Balancing Act

by Joanna Trollope

  He had been terrified that she would want children. He didn’t – not because he didn’t like them, but because he knew he lacked the capacity for sharing. He might regret that, but he didn’t think he could change it. But Cara was a girl, and girls were different. Girls, he thought, wanted babies. They just did. They wanted a man, and then they wanted a baby. But Cara didn’t, actually, want a baby. She was very clear about it, and wholly unapologetic.

  ‘I don’t want children, Dan. I never have. What’s wrong with that?’

  He had been flooded with relief.

  ‘Nothing. I just thought—’

  ‘I really like children. I hope Ashley and Grace both have children. I’ll be a fabulous aunt. But I don’t want my own. I expect a shrink would tell me it had everything to do with Ma being so preoccupied with the business while I was little, so I always felt starved of her full attention or something. I don’t know. I’m not sure I really care. I just know myself well enough to know that if I had a baby, I’d be a martyred mother, and I wouldn’t dream of asking anyone, let alone my children, to look after me in my old age.’

  Dan had gazed at her. He’d said, ‘I’ll look after you.’

  ‘No, you won’t. We’re going to work to pay for our own old ages. And before you reproach me for being a selfish cow, I’d like to say that I don’t think my choice is better than other women’s choices, just different. My grass isn’t greener, it’s just another kind of green.’

  Daniel had reached for her, and held her hard against him. ‘I can’t believe my luck,’ he’d said.

  In many ways, and despite the familiarity borne of a decade of marriage, he still couldn’t. When she’d arrived in the sales department of the company where he was already on the buying team, having graduated there from a Saturday job on the tills, he had been immediately attracted both by her looks and her attitude. Her name, Cara Moran, meant nothing to him, but her serious focus did. Like him, she had been good at mathematics and physics at school – she told him quite seriously, early on, that she had considered being an air-traffic controller – and she had, like him, been immediately fascinated by people management and, even more, by customer service and the sales floor. Like him, too, she had seen the fearsome old-school managers in the company as providing an admirable set of ethics rather than merely some kind of outdated authoritarianism, and had been keen to learn from them. After ten days and only one tentative date, he had known that he wanted to marry her when she turned to him at work and said earnestly, ‘Dan, what does success look like?’

  Well, he thought now, tramping steadily round the boardroom table, his iPad in his hand in case anyone knocked, success does not look like haring up to Stoke to fan the flames of a histrionic family farce. The priority this week – long-planned and the culmination of months of preparation – was the final decision about whether to engage a management consultancy to outline the best way to take the Susie Sullivan brand to another level. Would they, as Dan and Cara wanted, consider finally exporting their stoutly defended Made in England product after two decades of rigorously focussed home sales, or would they, as Susie wanted, put their energies into consolidating and extending the home market they already had? (Ashley, he thought, would waver until the last moment and then side with her sister and brother-in-law.)

  But Susie had just swept the meeting aside. It had fallen to Dan to ring the management consultancy team and tell them that the meeting – planned for months and with considerable difficulty given the complexity of everyone’s commitments – was now cancelled, owing to an unforeseen family crisis.

  ‘But it isn’t a crisis, is it?’ Daniel had said to his mother-in-law. ‘It’s a shock and it changes the personal dynamics, but it isn’t something that needs instant action. No one’s in intensive care, after all.’

  Susie had looked at him with an expression he was familiar with, from board meetings.

  ‘He’s in Grace’s flat. In her spare bedroom. It’s a crisis for Grace, Daniel, at the very least, every day it goes on.’

  Daniel had held her gaze. ‘Put him in a hotel. I’ll organize it, if you like. I’ll deal with it.’

  Susie had dismissed the suggestion with a single gesture of her arm. ‘I can’t do that. He’s my father.’

  ‘You can do that. He’s been a disgraceful father.’

  ‘Stop it, Dan. Stop it. You are the last person to have an opinion about family, having virtually no dealings with your own, as far as I can see.’

