Balancing Act (4 page)

‘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.’

Ashley swung Fred into a different position. ‘It’ll only be Ma again.’

‘This cottage—’

‘I don’t want to talk to her about it. If she’s going to buy it, whatever we all think, why doesn’t she just get on and do it?’

‘She’ll have her reasons.’

‘She can always justify anything she wants to do.’

Leo got to his feet and bent to pick Maisie up. He said, ‘I think that’s my line.’

Ashley regarded him, the towel and Fred clasped awkwardly in her arms. She said dangerously, ‘Are you criticizing my mother?’

‘I wouldn’t dare. I know how much we owe her.’

There was a brief silence.

Then Ashley said, without looking his way, ‘But you resent it.’

Leo adjusted his hold on Maisie. He said carefully, ‘No, I don’t resent it. I just think that sometimes all the good stuff comes at quite a price.’

‘For you.’

‘For us.’

Ashley stood looking at him. Both children were still and silent. She said again, ‘For you.’

Maisie put her face into her father’s neck. He took a deep breath. ‘Yes,’ he said, almost defiantly, ‘for me. But not exclusively for me. For
us.
It doesn’t help the dynamic between
us.
’

Ashley hitched Fred a little higher in her arms. ‘So what are you going to do about it?’

‘I – haven’t decided,’ Leo said. He gave Maisie a brief kiss and then he added, with marked emphasis, ‘Yet.’

Cara was making a salsa. She had assembled all the ingredients – an avocado, plum tomatoes, a small scarlet chilli – like a cookbook photograph on the breakfast bar in the flat, and had put beside them the huge stone pestle and mortar that they had bought during a holiday in Lombardy. The pestle and mortar didn’t come out of the cupboard very often: Cara had read an article on the arthritis that afflicted huge numbers of women in the Third World who spent hours each day grinding the ingredients for their basic food. Grinding was clearly only to be undertaken for reasons of occasional and specific authenticity.

She had bought a rye sourdough loaf from an artisan baker to accompany the salsa. It sat at the end of the breakfast bar in a stout, gusseted brown-paper bag, and beside it lay a slab of Italian butter, on a small slate. There would also be olives and fennel-infused salami. It was the kind of deliberate and delicious Saturday lunch that she set herself to prepare almost as a therapy, as a way of winding her mind down from the intensity of the week, after Pilates had done the same for her body.

It was hard, switching off. You could tell yourself that you were infinitely more effective at work if you had thoroughly re-booted at the weekend, but this was one of life’s many occasions when the theory was impossible to put into practice. After all, she and Dan were now, really, the engine of the company. Between them, they had rescued it from its hand-to-mouth state, and given it a promising future as well as a healthy present. There were now twenty-four people in the office and more than two hundred in
the factory, including an excellent new website guy in the former, and a factory manager, Neil Dundas, who didn’t, like his predecessor, want to pick a fight with Dan, in the latter. She picked up the avocado and flicked out its little nub of stalk. It was all looking gratifyingly
good.

Cara ran a knife smoothly round the avocado. The figures last week were admittedly down on the same week the year before, but overall, sales were up thirty per cent. It was the result of an accumulation of small things: the chocolate-drop-filled daisy mini-mugs were doing well, royalties were coming in from the tinware company and the paper-napkin company for using Susie Sullivan designs. And, of course, the marked-down stuff was just flying out. She pulled the avocado gently in half and inserted her knife tip under the stone. Discounting was never a problem for a company with its own factory, and one of the golden rules of merchandising was that you must mark a product down the moment that you notice its sales declining.

Daniel’s key scraped in the front-door lock across their open-plan sitting room. Cara picked up a spoon and began to scoop the avocado flesh out of the shell of its skin into the pestle. She said as he came in, ‘Good news.’

‘Oh?’

‘Ash got that contract. I checked her emails this morning. They want a special line, just for them, but they also want twenty grand’s worth of core stuff.’

Dan slung his black-leather satchel on to the chair by the front door and pushed the door shut. ‘Excellent. Does she know?’

‘She’ll see for herself later. Saturdays, she’s knee-deep in toddlers. She’ll be thrilled. She thought she’d blown it. So funny. The wet wipes …’

‘Don’t you want to know how I got on?’ said Dan.

Cara shook a few drops of Tabasco on top of the avocado.
‘I’m putting off asking you. You don’t look a happy bunny to me.’

Daniel came across and peered into the pestle. ‘Yum. I’m not.’

‘He wouldn’t help?’

‘He won’t try to dissuade her,’ Daniel said. ‘He wouldn’t even countenance it. He sees no reason why she shouldn’t have it, if she wants it. He thinks that if her reasons are nostalgic, or creative or whatever, that’s fine.’

