Balancing Act (20 page)

‘There hasn’t been much more than that for ages.’

Cara shut the fridge and put the milk down by the kettle. She said, ‘Is that why you’re moving out?’

Jasper put both palms down flat on the counter and stared at the kettle. He said, ‘The state of the fridge is a symptom. Not the disease.’

Cara said, on a rising note, ‘Don’t give me something else to cry about. Don’t tell me you’re leaving Ma—’

‘Of course I’m not.’

‘But if—’

‘Cara,’ Jasper said, picking up the boiled kettle and pouring water into the teapot, ‘we’d hit the buffers in this house
a long time ago. Your mother doesn’t really want to be here any more than I do. Life has moved on from here, you’ve all got your own places, I have something ahead of me for the first time in a very long time, and Susie – well, she needed a bit of a kick up the backside. You can get quite as stuck at the top of a company as you can at the bottom.’ He turned to look at Cara. ‘You and Dan dropping your little bombshell was exactly what was needed.’

‘I’m as heartbroken as I’m excited,’ Cara said. ‘I’m longing to leave, and I can’t bear the thought of it. I think I’d suffocate if I had to stay, but I can hardly stand the thought of not knowing everything that Gracie and Ashley know.’

Jasper held a mug of tea out to her. ‘Biscuit?’

‘A
re
there any?’

He smiled at her, and raised his own mug. ‘Probably not.’

‘I wish you hadn’t suggested it then. I could kill for a chocolate Hobnob.’

‘That’s better,’ Jasper said. ‘It isn’t like you to get yourself in such a state.’

Cara was opening cupboards in search of a biscuit. With her back to him, she said, ‘It is, you know. I’m a car crash under a very organized exterior.’

Jasper let a beat fall, then he said, ‘So is your mother.’

Cara turned round. She held something in her hand. ‘Ginger nuts,’ she said.

‘Don’t read the best-by date. It’ll be prehistoric. And they’ll be soft.’

Cara put the packet down on the counter and peered at it. ‘2009.’

‘Biscuits don’t go off. They get stale but they don’t get maggots.’

Cara ripped the packet open. ‘They look weirdly OK. Have one.’

Jasper took a biscuit and dipped it quickly into his tea.
‘Delicious. I wonder who bought them? I never buy ginger nuts.’

‘Ma’s inner chaos is her energy,’ Cara said. ‘Mine too. What luck we married steady men.’ She took a bite of biscuit herself and added through it, ‘Has she seen this flat you’ve found?’

‘She doesn’t need to.’

‘But Pa, if it’s your London base—’

‘My London base,’ Jasper said. ‘Where she is very welcome.’

Cara stared at him. ‘Aren’t you even asking her?’

‘No.’

‘But—’ Cara began, and stopped.

‘Where am I finding the money, you mean?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘I’m using what my parents left me, for a deposit. Followed by my share of the sale of this. It’s only a studio flat.’

‘But Pa—’

‘Cara,’ Jasper said, ‘I’ve been the follower for years and years. I’ve accommodated and tolerated and compromised, and to a large extent I haven’t minded any of that. In fact, for part of the time, part of me quite liked it. But I don’t like it any more. I have suddenly got a small, oddly shaped but definite future. I have a studio. I have a
band.
I haven’t had a band for over thirty years. The band means that I won’t be doing the following, I’ll be doing a bit of leading instead. Susie can join me whenever she’s free to. I don’t want another woman, I don’t even want your mother to be much different. But I do want to do my own thing now, and I’ll be pleased as Punch if sometimes she’d like to set aside her own priorities – like the company, like this ridiculous cottage – and join me.’

Cara was still staring at him, over her mug. She said wonderingly, ‘What’s got into you?’

He smiled at her. ‘Something not a million miles from what got into you and Dan.’

‘Did someone say something?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Who? What? Did—’

He shook his head. He was still smiling. ‘Cara, you don’t need to know. It’s your first lesson in not needing, from now on, to know everything.’

‘Hard—’

‘But not impossible.’

Cara turned to look down the kitchen towards the parrot cage. Polynesia was gazing almost dreamily into a little punnet of blueberries that Jasper had put there earlier. She had the air of someone who had been quietly, unobtrusively, listening.

‘And her?’ Cara said. ‘Polly?’

‘With me, of course.’

‘Does Ma know?’

