Balancing Act (9 page)

Brady leant back. He said slowly, ‘And there’s me thinking the sun never went in for you.’

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Jasper said, ‘I never wanted Suz to be different. I’d never have stopped her, because I never wanted to stop her. She’s amazing. She’s a force of nature. I’m proud of her. I admire her. But it’s me, Brade. I don’t know where I fit in now, with the girls in the business too. I thought of offering granddad services to Ashley, but then I thought, you sad old git, what are you, begging for favours because you haven’t pulled your bleeding finger out all these years? You haven’t made the effort, you’ve just lain dozing under the mango tree watching for lunch to fall off on to your stomach.’

‘Hey,’ Brady said, ‘steady on.’

‘Sorry,’ Jasper said. ‘Sorry.’ He tapped his glass. ‘It’s probably making me maudlin.’

Brady looked round the kitchen. He said, ‘You were a hell of a father. You brought up three kids here.’

‘Yup.’

‘Homework …’

‘The kids’ friends, toast, spaghetti …’

‘And now it’s you and the bird.’

‘Mostly.’

‘And this old boy …’

‘He hasn’t changed things, really. He’s just woken me up to it all, I suppose.’

Brady leant forward. He said, ‘You’re saying you’re lonely, Jas?’

Jasper took his reading glasses off his head and put them on the table. Then he rubbed his eyes. ‘I’m not lonely,’ he said. ‘I don’t seem to do lonely, really. It’s something else. It’s … it’s more that I don’t know what I’m for, any more.’ He looked across the table at Brady. He said, ‘Can you tell me, Brade, what the
point
of me is?’

For Christmas, Cara had bought Daniel a Boardman Performance Hybrid Pro bike. It had a super lightweight frame, and had been designed to use all the features of track cycling that would benefit the leisure or commuting rider. Daniel was just such a rider. Cara might prefer to commute by bus or on her feet, but Daniel had always, except in the foulest weather, cycled to work.

Since the arrival of the Boardman – carefully researched and selected by both of them – Daniel had wanted to do more than commute by bike. Most weekends he took himself off on a serious cycle circuit, one involving both distance and hills, and returned home on the kind of endorphin high that he knew benefited every other aspect of his life.

But today was rather different. Today, the prospect of a challenging bike ride was more welcome than usual, the psychological benefits being even more attractive than the physical ones. Cara was in the Fulham Road shop with Ashley and the marketing team, Susie was on her way up to Stoke to try and sort out the situation with Morris and Grace, and he, Daniel, was in the office in a deeply unsettled frame of mind.

The trouble was Cara. Daniel had never had any quarrel – well, not any quarrel of consequence – with Cara. He and Cara saw eye to eye on everything, really, and certainly everything of importance. It was a source of both pride and pleasure to him that they shared so much, morally and philosophically. They might fine-tune details rather differently, but they came at life and other people from a satisfactorily similar standpoint. In business and social life, Cara was Daniel’s best ally, as he was hers. They had got through many a tricky meeting by exchanging fleeting glances which confirmed to one another that they were neither mistaken nor alone.

But last night, Cara had returned from Radipole Road after an extremely important meeting with her mother, which they had carefully discussed in advance, and said that she wasn’t going to talk about it.

‘But you
must
,’ Daniel said unwisely. ‘You have to. It was a crucial conversation. We
planned
it. You must tell me what she said.’

Cara was in the middle of opening a packet of bresaola. She put it down on the kitchen counter. ‘I
mustn’t
do any such thing.’

Daniel came and leant on the other side of the counter. ‘Cara,’ he said, ‘this is a
joint
approach. You and me. For the future of the company.
Our
future. I thought you were for it.’

She looked at him. ‘I am.’

‘Well, then.’

Cara pushed the bresaola aside. ‘Ma was upset,’ she said. ‘Well, of course. Of course she was. We knew she would be.’

‘No,’ Cara said.

‘What do you mean, no?’

‘I mean that she was upset in a way I hadn’t reckoned on. Distressed. Angry, but
personally
angry.’

Daniel waved a hand. ‘Well, what did you expect? I mean, obviously she was going to react like that.’

Cara went on looking at him. ‘But I didn’t think it would make me feel like it did. It didn’t occur to me that I’d—’

She stopped. She looked down at the counter. ‘I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about Ma.’ She stopped again, and then she said, as if to herself, ‘Poor Ma.’

‘What?’ Daniel said.

Cara moved away from the counter. She said again, but louder, ‘Poor Ma.’

‘Poor? Your mother
poor
? When the only obstacle to our—’

‘Stop it!’ Cara shouted.

