Balancing Act

by Joanna Trollope

  Maisie shot up in bed. ‘Mumma! It’s the morning!’

  Ashley was carrying a tray of mugs. She wore a cardigan of Leo’s over polka-dotted pyjamas and her feet were thrust into immense sheepskin slippers that made her look like Donald Duck.

  Grace raised herself on one elbow. ‘Oh, Ash—’

  Ashley put the tray down on the bedside table. ‘Hot chocolate for Maisie. Tea for us. Budge up, I’m getting in.’

  ‘But I need to play,’ Maisie said.

  Ashley kicked off her slippers and began to climb into bed beside her sister. She said to Maisie, ‘Have you done a pee?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maisie said.

  ‘Fibber,’ Ashley said. ‘Go now.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Go now. Or I will pour your hot chocolate down the loo.’

  Maisie began to slither slowly out of the bed. She said, ‘I don’t want to go by myself.’

  Grace reared up a little further. ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No,’ Ashley said. She put a hand on her sister’s arm. ‘She can manage perfectly well on her own. Anyway, Leo’s in there. Shaving.’

  ‘I don’t want Dadda to help me.’

  ‘Then do it yourself.’

  Maisie had reached the floor. She glowered at her mother. She said, ‘Don’t talk to Grace.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t talk to Grace when I’m not here.’

  Ashley said, laughing, ‘But she’s my sister!’

  Maisie walked very slowly to the door. She looked back at them, side by side in bed. She said, ‘I got there first. I was there in the night time.’ Then she slid from view.

  Grace struggled to sit up. She said, ‘She’s wonderful.’

  ‘Did she wake you?’

  Grace pushed her hair back. ‘Not when she got in, whenever that was.’

  ‘I think she’s going to be a bit like Ma when she grows up,’ said Ashley. She handed a mug of tea to Grace. ‘Where is Ma, by the way?’

  Grace took the tea and held it with both hands. ‘Not at home, I don’t think. Maybe in Barlaston.’

  ‘We should know.’

  ‘We often don’t.’

  ‘No,’ Ashley said, ‘we often don’t. And she doesn’t want us to. Is it a kind of control?’

  Grace took a gulp of tea. ‘God, that’s good. That first mouthful of tea in the morning – nothing like it. It might be control, but I think it’s more to do with liberty. I think she kind of craves freedom – can’t bear to be told, or confined or anything.’

  ‘Which is where Cara and Dan have got it so wrong,’ Ashley said, settling back into the pillows. ‘They tried to assign her a role. And even if she didn’t hate the role itself, she wouldn’t have been able to stand the mere idea of having one in the first place. Certainly not one that someone else has devised for her.’

  Grace said, ‘Did Cara think of the idea? It doesn’t sound like Cara.’

  ‘It was Dan.’

  ‘Oh,’ Grace said. She held her mug against her chin. She said, ‘He so wants the company to prosper and grow.’

  ‘Grace,’ Ashley said, interrupting, ‘we can talk about them later. We’ve got all weekend to talk about the company. But what about you?’

  Grace closed her eyes briefly. She said, ‘Nothing much.’

  ‘Gracie. Don’t be irritating. Tell me.’

  Grace reached to put her mug down beside the bed. She said slowly, ‘I – just started some things that I can’t finish.’

  ‘Morris? Jeff?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘We all do that,’ Ashley said. Her tone was encouraging. ‘We all hope we can sort things, and then we find we can’t, and it’s often not our fault that we can’t.’

  Grace slid back down in bed and closed her eyes again. She said, ‘I shouldn’t have started it.’

  ‘Jeff?’ Ashley said again.

  ‘Cara said don’t. Cara said it was almost always dangerous online. But when I saw this photo and realized he lived so close—’

  Ashley said, in an extremely reasonable voice, ‘It isn’t a crime to fancy someone, you know.’

  ‘But now he’s kind of hooked on hating my family, but wanting to be part of it,’ Grace said. ‘The thought of Morris in his flat is so complicated it makes me want to run away. Or go to bed for a week.’

