Balancing Act

by Joanna Trollope

  Leo waited a moment, and then he said teasingly, ‘And so I’m urging Ashley to do what you did because I want her to end up without a family life?’

  She turned to look at him. ‘Have I?’

  ‘Don’t be daft. This is just a transition. For you, I mean.’

  Susie looked wary. She said, ‘From what to what?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘from full-on, full-time entrepreneur and businesswoman to rather more part-time all those things, in order to make way for a bit more family, a bit more home life.’

  There was a small silence, and then Susie said, ‘I’m good at business. And I won’t have a home much longer. Jasper wants to sell Radipole Road.’

  ‘Yes,’ Leo said.

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘Yes. I did. I would say that wanting to sell has been coming on for a while, with Jasper.’

  ‘Is it because I bought the Parlour House?’

  ‘No.’ He glanced at her. ‘Why did you buy the Parlour House?’

  She said simply, ‘I needed to. I really needed somewhere to help me feel what I felt when I first bought the factory. I needed to get back to the roots of it all. And I thought that buying somewhere up there which had family connections would join the dots and I’d feel as I felt twenty years ago.’

  ‘Not possible.’

  She sighed. ‘Sometimes you have to try something to discover that it won’t work. But that doesn’t invalidate the impulse.’ She glanced up at him. ‘Is that what was going on with Jasper?’

  ‘You’d have to ask him.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Susie said, ‘I think I am deliberately kept out of the loop. And then I wonder if it’s just me. Maybe I haven’t listened to anyone for ages, either.’

  Leo glanced at her. He said, ‘You can’t do everything. That’s why we all need to stand up and shout at you sometimes. Just to kind of say, hey, we’re here too.’

  She nodded, not speaking.

  He said in a softer voice, ‘You’re a cool mother-in-law, you know.’

  She was truly startled. ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yup,’ he said. ‘Not emotionally possessive of your daughters. Treating us sons-in-law like humans. Never expecting any of us to be grateful for anything you give us or enable us to have. In my book, that’s pretty good.’

  She put her hands to her face. ‘Goodness—’

  ‘But maybe you could be a bit more hands-off now? Maybe you could step back a bit and, well, get to know Maisie and Fred a bit better?’

  She dropped her hands and smiled a little ruefully. ‘Do you mean I should step aside for Ashley?’

  Leo stood up slowly. ‘I might do,’ he said.

  She looked up at him. She said, ‘Is this a plot? Were you sent to talk to me?’

  He shook his head. ‘Pure impulse,’ he said. ‘I saw you leave the table.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  She stood up too. ‘I don’t want to be pensioned off—’

  ‘No one’s suggesting that.’

  ‘I can’t not work.’

  ‘That isn’t on anyone’s agenda. It’s just – working differently. Working from another angle.’

  She smiled at him again. She said, ‘You’re a clever boy.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I don’t know many men who are so good at people.’

  He ducked his head. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’ll think about what you said. I can’t promise anything, mind, but I’ll think. But while we’re on touchy subjects, perhaps you can help me with something else. Perhaps you can do your different-angle thing for me in another area. Can I ask you something else? Something I need advice on. Leo, what am I to do about Morris?’

  Morris had taken to being the last person downstairs in the evenings. He said that at his age he didn’t need the sleep, and in any case, in all his life with Stella, he’d been the first one up and the last one to bed, because that had just been how things fell out between them, naturally. It had also been a source of important solitude for him, the quiet time of midnight, especially when there was a moon, and the raucous time of dawn, with all the tropical birds. For years, he had started every day sitting on the worn, paint-blistered steps of the beach house in Lamu, the first joint of the day between his fingers, the jungle chorus getting into its rowdy stride all around him and the sun rising ahead of him out of the quiet waters, bringing with it its daily blast of light and heat. To balance that with the silky quiet of darkness at the end of the day, a quiet only broken by the rustlings and faint chirrupings from the vegetation around, was a luxury. It was, probably, his only luxury. There were days when he had considered starvation a more attractive proposition than the prospect of yet another bowl of rice, maybe decorated with the bones and fins of some flavourless and dark-fleshed little fish. The idea of roast pork would have been as fantastical in Lamu as the idea of a well-appointed bathroom with constant hot water, and no opportunity for snakes to slither in through gaps in flimsy walls and coil themselves round the bucket that served as a toilet. Moving slowly around Leo and Ashley’s incredibly solid-feeling kitchen last thing at night, washing up stray mugs, picking up stray toys, was a nightly miracle for him of permanence in living. It might have its claustrophobic side, but that was far outweighed by its sheer concrete evidence of a settled existence.

