Balancing Act

by Joanna Trollope

  Now he was opposite both of them at the table. Leo had gone to the corner shop for something or other, leaving Morris in charge, and indicating as he did so that it wouldn’t be the last time; that he had started as he meant to go on. Maisie ate and stared, never taking her eyes off Morris. He made himself look back at her, consoling himself that she had jam smeared across one cheek and, comically, on the end of her nose. When she had eaten all the strips of toast, she drank noisily from a plastic mug of milk, holding it in both hands and still staring at him relentlessly over the top. Then she put the mug down with a bang, gave a little gasp and said, ‘Your hair is like a witch.’

  Morris smiled at her. ‘Witches are women.’

  ‘They’re spooky,’ Maisie said reprovingly. ‘Witches are bad guys.’

  ‘Ah,’ Morris said.

  Fred made a choking sound and a plug of banana shot out of his mouth and landed sloppily on the tray of his high chair.

  ‘He always does that,’ Maisie said.

  Morris got up and went round the table to pat Fred on the back.

  ‘Harder,’ Maisie said.

  Morris didn’t look at her. ‘I’ll do it my own way, missy.

  You OK, lad?’

  Fred stretched his arms up to be lifted out of his chair.

  ‘Not till he’s finished,’ Maisie said. ‘It’s the rule.’

  ‘Granddads,’ Morris said, ‘have their own rules.’

  He heaved Fred out of his chair and carried him back round the table to sit him on his knee. Maisie began to scramble off her chair. She said, ‘I need to sit on your knee too.’

  ‘I thought that I wasn’t in your good books,’ Morris said. ‘Wrong bird house, wrong hair …’

  ‘Lift me up.’

  ‘Can’t.’

  ‘Yes, you can.’

  ‘Not with one arm. One old arm. Got Fred in the other one, see?’

  Maisie began to push an empty chair next to Morris’s. She said severely, ‘You need sorting.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ Morris said. ‘D’you think you’ll be the one to do it?’

  Maisie adjusted the chair so that it was as close to Morris’s as she could get it. Then she clambered up inelegantly, and stood on the seat so that she could inspect Morris’s hair with full and close disapproval. She said, ‘This won’t do.’

  Morris was feeding Fred morsels of digestive biscuit. He said, ‘It’s been like this since I was sixteen. You sound just like my old dad. He couldn’t stand long hair on a man either.’

  ‘Are you going to live here?’ Maisie inquired.

  Fred leaned forward to lick crumbs off Morris’s fingers. Then he settled himself back into the crook of his arm, as if against pillows.

  ‘You’re a nice lad,’ Morris said, and then to Maisie, ‘And yes, for the moment. If you’ll have me.’

  Maisie considered. She put a hand out to touch the black ribbon tied round Morris’s ponytail, and shrank it back again. ‘I think so,’ she said.

  ‘You sound a bit doubtful.’

  ‘Well,’ Maisie said, ‘we’re pretty full up with people.’

  ‘You don’t take up much space. Nor does the little fella.’

  ‘I’ll grow you, you know. Till I’m huge.’

  ‘You might be,’ Morris said. ‘I was six foot two once upon a time. Tall genes in the family.’

  Maisie leant against him. She said breathily in his ear, ‘Witch hair, witch hair, witch hair.’

  ‘You tickle—’

  ‘Witch hair, witch hair—’

  ‘Maisie, would you like me to do something for you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Something you’d like and I wouldn’t?’

  ‘Yes,’ Maisie said.

  ‘I’m not promising,’ Morris said, full of sudden joy at the two solid small bodies pressed against him, ‘but I might consider – just consider, mind – cutting it off.’

  From the kitchen table at Radipole Road, Susie rang Grace. She had started to ring from an armchair in the sitting room, but restlessness had propelled her out of it and back down the hall to the big kitchen, with its French windows to the garden. The great parrot cage was in its usual place next to the glass doors, and beside it, on the floor, sat a much smaller and less decorative cage, with a sturdy handle on the top.

  ‘Are you going travelling?’ Susie said to Polynesia.

  Polynesia pretended not to hear her, as usual. She had taken up her stock position, if Jasper was out, at the furthest end of her perch, and was staring distantly at nothing.

