Balancing Act

by Joanna Trollope

  Leo swallowed. This was ridiculous. He was a qualified, educated, personable man of thirty-four, and Fred was his passport. He just had to lift Fred out of his buggy and stride in, confident and purposeful, trading on his gender instead of feeling incapacitated by it. He looked down at Fred. He was asleep, having nodded off in that sudden and complete way common to babies.

  ‘Freddy,’ Leo said to his son, not very loudly.

  Fred didn’t stir. He had slipped sideways a little, his soft round cheek squashed against the side of the buggy. His fat little hands were completely relaxed on his stomach, which rose and fell evenly under his navy-blue fleece.

  Leo looked back at the café. Nobody seemed to have noticed that he was hesitating there. Nobody had looked up from their complete engagement with each other and their children, and observed a lone father hovering – pitiful word, but that’s what he was doing – outside the glazed café door, wearing the expression of, let’s face it, a dog hoping for chocolate.

  ‘What shall I do?’ Leo said to Fred.

  Fred slept on. A small dribble of saliva slid from the corner of his slightly open mouth and ran gently down his chin. Leo bent down, took an elderly tissue from his pocket and wiped Fred’s mouth. ‘Go or stay,’ Leo said to him. ‘Up to you.’

  Fred’s thick eyelashes were completely still on his cheeks. He looked as if waking would be the last thing on his mind for hours to come.

  ‘OK,’ Leo said. ‘We’ll go.’

  He turned the buggy. He thought that if Amanda noticed and called out to him, he’d pretend he was only leaving because Fred was asleep. But she didn’t. Nobody had seen him there, and nobody noticed him leaving. He was seized by a sudden urge to run, pushing the buggy ahead of him at tremendous speed as if he was being pursued.

  Fred slept peacefully on. When they reached home, Leo left him strapped in his buggy in the hall and went down to the basement to make coffee. The need to make coffee suddenly seemed to be tremendously urgent; he needed to make it carefully and deliberately, and to heat milk in the microwave, which he could then painstakingly froth up with the special little gadget Ashley had put in his Christmas stocking. Ashley. He hadn’t actually thought of Ashley throughout this – this episode. What would Ashley think of him, wimping out on a perfectly friendly invitation just because he was out of his male comfort zone for the first time, in this new chapter that he had been instrumental in starting? Would she be sympathetic? Would she be woman-to-man indulgent? Or would she simply think that his behaviour was, well, lamentable? Leo’s father, who was an ardent racing man, would describe him as having fallen at the first fence. And the first fence had been nothing daunting, in itself.

  Leo carried his meticulously made coffee to the sofa where they all sat to watch television. The cushions were still dented from the previous evening, and although Leo had determined not to be any more precious about the house than he was about food, the sight of the crushed and flattened cushions, scattered with crumpled sheets of the Evening Standard brought home by Ashley the night before, was disheartening. They looked as he felt – distinctly ashamed of themselves.

  He sat down, his elbows on his knees, holding his mug of coffee. He looked at the foam on the top – the foam he had made. It lay in an even, light blanket, the edges just touched with coffee colour. He thought of how he had felt at the weekend, how confident he had been, especially with Grace, telling her in a forthright manner how she must conduct herself in future, stand up for her talents, stand up to her mother and her older sister, support Ashley in getting due recognition. He shut his eyes. What a load of cobblers, he told himself, what bullshit; who did I think I was kidding? Do this, do that to Grace, and three days later you’re too chicken to walk into a café full of mothers, even though Fred gives you the perfect excuse.

  He bent his head, sucked at the foam blanket. He would not, he thought, tell Ashley about this morning. He would, in fact, tell nobody. His only witness, luckily, had been asleep, and, in any case, couldn’t talk. He would be cheery with Amanda when he saw her at nursery-school pick-up that day, and pretend he’d had an appointment that prevented him from coming, and then he’d make a firm date to join them all next Wednesday. By next Wednesday, he would have obliterated the memory of today and tidied it away to the back of his mind as one of those beginner’s mistakes that could happen to anyone.