Daniel was startled. He stood still and watched her. She had her back to him now, and he wasn’t sure if she was crying. He said softly, tentatively, ‘Cara?’

She flung her head up, not looking at him. She said, ‘I’m going to have a shower,’ and then she walked past him, into their bedroom, without another glance.

He knew she hadn’t slept. He hadn’t, either. He had no idea how to resolve the situation, being a complete novice at not having Cara’s compliance, Cara’s support, Cara’s unasked-for solidarity. When the faint, late dawn began, he finally fell asleep, and woke to find Cara’s side of the bed empty, and a note by the coffee pot to say she had gone into work early. She had put an ‘x’ at the bottom of the note, but it looked perfunctory. It wasn’t a real kiss; it was just a punctuation
mark. He had showered and dressed, made a double espresso – never a sensible start to any day – and cycled to work with a heart as heavy as lead.

And now, three hours into the working day, his heart was no lighter. Cara had scarcely acknowledged him – or, rather, had displayed none of the marked affection he was frankly longing for – and had then taken off for the London shop without saying, as she usually did, when she would be back. Daniel could settle to nothing. Disciplined, focussed, energetic Daniel could think of nothing at all except that, for some reason he could not fathom, Cara had elected to side with her mother for the first time in their lives together, and the result was that he felt utterly and painfully excluded.

Sitting here at his desk was plainly completely pointless. All he was doing was fretting, nagging and needling away at himself in a way which, on top of a bad night, was exacerbating rather than resolving the problem. He stood up. At the next desk down the room, beside Cara’s empty space, sat Kitty, their assistant, her smooth fair head bent conscientiously towards her screen.

‘Kitty,’ he called.

She gave a little jump. ‘Yes?’

‘I’m just going out.’

‘Oh.’

He knew she wouldn’t ask where. Or why, for that matter. He made himself smile at her. ‘I’ll be a couple of hours, OK? Can you field my calls? I’ll leave my phone here.’ He made a show of putting the phone down beside his keyboard, and smiled again. ‘In case Cara calls.’

The country-house hotel, just south of the six towns, where Susie often stayed on her visits to Stoke gave her her usual bedroom, and Morris a much smaller one at the back with a narrow, very basic bathroom and a bed covered in
mustard-yellow candlewick. Morris said it was fine. There was a bed, hot water and a telly: what more could he need? He’d smiled at the receptionist and told her he’d grown up in a house just like this one, only a few miles away. She didn’t smile back, and informed him she came from Riga.

In the enormous lounge of the hotel – once a stately drawing room and now oppressively crowded with sofas – Susie had ordered tea for herself, and a brandy and soda for Morris. The receptionist from Riga had brought both in silence and Susie’s thank-yous had sounded unnaturally loud and forced to her, in consequence. There had been no other guests in the lounge but them, and the fire that had been lit in the grate much earlier had now burned down almost to silence too. Susie handed Morris his glass of brandy and the accompanying can of soda, poured a cup of tea, added milk, and then sat back and waited.

Morris decanted soda water into his glass very, very slowly. Then he set the can down carefully, took a considered sip, and put the glass down too. Finally he said, ‘I was trying to do something for myself, Susan. I was trying to spare Grace. After she told me she had no idea what to do with me.’

Susie said nothing. She drank her tea and looked at the dying fire.

Morris went on, ‘She likes that Jeff, you know.’

Susie took another sip of tea. She set the cup down on the nearest side table with a small bang. She said, ‘Well,
we
don’t like him for
her.
’

Morris crossed his legs. He was now wearing plum-coloured socks and his knitted waistcoat was garnished with an abstract ceramic brooch. ‘We can’t choose people for other people,’ he said. ‘We can’t dictate that. We like who we like and we don’t like who we don’t like. That’s human nature.’

‘It’s still not helpful,’ Susie said, ‘to encourage destructive relationships.’

Morris took another sip of brandy. He said, ‘I didn’t, Susan. I just accepted his offer of somewhere to stay, to get me out of Grace’s hair. I thought she’d be pleased. I thought you’d like me to solve the problem for you.’

‘It doesn’t solve any problem to have Grace or me in any way obliged to Jeff.’

Morris looked at her. He said, slightly piteously, ‘What was I to do, Susan, till I can move into your house?’

She gave an irritated little shrug. ‘I’d have done what everyone said I should have done in the beginning, and put you in a hotel.’

‘This’ll be cheaper.’

‘And more complicated. I bet Jeff leapt at the chance.’

