Balancing Act Read online

  ‘Always ready,’ Jasper said. He pushed the newspaper to one side. ‘And I shouldn’t be reading those reviews. All these new kids on the block, with their synthetic music, in their pathetic suits, God help us, all computerized and packaged. Does nothing but get me down, insofar as I let anything get me down.’

  Daniel extracted one coffee cup from its cardboard grip and set it in front of Jasper. ‘That’ll get you up again.’

  ‘But vinyl’s back,’ Jasper said. ‘Kids are collecting vinyl. It’s the same with these ebook things. After a while, people want solid stuff again. They get sick of grasping at air.’

  Daniel sat down at an angle to his father-in-law, ripped open the croissant bag and pushed it across. He said nonchalantly, ‘Susie back today?’

  Jasper took the lid off his coffee. ‘Who knows?’

  ‘Has she rung?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘And?’

  Jasper took a gulp of coffee. He said, ‘You’re not getting a reaction out of me that easily, mate.’

  Daniel tore off a piece of croissant. He said, ‘It’s a family matter, Jas. It’s a family decision.’

  Jasper leant back in his chair and said mildly, ‘I don’t see that, Dan.’

  Daniel leant forward. He had not only rehearsed what he would say, but he had assured Cara that his whole approach would be as anodyne as possible. He said carefully, ‘She hasn’t got the time to give to another house. She can’t manage another commitment. I mean, when would she live there?’

  Jasper smiled at him. ‘When she’s in Stoke.’

  ‘But she stays with Grace.’

  ‘Grace has a boyfriend.’

  ‘He doesn’t live with her.’

  Jasper’s smile grew broader. ‘You won’t provoke me, mate. If Susie wants this cottage, because of her grandfather and her childhood and all that, she should have it. She’s got bags of energy. She could run a dozen houses.’

  Daniel put the piece of croissant into his mouth and chewed. After a few moments, he said, ‘She’s amazing.’

  Jasper said equably, ‘You won’t get round me that way, Dan.’

  Daniel shifted to hunch over the table and his coffee. He tried to remember what he had rehearsed, on the way to Radipole Road.

  ‘Jas—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It … isn’t really about this house. Or, at least, the house is only a symptom.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be saying this to Susie, not to me?’

  Daniel glanced at him. He said impulsively, ‘Actually, I was just looking for a steer.’

  ‘I can’t promise anything.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Daniel said, suddenly vehement. ‘But as we all live off this company, what happens to it affects all of us, including you, however much you try to avoid responsibility.’

  There was a sudden, highly charged silence. Then Jasper said, in the tone of one abruptly faced with unreasonableness, ‘Hey, steady on.’

  Daniel said nothing. A decade in the Moran family had taught him that Jasper would do anything to avoid a confrontation. So, after a pause and in a much lighter tone, he said, ‘Can I explain the situation to you – the situation as I see it?’

  Jasper looked relieved. He nodded.

  ‘When I joined this company,’ Daniel said, ‘it’s no exaggeration to say that Susie thought she didn’t have the wherewithal to get bigger. She had too many products, she was only making things to order on a three-month lead, the shop was a random mess and the customers didn’t know where they were. And also – also, Jasper – she was using any profit she made to offset losses from previous years. Well, look at us now.’

  Jasper sighed faintly. He picked up his spectacles and blew on the lenses.

  Dan said, ‘You know where we are now. You know that when Cara and I joined, you could see visible signs of growth within a year. We go in for classic retail thinking, we’re always asking ourselves how we can exploit something that sells. We have grown this company to five times its size in ten years. And we’re on a three-year mission to get us to a turnover of £20 million. Are you with me?’

  Jasper nodded. He was holding his spectacles out at arm’s length and squinting through them.

  ‘Of course,’ Daniel continued, ‘I don’t want it to be twenty. I want it to be thirty. So does Cara. So does Ashley. So would Grace, if she thought about it. We all believe in the product. We are all committed to Susie’s vision.’

  He stopped. There was another short silence, and then Jasper said quietly, ‘But?’

  ‘But, Jas, Susie has to acknowledge what she doesn’t know. She has to learn to defer on some things.’