  He’d leant forward very slightly and said, without raising his voice, ‘You’re going to Stoke, Susie, because you want to, aren’t you? Isn’t that the truth? You want to dash to Stoke, and you want the girls to go with you, as validation. So that’s what’s happening. What you want.’

  He’d waited for her to be angry, but instead her shoulders had slumped and she had said sadly, ‘Oh Dan, if only it was that simple.’

  But she’d gone anyway. And so had Cara and Ashley, and the atmosphere in the office beyond the closed boardroom door was as unconducive to his usual steady application to the task in hand as it could be. He left his circuiting of the table and went to stand by the window that looked down, past other buildings, old and new, to the river. In the cold light it shone like a sheet of steel, gleaming even under a dull sky. The company was, at this precise moment, flat on budget, two per cent up on last year. But it should be more. It could be. He reached out the hand that wasn’t holding his iPad and beat it lightly against the glass. If he had anything to do with the future of Susie Sullivan pottery, it would be. Whatever the obstacles.

  ‘You don’t want me here,’ Morris said.

  His tone was entirely without reproach. He was sitting on Grace’s sofa, still wearing his strange assortment of outdated hippy clothing, with the addition of pale-blue woollen socks on his bony feet.

  Susie, sitting opposite him on one of Grace’s Italian plastic dining chairs, as if sitting upright gave her slightly more authority, said unhelpfully, ‘No, I don’t.’

  Morris sighed. He leant back and looked at the ceiling. ‘In your place,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t want me either.’

  ‘But that doesn’t get us anywhere. Talking like that doesn’t help.’

  Morris waited a moment, then tipped his head forward again and said, ‘I suppose you think I want money.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  He said simply, ‘I’ve never known how you got hold of it.’

  ‘What, me?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Anyone.’

  Susie gave a stifled gasp. Then she said, more shrilly than she’d intended, ‘You work for it!’

  He grinned at her. ‘I was never any good at that.’

  She looked away from him. ‘You’re shameless. It’s … it’s despicable.’

  ‘I’m teasing you, duck.’

  ‘Don’t call me that!’

  ‘I’ll try Susan, then.’

  She said, still looking away, ‘As you are incapable of working, and always have been, how have you lived all these years?’

  Morris leant forward and put his elbows on his knees. He contemplated his powder-blue ankles and said gravely, ‘My forgiving old dad.’

  Susie’s head whipped round. ‘I thought he’d cut you off without a shilling!’

  ‘He told my mother he had. Maybe at first he thought he would. But he paid me an allowance every month until he died, and then he left instructions in his will for something similar to go on.’

  ‘There was no mention of you in his will!’

  Morris raised his head. ‘It was in a separate will. There was a lump sum left with the Kenya Commercial Bank in Lamu, and that was paid out to me in instalments till five years ago, when it ran out.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Your Ma was ill. We had a bit of stuff to sell. Paintings and suchlike. I’m a good painter.’

  Susie looked round the room. She had sent the girls back to the factory, thinking that they needed to fortify themselves with a dose of normality after th
e sheer weirdness of their first encounter with their grandfather. Now she rather wished that they were still there, that she had her own touchstones of reality in the room with her. She said, ‘I don’t even know what to call you.’

  He said mildly, ‘Morris’ll do.’

  She sighed. ‘So my … your wife died and the money ran out and you thought we couldn’t refuse to take you in.’

  ‘Oh, you could, you know. But I thought I’d ask.’

  Susie was suddenly angry. ‘I don’t know how you dared to think that!’

  He gave the smallest of shrugs, moving his hands so that she couldn’t help but notice a small gecko tattooed inside one wrist. He said, ‘It’s changed, Lamu. It isn’t the place it used to be. I wasn’t at home there any more. I didn’t fit in.’

  ‘You don’t fit in here.’

  He glanced round the room. ‘Your Grace has been lovely to me.’

  ‘Grace is lovely to everyone. But you’re exploiting her. And I won’t have it.’