Morris linked his hands around his knees. ‘I can help his boss, see. I’m good with my hands. He says there’ll be plenty to do out at Trentham Gardens, fixing things. I’d like to have something to do.’ He glanced at Susie. ‘You’re not listening to me.’

She withdrew her gaze from the fire. ‘No, I’m not.’

‘Thinking about Grace? Lovely girl.’

‘No, actually,’ Susie said.

‘What then?’

‘Nothing to do with you.’

Morris looked unoffended. He released his hands and picked up his brandy glass. He said, ‘It’s not like I thought it’d be, you know. I thought you’d have a big house up here, full of rooms, and everyone would be busy and sorted. I thought I’d find myself a corner somewhere and help out a bit somehow, and we’d all bed down together after we’d got over seeing each other again. But it’s not like that, is it? It’s not settled and sorted in the least, it’s all up in the air and you’re never in the same place for two minutes and I’m beginning to wonder if this husband of yours exists, or whether you’ve just invented him. And the girls don’t seem right to me, none
of them – none of them quite, well, stable. Everything in motion all the time, everybody rushing everywhere—’

‘Please stop,’ Susie said.

He leant forward and said kindly, ‘You upset?’

‘No.’

‘Susan—’

‘Just don’t say any more. You’re in no position to say
anything.
’

Morris took another sip of his brandy. He said, ‘I know you think I’m the last straw, turning up like this. But maybe I’m not.’ He leant back again. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘I’m just what you need.’

T
o Ashley’s surprise, Daniel was leaning against her car in the car park under the office, tapping away at his BlackBerry. Ashley was carrying her workbag, her handbag, and a supermarket bag containing the two-litre cartons of full-fat milk that Leo had asked her to pick up. ‘Dan?’ she said simply.

He looked up, dropped his BlackBerry into his jacket pocket and came forward to relieve her of her burdens.

‘Were you waiting for me?’ Ashley said.

‘Yes,’ he said shortly.

‘Are you OK? Why didn’t you find me in the office?’

Dan stood by the boot of the car, holding the milk and Ashley’s workbag. He indicated with a nod that she should unlock it.

Ashley scrabbled in her bag for the keys. ‘What’s the matter?’

The boot lid swung slowly into the air. Loading the bags inside, Daniel said tersely, ‘You could
see
what was the matter.’

Ashley said, ‘Well, the atmosphere in the office wasn’t wonderful today, but it often isn’t very—’

‘You could see that Cara wasn’t speaking to me,’ Daniel said, slamming the boot shut.

Ashley opened her mouth, and shut it again wordlessly. Then she gestured towards the car. ‘Shall we talk sitting down?’

Side by side inside, facing the grey concrete wall of the garage, Ashley waited for Dan to speak. He sat beside her, stiff and silent. After a minute or two, impatient with whatever internal struggles he was having, she said, ‘
Why
isn’t Cara speaking to you?’

He said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘You
must
know. People always know why they’re in the doghouse.’

‘I’m not in the doghouse. Or if I am, I don’t know why.’

Ashley sighed. She wasn’t in the mood for this kind of conversation. She was fond of Dan in that tolerant, faintly resigned way that family choices of partner often require, but she frequently thought he could be a bit more relaxed about some things, not insist on so much, obsess less about details. In any case, she wanted to get home and see how Leo’s day had gone, how the children were, whether Fred had slept for only an hour or the usually fatal two, whether Maisie had wept at nursery school. She said, not altogether encouragingly, ‘You’d better tell me about it,’ and failed to stop herself from adding, ‘I suppose.’

Daniel looked away from her at the car parked alongside. He said, ‘Cara went to see your mother on her own, as agreed, to propose the new plan about Susie’s involvement in the company, and when she came back she was clearly upset, and refused to tell me what had happened. I mean,
refused.
Wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t tell me anything. And then twice –
twice
– said “Poor Ma,” but not to me. To herself.’ He turned and looked at Ashley. ‘So, as you spent the morning together, I thought you could give me a bit of a steer.
Tell me what I’ve done that’s so awful. In her eyes, anyway. All I’ve actually done is what we all three agreed in the first place. For which I now seem to be being punished.’

Ashley folded her arms and said non-committally, ‘All she said this morning was that Ma was very upset, and we’d have to go easy.’

‘Go easy?’

‘On pushing the idea of changing her role in the company.’

‘Well,’ Daniel said exasperatedly, ‘why didn’t she say that to
me
?’

Ashley looked down at her lap. ‘Maybe she didn’t think you’d listen. Maybe she thought you’d argue.’ She glanced at her brother-in-law. ‘Maybe she’s cross with you, now that Ma’s taken it badly, for having had the idea in the first place.’

