fulham. It was damp and chilly, and they adored it, festooning the ceilings and walls with Indian scarves and saris and cooking ferocious chilli con carne on a Baby Belling cooker which emitted blue sparks if you touched it with damp hands. Jasper’s group, the Stone Gods, had been signed up by EMI – their recording label, Parlophone, was to their profound gratification the same as the Beatles’ – and they were plainly bound for great things. While Jasper was out playing or recording, Susie had no intention of staying at home to water their infinite cascades of spider plants. She got a job in the half-hearted shop of a rundown pottery in Fulham, which made – to her mind – cod artisan pottery decorated with clumsy faux-naïf transfers. Within three months, she had improved the look of the shop, and within six, the sales figures. At the end of a year, she bearded the owner in the nicotine-thick fug of his disordered office and offered to buy him out.

  He winked at her. He had long grey hair tied back in a ponytail with a length of red woollen tape.

  ‘What with, ducky?’

  ‘A loan from the bank,’ Susie said.

  ‘And what bank is going to give a twenty-one-year-old a big enough loan to buy out a hundred-year-old pottery and retail premises?’

  Susie stared at him. She had no intention of telling him that the loan would come from her grandfather’s bank, in Stoke-on-Trent, and that her grandfather was tacitly underwriting the loan.

  She said, ‘I have the loan already.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ she said. She indicated the heavy black handset phone that sat in the muddle of his desk. ‘Ring them and ask.’

  Nineteen seventy-eight, the year Susie turned twenty-two and Jasper twenty-four, was momentous for both of them. The Stone Gods got to number four in the charts and played live on Top of the Pops; Susie bought the pottery and named it Susie Sullivan after her grandmother’s Irish mother, an immigrant to Liverpool whose family, along with hundreds of others, had been recruited to Stoke to work in the Potteries; and they got married in a registry office, Susie in a cream lace mini dress with trumpet sleeves and a floppy-brimmed straw hat wreathed in daisies. Jasper wore a purple velvet suit with flared trousers and took his bride off to Morocco for their honeymoon, whence she returned with ankle bracelets and the backs of her hands stippled with indigo. The basement flat was exchanged for a narrow, dilapidated house with mushrooms along the skirting boards and panels of Formica across the fireplaces, and when the cheerful chaos of their London life became briefly too much for them, Susie would drive her yellow Citroën 2CV, with its frog-like headlamps, up to Oak View, and climb under the Paisley quilts, secure in the knowledge that life in that solid household ticked on as comfortably and reliably as an old clock.

  And then, suddenly, her grandfather died of a stroke. One moment, it seemed, he was on the telephone in the room that had always been designated his office, rather than his study, and the next he was lying on his side of the marital bed upstairs, under a sheet, waiting for the undertaker. When he had fallen in his office, crashing against a bookcase, he had managed to cry out, incoherently but loud enough for his wife, watching racing from Doncaster
on the television across the hall, to get to her feet and make her purposeful but unsteady eighty-four-year-old way to his side. He was conscious, but he could not speak. By the time Jean had manoeuvred herself on to the floor beside him and heaved his head into her lap, he had had a second stroke, and was dead. In the time it had taken for the final furlongs to be run at Doncaster, he had gone from being upright and articulate to dead. It took rather longer for Jean to reach a point where she could move his head to the floor, and get herself to her feet and a telephone.

  Susie wondered if her father would come from Lamu, for the funeral. Her grandmother said that she was perfectly indifferent.

  ‘If he comes, he comes. I wouldn’t turn him away, but I wouldn’t welcome him, either.’ She had not glanced Susie’s way. ‘And we’d neither of us thank you for trying to persuade him. He’s got the information and that’s all I want done.’

  He didn’t come. But it seemed half of Stoke-on-Trent did. St Peter’s Church was packed, and the service was relayed on loudspeakers into the churchyard, where the original Josiah Wedgwood lay under his table tomb, fenced in with iron railings.

  After the funeral, Susie and Jasper returned to Oak View with Jean, who informed them that she was selling the house and moving to a bungalow on Barlaston Green, near the library. She said, looking straight at Susie, that she wanted no arguing. Then she left them at the kitchen table with the familiar blue-and-white Burleigh teapot and a ginger cake of her own making, and went slowly and alone up to bed.

  Susie had looked at Jasper across the table and said, sadly, ‘I never managed to tell her that I was pregnant.’

  Cara Moran was born in London in 1980. Her sister Ashley followed two years later, and then, after a further gap of six years, there was Grace. In the course of those eight years, it became plain to Susie, if not to Jasper, that the Stone Gods’ early promise was unlikely to come to anything much, and it became simultaneously evident to both of them that there was in Susie both an unstoppable force and a remarkable capacity to achieve. The old pottery building in Fulham was sold to a developer, and a purpose-built unit was rented instead on a small industrial estate in Lavender Hill. A new corner site was acquired for the shop, with a warren of haphazard offices in the basement underneath, and the pottery gradually transformed itself into a powerful, unmistakeable, fresh modern take on traditional spongeware.

  And then when Grace was eight, and the lower ground floor of their second Fulham house had been newly converted into a music studio for Jasper – ‘Don’t ask me about it,’ Susie said to her oldest daughter. ‘Just don’t ask me’ – Susie’s grandmother developed bronchitis and then pneumonia and died in the University Hospital of North Staffordshire. She left her pearls to Cara, her amethysts to Ashley, her cameos to Grace and her two platinum Swiss watches to Jasper. Everything else – which was nothing like it had been in her husband’s heyday – she left to Susie, including all the documentation relating to the purchase and subsequent sale of the factory where Jean McGrath had gone to apply for a job as an apprentice fettler all those decades before.