  Jasper’s gaze swung round to his son-in-law, and rested there. He said levelly, ‘Does she now?’

  ‘If she would delegate more, she would achieve more.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘She has to lose some control to gain more. She has to allow the next fuse not necessarily to be lit by her.’

  Jasper got up and crossed the kitchen to an enormous birdcage by the French windows to the garden. The parrot inside, a yellow-eyed African Grey called Polynesia, sidled along her perch so that she could croon at Jasper through the bars. He put a finger out and scratched the top of her head.

  ‘Suppose,’ he said, ‘she doesn’t want any of this?’

  Daniel swivelled to look at him. ‘You mean, she doesn’t want the company to grow?’

  ‘You’d have to ask her,’ Jasper said, his gaze on Polynesia. ‘But I’d guess she doesn’t want it to get less personal. Because if it isn’t personal, then it’s had it.’

  Daniel said quickly, ‘That’s my job.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘To grow the company while retaining its essence. Susie’s vision.’

  ‘You,’ Jasper said to Polynesia, ‘are my ideal woman.’

  ‘Radipole Road, south-west six,’ Polynesia said clearly.

  ‘I don’t want to even blur her vision,’ Daniel said, ‘let alone lose it. It’s a wonderful vision, and it works. But we can’t stand still. We have to build on what we have. And Susie has to cooperate with that house she wants to buy.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Jasper said, still scratching the parrot’s head.

  Daniel let a beat fall, and then he said, ‘It’s a distraction.’

  ‘She can cope.’

  ‘She will use it as an excuse not to focus,’ Daniel said. ‘We need her to see what we have to do next to expand the company, not to spend half a million pounds that is of no benefit to the company’s future.’

  Jasper blew Polynesia a kiss. Then he came back to the table and reached past Daniel for his coffee cup. He said, ‘Why didn’t Cara come?’

  ‘She’s gone to her Pilates class.’

  ‘Not ducking out of things?’

  Dan said stoutly, ‘She’s rung Susie already.’

  ‘To say …?’

  ‘Please don’t buy this house. Please listen to us about the best way to franchise the brand out to other manufacturers. Please don’t try and dodge the issue of the company’s future by getting involved in buying another property you do not need.’

  Jasper finished his coffee and put the empty cup down on the table. He said softly, ‘Maybe it isn’t a distraction.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Jasper said, staring at the framed Frida Kahlo poster on the wall above the table, ‘this house is actually about the company. About her fear that you’ll grow it into something she can’t recognize, something that isn’t her any more. This cottage is where she can go back to her roots, where it all began. It’s a size she can manage.’

  Daniel stared at him. ‘You think it’s deliberate?’

  ‘I think it might be.’

  ‘So …?’

  ‘So she’s fighting for some kind of creative survival.’

  Daniel got up slowly and walked to the door to the hall. Then he turned, and said to his father-in-law, ‘So you won’t try and dissuade her from buying this
house?’

  Jasper didn’t look at him. He went on staring at Frida Kahlo’s apricot-coloured roses in their fat black vase. He said gently but firmly, ‘No, I won’t.’

  In her flat near the Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent, Grace was ignoring her private telephone. For some instinctive reason, she had never given Jeff her work phone number, so if she switched her private mobile to silent, she would not be agitated every time he either tried to call or sent another aggrieved text.

  He had not tried to contact her at all the previous evening. He hadn’t spoken another word all the way up the M6, and he didn’t speak when he dropped her off at Manchester Piccadilly station. She had got out of the car, clumsily retrieved her bag from the boot, and was stooping to say ‘Have a nice weekend’ or something equally pitiful, when he slammed the car into gear and roared off. If it had been a more dignified car, and not an ageing Nissan Pixo, his angry departure might have been more effective. As it was, buoyed up by her own indignation and sudden sense of liberty, Grace bought a single ticket to Stoke, a cheese baguette and a quarter-bottle of Beaujolais, and felt that she had not only been justified in refusing to go to Edinburgh, but had somehow triumphed.