Dan stared at her. ‘
What?
How unjust is
that
?’

Ashley shrugged. ‘She had to carry the can, didn’t she? I mean, she was the one who had to actually
say
it to Ma. I know she offered, but it must have been a horrible thing to have to do, to have to say to your own mother, look, you’ve got to give up complete control, you’ve got to get used to the idea of stepping aside—’

‘Jesus,’ Daniel said furiously. ‘What
is
all this? What are you
talking
about?’

Ashley looked at him, and then she unfolded her arms and put the car key into the ignition. She said, not especially warmly, ‘So you don’t see—’

‘No, I do not,’ Dan said with emphasis.

‘Perhaps we shouldn’t expect you to.’

‘What?’

She turned to look at him. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you can’t be expected to feel what we feel, can you? I mean, you can’t help it, Dan, of course you can’t, but – you’re not family, really. Are you?’

Neil Dundas had been manager of the Susie Sullivan factory for three years. He had been working as assistant manager at an artisan pottery in Ross-shire, some way north of Inverness, when he had seen Daniel’s advertisement for a new manager, all the way south in Stoke-on-Trent, and had applied eagerly at once, although without much hope that he would get the job. But Daniel had responded within twenty-four hours and invited him down to Stoke. He had been interviewed by Daniel, by Susie herself, and by Cara, both separately and all together. Susie interviewed him in the factory café, over his first Staffordshire oatcake – it bore no resemblance whatsoever, he thought, to a Scottish one – and asked him, almost as her first question, ‘Could you stand up to Daniel?’

He had his mouth full. He’d nodded.

‘Could you
argue
with him?’ she said.

He swallowed the oatcake. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I have a reputation for arguing,’ Neil said. ‘Ask my boss. Ask my mother. If I think something’s right, I’ll argue it for ever.’

She’d smiled at him and said, ‘I don’t exactly want to
encourage
any arguing, ever. But if you are the interface between the workforce and the office staff, then you have to be braced for a few fisticuffs.’

Neil had smiled back. It had occurred to him to blurt out that no son of his mother’s knew the meaning of appeasement, but in the same instant he’d realized that it wasn’t necessary. This woman pouring tea for him out of a teapot of her own design, in a factory she had rescued almost from dereliction, was actually offering him a job that was in her gift to give him. He was, in fact, having tea with the boss. And the boss liked him.

‘Once I’ve understood your message,’ he’d said, looking
straight at her, ‘that’ll be the message from the factory. Loud and clear.’

He’d loved the job from the outset. The pottery he had worked in before was small and craft-driven, specializing in wood-ash glazes and unthreatening natural designs, so to be involved with a product that was still handmade, but commercially visible and successful, was immediately energizing. It was, he discovered, an advantage to be Scottish – foreign enough to be exotic, but egalitarian enough to be acceptable and accepted. Neil knew the processes of pottery, he understood manufacturing life and he was completely comfortable with the workforce. The fact that he arrived in Stoke in a state of disarray was only to his advantage, especially as far as the women in the fettling and decorating shops were concerned. The disarray was caused by his wife of two years declaring that she couldn’t possibly leave her family and friends in Dornoch, never mind the coast, the sands and the sea, to move not just to
England
but to a decayed industrial city of slag heaps and general depression. So Shona had stayed in the Highlands, and after a swift divorce had married a man who worked for the Forestry Commission in Morangie Forest, and cut Neil out of her life as completely as if he’d never been in it.

Neil had, at first, been utterly dismayed by a marriage – even a brief one – being treated as if it had never happened. But Susie had rescued him. She didn’t use tea and sympathy as a remedy, she used work. He joined the company one September, just before the Christmas production push, and it was February before he came up for air again to discover that, despite the economic gloom that was settling like coal dust across the country, the company had had one of its most profitable Christmases ever. Even Daniel, with whom there was an almost perpetual locking of horns, was congratulatory. But when he went to find Susie, scribbling
away at something in the design studio, and tried to thank her, she hadn’t even looked up at him.

‘All your own work,’ she said. ‘Don’t thank me.’

