Balancing Act (19 page)

She was truly startled. ‘
Am
I?’

‘Yup,’ he said. ‘Not emotionally possessive of your daughters. Treating us sons-in-law like humans. Never expecting any of us to be grateful for anything you give us or enable us to have. In my book, that’s pretty good.’

She put her hands to her face. ‘Goodness—’

‘But maybe you
could
be a bit more hands-off now? Maybe you could step back a bit and, well, get to know Maisie and Fred a bit better?’

She dropped her hands and smiled a little ruefully. ‘Do you mean I should step aside for Ashley?’

Leo stood up slowly. ‘I might do,’ he said.

She looked up at him. She said, ‘Is this a plot? Were you sent to talk to me?’

He shook his head. ‘Pure impulse,’ he said. ‘I saw you leave the table.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’

She stood up too. ‘I don’t want to be pensioned off—’

‘No one’s suggesting that.’

‘I can’t
not
work.’

‘That isn’t on anyone’s agenda. It’s just – working differently. Working from another angle.’

She smiled at him again. She said, ‘You’re a clever boy.’

‘Not really.’

‘I don’t know many men who are so good at people.’

He ducked his head. ‘Thank you.’

‘I’ll think about what you said. I can’t promise anything, mind, but I’ll think. But while we’re on touchy subjects, perhaps you can help me with something else. Perhaps you can do your different-angle thing for me in another area. Can I ask you something else? Something I need advice on. Leo, what am I to do about Morris?’

Morris had taken to being the last person downstairs in the evenings. He said that at his age he didn’t need the sleep, and in any case, in all his life with Stella, he’d been the first one up and the last one to bed, because that had just been how things fell out between them, naturally. It had also been a source of important solitude for him, the quiet time of midnight, especially when there was a moon, and the raucous time of dawn, with all the tropical birds. For years, he had started every day sitting on the worn, paint-blistered steps of the beach house in Lamu, the first joint of the day between his fingers, the jungle chorus getting into its rowdy stride all around him and the sun rising ahead of him out of the quiet waters, bringing with it its daily blast of light and heat. To balance that with the silky quiet of darkness at the end of the day, a quiet only broken by the rustlings and faint chirrupings from the vegetation around, was a luxury. It was, probably, his only luxury. There were days when he had considered starvation a more attractive proposition than the prospect of yet another bowl of rice, maybe decorated with the bones and fins of some flavourless and dark-fleshed little fish. The idea of roast pork would have been as fantastical in Lamu as the idea of a well-appointed bathroom with constant hot water, and no opportunity for snakes to slither in through gaps in flimsy walls and coil themselves round the bucket that served as a toilet. Moving slowly around Leo and Ashley’s incredibly solid-feeling kitchen last thing
at night, washing up stray mugs, picking up stray toys, was a nightly miracle for him of permanence in living. It might have its claustrophobic side, but that was far outweighed by its sheer concrete evidence of a settled existence.

He was standing by the sofa in front of the television, a sock of Fred’s in one hand and a double-handled pink plastic cup in the other, when Ashley came down. She was in pyjama bottoms and a camisole under a long grey cardigan, and her hair was pinned up roughly with a couple of clips. Free of make-up, she looked to Morris about fourteen – an age he had, over the years, become used to Stella being somehow arrested at. But Ashley, his and Stella’s granddaughter, seemed to Morris to be arrested by nothing. He held up Fred’s sock. ‘Just clearing up a bit.’

Ashley didn’t smile. She said, ‘I came down for some tea.’

‘Would you like me to make it?

She went across to the kettle. ‘Heavens, no.’

‘Only asking.’

She had her back to him, filling the kettle. She said, not turning, ‘Sorry.’

He shuffled across the room and put the pink mug on the counter above the dishwasher. He said amiably, ‘It’s been a bit of a day.’

Ashley began opening cupboards in search of mugs and tea.

‘It has. Where’s the valerian?’

Morris leant against the counter, smoothing Fred’s sock between his fingers. He said, ‘Long ago, when I didn’t fit somewhere I just pushed off. If things didn’t work out, I made myself scarce. Can’t do that now. I would if I could, you know.’

Ashley put a box of teabags next to the kettle and extracted one. She said, still not looking at him, ‘It’s not you, actually. It’s me. And possibly Ma.’