Jasper put his mug down. He crossed his arms. ‘Sweetheart,’ he said firmly, ‘Ma knows
everything.
’

Morris had discovered how to use the washing machine. He had also worked out the various clips on the harnesses on Fred’s buggy, Fred’s high chair and Fred’s car seat. He had mastered all the idiosyncrasies of the door and window locks throughout the house, and the vagaries of the pilot light on the boiler. He had had a boat on Lamu for years, a fishing boat, and looking after and operating that, as well as his precarious dwelling, had stood him in good stead as far as practical skills were concerned. He found the business of helping run a house was as little trouble to him as getting Leo to relinquish a lot of tasks had been. When it came to house-training this strange old vagrant from a tropical
island, Morris thought, Leo had been pleasantly surprised to find himself pushing at an open door.

Of course, Morris told himself, it was a blessing to be needed. It was more than that, really; it was a kind of unexpected gift, to realize that one could make a contribution to a busy working household, and a marked contribution at that. Shuffling about the house in his trodden-down espadrilles, Morris knew himself to be quietly useful: changing the fuse on Ashley’s hairdryer; watching Fred eat his way through his supper, pea by single pea; transferring one interminable load of washing from machine to dryer; monitoring the firm that Leo had summoned to create a garden while they unrolled lengths of turf to produce a lawn as instantly and remarkably as if it had been carpet. He couldn’t remember when he had had such a sense of purpose, let alone of his own value. Perhaps, he thought with mild astonishment, he never had. Perhaps he had drifted through eight decades without ever doing more than just getting by, suspending any sense other than the immediate one of the moment. Perhaps – and this was a large and uncomfortable perhaps – that was how he had dealt with failing to be the son that his father had wanted.

But now, at an age when tradition indicated that you should stop, he seemed to be starting. What’s more, he found that not only did he like starting, but that it made him want to go on. He was agile still, he was capable, and it seemed that after several false starts he had landed in some kind of berth. Of course, the berth in Ashley’s house couldn’t last. He knew that. He knew it even before Ashley told him that she found it hard having him there, and before he overheard, through a bedroom door Ashley and Leo had omitted to close, that if Dan and Cara were leaving the company, then a vacancy arose which Ashley and Leo seemed certain she
could fill. Morris had yet to straighten out in his own head which role in the company meant what, but as far as he could gather, Ashley was aiming to be commercial director after Dan left. And she and Leo seemed to think that Cara’s old role, and her own, should be filled by people from outside the company, outside the
family.
Morris, standing on the darkened landing on his way back from the bathroom, his old feet bare and silent on the sanded planks, had almost gasped at that and given himself away.

‘What about Grace?’ he’d wanted to shout. ‘What about Susan? What about them?’

Susan. Well, Susan was a problem that had to be tackled soon, just as the question of how he might still be useful to Ashley and Leo without actually cluttering up their spare bedroom had to be. It was, Morris thought, to use a modern phrase, a work in progress. Everything right now seemed to be in transition, and although he knew himself to be hindered by the lifetime shackle of his own passivity, he also knew that there were some things he might be able to deal with himself. And one of those things was Susan.

Poor Susan. Well, not poor really – not neglected and deprived and unconfident and aimless. But poor to have had a father and mother alive, throughout her growing-up, but never in contact. Poor to have had to discover the loneliness of being isolated by your own success. Poor Susan, to be so thrown by the reappearance of your useless old parent that you were unable to react with any consistency or constructiveness. Morris had caught her looking at him once or twice on the day of the photoshoot with an expression of bewilderment and apprehension, as if she was the only person in that crowded, busy room who still had an acute problem with his very existence.

Well, as Ashley had made very plain to him, he could probably help with that. He could at least try. In fact, with
Susan’s London house being put on the market and her husband turning into an old rocker – such a fashion for them now, it seemed – trying to help his daughter seemed, to his surprise, to be something he urgently wanted to do. He wasn’t at all sure how he should go about it – whether he should start by saying sorry, or by asking her how she was – but maybe it was better not to be sure. Maybe it was best, really, just to find a way of showing her, in a manner she could not doubt, that he had never been a father who was truly unfeeling or indifferent. He had just been a man whose emotions had been in cold storage, for all manner of reasons, some of which he was accountable for, and some of which he certainly wasn’t. And now, at the age of eighty-one, they were thawing out.