As far as Neil Dundas was concerned, the factory was Susie, and Susie’s alone. The heartbeat of it, the actual product, the workforce, the human energy, were all because of her. He appreciated that the London office was necessary, as well as the policies and programmes for expansion and progress that emanated from it, but as far as he was concerned, the actual manufacturing was what counted. And pottery was, in his mind, true manufacture, sinewy and practical. Checking the trolleys ready to be loaded into the kilns, inspecting the benches and work stations in the long, brightly lit rooms of the factory, dealing with the vagaries of life presented by the workforce, these were all in his blood. He bought a flat in Burslem, a car that had been assembled in the UK and a season ticket for Stoke City football club, and joined a local ramblers group. When asked if he missed the beauty of the Highlands, he grinned and said he’d rather have life than beauty.

Life, if he’d been asked to define it, consisted largely of the factory, partly of his own active existence, and in small but significant part of Susie and her daughters. He was fascinated by all of them, coming as he did from a severely traditional background which held inflexible views about the obligations and suitable occupations of men and women. His mother had been a nurse before she married, but gave it up when his elder brother was born and never thought of returning. She made herself useful in the community, but never for money, because to do so, it was implied, would have somehow been an affront to his father’s manliness. Coming from such a background caused Neil to wonder very much, when he first met Susie. The wonderment only increased when he then encountered her daughters. There were, by his
calculation, five people who ran the Susie Sullivan pottery, and four of those people were women. After three years of working for them, the wonderment might have worn off a little, but the respect had grown. Especially for Susie. Susie ran that factory – or, at least, influenced that factory – with an instinctive mixture of the personal and the impersonal that he doubted any man could manage. They all knew her as a person, but they knew she was the boss as well.

Her daughter Grace, however – the daughter whom Neil had much the most to do with – was more of an enigma. She was talented, no doubt of that, and popular round the factory, and she had no airs and graces about the practicalities of what they did. In fact, out of Susie’s three daughters, Grace was the only one who could actually
do
all the processes on the factory floor. Neil knew she could; he’d watched her. Her eye for what would or wouldn’t work in a functional sense was second to none. And she had a good manner with the workforce, always herself, but comradely somehow, kind without patronage. But for all her warmth and approachability, he couldn’t quite get a handle on her. She was just a little cool, just a little distant, just a fraction out of reach. It wasn’t grandeur, but she was elusive, all the same. She looked vulnerable, but also unavailable to be helped. It made her very interesting and disconcertingly attractive. Whenever Neil saw her unmistakeable red head across the yard, or through the design-studio window, he experienced a little jolt of electricity that could easily throw him off balance. Not for long – but long enough to make him aware of it, and to make him anticipate, more keenly than was comfortable, the next time it might happen.

The existence of Jeff in Grace’s life was painful to Neil. He told himself that Jeff was just an irritation, but he knew he was kidding himself. At first, Jeff’s height and looks were almost beyond bearing, but as his personality became
evident, indulgent exasperation at Grace’s choice gradually softened the blow of his appearance. Neil could shake his head at her folly, while making an automatic note of all Jeff’s failings and inadequacies, which were now mounting up to a shocking tally. He had had to watch them, as he had had to watch that strange old boy who said he was Grace’s grandfather arrive with his carpet bag of trouble, and move in on her as inexorably as Jeff had done. It was frustrating to watch, agonizingly frustrating. But watch he had to. It wasn’t so much that she was the boss’s daughter – this wasn’t the nineteenth century, after all – but more that riding to her rescue would make her angry, and make him look a complete idiot. They had a working relationship, and that was that. If his heart smote him on seeing her looking so strained and tired, it couldn’t be helped. Grace Moran had never given him the slightest hint that she saw him as anything other than a work colleague, and that was a fact that he would simply have to bite down on.

So when she came into his office unannounced and said she’d like to tell him something, he was completely unprepared. His office was small and chaotic, the door permanently wedged open with lever arch files of press cuttings, and lit by a single fierce fluorescent strip light which threw violent and unbecoming shadows on everything underneath it. It gave Grace’s face a truly terrible pallor, as well as darkening the evident smudges of weariness under her eyes.

Neil half rose from behind his computer. ‘Excuse the mess—’

‘I can’t see it,’ Grace said. She waved a hand, as if the clutter of papers was indeed invisible.

He stood more upright and edged round his desk towards her. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Tired,’ Grace said.

Neil moved a pile of stuff off a plastic chair to the floor,
and indicated that she should sit down. He said, ‘None of my business, but it’s been a rough old week.’

Grace sat. She pushed her hair back and said, ‘What goes on here is everyone’s business. And yes, it’s been rough.’

He picked up one of the many used mugs on his desk. ‘Tea?’

‘Don’t bother.’

‘It’s no bother. Nor’s coffee. I can nip to the café—’

‘Neil,’ Grace said, ‘I don’t need tea or coffee. I just want to tell you something.’