Cara turned towards the kettle. Those tomatoes would need skinning. She said, ‘Why did I ever think he’d take our side? Or that he’d at least agree to talk to her?’

‘We had to try.’

Cara ran water into the kettle. She said, ‘I can’t actually remember him standing up to her about anything. Even with us girls, he didn’t. But then, he didn’t really have to, because he was doing most of the mothering anyway, and we cut him a lot of slack for just quietly getting on with it.’

Daniel dipped a finger into the avocado pulp and then licked it. He said neutrally, ‘D’you resent that?’

‘What?’

‘That your mother wasn’t there for you when you were small, because of the business?’

Cara watched the kettle boil. ‘No.’

‘Really?’

‘He was so good at it,’ Cara said. ‘All our friends loved him. Making music and making cakes. What more could you wish for?’

Daniel watched her. He said, ‘But you don’t want children …’

‘Nor do you!’

‘Agreed. But I just wondered …’

The kettle pinged itself off. Cara picked it up and came back to the breakfast bar.

‘Dan, I’m not in the mood for an analysis of my childhood.
Dad was great. Ma was fantastic. The company is pretty well all in all to you and me. Enough, don’t you think?’

‘There was just something about your father this morning. Something a bit … oh, I don’t know … lonely, or – or abandoned.’

At the far end of the breakfast bar, beside the loaf in its brown bag, Cara’s telephone emitted a brief yelp, signifying that a text had arrived. She indicated with a jerk of her head that Daniel should pick it up.

‘Do see—’

He glanced at the screen and held the phone out towards Cara.

‘What?’ she said.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘She’s done it. She’s made an offer.’

‘A
ll I’m asking,’ Jeff said, ‘is that you give me a bit of a break.’

It was seven thirty in the morning and the design studio was empty, save for the two of them. Ben and Michelle, Grace’s assistants, would not be in until eight. Jeff, who normally avoided coming to the factory, as if merely being on premises owned by Grace’s family would somehow contaminate him, had known that he would catch Grace there alone, on a Monday morning, if he was early enough.

He was not only early, but also shaved, and bearing flowers and a round golden box of chocolate truffles. Grace was in her weekday uniform of jeans, battered knee boots and a fisherman’s sweater, with no make-up and her hair held back by an old bandana of her father’s. She had never felt less like smiling.

She stood by the window, with its checked curtains, where she had been when Jeff walked in, and looked past him. He was still holding the flowers. Pink oriental lilies. Where had the poor things been flown from? He held them up.

‘If you aren’t even going to speak to me, babe, then I might as well put these in the bin.’

He made a move towards a galvanized dustbin that stood at the end of the display table. It had ‘Paper Only’ painted neatly on the lid in black.

‘Not in there,’ Grace said automatically.

He dropped them on the floor. ‘You don’t want them, do you?’

Grace said nothing.

He held his empty hands out in supplication. ‘Please, babe.’

She slowly turned her gaze to look at him and said, ‘Please, what?’

‘Please gimme a break.’

‘Why?’

‘Because—’ He stopped, and then he said, dropping his hands, ‘Because you mean the world to me.’

Grace waited a moment, and then she said levelly, ‘No, I don’t.’

He took a step towards her, over the flowers.

‘Please don’t come any nearer,’ she said.

He stopped a yard from her. ‘I mean it, babe. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about the weekend. I don’t know what got into me. I missed you. I missed you all the time. It … it just felt kind of … pointless, being there without you.’

Grace moved backwards, away from him, and put the central unit between the two of them.

‘I’m not interested, Jeff.’

‘Let me explain a bit more—’

‘No.’

He waited a moment. Then he bent, picked up the lilies and put them on the nearest surface, in front of Michelle’s computer. He said, his voice catching, ‘Don’t say this is the end, babe.’

Grace sighed. She folded her arms. ‘
I
’m the one who needs a break.’

He said, suddenly eager, ‘I’ll give you anything you want.’

‘I don’t trust you. I need time away from you. I need not to see you.’

His smile was hopeful, boyish. ‘Anything you say. I’ll do anything you say.’

The door to the studio opened. Michelle, wearing her quilted parka and an enormous knitted bobble hat, like something from a Scandinavian fairytale, came in on a gust of cold air and chatter.

‘Oh my God, it’s Arctic out there, and
icy.
I was sliding all the way from the bus. I mean—’

She stopped. She looked at Grace. Then she looked with visible interest at Jeff. ‘Whoops. What have I walked into?’

‘He’s just leaving,’ Grace said.

Michelle’s eyes slid from Jeff’s face to the lilies lying across her keyboard.

Jeff said to Grace, ‘OK, he’s leaving. If you promise he can come back again.’

‘
I
’ll have you back,’ Michelle said. ‘Any time.’

Grace stepped sideways and picked up the lilies. She held them out to Jeff. ‘Take them.’