  ‘Where are you, Ma?’ Grace said.

  ‘In the kitchen at home, being ignored by the parrot. She is brilliant at ignoring, especially me. It looks as if she’s planning to get away, though. There’s a much smaller cage on the floor here, a new one. Do you know anything about a new parrot cage?’

  ‘No,’ Grace said. ‘Should I?’

  ‘I thought your father might have said something to you.’

  ‘Ma,’ Grace said, ‘you’re the one who lives with him. Why don’t you ask him yourself?’

  Susie paced back down the kitchen. It was on the tip of her tongue to say that she might technically be sharing a house with Jasper, but that she didn’t appear, at the moment, to be sharing anything else of any significance. She swallowed. Grace would not want to hear that. Nor would Cara or Ashley. There were some elements in a marriage that it would be entirely inappropriate – awful if invaluable word – to burden the consequences of that marriage with. She said instead, ‘Have you talked to Ashley?’

  ‘Haven’t you?’

  ‘Gracie—’

  ‘Morris is your father, Ma. It’s up to you to ring Ashley. Or even go round there and see for yourself.’

  There was a charged silence. Then Susie said carefully, ‘Are you cross about something?’

  ‘Me? No. Why would I be?’

  ‘It’s just that it isn’t like you to talk like this. You sound like Cara.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s time I sounded more like her. If I do.’

  Susie stood at the far end of the kitchen, between the table and the painted dresser which housed all the early prototypes of her pottery, those mugs and jugs and bowls decorated with strawberries and daisies and dots and diamonds that she had stood in the factory holding, all those years ago, in a kind of wondering ecstasy. She put out a finger and stroked the shiny curve of a small blue-spotted Dutch jug. She said, as neutrally as she could, ‘Cara and I had a sort of row—’

  ‘Cara didn’t describe it like that.’

  ‘So you’ve talked to Cara?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Gracie, why is no one talking to me?’

  Grace said maddeningly, ‘I’m talking to you now.’

  Susie closed her eyes briefly. She had the phone in one hand, and the little Dutch jug in the other as a kind of instinctive talisman. She said, ‘I wish I understood what’s gone wrong. What I’ve done wrong.’

  There was another silence. Susie pictured Grace pulling out one of her long, springy curls, as she was in the habit of doing whilst telephoning. The silence went on long enough for Susie to wonder if Grace had just quietly ended the call, when she said in a much more familiar tone, ‘I don’t think it’s as straightforward as that, Ma. I don’t think it’s a question of having made a sudden mistake, or anything. I think it’s been brewing for ages and none of us realized what was going wrong until it was suddenly impossible to ignore. And Morris – you can’t ignore Morris.’

  ‘He’s changed everything—’

  ‘No, he hasn’t. It’s too easy to blame everything on him. He’s just brought everything out into the open. Not by doing anything – just by arriving and creating a problem.’

  ‘What do you mean by everything?’ Susie said, putting the jug gently back on the dresser.

  ‘Changes,’ Grace said.

  ‘Changes? What changes?’

  ‘The need for them.’

  ‘But we are changing. We’re changing all the
time. We’re evolving—’

  ‘I’m not talking about the product, Ma. I’m talking about management. The way we’re structured. The way we’re paid. The way we interact with each other.’

  Susie leant on the kitchen wall next to the dresser. She felt that she ought to flare up at this moment, hold her ground, fight her corner as she always had, as she had believed that she should. But for some reason, she couldn’t find either the conviction or the energy to resist.

  Grace said, ‘Ma?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Susie said uncertainly. ‘Probably. Gracie, I don’t really know.’

  ‘What are you doing at home, on a work day?’

  ‘I’m leaning on the kitchen wall.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just feel – exhausted.’

  ‘You’re never exhausted.’

  ‘Darling,’ Susie said, pressing her forehead to the wall. ‘What do you think I should do?’

  ‘I think,’ Grace said, ‘that you should pull yourself together.’

  Susie gave a rueful laugh. ‘You don’t sound very worried about me.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Thank you, darling—’

  ‘I’m not, because you can sort this. You can sort all of it.