  He said nothing, just fiddled with a frayed sleeve.

  Susie said, ‘Did you really think we’d take you in?’

  ‘I told you,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d ask. I had enough for the plane fare and enough to – Oh, what does it matter? I never thought it’d be so cold.’

  ‘You mean that we wouldn’t turn a dog away in this weather, so we’d hardly do that to you.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I meant what I said. I’d forgotten about the weather. I’d forgotten about winter in the Midlands. You can rant at me all you want. I’ve been a shocking father, I know that, I deserve everything you want to accuse me of. But the fact remains that I’m eighty-one, I’m on my own and I’ve hit the buffers. It’s my own fault, I know that, but a fact’s a fact. I’ll go away again, if that’s what you want, but I don’t think you’d be easy in your mind if I did. I’d like to find some way of fitting in here again, if I can, but I accept I may have burned too many boats for that. I’ve lived off other people’s generosity all my life, and that’s how I am. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not going to grovel about it either. The bottom line is, Susan, that I’d appreciate your help now, but I won’t think any worse of you if you tell me to get lost. It’s up to you.’

  Susie stood up. Then she sat down again. She spread her hands out in front of her as if the sight of them, of her wedding ring, would somehow provide comfort and guidance. She said slowly, ‘Your turning up like this is a nightmare. A complete nightmare. And your exasperating passivity only makes it worse. You’ve never lifted a finger to earn anyone’s respect all your life, and it looks to me as if you have no intention of changing your ways. And I haven’t the first idea what to do about it. That’s the truth.’

  ‘What’s the proverb?’ Jasper said. ‘About a bad penny?’

  Daniel put his beer bottle down on the pub table between them. ‘It’s something to do with a counterfeit coin always finding its way back into circulation.’

  ‘And that’s Morris. Odd, to have a father-in-law after pretty well forty years of marriage without one.’

  Dan said, ‘Don’t you want to go up to Stoke to meet him?’

  Jasper laughed. He tipped his beer up and took a gulp. ‘Susie didn’t want me to.’

  ‘Did you offer?’

  ‘Sure. Just her and the girls, she said.’

  Daniel hesitated a moment, and then he said, ‘Did you mind?’

  ‘Nah. When have I ever minded a thing like that?’

  Daniel picked up a packet of vegetable crisps that lay on the table and pulled it open. Then he held it out to his father-in-law.

  Jasper grinned at him. ‘D’you think, Dan, that if they’re made of parsnip they don’t count as crisps?’

  Daniel said distantly, ‘I prefer them.’

  ‘You’re a pompous twit,’ Jasper said affectionately. He took a handful. ‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Purple ones too. Beetroot.’

  Daniel leant forward. ‘Jas,’ he said, ‘you must be concerned about what’s going on up there. They’ve been in Stoke two days. You must want to know what’s going on—’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Jas—’

  ‘Look,’ Jasper said, ‘it would be hard to be married to Suz if you were quite conventional. But I’m not conventional. Never have been.’

  ‘I am,’ Daniel said.

  Jasper grinned again. He patted Daniel’s arm. ‘I know, Dan.’

  ‘I have a work ethic, Jas. And that old bastard doesn’t sound as if he’s ever had one.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t want him sponging off Susie or Cara or any of us. And until there’s some kind of plan, I can’t be sure he won’t manage it, somehow. Just by being eighty-something, for starters.’

  Jasper said easily, ‘Suz’ll think of something.’

  ‘I could shake you.’

  ‘She often says that. But you can’t have two driven people in a marriage.’

  ‘Yes, you can.’

  Jasper let a beat fall, and then he said, ‘What has Cara said to you?’

  ‘That she’ll be back tonight and she’ll tell me everything then.’

  ‘And the old boy?’

  ‘She says she can’t talk about him yet.’

  Jasper laughed again. ‘Sounds very unsatisfactory for you all round!’

  ‘It is,’ Daniel said. ‘And on top of all else …’

  ‘All else?’

  ‘The company.’

