Balancing Act

by Joanna Trollope

  Susie unpacked her box of groceries, made him tea and a ham sandwich, and found sheets for the bed in the curtainless room. Jeff had left a note to say he’d be back at six and they’d go out for a curry. She didn’t seem to want to talk much any more, and Morris didn’t quite have the nerve to encourage her. They inspected the bathroom – clean, but very small – and back in the kitchen Morris took an obedient but unenthusiastic bite of his sandwich. Then Susie said, with difficulty, ‘It’s only for a few weeks.’

  Morris put his sandwich down. ‘And I’ll be helping out in the garden centre.’

  Susie glanced out of the window. ‘Looks like all they sell is Leylandii.’

  ‘I’ll be fine, Susan.’

  She didn’t look at him. She said, ‘I’d really rather you were in a hotel.’

  ‘I wouldn’t.’ He leant towards her, grinning, ‘Did you see that carwash place we passed?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On our way here. It said “Best Hand Job In Town”. Jeff told me they’re all run by Afghans.’

  ‘Oh,’ Susie said. She wasn’t smiling.

  He shrugged slightly. ‘Only trying to cheer you up.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave you here.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘But it’s … it’s not …’

  ‘Well, it’s not Grace’s flat, I’ll give you that. But it’ll do fine for now.’

  He wondered, for a split second, if she’d kiss him when she left. But she didn’t. She didn’t even look as if the thought had occurred to her. She handed him a new mobile phone and an envelope of cash, but she didn’t come any closer than that. And then she said that Grace needed her car back, for some reason, and she must go. So she went, rather suddenly and quickly, and left him standing there in Jeff’s bleak little kitchen, with his mug of tea and a half-eaten sandwich.

  He carried them both into the sitting room and sat on Jeff’s couch. Things change, he thought, all the time – a great moving carpet of change that you can’t stop and you can’t get off. When I was growing up, the Wedgwood factory was in Etruria, right bang in the middle. Now the factory’s out in Barlaston and there’s a ski slope where it used to be. I left a baby and now she’s a complicated woman with a business and grandchildren. I don’t know the grandchildren. I don’t know her. I don’t know how to handle her, what line to take. But then, I haven’t known what’s what for as long as I can remember. I seem to have lost my bearings. I didn’t know Lamu any more, not once they started building the new port and all those roads and planning an oil refinery, and I could see all the beauty and remoteness just vanishing under concrete. But then, I’m just an old relic, an old has-been, aren’t I? I don’t really know what I know. I don’t know what I think I’m doing, here or anywhere. Morris picked up the sandwich, looked at it and put it down again.

  He lay back against the cushions and looked round the room. It was tidy, but in an unlived-in way. No pictures, no colour, nothing that didn’t serve the purposes of watching television. Jeff’s running shoes were together in a corner, and above them, on a hook, the hooded top of a tracksuit. Otherwise, apart from remote controls and a neat stack of magazines, there seemed to be no indication of personality. The man who appeared to be in focussed pursuit of Grace, and who seemed to possess some force of will, lived in this anonymous place in an equally anonymous way. It was dreary, Morris thought, dreary. Deeply dreary.

  He tilted his head back and looked at the ceiling. It had been painted white once, but the corners and edges had now darkened to grey. He took a breath. He’d told Susan that he’d be fine in Jeff’s flat for a few weeks, and he would be. He’d make an effort to be. It struck him that he could actually put some energy into not being a problem, a nuisance. He felt suddenly rather surprised. He’d caught himself making a mental effort. That was novel. Very novel indeed. He raised his head and regarded the blank black glass of the television screen. He worked slowly backwards through his thoughts. Why had he determined to live with Jeff in this dismal flat until he could move into the Parlour House? Because, he realized, he was glad to do something for his daughter and granddaughter; he was actually pleased to be able to relieve their burdens, even a little.