  This elation lasted until she got home at almost midnight. But then, confronted with a chilly flat, an empty fridge and several messages from her sisters telling her to ring Ma, and from Ma telling her to call, however late, her victory – if that’s what it was – suddenly felt hollow and pointless. She dumped her bag in a corner, had a hot shower and got into bed wearing socks and mittens and a T-shirt. Then she rang her mother.

  ‘Gracie! Safe in Edinburgh?’

  ‘I didn’t go, after all.’

  ‘Didn’t you? Why not? Where are you?’

  ‘I’m home, Ma. I just didn’t feel like driving all that way.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘And Jeff’s mates – it’s his weekend, really. He’s better alone.’

  ‘Well,’ Susie said, ‘I’m tucked up at the hotel in Staffs. If you aren’t in Edinburgh, sweetie, you can come with me tomorrow, can’t you?’

  Gracie snatched a tissue from the box beside her bed and blew her nose. ‘Don’t think so, Ma.’

  ‘Why not? I’d love you to come. I’d really like—’

  ‘I can’t decide for you. I can’t be anything to do with your decision.’

  There was a brief silence at the other end of the line. Then Susie said, ‘I imagine you’ve talked to the others.’

  ‘Of course I have.’

  ‘They don’t want me to buy it – Cara and Ashley. Nor does Dan. What about you?’

  Grace suddenly felt worn out by the general intractableness of everyone close to her. She said, wearily, ‘You have to decide alone, Ma. And you have to have good reasons for your decision.’

  ‘So it’s a no from you, too.’

  ‘It’s a can’t-talk-about-it-any-more-tonight from me.’

  She had turned the light off after that and lain awake for hours, not so much going over the evening as circling endlessly round it. In the morning, her phone registered three texts from Jeff – all saying the same thing, as if he had jabbed angrily and repeatedly at the Send button and thus sent the same message three times – and two missed calls. She dressed, tied her wild red curls up into a scarf, and went over to the Potteries Museum café for breakfast: lukewarm tea in a metal pot, yoghurt and a limp Danish pastry, served with a warmth of manner that threw Jeff’s behaviour into disagreeably sharp contrast. Then she went back outside and stood on the corner of Bethesda and Albion streets, and looked down the hill at the wide, shallow valley below, full of tumbling roofs, and considered what she should do with the day – or, even, the life – ahead of her.

  Behind her was the sturdy Victorian building, striped with lines and arches of sky-blue tiles, that hid her flat from view. Her flat. Her two-bedroom flat with its surprising reception space and magnificent north window which was ideal for drawing next to, and which had sold the flat to her. She had bought it two years ago, before she met Jeff, when she had been promoted to run the design studio at the factory. It had been a real achievement, both actual and symbolic. A flat, a company car, a serious position which gave her valuable independence from the rest of her family in London. So, what did she do? What she did was look at all those achievements, and then compromise them all by taking up with Jeff. Gorgeous Jeff, with his jealousy and insecurity and resentment making him as dangerous and alluring as Heathcliff. She stared at the complicated road junction ahead of her, as if it somehow symbolized her inability to choose a path and set off determinedly down it, without looking back. In her pocket, her phone beeped again, indicating another text. She pulled it out and looked at it.

  ‘Sorry,’ Jeff had written. And three kisses.

  Maisie had drawn, with a green felt-tipped pen, all over her brother’s face and then her own arms, and the backs of her hands. Then she had picked up a second pen, a brown one this time, and climbed the stairs with a pen in each hand, the tips tracing wobbly lines up the white walls to the very top. At the top, she sat on the carpet, dismantled the pens and smeared the contents all around her, including on her new grey corduroy pinafore dress with an appliqué elephant on the bib. Finally she went to find her mother, who was having a leisurely Saturday-morning bath, and held out her green and brown hands.

  ‘Messy,’ Maisie said.

  Ashley, her hair pinned on top of her head with a giant plastic butterfly, was lying in the bath reading an article on Grayson Perry in The Ceramic Review. The children had been downstairs, after all – Maisie colouring at the kitchen table, Fred posting plastic shapes into a box – supervised by Leo. She lowered the magazine and regarded Maisie’s hands. ‘Where is Daddy?’

  ‘They broke,’ Maisie said. ‘They broke on the carpet.’