  He looked round the room. Breakfast still lay sprawled messily across the table, and he knew a tangle of bedlinen had been dumped on the floor in front of the washing machine, but not yet put in. That meant the beds upstairs were awaiting clean sheets, and, while he was up there, he should really sort out the bathroom. He took another noisy slurp of coffee. Trouble was, he thought, he didn’t feel like doing any of it. In fact, he felt an enormous resistance to doing any of the domestic chores that needed to be done before it was time to collect Maisie, a resistance that surprised him by its strength. He hadn’t made any allowance for the loneliness of his determinedly chosen new domestic role. Or the repetitiveness or the banality. He had longed to be welcomed in among those young women, and had been ashamed of the longing, ashamed to demonstrate it. Had he, he wondered, elected to do something he was actually going to fail at, as he had failed at so many things before?

  There was a wail from the hallway upstairs. Fred was awake. Domestic life, said the wail, did not allow for options. And it was entirely oblivious to gender.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  No,’ Grace said, ‘I’m not coming with you.’

  Jasper tried again. ‘Just to introduce us. Just that first moment—’

  Grace was checking that she’d got her keys and her phone and other essentials, her head bent over her bag. ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘No, Pa. I’ve held your hand all the way up here and got you this far. Now you have to do the next bit. He won’t bite you.’

  Jasper looked at Grace’s car keys, which she had pushed towards him on her kitchen counter. He said, ‘But I can’t promise not to bite him.’

  ‘Go right ahead, then.’

  ‘You’re no help.’

  ‘But I am,’ Grace said. ‘I’m whatever that thing is, in physics. A catalyst?’

  ‘I’m no good at confrontation,’ Jasper said. ‘You know that.’

  Grace slung her bag on her shoulder. She said remorselessly, ‘You managed yesterday. Talking to Ma, telling her what you were doing.’

  Jasper sighed. ‘I was still quite cross, yesterday.’

  ‘Stay cross for today, then.’

  He glanced at her. ‘No relenting then?’

  ‘No,’ she said for the third time. ‘No. None.’

  And then she gave the car keys another nudge. ‘Come on, Pa. Drive me to work and then go on to Trentham Gardens. He’s expecting you.’

  And that, Jasper thought, driving west out of Stoke, was an added burden. To have surprised an unwanted and historically despised father-in-law would have given Jasper the upper hand. To have him waiting instead, with time to prepare his reactions, was quite another matter. But Grace had insisted. Grace had rung her grandfather and informed him that her father was coming out to Trentham Gardens, and Morris had said he’d be in the workshop at the garden centre that Jeff’s boss had found for him. She’d said he’d sounded unperturbed, but that he was like that anyway, rolling with the punches, going with the flow. Jasper had said distastefully, ‘You almost sound as if you approve of him,’ and Grace had replied, ‘I don’t. But there are bits of him I seem to be able to tolerate,’ which Jasper had found peculiarly irritating. He realized he wanted to be backed up in his lifelong conviction that Morris had defaulted on every area of any self-respecting man’s life.

  Susie had been baffling on the phone, as well. She had sounded as if she was relieved that Jasper was taking the initiative over meeting Morris, but simultaneously both anxious and angry that he was doing any such thing.

  Jasper had said at one point, ‘Are you actually asking me not to?’

  And she had said hastily, ‘No.
No, not at all. I just wish …’

  ‘What do you wish?’

  ‘I just wish,’ she’d said maddeningly, ‘that all this didn’t have to happen.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ he’d shouted, and then there’d been silence, and he’d thought she might be crying and was just about to say something else, something gentler, when she’d said unexpectedly and in a much calmer voice, ‘Thank you for doing this, Jas,’ and he was left to grapple with yet another switch of mood.

  ‘You drive me crazy,’ he said to her. ‘Do you know that?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, sounding not in the least contrite.

  ‘Crazy.’