  Good God, Morris thought to himself. Holy Mother of Whatsit. He was smiling. He was sitting on a faux-leather couch in a disheartening room belonging to a man he had no feelings for really, one way or another, and he was smiling. I’ll be blowed, he said to himself; don’t know what’s come over me. He leant forward and picked up his sandwich. It had been nice of Susan to make it, after all. Even if she couldn’t manage a kiss.

  Michelle Knight had put quite a lot of energy over the last few years into making it possible for Neil Dundas to ask her out on a date. She’d had the same boyfriend since she was at school, and despite hoping that someone a bit more exciting than Mark would change things during her college years, it hadn’t happened, and Mark was still around, working now for a huge earth-moving-machinery company out towards Uttoxeter, and apparently content with the same friends and the same personal life he’d had since he was eleven.

  Michelle was fond of him and exasperated by him in exactly the way she was with her two younger brothers. They, like Mark, still lived at home, and got their washing done and their lunchboxes filled, whereas Michelle shared a flat with a girlfriend, and preferred to meet her mother in town for a coffee, rather than get sucked back into all the old routines of her growing up. She thought her brothers were infantile, and said so, and tried quite hard not to think the same of Mark, who joined the men in her family for all the Stoke City home games at Britannia Stadium, and had found a framed photograph of Stanley Matthews on eBay, dated 1963, for her father’s last birthday. He was lovely, Mark: pleasant-looking, kind, polite and familiar – oh, so familiar – but something nagged at Michelle that a more adventurous and interesting alternative might be out there.

  Neil Dundas had struck her as more interesting the moment he arrived. He was so very dark-haired and his accent was so very Scottish and he was so evidently approved of by Susie that he’d had a kind of distinction for Michelle all along. Also, at the beginning he had the faint melancholy glamour of being abandoned by his wife and of then seeming wonderfully unconcerned about replacing her. He’d presumably had other girlfriends, but nobody had seemed to stick. And he hadn’t looked bothered. He hadn’t looked lonely. He looked like a man for whom a relationship was not crucial, which might mean he was still, uselessly, missing his wife, or it might mean something much more attractively complicated.

  Michelle was not a girl to give up. Whenever there was a pretext to seek Neil out and ask him something, she took it. She was not prone to self-doubt, in any case, and because of Mark she had never known the peculiar humiliation of rejection. So when Grace was not in the studio on Monday morning, and Ben rang in to say that he thought he’d got the flu, Michelle decided that work could wait for the ten minutes it would take her to go and find Neil Dundas and ask him – all innocence – where Grace was.

  She found him by the kilns. He was examining the computer panels that regulated timings and temperatures. He said, ‘Morning, Michelle,’ without looking at her.

  ‘How d’you know it’s me?’

  ‘I always know it’s you,’ Neil said, still looking at the keypad, and then added, before she could assume anything, ‘I can recognize the footsteps of all of you.’

  ‘All of us?’

  ‘All you girls,’ Neil said. He pressed a couple of keys. Then he stepped back and looked at her, and smiled.

  She pushed up the sleeves of her sweater. ‘Where’s Grace?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘She’s not in the studio. And Ben’s got flu or something.’

  ‘Is that a problem?’

  ‘Well,’ Michelle said, ‘it’s not, as it happens, today. But why isn’t she here? Susie’ll be in later.’

  Neil hesitated. He was wearing a deep-blue denim shirt under a V-necked sweater, and the blue looked re
ally good with his hair.

  Michelle said, ‘I’m not up for any more dramas.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Her granddad. The boyfriend.’

  ‘You love them,’ Neil said. ‘The dramas.’

  She grinned at him.

  He added, ‘And you’re hoping I’ll give you another one.’

  She ran a hand through her hair, carelessly. ‘Anything to liven up a Monday …’

  ‘Well,’ Neil said, ‘she’ll be back by Wednesday. She’s fine.’

  ‘So you know!’

  ‘Only that.’

  ‘What about Susie? When Susie comes in, what’ll you say?’

  ‘Just that,’ Neil said.

  ‘Is she with Jeff?’

  ‘No,’ Neil said, too quickly.

