Balancing Act Read online

Ashley stretched an arm along the table to touch Grace’s nearest hand. ‘Not just your spare room, Grace, but your bathroom.’

  Grace gave Ashley’s hand a brief squeeze and let it go. She said, ‘He’s weirdly tidy. And domesticated. I haven’t had many men in the flat, but he’s by far the most civilized. And clean, actually.’

  Cara said, ‘Gracie, you don’t have to put up with it.’

  Grace sighed. She pushed the sketchbook away. She said, ‘If I don’t, then Ma does.’

  Ashley looked down at the table top, her expression abruptly chastened. She said, ‘But that doesn’t seem fair.’

  ‘None of it’s fair. That’s why Dan wants to put him in a hotel,’ said Cara.

  Grace said slowly, ‘I think Ma is really confused. I don’t think she can bear him anywhere near her, but she can’t turn her back on him either. She can’t behave as badly to him as he has to her.’

  Cara took her hands away from the foxglove mug and put them over her eyes. From behind them she said, ‘But you can’t offer yourself as a sacrifice so that Ma can live with her own conscience comfortably.’

  ‘No,’ Grace said, ‘I know that. I can’t. I won’t. It’s only temporary. He’s only been here three nights.’

  Ashley looked at her. She said abruptly, ‘What do you truly, honestly feel about him?’

  Grace shrugged.

  Cara took her hands away from her face. She said, ‘I can only just stand to be in the same room—’

  ‘Car, I didn’t ask you.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Grace said.

  ‘Nothing? Just – just, really, nothing?’

  ‘Well,’ Grace said, ‘indifference, I suppose. My head says he’s my grandfather and he’s old, and the rest of me says not very much, to be honest. A bit of duty, a lot of indifference. But I do mind about Ma.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cara said.

  ‘Me too,’ said Ashley.

  ‘So,’ Grace said, ‘there we are. Big old problem nobody wants, Ma least of all, so we have to do something about it, for her.’

  Ashley said ruefully, ‘And to think we were all so fed up with her, only a week ago, about this house she’s buying!’

  ‘That’s families,’ Cara said. ‘Families and businesses. Always a battleground. And it will be again. We’re just briefly united, aren’t we, by this – this pantomime misfortune.’

  ‘He made a curry last night,’ Grace said. ‘Cinnamon and cloves and ginger and everything. It was amazing.’

  ‘Could you eat it?’

  ‘You mean, could I eat anything he made? Well, yes, I could. I did. And then Jeff finished it.’

  ‘Jeff? What was Jeff—’

  ‘I’m trying to dump him,’ Grace said, ‘but he won’t get the message.’

  Cara leant forward. She said urgently, ‘Gracie, if he’s harassing you—’

  ‘He isn’t, yet. And I’m not completely decided.’

  ‘Oh Gracie, please.’

  ‘Car,’ Grace said, ‘I know he’s bad for me. I know he’s moody and manipulative and loves himself more than he’ll ever love me, but there’s something still, just something, and I know it drives you mad watching me not doing what you want, but I don’t do things like you, I don’t feel things the same way you do, I don’t have your certainty about everything …’

  Cara put her hands out, palms towards Grace, in a halting gesture. ‘OK, OK, I get it. I shouldn’t have reacted, it’s none of my business. I’m just wound up about what’s going on, about Ma, about what we do. I’m just—’

  ‘I know what we do,’ Ashley said suddenly.

  She had pushed herself upright in her chair. The other two turned to look at her.

  ‘What?’

  She looked from one to the other. ‘Leo would say, work with what you have.’

  ‘So?’

  She looked at Cara. ‘What do we have? One unwanted extra house. One unwanted old grandfather.’

  She turned to Grace. ‘So we put one inside the other.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  There was, Leo Robbins noticed, a pizza box jammed hastily into the kitchen bin. The jamming had clearly been hasty because the flip-top lid was wedged ajar by a corner of the box. When he opened the lid fully and peered in, he saw the flattened plastic pouches of a sugary children’s fruit drink that the nanny had been expressly forbidden to give Maisie and Fred, and a couple of empty yoghurt pots, although the sweetened yoghurt fell into the same banned category. The nanny, a cheerfully unapologetic girl from Margate, had plainly given the children a fast-food supper and then swanned off for her evening’s entertainment, leaving the bathroom in disarray and Fred’s disposable-nappy receptacle in acute need of being emptied.