A
shley and Cara were sitting at the boardroom table in the office. In front of them was an open laptop, and on the screen was Grace, slightly fuzzily holding up a huge jug in the studio at the factory.

‘This is the party pitcher for the Balloons and Bunting range. Or at least, it’s the prototype. I think the handle needs to be broader, and the spout less pinched.’

Ashley leant forward. ‘It looks fine.’

‘I think I should make the balloons bigger—’

‘I can’t bear it,’ Cara said. ‘That I won’t be here to see it launched.’

Grace put the pitcher on the table beside her and looked towards her camera. She said, ‘Of course you’ll be there. You’re not going to
Australia
, you’re going a mile up the road.’

‘Exactly,’ Ashley said. She had had another new haircut, a sort of feathery bob.

Cara said, impatiently, ‘You know what I mean.’

‘Nonsense,’ Grace said. Her voice sounded uncharacteristically confident. ‘We’ll tell you whatever you want to know. And then when we need rebranding in a few years’ time, you can do it for us. For nothing.’

The others laughed.

Ashley said, ‘We’re inundated with applications for our jobs here.’

‘I bet,’ said Grace.

‘People are so well qualified. Almost over-qualified.’

‘What does Ma think?’

Cara and Ashley looked at each other.

‘We haven’t asked her,’ Ashley said.

‘Haven’t you?’

‘Of course, we will …’

Grace leant towards the screen. She said confidentially, ‘I think she might sell the Parlour House.’

‘What?’

‘She just came out with it. She just said to me that she had had a bit of a wake-up call, partly about Pa and partly about her own need to see things a bit differently. She said all these houses and flats just suddenly looked like a metaphor for what was the matter and why she and Pa weren’t doing very well together, and that what had seemed so important looked a bit daft instead.’

‘But I thought it was about this creative-vision thing—’

‘It was.’

‘I thought she couldn’t have the ideas that were so central to the company if she didn’t have somewhere of her own to be, and think, and all that.’

Grace leant closer still, so that her face was distorted and her eyes grew huge as plates. ‘Maybe
I
’m going to have the ideas from now on. Maybe, even if she can’t quite say so yet, she sort of senses that there’s going to be a bit of a change.’

The others leant forward too.

‘Gracie! Have you talked to her?’

‘In a roundabout way.’

‘What happened? What did she say?’

‘It was more what
I
said.’

‘Which was?’

‘I – sort of lost my temper.’

‘Wow.’

‘What did you say?’

Grace pushed her hair back. She said, ‘I kind of told her to get a grip. I said look at what’s happened – Morris arriving, Cara and Dan going, Pa finding a new lease of life – look at all that and wake
up
, stop eluding everyone and refusing to be pinned down or ever
there
, while insisting on having control of everything. You can’t do it, I said, any more than you can stop Ashley wanting to do Dan’s job her way, or me wanting more control up here. We are all moving on, we are all changing places. And you’ve got to stop wanting nothing to change unless you say so, and look at your own life, look at your marriage, take in the fact that you are actually not even going to have a
home.
You’ve got to be a person, not just a business obsessive. You’ve got to set us all
free
, like you’ve always been.’

There was a short, stunned silence.

Then Ashley said again, admiringly, ‘Wow.’

‘Ten out of ten, Gracie,’ said Cara.

‘Yes. Well.’

‘Did she yell at you?’

‘No. No, actually, she didn’t. She went very quiet. Then she said Maisie had given her a painting she’d done at school. It was completely black, Ma said. All over. Maisie said it was a picture of what was under her bed. Ma said she would treasure it.’

The other two were laughing. Cara said, ‘Didn’t she say anything about what you’d said?’

‘Not then. But this morning, she told me she was getting the Parlour House valued. Which I took as a roundabout way of letting me know she’d heard me.’

‘You’re very patient. I’d have asked her outright.’

‘I didn’t have the heart,’ Grace said. ‘Ash, that’s cool hair.’

Ashley tossed her head slightly. She said airily, ‘Commercial Director hair?’

Grace gave a little whoop.

‘Will you miss me?’ Cara demanded.

‘Nah.’

‘You must be joking—’

‘Dan is so happy.’

‘You will be.’

‘I couldn’t stand to stay. But—’

‘It’ll give you a chance to like Ma again,’ Grace said.