Morris went on smoothing the sock. He said indistinctly, ‘Can’t blame her.’

Ashley turned round. ‘I don’t. I understand her. I understand me, too, being on her side. But understanding her doesn’t mean she’s right. Or that I am.’

Morris didn’t look at her. He said, ‘What’s done is done. You can’t change things by wishing.’

Ashley switched on the kettle. She said, watching it gather itself up to boil, ‘Nor can you change other people.’

‘That’s why I used to run.’

Ashley flicked a glance at him. ‘No running now.’

‘No. And … and you get stuck with the consequences.’ He grimaced at the sock and then he said, ‘I’ve never been much of a one for saying sorry, but I’m sorry for that. Just as I’m sorry about Susan.’

Ashley went back to watching the kettle. ‘Have you said that to her?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

He paused, and then he said, ‘Haven’t dared.’

‘You should dare,’ Ashley said. ‘You ought to.’

Morris laid the sock beside the mug. He said, ‘D’you think it would help?’

‘Yes, I do. She’s having an awful time. And you’re not. Are you?’

He said quietly, ‘I’m glad to be here, Ashley.’

The kettle gave a short scream and subsided. Ashley picked it up and began to pour water into her mug. She said, ‘And I’m trying to get used to it. The children like it, Leo likes it, and I am going to try to like it. I have to somehow get over your – unforgivableness. As well as just having you here. That’s
my
problem. But Ma is different. Ma is your problem, at least in part. You have to help her. Try and make it up to her by helping her now, helping her to forgive you and to
move on from where she’s been all her life, because of what you did.’

Morris was silent. He stood leaning against the kitchen counter, his head bent and his hands, as was his wont, in his opposite sleeves.

Ashley left her teabag to steep and leant back too. She put her hands into the pockets of her cardigan and wrapped it across her. She said, ‘You defied convention by running away. Well, now you’ve come back, and you’ve got to face the fact that people like Leo and me are dealing with it in a very different way. Just as Ma did, except that you were too far away to see it. Leo gets it. Leo understands that, just like Ma, I really wanted children, but I really want life too. Wanting fulfilment doesn’t stop just because you’ve become a mother, and I’ll always be torn because mother love is such a fierce feeling. Leo understands that I’m torn like this, he gets that I’ve got a kind of hunger in me, the kind of hunger Ma had, and he also realizes that Ma has let the balance of her life slip recently, and that you are actually one of the people who can help her get it right again, help her see that however brilliant the company is – and it is – it can’t give her everything she needs. It satisfies one hunger, but not the other. She’s so much more than a mother and grandmother, but she’s both those vital things, too. And at the moment, you’re not helping her be either, because you’re not showing her that you’re on her side.’

Morris didn’t look up. He said gruffly, ‘I’m the last person she wants.’

‘No,’ Ashley said. ‘Nobody feels that about their fathers. Not deep down. Anger’s only a way of showing how miserable you are.’

‘She’s got everything she needs. She doesn’t need me.’

‘She does,’ Ashley said. ‘She
does.
Don’t you even want to
try
?’

He glanced at her. Then he looked back at the floor beyond his feet. ‘Yes,’ he said.

Cara let herself into Radipole Road, and allowed the front door to slam shut behind her, deliberately.

‘Hi there!’ she shouted.

There was no reply.

‘Pa!’ Cara shouted. ‘Ma?’

Silence. The hall lights were on, but ahead of her the stairs were in darkness, and so were the kitchen and sitting room. She went down the hall rapidly and fumbled for the light switches, a whole bank of them sleekly set into a brushed-aluminium plate which had been put up when the house was rewired for Jasper’s studio. The kitchen sprang into abrupt and brilliant light. It was empty. Tidy and empty. Even the big parrot cage was empty, the door open and a scattering of striped seeds lying on the floor. A Susie Sullivan jug of improbably orange gerberas on the table was the only sign of life.

Cara went back down the hall to the sitting room. It had the air it always had after one of Benedita’s visits, the cushions unnaturally plumped, as if the whole room was standing to attention. The TV guide was folded back to show a date two days previously. It was weird, Cara thought, ghostly. Deckchairs on the
Marie Celeste
and all that. No sign even of Polynesia.

