Balancing Act

To everyone at Eastwood Pottery, Stoke-on-Trent,
with my love and grateful thanks.

‘W
hat
is
all this?’ Cara Moran said loudly to her youngest sister over the telephone. ‘What’s all this about Ma buying another house?’

In the design studio of the factory, Grace Moran sat with her eyes closed and her phone held a few inches away from her ear. She counted to five and then she said, deliberately non-committal, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes, you do!’

‘Car, I don’t know any more than you do.’

There was an expression of disgusted impatience from the London end of the telephone line. Cara would be at her desk, Grace thought, in the new office suite that the company had acquired only a year ago, wearing an expression Grace remembered keenly from their childhood and which never boded well.

‘You must know,’ Cara said crossly. ‘Of course you know. You’re in Staffordshire, aren’t you? How can I know from London what nonsense Ma is getting up to in Staffordshire?’

Grace opened her eyes and glanced down at the sketchbook in front of her. A whole page of drawings of jugs. Jug after jug. Tiny modifications in each sketch, so that what her mother liked as a design idea would also work in production.

‘I want a pinched spout,’ Susie had said. ‘I want that cosy, domestic, traditional look. A Dutch jug.’

Grace had not sought support from her two young design colleagues, who had remained steadfastly staring at their computer screens. She had said to her mother patiently, ‘You can’t have a pinched spout on that, Ma. It’ll be different every time they cast it, and then it might crack in the firing.’

Now she said to her sister, in the same patient tone, ‘Ma’s allowed to buy a house, you know. It’s her company, after all.’

Cara gave a little yelp of mocking laughter. ‘Don’t we know it!’

‘And this isn’t an expensive house—’

‘Since when was half a million not expensive?’

Grace picked up a pencil and added a daisy motif to one of the jugs. She said calmly, ‘So you
do
know about it.’

There was a short pause.

Then Cara said in a different tone, ‘Ashley and I Googled it at lunchtime.’

‘Ah.’

‘It looks like a sweet house.’

‘It’s where her great-grandfather worked. The one who was a dairyman.’

‘I know.’

‘The Parlour House. It’s a cottage, really.’

‘In Barlaston.’

‘She was born in Barlaston,’ Grace said.

‘Gracie, I know. I get all that. But she hasn’t got time to live in it. She’s got a perfectly good house in London, and she’s busy. Flat-out busy. Anyway, what about Pa?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Has she even told him?’

Grace sighed. ‘He won’t mind. He never minds.’

‘Well, there’s the money.’

‘I suppose the house would be an asset—’

‘Not if it’s for her private use. You know how it works – how it’s always been. We’re all salaried and then the company gives Ma and Pa what they need. But finding an extra million before tax—’

‘She’s not extravagant—’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘So you and Ashley and Dan have already discussed it?’

Cara said firmly, ‘Just Ashley and me.’

‘Why are you ringing me? You never ask my opinion on anything to do with money. You don’t think I have any aptitude for it. You think I only just understand that a cash machine isn’t a kind of money box—’

‘Rubbish, Gracie.’

Grace threw her pencil down. It clattered lightly along the central table and then fell on to the wooden floor and rolled gently under a desk.

‘Grace?’ Cara said. ‘Are you still there?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Will you go and see her?’

‘What?’

‘Will you,’ Cara said, enunciating deliberately as if speaking to someone hard of hearing, ‘see Ma tonight and explain to her that buying another house might not be the most practical use of her time or energy, and that property of any kind really has to be seen as an investment asset for all of us?’

‘Why me?’

‘Because, Grace, you are in Stoke, and Ma is staying out at Barlaston tonight, and we are all in London.’

Grace got up and crossed the studio to retrieve the pencil. She said, stooping, ‘But I’m not here tonight. It’s Friday.’

‘I know it’s Friday. Why aren’t you there?’

Grace straightened up. It was a nice pencil. The lead didn’t
break all the time when you sharpened it. She said, ‘I’m going to Edinburgh tonight.’

‘Edinburgh? Why?’

‘Jeff’s got a friend doing a gig up there. We’re going to support him.’

‘But—’

‘I’m allowed time off!’ Grace cried. ‘I’ve been here since eight o’clock this morning!’

‘It’s not that.’

‘It’s Jeff, isn’t it?’ Grace said. ‘You don’t want me doing anything with Jeff.’