  He was standing by the sofa in front of the television, a sock of Fred’s in one hand and a double-handled pink plastic cup in the other, when Ashley came down. She was in pyjama bottoms and a camisole under a long grey cardigan, and her hair was pinned up roughly with a couple of clips. Free of make-up, she looked to Morris about fourteen – an age he had, over the years, become used to Stella being somehow arrested at. But Ashley, his and Stella’s granddaughter, seemed to Morris to be arrested by nothing. He held up Fred’s sock. ‘Just clearing up a bit.’

  Ashley didn’t smile. She said, ‘I came down for some tea.’

  ‘Would you like me to make it?

  She went across to the kettle. ‘Heavens, no.’

  ‘Only asking.’

  She had her back to him, filling the kettle. She said, not turning, ‘Sorry.’

  He shuffled across the room and put the pink mug on the counter above the dishwasher. He said amiably, ‘It’s been a bit of a day.’

  Ashley began opening cupboards in search of mugs and tea.

  ‘It has. Where’s the valerian?’

  Morris leant against the counter, smoothing Fred’s sock between his fingers. He said, ‘Long ago, when I didn’t fit somewhere I just pushed off. If things didn’t work out, I made myself scarce. Can’t do that now. I would if I could, you know.’

  Ashley put a box of teabags next to the kettle and extracted one. She said, still not looking at him, ‘It’s not you, actually. It’s me. And possibly Ma.’

  Morris went on smoothing the sock. He said indistinctly, ‘Can’t blame her.’

  Ashley turned round. ‘I don’t. I understand her. I understand me, too, being on her side. But understanding her doesn’t mean she’s right. Or that I am.’

  Morris didn’t look at her. He said, ‘What’s done is done. You can’t change things by wishing.’

  Ashley switched on the kettle. She said, watching it gather itself up to boil, ‘Nor can you change other people.’

  ‘That’s why I used to run.’

  Ashley flicked a glance at him. ‘No running now.’

  ‘No. And … and you get stuck with the consequences.’ He grimaced at the sock and then he said, ‘I’ve never been much of a one for saying sorry, but I’m sorry for that. Just as I’m sorry about Susan.’

  Ashley went back to watching the kettle. ‘Have you said that to her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He paused, and then he said, ‘Haven’t dared.’

  ‘You should dare,’ Ashley said. ‘You ought to.’

  Morris laid the sock beside the mug. He said, ‘D’you think it would help?’

&n
bsp; ‘Yes, I do. She’s having an awful time. And you’re not. Are you?’

  He said quietly, ‘I’m glad to be here, Ashley.’

  The kettle gave a short scream and subsided. Ashley picked it up and began to pour water into her mug. She said, ‘And I’m trying to get used to it. The children like it, Leo likes it, and I am going to try to like it. I have to somehow get over your – unforgivableness. As well as just having you here. That’s my problem. But Ma is different. Ma is your problem, at least in part. You have to help her. Try and make it up to her by helping her now, helping her to forgive you and to move on from where she’s been all her life, because of what you did.’

  Morris was silent. He stood leaning against the kitchen counter, his head bent and his hands, as was his wont, in his opposite sleeves.