  Michelle paused. She folded her arms and regarded him, her head slightly on one side. ‘Neil,’ she said, ‘why do you know any of this? Why did she tell you?’

  Leo, Ashley noticed, was asleep. He had been watching Newsnight beside her, talking desultorily, and then she was suddenly aware that his silence was more than just not speaking, and when she turned her head she saw that he was asleep, his head against the sofa back with his mouth slightly open. Her first thought was how like Maisie he was, and her second was that he never went to sleep in the evenings, that it was she who often nodded off, and had to be roused by him and pushed yawning towards the stairs.

  She took a long look at him. He really was very like Maisie. The same tawny, curly hair, the same clear complexion, the same square chin. But Fred was more like him in temperament than Maisie was. Maisie was, in truth, very like how Ashley remembered Cara being as a child. Indeed, there were moments now, even, in the office, when something Cara did or said reminded Ashley forcibly of Maisie.

  She put a hand affectionately on Leo’s nearest thigh. He didn’t stir. No wonder he was tired. He had gone at this whole new lifestyle with such gusto, eliminating rubbish from the fridge and the food cupboards, sorting out the clothes that even Fred had grown out of, running a crisp new line of sealant along the back of the bath and the basin, and around the rim of the shower tray. All that on top of the chore – yes, it was a chore – of taking Maisie to nursery school, and collecting her, never mind sitting through those interminable children’s meals with their endless requirements of diversion and negotiation. But he said he liked it. He said he knew he’d only been at it a week, but he liked it.

  ‘And,’ he’d said, draining pasta over the sink in clouds of steam, ‘think of the money!’

  She did think of the money. She’d thought of money all her life. Friends had assumed that because her mother had her own business, the Moran family had always had the luxury of not having to think about money, that money had just been there, comfortably, easily, perpetually, and that if it wasn’t, for some reason, Ashley’s mother only had to order five hundred more mugs to be made and it would magically appear again. But, as Ashley grew tired of saying, if you have a working mother, if it’s your mother who is providing for the family, and not traditional old dad waltzing out of the house for twelve hours a day to do something nobody’s very interested in, then you are very conscious of money, because it’s the need for money that dictates your mother’s absence.

  And her absence had been, if not exactly painful, in Ashley’s experience noticeable. Jasper had been a fantastic father – always there, invariably tolerant, constantly accommodating. But despite all the warmth he generated, Susie needed to be back for the family circle to be complete. Ashley had often wondered if Cara’s resolve not to have children stemmed from those years of Susie’s absence, although she had to admit that Susie’s presence, when it intermittently arrived, had not always been an altogether harmonious or completing element. She brought energy back into the house, certainly, but she also often brought a kind of jangle too, a crackle of unfinished and unresolved things. Evenings huddled up on the sofa with Pa, watching a movie on television with bowls of popcorn he’d popped himself in a saucepan the size of a bucket, were in truth a better recollection of childhood security.

  Anyway, Ashley thought, moving her hand softly against the denim of Leo’s jeans, look at me. I’m doing exactly what Ma did and Leo is doing exactly what Pa did. In fact, I’ve battled to do my version of what Ma did. I’ve tussled with guilt and pressure and exhaustion and anger, but somehow I’ve always known that I’d rather battle than give up either side of my life. I couldn’t bear not to be a mother. I couldn’t bear not to work. I couldn’t bear, most of all, to be beholden to some man to pay the bills, not to be independent, not to call my own shots. So we’ll see if it works out, this new regime, this new deal between us. The children have eaten more vegetables this last week than in the rest of the year put together. And by the time I’d paid Cheryl, and her tax and all the National Insurance, there wasn’t much change out of seven hundred pounds, which is what Leo brought in, just about, when he was working.

  So even if we won’t be better off, we won’t be much worse off either, and psychologically we’ll be in far better shape. I won’t be running to stand still any more, to pay for childcare we both knew was inadequate. Ashley looked at Leo’s sleeping face again, and felt so very grateful to him for making it possible.

  She reached up to kiss him in gratitude, gently, but meaningfully. On the sofa cushion beside her, her phone began to vibrate, its screen flashing. ‘Grace,’ it read.