‘Only if—’

‘I need space,’ Grace said. ‘I need time to think. I don’t know.’

Jeff took the lilies. He said with fervour, ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’

‘Just go.’

He walked to the door and paused, his free hand on the handle, turning to look back at Grace with meaningful ardour. Then he let himself out and they heard his booted footsteps resounding down the outside staircase.

Michelle dropped her bag. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘And all that before breakfast.’

‘Sorry that you—’

‘Don’t mention it. I like to start the week with a bit of drama. So that’s the famous Jeff?’

Grace nodded.

Michelle said, ‘Handsome is as handsome doesn’t?’

Grace said, ‘It wasn’t a very good weekend.’

‘He works for that garden centre, doesn’t he? Out Trentham way?’

‘Yes,’ Grace said shortly.

‘What does he do there?’

Grace didn’t look at her. She said, ‘It’s a bit vague …’

‘Depressing, you mean,’ Michelle said. ‘It must be one of the most depressing garden centres in England. And plants are supposed to cheer you up, aren’t they? Living things, and all that.’

Grace looked away in silence.

‘OK,’ Michelle said, ‘I get the message. I can take a hint. I just like to know what’s going on, same as you do, if only you’d admit it.’

She took off her bobble hat and hung it on the bentwood coat rack in the corner. She said, ‘And a little bird told me that your mum’s buying a house in Barlaston.’

Grace stared. ‘What?’

Michelle unzipped her parka.

‘You can’t keep anything to yourself round here. You know that. Especially if it concerns your mum. So it’s true, isn’t it? I can tell from your face, just as I can tell that if your Jeff wasn’t so hot you’d have given him the Monday-morning push.’ She paused by the central unit and looked down at the golden box. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Chocolates! And I’ll have to eat them all, won’t I? Because you simply couldn’t face them, could you?’

There was nobody at home, in Radipole Road, except the parrot. Jasper had left one of his comical doodle notes on
the kitchen table, saying that the cleaner couldn’t come because she had a child off school, and that he would be back about six, possibly with Brady and Frank, and if so, he’d get a takeaway for all of them.

Apart from the note, the kitchen table was empty, save for a Susie Sullivan jug of small, forced irises. The irises had no doubt come from Holland. The jug was from the Rise and Shine range, twenty years old and still selling.

Susie crossed over to the birdcage. Polynesia, busy investigating something under one wing, affected to take no notice. She was at the far end of her perch and, apart from the small clucking sounds integral to her search, offered no greeting.

‘Polynesia,’ Susie said, ‘just because I’m not Jasper—’

At the sound of his name, Polynesia extracted her head and eyed Susie sideways.

‘I’m sorry it’s only me,’ Susie said. ‘But it’s better than being alone, isn’t it?’

Polynesia clucked briefly. Then she sidled along her perch so that she was nearer Susie, but not near enough to be touched.

Susie said, ‘You’ve had him to yourself all weekend, after all.’

Polynesia considered this. Then she edged back the way she had come and put her head back under her wing.

‘It’s a bit much,’ Susie said, ‘to have a parrot that won’t even
speak
to me. I think I’ll get one of my own for the Parlour House, just to put your beak out of joint.’

‘You bugger off,’ Polynesia said, indistinctly but unmistakeably from among her feathers.

Susie laughed. ‘You’re a baggage, Polynesia Moran. You really are. Isn’t it lucky for you and me that Jasper seems to like baggages?’

Polynesia’s head shot up again. ‘Polynesia Moran,’ she said. ‘Jasper Moran. South-west six.’

Susie went across the room, by force of habit, to the kettle. Beside it, Jasper had left a pile of mail, the more interesting envelopes slit open with their contents re-inserted sideways, to indicate that he had read them. The girls – well, not Grace so much, but Cara and Ashley – had been saying for years that Susie should have an assistant, someone dedicated to running her life, from organizing her correspondence and the diary to collecting her dry-cleaning. But she had always refused. She had office staff both in London and Stoke, she said, and she had Jasper, who had been in at the very beginning of the company, which was more than any of the girls had been. In any case, she didn’t want more people in her life, more people to accommodate and consider.

‘What she means,’ Ashley said to Cara, ‘is that she doesn’t want anyone to know exactly where she is or what she is up to. And, situated as I am right now, I can’t blame her.’

Jasper never questioned anything. He knew she didn’t mind if his studio was full of sundry musicians, and by the same token, he didn’t mind if she was, unpredictably, somewhere other than Radipole Road. They had, she thought, and not without a touch of self-congratulation, reached a point of immense mutual respect and comfortableness, and the liberty they both cherished would only be diminished by the introduction of an assistant – however delightful – who would, of necessity, know every detail of their lives.