  If you want to.’

  ‘Want to!’

  ‘Yes,’ Grace said. ‘And now, Ma, I’ve got to go. I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘Could you possibly give a message to Neil?’

  ‘No,’ Grace said, ‘I couldn’t. You’ll have to ring him yourself.’ And she put the phone down.

  Susie stayed where she was for a few moments, her phone in her hand. Then she said to Polynesia, ‘She put the phone down on me. Grace actually put the phone down on me. Grace!’

  Polynesia stirred not a feather. She went on looking out at the garden, her back to Susie. A car went past, down Radipole Road, too fast, music blaring, leaving the atmosphere quivering faintly in its wake. Susie took her forehead away from the wall and dropped the phone on the table. Even Grace had said that the major log in the current jam had her name on it. Grace! She walked back down the kitchen to stand by the new portable cage.

  ‘Are you all just leaving me?’ Susie said to Polynesia.

  Ashley said firmly that she didn’t want to talk in the office. Daniel had suggested the boardroom, but Ashley said that she would prefer to be out of the office altogether, so the three of them were in a wine bar on the Fulham Road, sitting on velvet-covered chairs round a plate of Spanish ham that Daniel had ordered with their drinks. Ashley was drinking fizzy water, and had had a haircut, Cara noticed. It suited her. As did her navy-blue sweater dress, which Cara didn’t recollect seeing before – any more, as a matter of fact, than she remembered those particular ankle boots. Cara tried very hard never to assess, let alone judge other women by what they wore. But you couldn’t help noticing, could you?

  Ashley rolled a piece of ham into a cigarette shape and ate it, ignoring the bread basket. She added a wedge of lime to her water. She looked remarkably together, Cara thought, especially for someone with two small children at home, let alone an unwanted grandfather in her spare bedroom. Cara shuddered inwardly at the thought of Morris anywhere near her and Dan’s flat, their private space. But Ashley looked strangely unruffled. In fact, since these recent upheavals in her private life, Ashley had looked a great deal less harassed and flung-together than she had done in the days of Leo being out at work and a full-time nanny at home.

  Cara glanced at Daniel. He seemed in no more of a hurry than Ashley to get down to business. He was sipping thoughtfully from a glass of Riesling – Riesling was his latest wine thing – and asking Ashley peacefully about how things were at home, and she was replying, equally comfortably it seemed to Cara, that it was all remarkably OK, thank you, and the children had rather taken to him, and he was weirdly quite easy to have around, and had even made a start on the garden, having an aptitude for plants and outdoor spaces. Even Maisie, Ashley said, whose wellington boots were as pristine as when they left the shop on account of her fierce insistence on only ever wearing her buckled shoes, had consented to put them on to join Morris in the garden. It was a first. She had thought Maisie was going to be like one of those cats that single girls have as baby substitutes, who are terrified of any surface that isn’t carpeted because they are never allowed out.

  ‘Doesn’t he creep you out a bit, Ash?’ Cara said.

  Ashley picked up a second slice of ham. ‘Less than I thought he would. He’s very clean. And now the hair’s gone—’

  ‘Gone!’

  ‘He had it all cut off. For Maisie. They went to the barber together. It’s so short now, it’s practically shaved. A definite improvement. And Maisie has stopped bossing Fred around, now she’s got Morris to boss instead. So that’s a relief.’

  ‘I’m glad something is,’ Cara said. She took a sip of her wine. ‘Ma’s in a very odd mood, she hasn’t mentioned the Parlour House for ages, Grace is being very elusive, and Pa is having some kind of mid-life crisis and hiring a studio in Hackney. What’s all that about?’

  ‘Perhaps it’s nearer these gigs he’s doing,’ Daniel said. He glanced at Cara. ‘Should we be going to hear him?’

  She gave a small snort. ‘No. Absolutely not. He’s got this state-of-the-art studio at home—’

  ‘But perhaps it feels a bit disconnected,’ Ashley said.

  Cara shrugged. ‘Maybe. I don’t think that we can worry too much at the moment about Pa’s Great Gatsby desire to relive the past.’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh.’