Switching on lights as she went, Cara climbed the stairs. Her parents’ bed was made, but there was a towel hanging over a corner of the bathroom door and one of their toothbrushes was still faintly damp. To her relief, her mother’s familiar make-up bag was open by one of the two washbasins, with its usual comforting jumble inside, and there was laundry in the dirty-clothes basket and her father’s slippers – ancient, dark red leather with no backs and worn soles – lying by the shower.

Cara shivered. It was not just strange, but wrong, somehow, to be investigating her parents’ bedroom for signs of life. When she was little, she remembered feeling an absolute right to possession, a natural justification at barging into her parents’ room or conversations whenever she felt inclined to, as if they could never have a greater concern than with her. In fact, she had felt the need to test that concern almost constantly, to challenge them to have any commitment more pressing than their children, as if she knew that one day she would inevitably find them wanting. Well, she supposed, in purely orthodox terms, her mother would have been found wanting. Her mother was often away, and was constantly preoccupied. But she had, at the same time, created for the household a stability that the mothers of most of Cara’s friends took for granted, the only difference being that it was their fathers who provided it.

Cara picked a lipstick out of her mother’s make-up bag. It was the same brand, same colour she had used for ever. Like her scent, it was instantly recognizable as Susie’s. The lipstick itself was also worn down in the idiosyncratic shape of all Susie’s lipsticks, with a curious little peak at one side. The sight of it made Cara suddenly ashamed of herself. It was like looking in the drawers of her parents’ bedside tables on the sly, and being rewarded – or punished – for such snooping by finding evidence of the sort of bedroom games that it was absolutely unthinkable for her own mother and father to indulge in. She clicked the lipstick shut hastily and dropped it back into the make-up bag. She was aware of her reflection in the well-lit mirror above the basin, but she couldn’t actually look at it. Feeling abashed was one thing. Seeing it written plainly on your thirty-three-year-old face was quite another.

She went quickly out of the bathroom and bedroom, turning off the lights as she went. She would go down to the
kitchen and leave her mother a note, saying that she had come round to see her on the off-chance, but no more. She would leave the note where they had always left everything of significance for Susie: on the counter not far from the kettle, weighted with a chipped plaster-of-Paris parrot that Grace had made at school when she was eleven.

As Cara reached the bottom of the stairs, a key sounded in the front door. Cara froze. The door opened and Susie stepped in, uncharacteristically clad in a shapeless old padded jacket of Jasper’s, with a striped muffler tied over her ears. She paused, took in Cara and gave a gasp of surprise.

‘Darling!’

Cara hurried forward. ‘Sorry, Ma. I should have texted. I didn’t mean to give you a fright.’

Susie’s cheek was cold against Cara’s lips. She said, ‘I wouldn’t have picked up a text anyway. I’ve got my phone in my pocket, but it’s turned off.’

‘Where have you
been
?’

Susie pulled off the muffler and shook her hair. ‘Walking.’

‘Walking?
’ Cara said. ‘But you never walk.’

Susie smiled at her. ‘I did just now.’

‘I couldn’t think where you were. I thought you’d be back from Ashley’s by now.’

‘I was,’ Susie said. ‘I am. But I wanted some exercise. I wanted to do a bit of thinking, and it’s easier walking while you think, isn’t it?’

She pulled off Jasper’s jacket and looked at it. ‘We bought that in Berlin. We hadn’t reckoned on it being so cold. It must be more than twenty years old.’ She looked at Cara. ‘Lovely to see you, darling.’

Cara began to move down the hall towards the kitchen. She said, ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

Susie stood where she was, holding Jasper’s jacket. She said, ‘Cara?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s Sunday night. Are you – are you here for a reason?’

Cara stopped walking. She turned in the kitchen doorway and put her hands on the frame. ‘Yes,’ she said again.

Susie folded the jacket and laid it on the hall chair. Then she moved across to a mirror on the wall and ran her fingers through her hair. She said, ‘Nothing awful happened?’

‘No,’ Cara said. ‘It’s just that I – well, I’ve got something to tell you.’

M
aisie had a haircut for the photoshoot. Usually she wriggled and raged on a bathroom stool, swaddled in a towel, while Ashley darted at her curls with a pair of scissors. But today, in honour of the first fully fledged professional photoshoot to happen in her very own kitchen, she was taken to a real hairdresser, propped on a pile of magazines to raise her high enough for the stylist to cut her hair properly, and swathed in a black nylon cape that fell in bat-like folds almost to the floor.