  Leo was not, personally, sanctimonious or particularly precious about food. But there was a difference, surely, between asking a nanny to avoid specified seductions ingeniously crafted by the food industry, when it came to her very young charges, and coming over all purist. All he and Ashley had ever said to Cheryl was please don’t give them sugar-laden, processed junk, and please cook them something fresh for supper every night. And Cheryl had widened her expertly made-up eyes and said, ‘Oh, I’d be happy to. I’m a good cook, me. I take after my mum.’

  And then, night after night, there’d been children’s ready-meal boxes in the bin, and seldom any fruit or vegetable peelings other than banana skins. There was a packet of chocolate-flavoured puffed-rice cereal in the cupboard, and a shrink-wrapped block of child-sized boxes of strawberry-flavoured drink. Cheryl herself, if the contents of the bin were anything to go by, subsisted on crisps and chocolate. Her skin, Leo thought despondently, was immaculate.

  After sorting out the bathroom – he must remember to run more sealant along the back of the bath, Fred being such a vigorous splasher – he had gone to check his sleeping children. To be fair to Cheryl, they looked clean and orderly, Fred upside-down in his cot, backed up against one end, and Maisie asleep on her side, her mouth slightly open to accommodate the thumb lying slackly in it, her other hand clutching the rag of cloth that had once been a stuffed mouse made of striped recycled cotton. She was breathing through her nose in little snorts, and Leo had knelt down by her side for a while and put his face close to hers, to inhale that warm and innocent breath. Then he had gently removed her thumb, pulled Fred back into the body of his cot, and gone downstairs to extract all the packaging from the kitchen bin, to confront Cheryl with in the morning.

  After that, he decided he would make supper. Ashley had been late last night, too late to eat with him, having travelled down from Stoke with Susie and Cara and then stopped off with them at Radipole Road to be given fish and chips and red wine – his father-in-law’s staple comfort menu – before finally arriving home after eleven, slightly wired and dishevelled and in no fit state to give a coherent account of anything. That had occurred at a quarter to six that morning instead, when they had both been woken by Maisie attempting a pee on her own and dropping the toilet roll into the lavatory pan in the process. They had knelt together on the bathroom floor, consoling and mopping and finding dry pyjamas, and Ashley had described her grandfather and the meetings and the talks and had then, leaning against the side of the bath, burst into tears and said, Sorry, so sorry, I don’t know why I’m crying but I just am.

  Maisie had been very distressed to see her mother weeping, and then, of course, Fred had woken and roared for attention, stamping about in his cot and rattling the bars. By the time Cheryl arrived at eight fifteen, her ponytail and make-up both perfectly in place, Leo had been full of gratitude to see her, which had, he supposed, been taken by Cheryl to mean that she could do pretty much what she wanted that day, even so far as giving the children supermarket pizza and sugar water for supper. After all, there were consequences to everything, even if in this instance they were the labyrinthine ones of an unprincipled and amoral old man turning up unannounced and drawing everyone’s attention inexorably to him, like iron filings to a magnet.

  Leo opened the fridg
e. There was nothing in it that constituted the solid basis for a meal: no lamb chops or salmon fillets or left-over chicken. There was half a jar of artichokes in oil, the end of a packet of pancetta, a tired bag of salad and various plastic boxes containing forgotten bits and pieces. He would have to do what his famously frugal mother called ‘running a teaspoon round the fridge’. Well, he was good at that – an inventive user-up of whatever was on offer. And what seemed to be on offer for Ashley at the moment was not, in his view, acceptable. She was a major contributor to that company, but Leo didn’t think she was allowed the voice that such a contribution merited. It was affecting her and, in consequence, was affecting them. And these new developments were going to affect them even more. Which was why, with an appetizing plate of something ingeniously put together out of nothing very much in front of her, Ashley was going to hear how different their life was going to be for the next year at least. Because, he, Leo, was going to tell her.