  Ashley left her teabag to steep and leant back too. She put her hands into the pockets of her cardigan and wrapped it across her. She said, ‘You defied convention by running away. Well, now you’ve come back, and you’ve got to face the fact that people like Leo and me are dealing with it in a very different way. Just as Ma did, except that you were too far away to see it. Leo gets it. Leo understands that, just like Ma, I really wanted children, but I really want life too. Wanting fulfilment doesn’t stop just because you’ve become a mother, and I’ll always be torn because mother love is such a fierce feeling. Leo understands that I’m torn like this, he gets that I’ve got a kind of hunger in me, the kind of hunger Ma had, and he also realizes that Ma has let the balance of her life slip recently, and that you are actually one of the people who can help her get it right again, help her see that however brilliant the company is – and it is – it can’t give her everything she needs. It satisfies one hunger, but not the other. She’s so much more than a mother and grandmother, but she’s both those vital things, too. And at the moment, you’re not helping her be either, because you’re not showing her that you’re on her side.’

  Morris didn’t look up. He said gruffly, ‘I’m the last person she wants.’

  ‘No,’ Ashley said. ‘Nobody feels that about their fathers. Not deep down. Anger’s only a way of showing how miserable you are.’

  ‘She’s got everything she needs. She doesn’t need me.’

  ‘She does,’ Ashley said. ‘She does. Don’t you even want to try?’

  He glanced at her. Then he looked back at the floor beyond his feet. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Cara let herself into Radipole Road, and allowed the front door to slam shut behind her, deliberately.

  ‘Hi there!’ she shouted.

  There was no reply.

  ‘Pa!’ Cara shouted. ‘Ma?’

  Silence. The hall lights were on, but ahead of her the stairs were in darkness, and so were the kitchen and sitting room. She went down the hall rapidly and fumbled for the light switches, a whole bank of them sleekly set into a brushed-aluminium plate which had been put up when the house was rewired for Jasper’s studio. The kitchen sprang into abrupt and brilliant light. It was empty. Tidy and empty. Even the big parrot cage was empty, the door open and a scattering of striped seeds lying on the floor. A Susie Sullivan jug of improbably orange gerberas on the table was the only sign of life.

  Cara went back down the hall to the sitting room. It had the air it always had after one of Benedita’s visits, the cushions unnaturally plumped, as if the whole room was standing to attention. The TV guide was folded back to show a date two days previously. It was weird, Cara thought, ghostly. Deckchairs on the Marie Celeste and all that. No sign even of Polynesia.

  Switching on lights as she went, Cara climbed the stairs. Her parents’ bed was made, but there was a towel hanging over a corner of the bathroom door and one of their toothbrushes was still faintly damp. To her relief, her mother’s familiar make-up bag was open by one of the two washbasins, with its usual comforting jumble inside, and there was laundry in the dirty-clothes basket and her father’s slippers – ancient, dark red leather with no backs and worn soles – lying by the shower.

  Cara shivered. It was not just strange, but wrong, somehow, to be investigating her parents’ bedroom for signs of life. When she was little, she remembered feeling an absolute right to possession, a natural justification at barging into her parents’ room or conversations whenever she felt inclined to, as if they could never have a greater concern than with her. In fact, she had felt the need to test that concern almost constantly, to challenge them to have any commitment more pressing than their children, as if she knew that one day she would inevitably find them wanting. Well, she supposed, in purely orthodox terms, her mother would have been found wanting. Her mother was often away, and was constantly preoccupied. But she had, at the same time, created for the household a stability that the mothers of most of Cara’s friends took for granted, the only difference being that it was their fathers who provided it.

  Cara picked a lipstick out of her mother’s make-up bag. It was the same brand, same colour she had used for ever. Like her scent, it was instantly recognizable as Susie’s. The lipstick itself was also worn down in the idiosyncratic shape of all Susie’s lipsticks, with a curious little peak at one side. The sight of it made Cara suddenly ashamed of herself. It was like looking in the drawers of her parents’ bedside tables on the sly, and being rewarded – or punished – for such snooping by finding evidence of the sort of bedroom games that it was absolutely unthinkable for her own mother and father to indulge in. She clicked the lipstick shut hastily and dropped it back into the make-up bag. She was aware of her reflection in the well-lit mirror above the basin, but she couldn’t actually look at it. Feeling abashed was one thing. Seeing it written plainly on your thirty-three-year-old face was quite another.