As long as she was in the hairdresser’s, and absorbed by her own reflection in the mirror in front of her, she was, Ashley reported, angelic. But once back at home and presented with the new dark-blue, white-collared corduroy dress, with matching blue and white striped tights, that had been chosen for her to wear for the catalogue photographs, she disintegrated into sudden and complete fury. She was
not
wearing that dress. She was wearing her favourite princess dress from her dressing-up box, the one made of scratchy panels of iridescent gauze, with artificial jewels glued gaudily to the bodice. She did not shout, she screamed. Then she cast herself down on her bedroom floor, like someone helpfully demonstrating a textbook tantrum, and, while still yelling,
kicked her feet so hard against her chest of drawers that her shoes fell off.

‘I’m afraid that it’s a complete meltdown,’ Ashley said, coming down to her unrecognizably styled kitchen. ‘She’s
purple.
’

Leo was sent up to try and calm her. When that failed, Morris, who had worked a small miracle by creating a sufficient semblance of a garden outside the French doors to satisfy photographic requirements, went upstairs to try his luck at pacifying her. He returned to report that he had managed to get her to stop screaming, but that nothing he said would induce her to put on the blue dress instead of the princess one. He said she had got into bed fully dressed, clutching the princess dress, and was lying under her Hello Kitty duvet, smouldering with determination.

Susie, who had been rearranging the mugs and jugs and bowls on Ashley’s dresser in a way that aroused familiar admiration in everyone there, turned round and announced unexpectedly that she would go up.

Ashley was astonished. ‘Oh, Ma!’

Susie gave a daisy-patterned jug a little nudge to the left. She said, surveying it, ‘When are the other children coming?’

‘In ten minutes,’ Leo said. ‘Amanda’s bringing Felix and the baby, and there’s a couple more from school.’

‘Right,’ Susie said. She crossed the room to a box packed with various items from the new range to be photographed, and picked out a couple of mugs. ‘Wish me luck,’ she said, and went out of the kitchen. Everybody present – Ashley, Leo, Morris, and the photography crew, headed by the company stylist, who had chosen Maisie’s catalogue clothes – watched her go in respectful silence.

Maisie’s room was dim. She or Morris had pulled the curtains across when she retired to bed, leaving the eerie
gloom of partly obscured daylight. Maisie lay on her side in bed, her thumb in her mouth, and stiff folds of glistening gauze clamped in her arms.

Susie put the two mugs she was holding down among the litter of small plastic objects on top of Maisie’s chest of drawers. Then she said, ‘I think I’ll draw the curtains.’

‘No,’ Maisie said, round her thumb.

Susie went across to the window. ‘The thing is,’ she said, pulling them apart, ‘that I can’t see in the dark. I’m not a cat, I’m a grandmother, and I need light to see by.’

Maisie took her thumb out. ‘My eyes hurt!’ she shouted.

Susie went back to pick up the mugs, and then sat down on the edge of Maisie’s bed and held them out. ‘See those?’

Maisie squinted. ‘Yes,’ she said reluctantly.

‘What’s on them?’

Inch by inch, Maisie half sat up. Her newly cut hair clustered round her head in soft curls.

‘You look lovely,’ Susie said.

Maisie peered at the mugs, ignoring the compliment. ‘Balloons,’ she said.

‘And this one?’

‘Flags.’

‘Bunting, actually. And there’s some with kites. We’re going to take pictures of them, you see – pictures of you, and Freddy and Felix and all the others, with this lovely new china, for a special children’s catalogue. We’ve never had a catalogue just for children before, so you will be the first children ever to be in a catalogue on your own. This is special china for that catalogue, special china for children. It’s called Balloons and Bunting. That’s the name of the range. It was designed by your Aunt Grace.’

Maisie crawled slowly out of her nest of gauze and bedclothes and reached out to touch the mug.

Susie said, ‘What colours can you see?’

Maisie sighed. It was astonishing, Susie thought, to bellow your eyes out for over half an hour and be without a blotch or a tearstain ten minutes later.

‘Red,’ Maisie said. ‘Blue. Green.’