  Ashley looked down at her sister. She said gently, ‘Morris is actually Ma’s problem, Gracie. If she doesn’t want him in Jeff’s flat, then she has to put him somewhere else. It isn’t up to you.’

  Grace opened her eyes. ‘I was trying to help.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I mean,’ Grace said, rolling on her side towards her sister, ‘I know you and Cara think Ma is holding the company back in lots of ways, and I expect you’re right – at least, partly right – but I can’t help seeing her point of view, too. I can’t help wondering what it must feel like to start something as important as the company, and nurture it all these years, and watch it grow, and employ people and become a household name, and then be told by your children that you’ve got to change and play a different role and let them take over all the modern aspects of business that they now understand better than you do.’

  There was a pause. Ashley put her mug down, too, and folded her hands in front of her. She said after a while, ‘I don’t think Cara and Dan are doing very well together.’

  Grace raised her head. ‘Really?’

  ‘I had a weird encounter with Dan. He was waiting for me in the office car park. He asked me if I knew why Cara wasn’t speaking to him.’

  Grace pulled herself into a sitting position again. ‘Isn’t she?’

  Ashley was looking straight ahead. She said, ‘They came up with this scheme that Ma would step down from being the MD, really, and Cara went round to Radders to tell her this and had some kind of epiphany on the way home about Ma’s position and what they were asking of her, and she seems to have been angry with Dan about it ever since.’

  ‘It fell in,’ Maisie said from the doorway. She was wearing only the top half of her pyjamas.

  Ashley began to scramble out of bed. ‘Not another one, Mais. Not another loo roll.’

  ‘Well,’ Maisie said cheerfully, ‘there you go.’

  Grace said, ‘Ash, can we—’

  ‘In a sec,’ Ashley said. ‘I’ll just have to rescue the bog roll. And see where Leo was, why he didn’t—’

  ‘He went downstairs,’ Maisie said. ‘With Freddy. Freddy did a huge—’

  ‘I don’t want to know. Grace doesn’t want to know either. Where are your pyjama trousers?’

  ‘Wet,’ Maisie said. She looked up at her mother. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, with emphasis.

  From the bed, Grace began to laugh.

  Ashley turned and looked at her. She made a gesture of mock despair. ‘What to do?’

  ‘It’s good for us,’ Grace said, still laughing. ‘It’s so good for us. Maisie, you are just what we need.’

  Maisie put her hands on her hips and struck a pose. ‘Oh, I know,’ she said, with satisfaction.

  Jasper was watching snooker on television, world championship snooker, live from Sheffield. He would have preferred to watch football, but the only football on television that night was Spanish, and he wasn’t enough of a fanatic to prefer Spanish football to snooker. In any case, there was something quite soothing about snooker, the darkened indoor quality of it, the formality of the players’ clothes, the solid click of the balls. It was also something to be doing, an anodyne occupation for the moment – twenty-four hours after he had expected it – when he would finally hear Susie’s key in the lock.

  She had rung and texted him as usual, every day. She had, also as usual, recited a list of commitments which meant that she couldn’t quite plan, as she didn’t know exactly where she’d be, when. He had given up saying, ‘But you always keep your appointments at the factory, and at everything to do with the factory, to the minute,’ because it was pointless and undignified. Her reply had in
variably been, ‘But Jas, I’m always back. I always come back in the end,’ and, of course, she always had. Punctually, regularly when the girls were small, and then gradually less consistently as they grew up, until the unannounced randomness of her returns was pretty well complete. Now, this evening, he heard her open the front door, shout ‘It’s me!’ as if it could ever conceivably be anyone else, let the door slam behind her and add with relief, ‘Hello, home.’ He waited. There was a soft thud as she dropped the bag she was carrying on the hall floor, and then the scuffle of her kicking her shoes off.

  ‘Jas,’ she said from the sitting-room doorway, her tone plainly anticipating a warm welcome. ‘What a few days!’

  He smiled at her from his armchair, but he didn’t get up.

  ‘I bet.’

  She padded across and bent to kiss him. She said, ‘Why are you watching snooker?’

  ‘I felt like sport,’ he said, ‘but not Spanish football.’

  She gave his arm a kindly pat. ‘I didn’t know if you’d be here. Thought you might be round at Ashley’s again.’