  It was weird, really, how something as trivial as irritation with Cheryl could be so galvanizing. Leo – famous, he knew full well, for being calm and easygoing – was also a master at procrastination and prevarication. Look at the garden. Look at his limping, part-time, half-hearted work. He could work twice as hard as he did; he could accept every teaching job he was offered, not just one in three; he could organize some garden people, at least, even if he didn’t want to get out there personally with a rotivator. But he did none of those things. His school reports hadn’t exactly said that he was lazy, but they had gone on a bit about his need for confidence and approval, his inability to risk aiming more than just a shade higher than he was already. And he was frustrated with himself. Always had been. ‘Come on, Leo,’ he’d say to himself. ‘Just do it.’ But there had been too few things that he had felt certain enough about to do. Except marrying Ashley. He had been full of conviction about marrying Ashley, and he had never ceased to marvel that she had married him. And now – at last, and so much more valuable to her than sorting the piffling garden – he had come up with an idea that filled him with energy and rare certainty. An idea that he was going to put to her while she ate the dinner he had made.

  ‘It’s the answer, really,’ Susie said.

  She was in her usual armchair in the sitting room at Radipole Road. One wall of the room was entirely lined with bookcases, painted deep blue, and Polynesia was sidling along the top of these, clucking in appreciation of her freedom. The door to the hall was closed, just in case her notions extended to flying upstairs.

  ‘I hope you’re keeping an eye on her,’ Susie said, ‘in case she makes a mess.’

  Jasper had a box of guitar plectrums on his knee and was sorting them. They made small clicking sounds like dice as they slipped through his fingers. He said, ‘I’ll clear it up. I always do. It’s good for her to be out of the cage.’ He paused and then he said calmly, ‘Do we have to have this conversation every time she’s out? When you’re away, she’s out all the time.’

  Polynesia reached the end of the bookcase and was confronted by a large pottery vase. She peered at it.

  ‘Watch,’ Jasper said, looking up, grinning. ‘She’ll tick it off in a minute.’

  ‘Why don’t you bugger off?’ Polynesia said to the vase.

  Susie didn’t look up. She said, ‘That’s what she says to me.’

  Jasper was delighted. ‘Does she?’

  ‘She only loves you. You know that.’

  ‘I didn’t know she told you to bugger off.’

  ‘Since you presumably taught her to say it, I think you probably did know. Actually.’

  Jasper smiled at her. ‘Want a fight?’ he said kindly.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Bugger off,’ Polynesia said again to the vase. ‘Off. Off. South-west six.’

  Susie said, ‘I’d rather talk to you about … about Morris.’

  Jasper stopped sifting. He said, ‘Well, you’ve seen him and sorted him.’

  ‘He isn’t sorted. He’s in Grace’s spare bedroom.’

  ‘Dan offered to book a hotel room.’

  Susie sighed. ‘Jas, don’t be obtuse. Whatever I feel or don’t feel, he’s old and he’s my father.’

  Jasper said reasonably, ‘Old people manage perfectly well in hotels.’

  ‘Why are you being like this?’

  Jasper lifted the box of plectrums off his lap and set it on the floor.

  ‘Suz, I’m not being like anything. But I can’t work out what you want from me. You don’t want me to come to Stoke, you don’t want me to meet Morris, but you do want me to agree with you and support you while you keep changing your mind. If I were you, I’d put Morris in a hotel for now, and then send him back to Lamu with a remittance to keep him there till he pops his useless clogs. But you won’t do that, so I can’t help you.’

  Susie stirred in her chair as if she was trying to get comfortable. She said, almost as if Jasper hadn’t spoken, ‘Maybe Ashley’s right. Maybe it is the answer.’

  Jasper got up, crossed to the bookcase and stood directly below Polynesia. She bent down immediately, crooning and clawing at the painted wood with her gnarled grey talons.

  ‘Jasper.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you think of Ashley’s idea?’

  He put a hand up so that Polynesia, bending dangerously low, could have her neck feathers ruffled. He said, ‘Suz, I don’t have an opinion.’

  ‘You must do!’

  He turned round, retrieving his hand. He said soberly, ‘You know my opinion. I couldn’t quite get why you needed to buy the Parlour House, but you assured me it was creatively essential and I believed you – I believe you – so I went along with it. Now you tell me that it’s the place to park Morris while you think what to do with him next, and as you don’t want to take my advice about him, I’ll go along with your wishes again. I don’t want to argue with you, I don’t agree, but you’ll have to put up with that. I’ll go along with what you want, but you can’t have agreement as well. You’ll have to reconcile yourself to that.’