‘It’ll free me,’ Cara said. ‘Agreed.’

Grace glanced at her watch. ‘Gotta go, chickens.’

‘Have you? Where?’

Grace pulled back slightly from the camera. She said casually, ‘Oh, boots.’

‘Boots?’

‘Walking boots.’

‘But you never walk. You’re as bad as Ma.’

‘I’m starting,’ Grace said. ‘Peak District. Saturday.’

‘Not Jeff—’

‘No, Car. Not Jeff. Promise. Never Jeff again.’

‘Who then?’

‘A friend.’

‘A boyfriend?’

‘A friend,’ Grace said, ‘who is a man. As it happens.’

‘Not Neil—’

‘Why not Neil?’

Ashley said, ‘Could you think of Neil as a boyfriend?’

Grace had moved away from her screen to collect items from the table in the studio and was dropping them into her bag. She called, ‘He’s a friend I can talk to about all the things I’d like to do with the company, bounce all my ideas
off – like importing bedlinen from Spain and toiletries from France—’

‘Ma will have a fit.’

‘About Neil?’

‘About imports.’

Grace turned to the camera. She sang, ‘There may be trouble ahead.’

‘You mean it!’

‘I do,’ Grace said.

‘Walking the hills of Derbyshire with Neil Dundas!’

Grace slung her bag on her shoulder. She bent towards the camera again and blew her sisters a kiss. ‘I mean a lot of things,’ she said. And switched off her screen.

Morris put down a thick white cup of coffee and a granola square on a blue paper napkin in front of Susie. She looked at the granola square. She said uncertainly, not wishing to sound rude, ‘Thank you, but I’m not really hungry.’

He lowered himself into an adjacent chair at the café table. ‘I didn’t think you would be, Susan. But it’ll give you something to do, I thought, breaking it into pieces.’

‘Goodness,’ she said, trying to laugh, ‘is it going to be that awkward?’

He gave her a surprisingly level look. Then he pushed the mug of teaspoons on the table towards her. ‘Sugar?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you’d take sugar, either.’

‘Is this some kind of test? Or game?’

He shook his head. Then he smiled at her. ‘No,’ he said.

Susie picked up her coffee cup with both hands. She said, looking at it rather than at Morris, ‘Do you realize that this coffee is the first thing you have ever given me in my life?’

He didn’t flinch. He said gravely, ‘I hope it’s the first of many.’

Susie took a sip. Then she said, ‘When you asked me to meet you here, I thought perhaps – perhaps you wanted to say sorry.’

Morris sighed. He said, ‘Is that what you want?’

‘I’d like it to be what
you
wanted.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you want the honest truth, Susan, I’d rather use my energies getting things right now, rather than weeping and wailing about a past I can’t change.’

Susie felt a peculiar and unforeseen stab of affection. She said tolerantly, surprising herself, ‘You’re a shocker.’

‘I might be. But it doesn’t stop me from seeing how hard it is for you to watch those girls of yours doing exactly what you’ve brought them up to do, without maybe understanding the consequences of what you were doing to them all those years.’

Susie gave a little start. She opened her mouth to contradict him, and then closed it again. Morris reached out a hand, briefly gripped her nearest wrist and took his hand away again. He said, ‘I’ve never been much of a one for running races – I don’t need to tell you that – but I’d imagine that being out in front for years and years doesn’t actually prepare you very well for having your own daughters drawing level. And then maybe pulling away from you.’

Susie said in a low voice, ‘I am really, really proud of them.’

‘I know you are.’

‘
Really
proud.’

‘You may not want to hear this from me,’ Morris said, ‘but I feel the same way about you.’

‘Please don’t.’

‘And I can see that it’s lonely.’

‘It’s not lonely!’ Susie said with energy. ‘It’s liberating!’

Morris indicated the granola square. ‘Why don’t you eat some flapjack?’

‘I don’t want it.’

‘I’ll take it back for Freddy, then,’ Morris said mildly. ‘Freddy’s a cookie monster.’

Susie pushed the paper napkin towards him. She said in a rush, ‘You’re right.’

‘I don’t need to be right, Susan. I just need to be allowed to make a start.’

She nodded.

‘I can’t change the past,’ Morris said again. ‘But maybe I can help you from missing out on things you can’t have a second chance at, now.’