  ‘Thank you, Jas,’ Susie said, her voice suddenly full of warmth. ‘Thank you.’

  They were thanks he could not quite believe in, even now, five minutes away from his destination. They were more about her own relief than ongoing thankfulness, as Susie’s gratitude so often exasperatingly was. But he went on craving her appreciation, all the same, as he went on wanting to relieve her, please her. He got something out of doing things for her – he must do, mustn’t he? Why else would he be on this absurd errand to meet someone whose failings had coloured Jasper’s life, as well as the lives of all those he held most dear, for as long as he could remember? He swore softly under his breath. His daughters thought, however fondly, that he was a doormat. They thought he let their mother wipe her feet on him. Well, his relationship with Susie was not actually any of their business, however much they considered that it was. But Morris was another matter. When it came to feet-wiping, Jasper was going to make it very plain who would be on the receiving end. And it wouldn’t be him.

  The garden centre had a patchily gravelled car park, largely made up of shallow puddles. Jasper parked Grace’s car close to the entrance and climbed out, avoiding the adjacent puddle with difficulty.

  ‘SPRING BEDDING PLANTS!’ an amateurishly written sign said, next to the doorway. ‘EASTER HANGING BASKETS!’

  Jasper pushed open the door to a sizeable but gloomy shed-like building, full of earthy smells and the piped sound of Dean Martin singing ‘That’s Amore’. Morris had said to walk right down the centre, past the seed racks and the outdoor furniture, through the double doors, to turn right and then left, and he’d be there at the end, by all the rainwater butts. Jasper looked round. There appeared to be nobody there, not a customer nor a salesperson. In front of him were displays of begonias and African violets in pots, and beyond them, a few dispirited orchids above a neglected plastic pool of water, shaped like a shell.

  Jasper set off down the room. Dean Martin sang nonchalantly on and water from an electrically pumped fountain splashed irregularly into the plastic shell. Beyond it, elaborate wrought-iron furniture was grouped under a green canvas parasol, and on one of the tables were several charming wooden bird houses, painted in pale subtle colours that Susie would have approved of, next to a notice which read, ‘Unique bird houses from Bali. Commissions taken. Prices on request.’ Beside them was a plastic parrot in a cage, a purple orchid and a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses. Those, then, were Morris’s bird houses, marketed as deemed appropriate for the local community. Susie, Jasper thought, would have a fit.

  He pushed through the double doors and turned right, then left, as instructed, along a cracked concrete path that ran past rows of shrubs in pots, tied to yellow canes. At the end of the path was a small wooden structure, once perhaps a prototype summerhouse, with a half-glazed door set between two diamond-paned windows. Through the glass, Jasper could see an old man sitting at a workbench, with long white hair tied back at the base of his skull with a length of tinsel. He was dressed in various knitted layers and his feet, clad in powder-blue socks, were thrust into striped canvas espadrilles with the backs trodden down. He was bent over a piece of plywood, a fretsaw in his hand. To his surprise, Jasper could hear jazz playing nearby. He stood there, watching, uncertain what to do, and even more uncertain as to what he was feeling. And then, as if conscious of being watched, the old man raised his head and saw Jasper. For a few long seconds they looked at each other, not smiling. And then the old man put down everything he was holding, rose to his feet, shuffled across the bare floor to the door and opened it. The jazz was suddenly louder. He gave Jasper a tentative smile.

  ‘Hello, son,’ Morris said.

  The atmosphere in the factory, Neil thought, was always different when Susie was there. It was the same kind of difference that had prevailed in the kitchen of his childhood when his mother was at home, a sense of everything being settled and safe and reliable, underpinned with the best kind of quiet energy. As a boy, he had disliked being at home if his mother wasn’t there. These days, thirty years later, he felt much the same, if in a more detached way, about the factory. It was always busy, always absorbing, but if Susie was somewhere in the building, it was better. She gave the place authority. In fact, although a staunch non-believer, he would go so far as to say that Susie conferred on the factory, quite without meaning to, a kind of blessing.