  Susie looked at the fireplace. Jasper had lit a fire, hours before, and it had now burned down to a soft red glow in a heap of feathery ashes.

  She said, ‘I can’t behave other than very well, in the circumstances.’

  Jasper came back to his chair and lowered himself into it. He looked across at her. Forty years together and he could still sometimes glimpse the girl in the straw hat wreathed in daisies, even if that girl had never been as blonde as the woman before him now.

  He said, ‘Accepted standards say you should do your duty. That means seeing that he is warm and fed and looked after. Well, you’ll do that. You and Grace are doing that already. But circumstances do not say that you should behave towards him as if he’d been, to the smallest degree, the kind of father he bloody well should have been.’

  ‘But I have to live with myself afterwards,’ Susie said unhappily. ‘I have to make a decision that I feel comfortable with.’

  Jasper shrugged. ‘I’m not interested in martyrdom.’

  ‘Nor me.’

  ‘Nor do I think I can go on with this conversation much longer. I’m revolted by the mere thought of the man, but he’s not my dad, thank the Lord.’ He stood up, slightly stiffly. ‘You decide what to do and I’ll try and live with it.’

  Susie looked up at him. ‘Only try?’

  ‘Yup.’

  Jasper went back to the bookcase and looked up at Polynesia. She had now decided that the vase was a friend and was leaning against it, murmuring. He said, ‘I’ll do my best. Like I’ve always done. I’ll do my best to support you in this ridiculous daddy palaver, as I’ve done in everything else. Put him in the Parlour House if you must, but I’d send him packing back to Lamu with enough money to keep him there. Money he’ll forfeit if he tries to get on another plane. That’s what I think, and I’m not changing my mind and I’m not saying it again. And now,’ he said, reaching up to grasp Polynesia’s feet, ‘I’m going to put madam
here back in her cage, and then I’m going to bed.’

  ‘He’s very … peculiar,’ Cara said. She was pushing linguine round her plate, whose rim was decorated with a precise ring of clam shells. ‘Tall, and very thin and very brown, with straggly white hair tied back and lots of threads and thongs and beads tied round his wrists. Grace says he’s very clean.’ She gave a brief shudder. ‘I don’t care if you could eat off him. He gives me the creeps. Especially as he and Ma have the same eyes. I kept looking at his eyes and thinking “How dare you have her eyes?” even though I knew it was insane.’

  Daniel reached across the restaurant table and poured more sparkling water into Cara’s glass.

  She said, ‘I’m not very good at forgiving people. I mean, it wouldn’t matter to me how beautiful someone was, if their behaviour was shite. And his has been shite personified. Being anywhere near him made me feel kind of … contaminated.’

  ‘I know,’ Daniel said. He let a little silence fall, and then he said, ‘Could we talk a bit of business?’

  Cara put her fork down. ‘I would love to talk a bit of business.’

  ‘We have to reschedule that meeting.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And I think, Car, that we have to talk to Ashley.’

  Cara had picked up her wine glass. She put it down again abruptly. ‘Ashley? Why Ashley?’

  ‘Because I’ve been doing a bit of thinking while you were away, and I think we need Ashley to understand something.’

  Cara leant forward. ‘Have you been talking to Leo?’

  Daniel smiled at her. ‘You know I hardly ever talk to Leo. Lovely chap and all that, but not an inhabitant of my planet. No. I think we have got to talk to Ashley, on her own, about where we go from here, and what needs to be different.’

  ‘Now? Right now? After what’s happened?’

  Daniel said seriously, ‘Especially after what’s happened.’

  Cara pushed her plate aside and folded her arms on her table mat. She said, ‘D’you know, Dan, that what I hated while I was in Stoke – I mean, I hated seeing Ma so upset and Grace being so shoved about, as usual, but what I hated was that he – that all this stuff about him – was getting in the way of the company, kind of distancing it, as if he had the power to somehow blot it out for us, this thing that Ma started, that we’ve all made, that’s our lives, really, and he could just wander in, all old and forlorn and greedy, and just kind of get in the way, obliterate it, make us all forget to put it first, where it should be …’ She began to hunt about in her pockets for a tissue. ‘Sorry, Dan, sorry. And all the people in the factory were so sweet. I mean, they were fascinated, of course, but so concerned and puzzled. Oh damn. Have you got a tissue?’