‘I know.’

He gave a little chuckle. He said, ‘I thought you might flare up at me there.’

She shook her head. She said sadly, ‘I don’t want to.’

‘Drink your coffee.’

She picked her cup up again, obediently. She said, almost shyly, ‘What – what was my mother like?’

Morris gave a little sigh. ‘Sweet,’ he said. ‘Innocent.’

‘Childlike?’

He nodded.

‘Am I like her?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘Grace has got her hair.’

‘You heard what I asked.’

Morris sighed. ‘I see something of her in you. I see it in Cara. I see it in Maisie.’

‘Why d’you say it like that?’

‘The truth is, Susan,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to see anything or anyone – even you yourself – standing in the way of your being happy. Seems to me that you’ve inherited some good, but a bit of bad, like we all have. But you’ve done something I never did – and I’ve suffered for it – and that’s choose a good partner and have a family. I want to see you look around you. I want you to see what you’ve got now, instead
of always what you might have. I don’t want to see you wasting what you’ve got.’

She put her cup down again. ‘Am I?’

‘You don’t need to be
told
a thing like that.’

Susie looked away from him across the café. She said, ‘I’ve come so far.
So
far. You wouldn’t believe how far. All those years of mistakes and negotiations, all the battles while I learned the lessons of doing business, all the recovering from bad advice, all the litigation with rivals who’d spied on me, all the training of people, the girls—’

‘I don’t doubt it.’

Susie gave a rueful little laugh. She said, ‘I sort of feel I have to wear the scars. I feel that the company is my – validation.’

‘What about the girls?’

‘What about them?’

‘They’re your validation, Susan.’

She regarded him.

He said gently, ‘They’re not your rivals.’

‘I never thought—’

He reached out a second time to hold her wrist, and kept his hand there. She didn’t take hers away. He said, ‘Those girls of yours have got to learn, just as you had to learn.’

‘But I’ve sheltered them.’

‘Not any more, you shouldn’t.’

She looked down at her hand in his grip. She said, half laughing again, ‘I didn’t think you knew anything about anything.’

Morris let go of her wrist, and wrapped the paper napkin round the granola square before he put it in his pocket. He said amiably, ‘Nor did I.’

‘I thought you didn’t know how not to be a burden.’

Morris stood up a little stiffly. He said, ‘Now that’s the last thing I want to be.’ He glanced down at her. ‘Get up, Susan. We’re starting as we mean to go on. Time to collect Maisie.’

‘I don’t think,’ Jasper said to the estate agent, his phone in the hand not holding a vodka and tonic, ‘that I’m sure enough about that flat to make an offer, after all.’

The agent, ten miles away across London, in Hoxton, did her professional best not to sound exasperated. ‘I thought that the third viewing—’

‘So did I,’ Jasper said.

‘It’s a great location. And, I have to tell you, a very fair price.’

Jasper took a sip of his drink. Susie, he reflected, would not have needed a shot of vodka before she made a difficult phone call. He said, sounding lame even to himself, ‘I’m sure.’

‘Well,’ the agent said, gathering up her energies for a renewed assault, ‘as it happens, I’ve got several other properties newly on the market, one-bedroom flats that meet all your specifications, even if they don’t all have the view or the ceiling height of—’

‘No, thank you,’ Jasper said.

‘Excuse me?’

‘I said,’ Jasper said, with elaborate courtesy, ‘no, thank you. I don’t think I’ll be looking for a flat. Not any more.’

‘But I thought,’ the agent said, sounding seriously unsettled, ‘that you wanted a studio flat within walking distance of your music studio.’

‘I did.’

‘May I ask, did the lease on the studio fall through?’

‘Oh no,’ Jasper said. ‘Why should it?’

‘I was under the impression that you—’

‘So was I,’ Jasper said. He smiled into the telephone. ‘I read myself wrong. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.’

‘Not
wasted
, I’m sure,’ the agent said bravely.

Jasper took another mouthful of his drink. ‘Well,’ he said,
‘I’m not going to be buying in your area, after all. So if that counts as wasting your time, I’m very sorry.’

The agent cleared her throat. He could tell that she was trying not to compute the hours she had spent on him which had, just now, come to nothing, nor to anticipate exactly how she would tell the vendor that his prospective buyer had just pulled out, for no reason he cared to specify.