  She scrambled off the sofa and carried the phone to the far end of the room, pressing it to her ear. ‘Gracie?’

  ‘Sorry it’s so late—’

  ‘That’s OK. Are you OK? Where are you?’

  ‘In my flat,’ Grace said. ‘I’m at home, with all the doors locked.’

  ‘Did you go away with Jeff, this weekend?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? But nobody could find you—’

  ‘I was here.’

  ‘You sound odd. Are you—’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Grace said. ‘I was going to run away, and then I didn’t. I stayed here. I just – well, I just shut down, here. I’ll go into work on Wednesday.’

  Ashley leant against the long cupboard where the mops and the vacuum cleaner lived. She said, ‘We haven’t talked properly in ages.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Not since we came up to meet Morris.’

  ‘He’s gone,’ Grace said.

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘He’s at Jeff’s place.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where’s Ma?’

  ‘I thought that she was up in Stoke with you,’ Ashley said. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t go in today.’

  Ashley shifted a little. She said, ‘You don’t sound quite right to me.’

  ‘I don’t know whether I am—’

  ‘There’s been a lot going on down here. Cara and Dan and me. Leo …’

  ‘What about Leo?’

  ‘He’s taken the children over.’

  ‘Wow,’ Grace said. ‘Is that OK?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. But he seems determined to make a go of it.’

  Grace said suddenly, ‘I’m in a bit of a mess.’

  ‘Gracie. Are you pregnant?’

  ‘No!’ Grace said. ‘God, no. But – look, I can’t say what I want to say over the telephone. I’m just a bit done in by everything up here—’

  ‘Come to London.’

  ‘Well,’ Grace said doubtfully, ‘I might.’

  ‘Come this weekend. Come on, Grace. Just come. I can tell you everything. It’s been such a mental time, Ma’s house and Morris and trying to restructure stuff and everything. You can see the children.’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  Leo appeared suddenly at the other end of the room, rising from the sofa in a haze of sleep and standing, swaying slightly, outlined against the muted television screen.

  ‘Get a train on Friday,’ Ashley said. ‘The children’ll be thrilled to see you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Grace said. ‘OK.’

  Ashl
ey felt a little surge of vitality, an electric charge of being in control, and strong enough to prop up those who were faltering. ‘Fab,’ she said, ‘see you Friday,’ and flipped her phone shut. Then she walked across the room and put her arms round Leo. ‘I was going to kiss you just now,’ she said, ‘but my phone rang. So I’ll do it now, instead.’

  ‘Michelle says that you know where Grace was this weekend,’ Susie said to Neil Dundas.

  It was late afternoon and the factory was quiet. It was the time of day Neil usually liked best, walking through those long rooms filled with the day’s productivity, the air settling after the disturbance caused by a couple of hundred occupied people, the kilns humming their way through their night-long programmes.

  He said, not pausing in his rapid checking of a truckload of ghostly fired jugs, ‘I don’t. I didn’t.’

  Susie was holding a clipboard against her. She always had a clipboard when she went round the factory, for scribbles and sketches. She said, ‘I rather think you did. I think she told you.’

  Neil picked up a jug, inspected its base and put it back. ‘She told me she was going away for a few nights and that she’d be back on Wednesday at the latest, and that nobody was to worry.’

  ‘Why do you think that she told you?’ Susie said.

  Neil turned to look at her. He said firmly, ‘Because I wouldn’t make anything of it, and I’d leave her alone.’

  Susie crossed both arms across her clipboard. ‘I’ll ignore that.’

  Neil turned back. He said, ‘Did you need her, anyway?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, did you need to speak to her this weekend?’

  ‘I needed,’ Susie said reprovingly, ‘to check that she was all right.’

  ‘Can’t help you there.’

  Susie waited a moment, and then she said, ‘It seems she didn’t go anywhere. She’s just staying in her flat.’

  Neil began to push the truck aside, to make way for another. ‘I wouldn’t know.’