  ‘Nope,’ he said, ‘not again. Hungry?’

  She considered this. ‘Not really.’

  ‘Glass of wine?’

  She began to move back towards the door. ‘Just tea, I think. I’ll get it. Lots to tell you.’

  Jasper grunted. He turned back to the snooker.

  Susie paused in the doorway. ‘Jas? Are you sulking?’

  He went on looking at the television. He said, ‘Why would I be sulking?’

  ‘Because I wasn’t back yesterday. Because of the new cottage. Because of Morris.’

  Jasper waited a moment, and then he said, ‘Even you must think it’s a bit odd that I haven’t met him.’

  ‘What d’you mean, even me?’

  ‘Well,’ Jasper said evenly, ‘you lead very much the life you choose to lead. Your rules are not really designed to take account of anyone else’s wishes. You are a law unto yourself, Suz. So your attitude to a long-lost parent isn’t going to be exactly conventional, is it?’

  Susie came back into the room and stopped a few feet from Jasper’s chair. She said, ‘I’m not pleased to see him, Jas.’

  He went on steadily looking at the snooker. He said, ‘I know. We all know. But it isn’t unreasonable, is it, to think that when you have a big personal problem in your life all of a sudden, you might think of sharing it with your husband?’

  Susie said, with difficulty, ‘I’m … not very proud of him.’

  ‘Which only underlines what I’ve just said.’

  Susie sat down on the arm of the sofa and looked at her stockinged feet. She said, almost under her breath, ‘Sorry, Jas. I’m sorry.’

  He picked up the remote control and aimed it at the television. In the silence that followed, he said, ‘Sorry about what?’

  ‘If – if I’ve looked as if I’m shutting you out.’

  ‘I’m used to that, Suz. I’m used to you and the business. But this is a bit different, don’t you think? Your own father?’

  She said, still staring at her feet, ‘There’s been such a lot going on. Cara and Dan wanting changes, Ashley wanting more of a say, poor Grace in such a mess—’

  ‘And none of it,’ Jasper said, ‘for sharing?’

  She said again, ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I never know what you’re really sorry about. Sometimes I think you’re just sorry you’ve dropped a ball in the juggling act. Sometimes I wonder how sorry you’re really capable of being about other people’s feelings, especially if you’ve had a hand in hurting them.’

  Susie raised her eyes. She said, ‘Have I hurt you?’

  He didn’t look at her. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jas, I never meant—’

  ‘Please don’t start on that. Please don’t tell me about your intentions and how they got corrupted by subsequent events. Please don’t make excuses.’

  Susie was silent for several long seconds, then she said, ‘Can I at least try to do better?’

  ‘Like how?’

  ‘Like us going for a long walk together tomorrow, down by the river or something, and having a meal out at the pub.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Jasper said, ‘I can’t. Not tomorrow.’

  She was startled. ‘You can’t? What are you doing?’

  ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘what can I be doing – me, Jasper, who never has any commitments beyond lounging through life on his wife’s money?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. I didn’t mean that. I never meant—’

  ‘I’m working,’ Jasper said flatly.

  Susie stared at him.

  He picked up the remote control and switched the snooker back on. ‘I’m playing in a gig tomorrow, Suz. With Brady. We’re rehearsing in the afternoon and playing in the evening.’ He dropped the remote on to the arm of his chair. ‘In Shoreditch,’ he said.

  ‘You must come more often,’ Leo said to Grace. They were washing up together. Ashley and Fred had gone upstairs for a nap, and Maisie was on a beanbag in front of a Peppa Pig DVD, with her thumb in.

  Grace said, ‘I’d like that.’

  Leo was washing up with conspicuous competence, rinsing the soapsuds off saucepans and peering at them to see if there were any smears that he had missed.

  ‘It can’t be good for you, work and play being so local all the time.’

  ‘I like it,’ Grace said. She was polishing wine glasses slowly, with a cloth. ‘I like Stoke.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ Leo said. ‘I just mean that it’s small.’

  Grace set a wine glass down. She said, ‘There’s nothing the matter with Stoke, you know. It’s me. I got in a bit of a tangle.’