  He was aware that everyone who worked in the factory felt it, to some extent. Susie knew everyone by name, after all, and their family situations, and often about their dogs and cats as well as their children. Even the most traditional men, doing the most traditionally male jobs in the factory, like casting, or operating the kilns and the blungers, had succumbed to the particular – and surprising – charm of working for a woman; or, as Neil put it to himself, the charm of working for this particular woman. She might never have thrown a pot in her life, but she was Staffordshire born and Stoke bred, and she had endeared herself to the whole workforce with her egalitarian views on employment and now by buying a cottage out at Barlaston. Some of them had been out to look at the Parlour House, and the general view was that it was pretty but modest. The modesty was much approved of. With her money – always perceived as some fabulous amount – it was said she could have aspired to the pedimented grandeur of Barlaston Park. But no. She had chosen a cottage, and, what’s more, a cottage with family connections. Her great-granddad had delivered the churns of milk to the dairy there, back in the day. She might own a factory now, but she was only three generations away from a farm labourer in Barlaston. You could tell that, some of them said, by looking at her hands. They were the kind of hands familiar to everyone in the factory: hands that were used to doing things, useful hands. When she’d shown some of the decorators how to hand-letter the christening and children’s mugs which had been bestsellers now for well over a decade, they’d all marvelled at her deftness. She could draw, she could design, she had bought a factory and built a business. And when she was in the building, there was a definite feeling that those two hundred and twenty souls working there were somehow a family.

  Which was why, Neil supposed, he always felt a small lurch of disappointment if she cancelled a visit. She tried not to, he knew that, and there was usually a good reason, to do with the demands of the London office. But not this time. This Tuesday, Neil had expected to see her, and the factory, too, had had an air of anticipation, like children grouped ready for their mother’s mildly exciting return, and then Susie had rung to say she couldn’t, as it happened, make it till later in the week.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘So sorry.’

  Neil had waited for her to explain. He said, to give her an opening, ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, as if nothing could ever be anything but OK. ‘Everything’s fine.’

  He waited again.

  There was an unnaturally long pause. Then Susie said, ‘I’ll probably see you Thursday. Friday, for definite.’

  ‘I rather wanted to talk to you about—’

  ‘Not now,’ Susie said. ‘Sorry, Neil.’

  She’d rung off. Not abruptly, but decidedly. She would not be in Stoke until the end of the week, and the design for the coffee-shop chain’s special order was proving problematic. He could solve the problem himself, of course, but she didn’t like him to do that, she didn’t like any
changes to be made without her personal sanction. The order had to go out in ten days’ time, and if she wasn’t going to be in Stoke until Friday, that was three working days lost out of seven. Well, it would be up to him to manage a fast turnaround; but he would, all the same, have given a great deal to know what was keeping Susie in London.

  ‘Neil,’ someone said, from his office doorway.

  He looked up from his computer screen. Grace was standing there, a huge grey scarf looped round her neck, and her bag on her shoulder. She looked – well, she looked much better. Great, in fact. He stood up, smiling. ‘I thought the family’d deserted us—’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘you’ve just got different members of the cast.’ She hitched her bag more firmly on to her shoulder. ‘My dad’s here,’ she said. ‘He’s just seeing my – grandpa.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be strange,’ Morris said, ‘me sleeping where my old granddad used to come to work every day?’

  Jasper was standing three feet away from him, in the small sitting room of the Parlour House, his hands shoved into his coat pockets and his collar turned up. He said gruffly, ‘I don’t know what she sees in this place.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be anything you could see,’ Morris said mildly.

  Jasper grunted. The cottage felt unremarkable to him, chilly and damp and undistinguished. He didn’t feel in the mood to be imaginative, let alone appreciative. In fact, he felt thoroughly wrong-footed, and by an old man he had determined to detest, but from the first word, Morris hadn’t allowed himself to be comfortably detestable, and that, to Jasper’s current frame of mind, was unforgivable. It was unbearable, right now, for the myth not to manifest itself as a monster.