Cara said carefully, ‘Well, I am just not wild about relationships made online.’

‘Everybody does it now,’ said Grace. ‘It’s what we all do.’

‘Okcupid,’ Cara said with distaste. ‘Luvstruck.com.’

‘You don’t like Jeff.’

‘No, I don’t like Jeff. I don’t think he’s good enough for you. But that’s beside the point. The point is that Ma needs to be talked to before she hands over a deposit.’

Grace dropped the pencil into the mug – the mug made in the factory – that held all her pens and pencils. She said, slightly defiantly, ‘Sorry. Anyway it’s Friday. No money will get transferred till Monday.’

‘We need to talk to her.’

‘
You
talk.’

‘Grace, I always have to do the talking.’

‘You’re the eldest.’

‘And you’re the youngest, so you never get to do anything difficult.’

Grace wanted to say that sometimes being the youngest made every single thing difficult. Instead she said as levelly as she could, ‘I’ll call Ma on my way to Edinburgh.’

‘You really are going to Edinburgh?’

Grace’s private phone, lying on the desk beside her
sketchbook, flashed again. ‘Jeff,’ said the screen. Grace picked it up.

‘Yes,’ she said to her sister. ‘Yes, I am.’

Ashley Robbins, née Moran, let herself into her car in the underground car park and dropped her handbag and workbag – indistinguishable in size or weight – into the footwell of the passenger seat beside her. The footwell already contained several empty, dented juice cartons, a half-drunk bottle of one of Leo’s irritatingly boastful energy drinks and a drift of crumbs. The latter would, of course, now adhere to the bottom of her bags and she would forget that they were there until, like last week, they transferred themselves shamingly to the immaculate desktop of the china-ware buyer of a big chain of department stores, who might – or, now, might not – put in a substantial order for a wide range of Susie Sullivan pottery. The buyer had behaved as if her desk had not just been smeared with crushed crisps, so Ashley spent much of the meeting surreptitiously trying to remove the mess with wet wipes, which filled the room with an insistent aroma of synthetic lemon. There had, as yet, been no confirmation of the order.

Ashley buckled on her seatbelt, started the engine and turned on the headlights. The car radio, bursting into life with the engine, announced that it was three minutes to six and the weekend weather would be mild and unsettled with slow-moving bands of rain advancing from the west. Rain which would, in turn, curtail visits to the playground – some mothers took towels to dry off the slides and swing seats, but Ashley was not one of them – and prevent Leo from making progress in the stretch of mud and broken concrete that he assured her would one day be a garden. She had tried not to say, ‘When the children are too old to use it,’ and failed. Leo had drawn a beautiful plan of the projected garden and
pinned it up in the kitchen. When it had been there a month, Ashley suggested that they get quotes from a few garden companies to put the plan into practice. Leo had looked deeply wounded.

‘I can do it, Ash. I’m good at that sort of thing. You know I am. I want to do it myself for the children.’

The western end of the King’s Road was solid with Friday-evening traffic, and a light, persistent drizzle was making the windscreen look as if it had been daubed with oil. She ought to have walked. The office was only a twenty-minute walk from home, in Fulham, and perfectly walkable, but it had been threatening to rain that morning, and she was late, and there were her bags to carry and the car was at the kerb outside. So she had succumbed to the car, and now she was jammed behind a number 22 bus, with another car almost touching her back bumper. Leo would have taken over from the nanny by now – not a wildly satisfactory nanny, this new girl, either, but then nobody had been, since Nicky left to get married and moved to Australia – so there wasn’t the frantic rush there might have been. But frantic seemed to be her default mode at the moment, and wherever she was, at work or at home, felt somehow wrong. The guilt that stalked her seemed to have no respect for the number of simultaneous roles she was required to fill. Mothering? You should be at work. In the office again? You should be at home. Friendships? Don’t even bother going there.

At least Leo never said that. He never reproached her about work or the fact that working in a family company meant that the lines between work and home were not so much blurred as irrevocably tangled. Leo didn’t seem to share the urgency that surged in Ashley’s bloodstream; he didn’t seem to feel driven, or impelled, or even much obliged to do anything beyond the most immediate requirement. He would sit on the floor with Fred, building an unhurried Lego
tower, and giving no indication that his mind was on anything other than helping Fred’s small fat hands to slot a blue brick on top of a red one. And when Maisie hurled herself at him in one of her three-year-old turbulences, he would just catch her and hold her, until some kind of inner resolution eventually enabled her to stop thrashing about like a pinned firework and be set down again.