  Leo untied the butcher’s apron he was wearing and pulled it over his head. He said, ‘You and Ash need to see more of each other.’

  ‘Yes,’ Grace said. ‘I’d forgotten how well we get on.’

  ‘Especially now.’

  Grace picked up another wet glass. ‘What’s special about now?’

  Leo hitched himself on to a corner of the kitchen table. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you can see that things round here aren’t quite what they used to be.’

  Grace pushed her cloth inside the wine glass. She said warmly, ‘I think it’s great of you to take on the children and the house and everything. Ash says it’s going to change so much for her.’

  ‘I mean it to. And for the children.’

  ‘Of course,’ Grace said politely.

  ‘But it isn’t just to avoid the childcare problems we’ve had in the past, you know. It’s more than that.’ He looked at the second glass Grace had set down beside the first. ‘The thing is, you and Ash should have as much clout in the company as Cara and Dan do.’

  Grace said quickly, ‘They’re very fair.’

  ‘Fair,’ Leo said, ‘is all very well, from a position of power. But you and Ash don’t have the power that they do. And you should.’

  Grace hung her tea towel over the back of the nearest chair. She said, ‘Maybe I prefer influence to power. Perhaps it suits me better.’

  ‘That’s just semantics,’ Leo said. ‘This is a family business and there must be equality. Ash and I have made a kind of deal in our marriage and home life. You and she need to make one in your working lives, too.’

  Grace looked at him for a long moment. Then she said, ‘Leo, is this why you’ve decided to take on the childcare? To free Ashley up to … to go for something?’

  He stood up and crossed the kitchen briskly towards the kettle. ‘Yes,’ he said, with his back to her. ‘Coffee?’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘I’ve come,’ Cara said, ‘to say sorry.’

  She stood just inside the boardroom door, holding the handle. Susie was sitting at the table, her sketchbooks spread around and her laptop open. She glanced up at Cara as if she couldn’t quite remember who she was, and said absently, ‘You what, darling?’

  Cara shut the door behind her. She said, ‘I shouldn’t have spoken to you l
ike that. I shouldn’t have stormed off.’

  Susie was wearing her reading glasses. She took them off and laid them on the nearest sketchbook. She said, ‘I have to hear these things, I know I do.’

  Cara took a chair opposite her mother. She said, ‘It wasn’t meant to sound so antagonistic.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ma, it wasn’t a criticism. It was meant to be a suggestion.

  That’s all.’

  Susie said sadly, ‘I think it’s my week for criticism.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  Susie sighed. She picked up her glasses, fiddled with them a bit, then put them down again. She said reluctantly, ‘It was a rather … painful weekend.’

  ‘Ma!’ Cara said. ‘In what way?’

  Susie pushed herself back in her chair. She said, ‘Is Dan out there?’

  ‘He’s on the phone. He’s busy.’

  ‘Are you both—?’ She stopped.

  ‘Sort of,’ Cara said. She leant forward. ‘But what about you? Was it Morris?’

  ‘Only indirectly.’

  ‘Then?’

  Susie looked away. She said unhappily, ‘Your pa.’

  ‘Pa?’

  ‘He’s very angry with me.’

  ‘Oh,’ Cara said with a shrug. ‘Take no notice. Pa’s never cross for more than five minutes, he can’t keep it up.’

  ‘He’s really angry,’ Susie said. ‘Coldly angry. He was out all yesterday, playing some gig with Brady. I wanted to go and hear him, but he said no.’

  ‘He said no?’

  ‘He said he didn’t want me to.’

  ‘Childish,’ Cara said.

  ‘Not really. More … more like someone having to resort to doing something very obvious to get a point home to someone else who won’t listen.’ She looked at Cara. ‘Have you spoken to him?’

  ‘Not since last week.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He was perfectly normal. We fixed a night for supper this week, talked about Leo and Ash a bit, he said he thought Grace was better. Nothing out of the ordinary.’

  Susie said, ‘He thinks he should have met Morris.’

  ‘Well, shouldn’t he?’

  Susie picked up her glasses again. She said slowly, ‘I don’t really want Morris mixed up with my real life.’