They had, after all, managed an overall harmony for the past thirty years that was nothing if not impressive. They were still in only the second house they had ever bought, and if it now boasted a hi-tech music studio and sound system and a lavishly enormous hot-water tank, it was still basically no more than a Victorian terraced house with a fifty-foot garden – now cunningly landscaped – and a paved patch in front where passers-by threw crisp packets and stringy wads of chewing gum. As they both had a horror
of pretension in any form, this house and a mildly amateur way of approaching the nuts and bolts of Susie’s business life suited them admirably. Cara and Ashley and Daniel could chastise Susie for a lack of professionalism as much as they liked, but they knew that it was all about control. If you stayed in the house you knew, with domestic arrangements that weren’t just familiar but entirely manageable, with as few intimate human commitments outside the immediate family as possible, then not only were you free to concentrate all your energies on creativity, but you remained undeniably in charge.

And that, Susie thought, flicking through the envelopes, is what suits me. I’ve been in command of my own life since I got my first bank loan, and nothing –
nothing
– is going to take that away from me. She put the last envelope down on the stack – nothing there that needed any immediate action on her part – and carried the kettle over to the sink to fill it. Coffee first, and then a brisk walk to the office with the details of the Parlour House on her laptop. She wouldn’t explain or justify her decision; she would simply announce it. And add that she had had an offer accepted of forty-five thousand below the asking price.

Polynesia had shunted herself along her perch once more until she was as close to the bars of her cage as she could get.

‘You bugger off,’ she said again.

Susie was talking in the steady, unhurried way she had that was so difficult to argue with. Her laptop was open on the boardroom table, showing a shot of the Parlour House taken from the lane, with an improbable hydrangea-blue sky behind it.

‘It really was that colour on Saturday,’ Susie said. ‘And the house is so sweet – just a cottage really. I made the offer at lunchtime and Mrs Whatsit from Lyndhurst had said yes
by mid-afternoon. Exchange of contracts by the end of the month and completion to suit me. Perfect.’

Ashley did not look across the table at her sister. She knew, from a sidelong glance, that Cara was looking down at the figures in front of her, and not at either the screen or her mother. Cara wanted a normal Monday meeting, as scheduled. She was trying to move on, round an immovable, immutable obstacle. Susie, on the other hand, only wanted to talk about the house.

‘I’ll use it when I’m in Stoke. I’m there a day or two a week, as it is, and maybe Jasper will come and join me sometimes.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘I’m longing to show it to you. And the PR people. It will be great for publicity.’

Neither Ashley nor Cara said anything. Cara was scribbling in the margins of her notes, her head bent. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, so that Ashley had a clear sight of the tautness of her jaw. It looked as if her teeth were clenched again. Ashley’s dentist had told her that she must make a conscious effort not to grind her teeth, and to relax her jaw and her shoulders. ‘Drop both,’ he’d said. ‘Your shoulders are not attached to your ears.’

Susie looked across the table at Cara. ‘Where’s Dan?’

Cara didn’t look up. She said, ‘He’s got a meeting, Ma.’

There was a brief pause. Then Susie said, ‘We always have a Monday meeting, the four of us.’

‘I know,’ Cara said. She put her pen down. ‘But it was the only time this particular management consultancy could see him.’

Susie sighed. ‘Not that again.’

‘Ma, it’s a recognized process of development. We’ve been through all that – you know we have.’

‘And I’ve accepted it. From fifteen to twenty is a logical progression—’

‘But not,’ Ashley said, ‘what we could do.’

Susie drew the laptop towards her and leant forward to study the picture on the screen.

Cara said, ‘Could we talk about gifting, instead?’

‘Of course,’ Susie said, not looking up.

‘It’s growing,’ Cara said. ‘The personalized stuff is just flying out, particularly on the internet. Can we—’

‘No,’ Susie said suddenly, shutting the laptop smartly. ‘No, we can’t. This will lead on to you telling me that I must delegate more, that it’s no longer all about me and I must recognize that. And I don’t want to hear it again.’

‘But you just said—’

‘Cara,’ Susie said, ‘I will talk about anything, but I am not going to be lectured. And it has nothing to do with family, before you accuse me of that, either. I am buying this house because I must have somewhere of my own – somewhere I can think, and draw, and plan, somewhere I am not badgered to let go of this, or change that, or delegate the other, until I sometimes feel that nobody remembers where this company, and all the people who depend upon it, came from in the first place.’

Ashley put the heels of both hands into her eye sockets and pressed until there were preoccupying explosions of colour behind her closed lids. This moment was not unlike today’s breakfast, in essence, when Fred, holding his plastic bowl of cereal out sideways, his round brown eyes fixed on her face, had slowly and purposefully tipped it upside-down. Watching the cereal fall to the floor was very like watching her mother breathe now, with deliberate regularity.