If she was honest, he’d had that effect on Ashley, too, at the beginning. She’d thought, after university, that the last thing she wanted was to join the family firm. Her older sister was determinedly gaining merchandising experience in a household-name company, her younger sister was doing a graphics course at art school, and the comfortable assumption was that both of them would join Susie Sullivan pottery at a significant level in due course. But Ashley said she didn’t want that. Ashley said she wanted an academic career. Then she said she wanted to go travelling. Then she said she thought she’d try property development, at which point Leo Robbins, whom she’d known vaguely at university, showed up at the party of a mutual friend and indicated to her, largely by what he left unsaid, that it was a pity to waste her cleverness by behaving like an airhead trustafarian.

She started going out with Leo and she got an unremarkable job in the marketing department of a major newsagent chain. It was a horrible job, mostly consisting of cold-calling advertisers and cosseting tiresome customer accounts, but it had a revelatory side. Within three months, Ashley was as hooked on marketing as she was on Leo. Marketing was, of course, largely common sense, but it was also analytical. Leo, gazing at her shining face, never said
I told you so
, but he took real pleasure in her enthusiasm and aptitude. His own job, as a Media Studies supply teacher in the Greater London area, seemed not to be a matter of huge concern to him. Sometimes he worked, sometimes he didn’t. He was
amiable, capable, practical, and devoid of Ashley’s compelling energy.

‘He’s a great foil for you,’ Ashley’s father said.

‘Is that a compliment?’

He shrugged. ‘It’s an observation.’

So here she now was, marketing director of Susie Sullivan, married for six years to Leo Robbins, with two small children and a shabby house in Fulham, sitting in her car on a Friday night in a traffic jam in the rain, lining up in her mind all the things she would need to do once she got home. One of which was to ring her mother. About this house.

It was quiet in the office, with the kind of Friday-night hush which presages a prolonged period of inactivity. The desks were all tidy, and in the so-called boardroom – only Susie could have insisted on a boardroom which resembled nothing so much as a pretty kitchen – the alternate red- and duck-egg-blue-painted chairs were neatly arranged around the blond wooden table. The table itself bore nothing except a Susie Sullivan jug of scarlet and royal-blue anemones. Flowers meant that Susie herself had been in the office or was about to arrive. She insisted on flowers everywhere, and garden or hedgerow flowers if possible.

Cara walked slowly down the length of the office. It was open-plan and airy, and although the windows were currently black with evening winter rain, in daytime they afforded an astonishing panoramic view of west London: of the river, of trees, which in the summer were as neat and dense looking as green sponges. They had designed the office between them, her mother and her sisters, with natural flooring, display cabinets resembling dressers painted in the trademark duck-egg blue and scarlet and laden with pottery, walls of framed posters and framed tea towels, conference tables like kitchen tables, proliferations of teapots and rows of mugs on hooks,
all of it managing to diminish almost to invisibility the necessary computer terminals and whiteboards.

‘I want,’ Susie had said, standing in the entrance of what had then simply been four thousand square feet of empty office space, ‘the buyers from the stores to come in here and
gawp.
I want them to see the brand, and the lifestyle we’re selling, like they’ve never seen anything so clearly before. I want colour, I want warmth and welcome, but I want order. This office must exude efficiency, but it must also exude
home.
’

To Cara’s eye, it did. The big white tables on which they all worked were backed by shelves of thoughtfully arranged pottery and walls of romantically shot photographs of pottery: jugs of cow parsley on garden tables, butter-smeared knives on pretty plates, teapots beside tumbles of pasteliced cupcakes. There were Susie Sullivan lamps next to the computer screens and Susie Sullivan fabrics on the back cushions of some of the desk chairs. The lighting glowed and shone rather than blazed. It looked – well, Cara thought, as she had often thought since they moved from the frankly cramped ad hoc basement offices of the London shop – completely and utterly inviting. However sophisticated you were, however urbane, however much your tastes ran to the impersonally perfected world of hotel living, you could not stand on the threshold of these offices and not feel the impulse to acknowledge the strength and sheer seduction of her mother’s domestic vision.