  ‘Ah,’ Jasper said. He plunged his hand into the crisp packet again. ‘The company. That.’

  There was a pause. Then Daniel said tentatively, ‘Do you hate it?’

  ‘Me? No! I don’t hate anything. Why should I hate the company?’

  ‘Because,’ Daniel said, not looking at him, ‘it means so much to Susie and she’s so involved with it.’

  Jasper smiled at his beer bottle. ‘I was there at the beginning, remember? She tells me everything, anyway. There’s nothing about the company I don’t know.’

  Daniel took a crisp. It was as pointless to contradict such an absurd statement as it was to argue with Susie in certain moods. He said instead, ‘Are you curious to meet your long-lost father-in-law?’

  ‘I would quite like to punch his lights out,’ Jasper said amiably.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Leaving a baby. Leaving your parents literally holding your baby. Not bothering to come back for our wedding. Not bothering to come back for either parent’s funeral. Subsidized by your father all your life. What an apology for a human being.’

  ‘But,’ Daniel said, ‘I have a feeling they’ll still come to his rescue. The girls, I mean.’

  There was a pause, and then Jasper said slowly, ‘I won’t like that.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Just that. I won’t like them spending energy on that old waste of space.’

  ‘So,’ Daniel said, suddenly intent, ‘you do mind. You did want to go up to Stoke and be a bit of a brake on Susie. You do have an opinion about the company.’

  Jasper took another gulp of beer, and put the bottle down. He said, ‘As far as the company’s concerned, I’ve been glad of it, thankful for it. Over the years I’ve discovered that if you are furious about your marriage, it’s pretty nice to have a super topic diversion, like a business.’

  Daniel took a deep breath. ‘Furious …’ he repeated.

  ‘Not often. Not always.’

  ‘But sometimes. Enough to—’

  Jasper stood up. He looked down at his son-in-law. ‘I’m off to hear a mate at Ronnie Scott’s. A wicked trumpeter. Want to come?’

  The design studio was quiet and warm. From the curtained windows, you could see lights were still on in the factory wing across the yard, where the kilns hummed on through the night and the blungers turned the great cakes of china clay into manageable slip, before the morning. But apart from the skeleton night staff and probably Neil, the factory manager, who worked seemingly tireless hours, no one would be there. In the studio, Michelle and B
en’s computer screens had been switched off when their owners went home, leaving the room to the three sisters, grouped round the wooden kitchen table which hosted meetings as well as Ben’s rigorously vegetarian sandwich lunches, and provided a welcome space for sketching.

  There were tea mugs on the table and an open bottle of Prosecco, which Grace had found in the fridge, but which, when it came to it, nobody had felt like drinking. Celebration was clearly out of order, and Prosecco didn’t seem appropriate for consolation, either. Grace had opened one of her mother’s sketchbooks, which were always lying about on that particular table, and was examining a page of drawings of cutlery, as if some minor design decision would somehow offer a solution to the large and unmanageable personal problem facing all of them. Ashley was leaning back in her chair with her eyes closed and her arms folded, and Cara was sitting bolt upright, her hands around a foxglove-patterned mug, whose contents had long grown cold.

  She said suddenly, ‘How much longer shall we give her?’

  ‘Who?’ Grace said idiotically.

  ‘Ma.’

  ‘She’ll ring,’ Ashley said. ‘She’ll text. Something.’

  ‘Our train’s at six ten,’ Cara said.

  Ashley opened her eyes. ‘We’ve got an hour and a half. Ages.’

  ‘D’you think she’s all right?’

  ‘She’ll tell us if she isn’t.’

  Ashley sat upright slowly. She said, ‘She must be knackered by all this. I am.’

  ‘Me too,’ Cara said. She looked at Grace. ‘Gracie?’

  Grace traced a forefinger around a sketched spoon and fork. She said, almost inaudibly, ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘You can’t be, Gracie. He’s in your spare room. It’s much worse for you than for anyone. Please let Dan find him a hotel, at least.’