  ‘Look at your dress!’

  Maisie squinted down at herself. ‘What a pity,’ she said, philosophically.

  Ashley flung the magazine down, out of splashing range. As she began to get to her feet she said again, ‘Where is Dadda?’

  Maisie shrugged. She leaned over the edge of the bath and dabbled her hands in the water. ‘Gone,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean, gone?’

  Maisie lifted her hands out of the water and inspected them. She said, with precision, ‘He isn’t there.’

  ‘Isn’t where?’

  Maisie sighed. She said slowly, ‘He isn’t in the kitchen.’

  Ashley seized a towel and wound it tightly around herself, under her armpits. She took Maisie’s hand. ‘Come with me.’

  Maisie hung back, dragging on her mother’s arm. She said, ‘Oh, I need to wash my messy hands.’

  Ashley stooped and whirled Maisie up into her arms. The towel untucked itself and fell to the floor.

  ‘Fuck,’ Ashley said. She set Maisie on her feet again and seized the towel.

  Maisie said, ‘He went to the loo.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘Dadda. He said, “I’m just going to the loo. You go on with your drawing.” But I needed to come upstairs.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I needed to do big drawing, you see. Very big drawing.’

  Ashley leant over the bath and flipped out the plug. Then she took Maisie’s hand again and ran her down the landing. She stopped at the top of the stairs and surveyed the scribbles.

  ‘Oh, Maisie!’

  Maisie looked nonchalant. She said carelessly, ‘I expect it will wash.’

  ‘Maisie, you know not to draw on walls. You know not to draw on the carpet or the floor. You know all that.’

  Maisie burst into sudden tears. She screamed, ‘I’m not naughty! I’m not! I’m not!’

  Leo appeared at the bottom of the stairs and looked up.

  ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘So much for my peaceful Saturday-morning bath,’ said Ashley.

  Leo began to climb the stairs. He said sorrowfully, ‘Oh, Maisie—’

  ‘Don’t say that!’
Maisie shrieked. ‘Don’t say that!’

  Leo reached the landing. He sat on the top step so his face was on a level with Maisie’s.

  She cried, ‘I’m not naughty! I’m not—’

  ‘But you are, Maisie. Look at the poor walls, look at the poor carpet. Never mind your new dress.’

  ‘And your poor Mumma,’ Ashley said.

  Leo didn’t look at her. He said, still regarding his daughter, ‘Mummy can now go back to her bath.’

  ‘But,’ Ashley said, adjusting her towel, ‘Mumma has let it out now.’

  Leo didn’t flinch. He said, ‘Then Mumma can run another one. And Dadda is not going to apologize to Mumma for going to the loo for three minutes, in case she was planning to suggest it.’

  Maisie said, between sobs, ‘I didn’t mean to.’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Leo said. ‘You let yourself do it. You allowed your hands to uncap those pens and then draw with them, all the way up. It wasn’t a mistake.’

  Ashley knelt on the stained carpet. She took Maisie’s hand. ‘Look at me.’

  ‘No!’ Maisie roared.

  ‘No!’ Fred shouted, from the bottom of the stairs.

  He had crawled out of the kitchen and was now on his knees, clutching the bottom step.

  Ashley leapt to her feet and raced down to him. ‘Freddy!’ She bent over him, clutching the slipping towel.

  ‘No,’ he said again, waving her outstretched hand away. He glanced up the stairs, longingly.

  ‘Not Fred,’ Maisie said indistinctly.

  Ashley bent down and scooped Fred up with her free arm. He protested at once. Ashley said to Leo, ‘I’ll take him to the bathroom with me.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to be peaceful.’

  Ashley climbed back up the stairs, Fred kicking under one arm. As she stepped round Maisie and Leo she said, crossly, ‘Fat chance of that.’

  Leo didn’t look at her. He put a hand out and took Maisie’s nearest one. He said, ‘Maisie is going to help me clean the walls and the carpet. And she is going to think how to say sorry.’

  Maisie glared at him. She said again, but without conviction, ‘I didn’t mean to.’

  From the bathroom came the ringtone of Ashley’s mobile.

  Leo said, unnecessarily, ‘Your phone.’