‘But not pink.’

‘I
like
pink.’

‘So do I,’ Susie said. ‘But deep pink. Or soft pink. Not bubblegum pink.’

‘Pink is my
favourite.
’

‘This china, Maisie, is for
all
children. Not just you. This is for boys as well as girls, and big children as well as little children. And for these very special photographs, we need all the children – and you are the chief child – to wear colours that match the balloons or the kites or the bunting. So if you wear bubblegum pink, you won’t match. So you can’t be in the photos, I’m afraid. Fred will be, and so will Felix and his sister, but we’ll have to do without you, because you won’t match. It’s very sad, because we wanted you to be the chief child in the photos. But there we are.’

Maisie sat for a moment, looking at the mugs. Then she looked back at the garish shimmer in her bed.

‘If you scream again,’ Susie said pleasantly, ‘I will just go downstairs and leave you here, and tell the cameraman to photograph the other children because you won’t be coming. What a pity. What a shame.’

Maisie gave a shuddering sigh. She glanced with distaste at the dark-blue dress hanging trimly on her wardrobe door. Then she climbed slowly off her bed and stood in front of Susie, her chin raised in defiance. ‘I’ve got my Sleeping Beauty pants on,’ she said,
‘anyway.’

‘I saw the studio lights were still on,’ Neil said, ‘so I guessed you’d still be working.’

Grace was sitting at the big table, staring at the screen of
her laptop. She had hardly glanced up when he came in.

‘I’m not working,’ she said. ‘I’m looking at the photos from the shoot today. Ashley’s just sent them. They’re amazing. Absolutely amazing. We’ve always had good photos, but we’ve never had ones as good as these.’

Neil went round to stand behind her, instructing himself, as he did so, not to lean too close, not to allow his mind or his senses to register anything beyond what was on her screen. It showed a picture of Maisie and Fred, apparently only lit by the candles in the background. Maisie, in dark blue, her stout striped legs ending in red suede boots with thick soles, was standing on a chair concentrating on pouring milk from a Balloon jug into a Kite mug in front of Freddy. He was in his high chair, in a checked blue shirt with buttoned cuffs, and he had flung his short arms into the air in a gesture to match the look of rapture on his face. Both children appeared entirely oblivious of any camera, their faces caught in the glow of what they were doing.

‘It’s a winner, isn’t it?’ Grace said.

Neil cleared his throat. He moved sideways to avoid the distraction of Grace’s vulnerable back view. ‘It certainly is.’

‘There’s loads of them. That one is obviously the cover shot, as Ash says, but there’s lots of others nearly as good. A fantastic one of a wonderful baby with her face almost obscured by the mug she’s drinking from. And a sweet little boy counting M & M’s on a Bunting plate.’

‘You must be thrilled.’

‘I am,’ Grace said. ‘They plainly had such a good day.’

Neil propped himself against the table and crossed his arms and ankles. He said, ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant you must be thrilled with the range. All your own work.’

Grace gave the laptop a shy smile. ‘Well, that too.’

‘The idea of a children’s catalogue—’

‘I think that was Ashley.’

‘No,’ Neil said, ‘it was you. It was Ashley’s idea to increase the number of catalogues, but the idea of having one to launch a specific children’s range was you.’

‘Oh,’ Grace said. She didn’t look at him.

‘And the designs for that range were yours, too.’

Grace leant forward to look at a picture of Maisie sitting on a stool, with a bowl in both hands, staring straight and solemnly to camera. She said, almost under her breath, ‘It’s just as well that today was good, actually.’

Neil waited. He watched her flick through a few more slides. He noticed, slightly to his despair, that as well as the scattering of freckles across her nose and cheekbones, she had a single darker one, almost like a beauty spot, just above the left-hand corner of her mouth. He said, too loudly, ‘Say again?’

Grace didn’t look at him. She said, ‘Ma rang. Just before Ashley sent these through.’

Neil looked down at his feet. He said as brusquely as he could, ‘Remembering episodes in the past, Grace, are you sure you want to share this kind of thing with me?’

Her face flamed. ‘Oh God.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’d just like to be sure. Where I stand.’

‘I should never—’

‘No,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t.’

She gave him a quick glance. Her face was still pink. She said, ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

‘Nor do I. I just don’t want it to, again. I’d prefer not to know than be sent back below stairs.’