  ‘I’m feeling harsh,’ Cara said. ‘I’m angry with both of them. Pa has just stepped away from us, and Ma is expecting us to fall in with what she wants, because in the end we have to. They’re both being a kind of exaggeration of what they used to be, and totally ignoring each other, as if they have no responsibility for one another. It’s driving me nuts. So I’m trying not to think about it. I’m practising detachment. It’s wonderful when it works.’

  Ashley looked across at her brother-in-law. She said, ‘What do you think, Dan?’

  He gave a small shrug. ‘Not a lot, actually.’

  Cara looked aggrieved. ‘Dan!’

  He smiled at her. ‘Other things on my mind, sweetheart.’

  ‘You’re so lucky, not being family,’ said Ashley.

  ‘I know.’

  Ashley took a sip of her water. She said, laughing a little, ‘Maybe that’s the only thing you have in common with Leo!’

  ‘I like Leo.’

  ‘I’d be very fed up with you if you didn’t like Leo.’

  ‘Ashley,’ Cara said suddenly, turning towards her, ‘why are we here?’

  Ashley sat back. She crossed her legs and flicked something invisible off her sweater dress. Then she said, ‘Me, actually.’

  ‘Go on,’ Cara said. She looked at Dan for his customary support. He didn’t look back. He was smiling in a mild kind of way at Ashley.

  ‘Two things,’ Ashley said.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘The first is the catalogues. I want the photoshoots to happen at my home now, as I said before. My home which might soon have a garden. It’s too late for an Easter catalogue now as well as the spring one, but I want one for next year. As well as early and late summer, with special gifting pages. And I want to change the design and the typography – matt finish and italic handwriting. And before you object, I have worked out the costs, and increased sales will more than compensate for the price of producing and mailing more catalogues as well as updating the website.’

  She stopped and picked up her glass. Cara glanced at Daniel again. His expression hadn’t altered. She said aggrievedly, ‘You never consulted me.’

  Ashley took a gulp of water. She said, ‘I am now.’

  ‘That speech didn’t sound like a consultation. It sounded like a fait accompli. Dan?’

  Daniel shifted a little in h
is chair. He said imperturbably, ‘I can’t see any real problem with any of that.’

  ‘Dan!’

  Ashley nodded at him. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘But I don’t agree,’ Cara said. ‘I’m not just passing this on the nod. I need to see the figures.’

  Ashley regarded her. ‘I’ll email them to you.’

  Cara leant towards Dan. She said, ‘What’s the matter with you? Why aren’t you even asking her questions?’

  Daniel reached out and patted Cara’s wrist. He said, ‘Let’s see what the second thing is first, shall we?’

  ‘Don’t patronize me.’

  ‘Angel, I’m not—’

  ‘Your tone is patronizing.’

  Ashley cleared her throat. ‘Could I just tell you about item two? I have to go in two minutes.’

  ‘Oh, do you?’ Cara said crossly. ‘First, drag us here, all secrecy and self-importance, and then tell us you’re in a hurry?’

  Ashley sighed. ‘I’ve got children at home.’

  ‘Don’t remind me.’

  Daniel squeezed Cara’s wrist. ‘Let her speak, sweetheart.’ Cara glared at Ashley. ‘Well?’

  Ashley looked straight back at her. She said, ‘It’s about money.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘What I’m paid. How I’m paid.’

  Daniel’s grip on Cara’s wrist tightened. He said, ‘Which is …?’

  ‘We know from research, don’t we,’ Ashley said, as if reciting, ‘that men are four times more likely than women to ask for a pay rise. And women are notoriously bad at asking about pay anyway. However, if a woman’s pay is set by a committee and based on strict performance criteria, they not only do much better for themselves, but they frequently outperform men. So I want that to happen to us. To all of us. I want the way we’re paid to be decided by all of us on the board, and then to be related to performance. Including Ma.’ She switched her gaze to Dan. ‘Well?’

  ‘Wow,’ Cara said. She looked at Dan too. ‘Bombshell—’

  He said, in the same strangely distanced way, ‘Sounds intriguing.’

  Ashley said, ‘I’m going to push for it. I’m telling Grace next and then Ma. And I’d like your backing.’