Balancing Act (3 page)

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.’

D
aniel 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?’

‘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.