Grace cleared her throat. She shook her head, then said, ‘I want to tell you. Please don’t hold an insane and clumsy stupidity against me.’

‘Look at me,’ he said.

She turned her head, very slowly. She said, ‘I’m so sorry. I really am so sorry.’

‘I know. And I’m a chippy Scot. But I won’t mention it again.’ He held her gaze. ‘What is it? What did Susie want me to know?’

Grace swallowed. She pushed her hair off her face in a characteristic gesture. ‘Cara went round to see her, on her own, on Sunday night. In order to say – to tell her – that she and Dan have decided to leave the company.’

Neil gave a long, low whistle.

‘Yes,’ Grace said.

‘Leave?’

‘Yes.’

‘Leave completely? Quit being commercial and merchandizing directors?’

‘Yes.’

Neil uncrossed his ankles and moved to bring a second chair close to Grace’s. He sat down and leant towards her.

‘Why?’

Grace turned to look at him. She said, ‘Why do you think?’

‘Isn’t it a bit drastic?’

‘Not for them,’ Grace said. ‘No, I don’t think so. You can’t go on wanting and needing change, and not getting it, for ever. And anyway—’ She stopped.

‘Anyway what?’

‘Anyway,’ Grace said carefully, ‘they weren’t ever as committed to the
product
as some of us. It was the systems they liked. They are brilliant at running and promoting a company, and that’s what they’re going to do.’

‘Which is?’

‘They’re joining this friend of theirs, Rick Machin. They’re going to start up something new with him, rebranding companies which have got tired or are losing momentum. Any kind of company, Ma said, starting with a hotel chain and a firm that makes warehouse systems. She said Cara was very fired up about it, about the idea, the independence—’

‘Independence?’

‘From a family company, I suppose.’

Neil straightened up. He looked round him. ‘D’you keep wine in that fridge?’

‘No,’ Grace said. ‘Only milk.’

‘You need more than milk. So do I. This may even be a more-than-beer moment.’

‘Neil,’ Grace said, ‘we shouldn’t be
celebrating.
’

‘I wasn’t thinking of that. I was thinking of shock. Medicinal drinking.’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Shock.’

He stood up and held out a hand to her. ‘Come to the pub with me. Bring those pictures.’

‘Neil—’

‘Don’t turn me down.’

‘I wasn’t going to. I was just going to say how weird I felt, how I thought I shouldn’t feel what I’m feeling.’ She reached forward and closed her laptop. Then she stood, too, and stayed there, looking down.

‘Which is?’ he said.

She didn’t move, but he could see that she was trying, without much success, to suppress a smile.

‘Excited,’ she said.

‘I can’t stop crying,’ Cara said. ‘I don’t know why I keep crying. I don’t want to cry like this.’

Jasper pushed a box of tissues towards her. He said, ‘I had a Latin teacher once whose favourite saying was “There is no change without sacrifice”.’

Cara snatched a handful of tissues and blew her nose. Her appearance, Jasper noted fondly, was as together as it ever was, but her nose was touchingly pink.

‘Coffee?’ he said. ‘Tea? Something stronger?’

She made a little waving-away gesture, then she blew her
nose again. She said, ‘I want this new future to happen. I really do. It’s exactly what we like doing and we can do it together. But it’s just awful, leaving. I feel like I’m leaving far more than I ever felt it on my wedding day. That felt like adding Dan. This feels like – like
emigrating.
’

Jasper ran water into the kettle. ‘When you girls were growing up, I learned not to come running if one of you screamed blue murder. It usually meant you’d only broken a fingernail.’

‘This isn’t melodrama, Pa,’ Cara said. ‘It’s real drama. Dan and I are changing every single relationship in our lives except the one we have with each other.’

Jasper put a Susie Sullivan teapot – Poppy Fields range – on the counter and dropped in a couple of teabags. He said, ‘Sweetheart, we’re all doing that, even your mother. We’ve all been flung up in the air and we’re all coming down again in different places. It won’t mean the end of things. It’ll just mean seeing it all from another angle.’

Cara opened the fridge and took out a plastic container of milk. She said, looking into the fridge, ‘Heavens, there’s nothing
in
here. Just milk and a lemon and some contact lens saline.’