  For Susie, there was no decision to be made. She was in her mid thirties, with a growing family, a growing business, and a raft of powerful impulses driving her on, chief of which was a determination to commemorate her grandfather in the most appropriate place and manner conceivable. His old factory in Hanley, flanked by wasteland on one side and a scarcely used canal on the other, was now only occupied by its owner in a single wing. The central block, where her grandparents had met, was boarded up, and the secondary wing, where the stores had been kept and machinery repaired, had broken windows and planks nailed across the main doors. In the yards between the wings, where cobblestones had once kept the horses’ hooves from slipping, and buffer stones had protected the corners of the buildings from heavily laden carts, weeds were growing dankly and half-heartedly, and there were drifts of litter and cigarette butts in the gullies. It was not, Susie thought, standing looking at it all on a leaden March morning, a factory in good health. Everything was dispirited; everything spoke of decay. It was a business limping along making cheap goods for an unenthusiastic market. Seventy people laboured in that rundown building, making nothing that they, or anyone else, could take pride in. She turned up her coat collar. Well, it was time to change all that. It was time to energize, to put the heart and the craft back into the old Snape pottery, time to give the people of Hanley a proper reason to live and work where they did.

  Looking at the factory now, she thought, as she stood gazing out of the upstairs window at the Parlour House’s unkempt but promising garden, you could still see the original pot bank. The canal was still there, of course, with an old bottle kiln on the far bank, one of the few survivors of its time. The stretch of wasteland on the other side had been reclaimed from rubble and weeds and planted optimistically as a meadow. But the factory itself looked cherished now, its brickwork repointed, its slate roof solid, its whole appearance softened and mellowed with duck-egg-blue paint on all the woodwork and climbing plants trained up the walls. Susie had left the Snape Pottery lettering on one wall, but had added SUSIE SULLIVAN above it in bold white letters surrounded by the daisy and diamond motifs that had been her first bestsellers. It had never failed to thrill her, arriving by taxi from Stoke station and seeing the factory standing there looking so coherent, so collected, with lights in all its windows, cars in its yard, and stack after tidy stack of her diamond-patterned boxes visible in the warehouse wing, packed full of pottery destined for stores in London, stores in Edinburgh, and kitchens the length and breadth of the country.

  She gripped the sill of the window she was standing by. It meant so much to her, that factory, that business. It didn’t just represent what she had built, or where she had arrived at; it represented her past, her grandfather’s past, the past of those six towns and the riches of the land they were built on, as well as all the unimaginable human effort that had gone into digging coal out of its depths, and fashioning its clay into every kind of object required by domestic life. And it was this, this belief that she grasped the essence of this part of England, as well as the essence of what people wanted in terms of home and hearth, in taming some tiny patch of the wide, wild world to be a reliable sanctuary, that made her resist relinquishing any control of the business to outsiders.

  Her brand was essentially her invention. Without her, it was traduced somehow, diluted, distorted. She understood the figures – good God, hadn’t she looked after all the books herself for twelve years? – and she understood the ambition. But none of them – Cara and Daniel and Ashley and Grace – seemed to grasp how intrinsic her eye, her sense was to the success of the whole business.

  Which was, really, what this cottage was about. With the Parlour House, she could go back to where she had begun, she could make it into something that demonstrated incontrovertibly to them that her concept, her comprehension of a particular longing and dream and aspiration in the public, was not just at the heart of Susie Sullivan pottery, but what made it work.

  ‘You,’ she said out loud to the empty house, ‘are going to show them. You are going to show what I don’t seem able to explain.’ She patted the wall next to the window. ‘You, Parlour House, are my trump card.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Daniel expected to find his father-in-law in his studio. It was a Saturday morning, after all, and his mother-in-law was away in Staffordshire, so Jasper would have made one of his habitual pint mugs of strong tea and be where he was always happiest, down in the lower-ground-floor studio, fiddling about on the keyboard with a new idea for a song, or trying it out on his guitar.

  Daniel had a front-door key to his parents-in-law’s house. Neither Susie nor Jasper had – to Daniel’s initial surprise, and abiding delight – any conventional sense of privacy, or indeed of any formalized generational divide. Their daughters had been brought up very much as their equals and companions, and neither of the parents had the faintest concept of requiring a respectful
distance to be kept around their private lives. In consequence, the Victorian family house in which the three girls had done most of their growing up was open to all of them. Cara had simply never surrendered her own keys, and nobody had ever expected her to.

  So, this Saturday morning, armed with two Americano coffees and a bag of croissants, Daniel let himself into Radipole Road, allowing the front door to bang shut behind him to announce his arrival. Then he called out his father-in-law’s name, expecting to receive no response before opening the sound-proofed door under the stairs and descending to the music studio.

  Instead, from the far end of the hall, Jasper shouted, ‘Kitchen!’

  He was sitting at the kitchen table, in the blue-painted carver chair that had somehow become his, with a newspaper spread out in front of him. He was in his habitual black jeans and black T-shirt, and his longish pepper-and-salt hair was tousled in a way Daniel had at first thought was casually contrived, but had come to realize was just the way it was. He had a mug in front of him, large tortoiseshell-framed spectacles on his nose, and his usual amicable air of being unsurprised to see anyone.

  He took his glasses off and beamed at Daniel. ‘Morning, mate.’

  Daniel put down the cardboard cup-holder and the bag of croissants. There was, as usual, music playing on the stereo system. Jazz this morning, somebody brilliant on a saxophone. ‘Some breakfast, Jas? Are you ready to follow one variety of caffeine with another?’