  She went quickly out of the bathroom and bedroom, turning off the lights as she went. She would go down to the kitchen and leave her mother a note, saying that she had come round to see her on the off-chance, but no more. She would leave the note where they had always left everything of significance for Susie: on the counter not far from the kettle, weighted with a chipped plaster-of-Paris parrot that Grace had made at school when she was eleven.

  As Cara reached the bottom of the stairs, a key sounded in the front door. Cara froze. The door opened and Susie stepped in, uncharacteristically clad in a shapeless old padded jacket of Jasper’s, with a striped muffler tied over her ears. She paused, took in Cara and gave a gasp of surprise.

  ‘Darling!’

  Cara hurried forward. ‘Sorry, Ma. I should have texted. I didn’t mean to give you a fright.’

  Susie’s cheek was cold against Cara’s lips. She said, ‘I wouldn’t have picked up a text anyway. I’ve got my phone in my pocket, but it’s turned off.’

  ‘Where have you been?’

  Susie pulled off the muffler and shook her hair. ‘Walking.’

  ‘Walking?’ Cara said. ‘But you never walk.’

  Susie smiled at her. ‘I did just now.’

  ‘I couldn’t think where you were. I thought you’d be back from Ashley’s by now.’

  ‘I was,’ Susie said. ‘I am. But I wanted some exercise. I wanted to do a bit of thinking, and it’s easier walking while you think, isn’t it?’

  She pulled off Jasper’s jacket and looked at it. ‘We bought that in Berlin. We hadn’t reckoned on it being so cold. It must be more than twenty years old.’ She looked at Cara. ‘Lovely to see you, darling.’

  Cara began to move down the hall towards the kitchen. She said, ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

  Susie stood where she was, holding Jasper’s jacket. She said, ‘Cara?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s Sunday night. Are you – are you here for a reason?’

  Cara stopped walking. She turned in the kitchen doorway and put her hands on the frame. ‘Yes,’ she said again.

  Susie folded the jacket and laid it on the hall chair. Then she moved across to a mirror on the wall and ran her fingers through her hair. She said, ‘Nothing awful happened?’

  ‘No,�
� Cara said. ‘It’s just that I – well, I’ve got something to tell you.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Maisie had a haircut for the photoshoot. Usually she wriggled and raged on a bathroom stool, swaddled in a towel, while Ashley darted at her curls with a pair of scissors. But today, in honour of the first fully fledged professional photoshoot to happen in her very own kitchen, she was taken to a real hairdresser, propped on a pile of magazines to raise her high enough for the stylist to cut her hair properly, and swathed in a black nylon cape that fell in bat-like folds almost to the floor.

  As long as she was in the hairdresser’s, and absorbed by her own reflection in the mirror in front of her, she was, Ashley reported, angelic. But once back at home and presented with the new dark-blue, white-collared corduroy dress, with matching blue and white striped tights, that had been chosen for her to wear for the catalogue photographs, she disintegrated into sudden and complete fury. She was not wearing that dress. She was wearing her favourite princess dress from her dressing-up box, the one made of scratchy panels of iridescent gauze, with artificial jewels glued gaudily to the bodice. She did not shout, she screamed. Then she cast herself down on her bedroom floor, like someone helpfully demonstrating a textbook tantrum, and, while still yelling, kicked her feet so hard against her chest of drawers that her shoes fell off.

  ‘I’m afraid that it’s a complete meltdown,’ Ashley said, coming down to her unrecognizably styled kitchen. ‘She’s purple.’

  Leo was sent up to try and calm her. When that failed, Morris, who had worked a small miracle by creating a sufficient semblance of a garden outside the French doors to satisfy photographic requirements, went upstairs to try his luck at pacifying her. He returned to report that he had managed to get her to stop screaming, but that nothing he said would induce her to put on the blue dress instead of the princess one. He said she had got into bed fully dressed, clutching the princess dress, and was lying under her Hello Kitty duvet, smouldering with determination.

  Susie, who had been rearranging the mugs and jugs and bowls on Ashley’s dresser in a way that aroused familiar admiration in everyone there, turned round and announced unexpectedly that she would go up.