‘I think,’ Jasper said, ‘it’s just a reaction to always being given what society thinks is age appropriate. At any age.’
‘Kettle or machine?’
‘Kettle. I like a big cafetière of the old-fashioned stuff.’
Leo carried the kettle to the sink, stepping over the toys and clothes on the floor. He said, ‘I drink so much coffee-shop coffee these days.’
Jasper was watching Fred pull himself up on the low table by the television. He said affectionately, ‘You boys together. Always out.’
‘Actually,’ Leo said, ‘it’s our new social circle.’ He put the kettle back on its power pad and switched it on. ‘Maisie’s school mothers.’
‘Yummy mummies?’
‘Only some of them,’ Leo said.
They both laughed.
‘Good for you.’
‘Actually,’ Leo said again, ‘I made a bad start. I just kind of funked even talking to them. But I did a coffee-shop thing the other day, and it was weird but it was OK in the end. In fact, I quite liked it.’
Jasper moved to retrieve the remote control from Fred. He said casually, ‘Is that dangerous?’
Fred roared.
Jasper put the DVD control into his hand instead. ‘I imagine the DVD isn’t switched on?’
‘No,’ Leo said. ‘And no to the other, as well. I’m not in the market for straying.’
Fred thumped down into a sitting position, clutching the second remote.
‘Sorry,’ Jasper said.
‘It’s OK.’
‘I’m just always a bit sensitive about – well, you know, I’m Ashley’s father.’
‘And I’m her husband. I suggested this arrangement.’
Jasper looked up. He said, ‘I shouldn’t have said what I did …’
‘No. I’m not a cliché, Jas. Any more than you are. I’m not out to punish Ashley for earning more than I ever will. I’m just trying to get the hang of keeping the domestic show on the road.’
There was a small silence, broken only by the bubbling of the kettle. Then Leo said, ‘You OK?’
Jasper made a face. ‘Yes and no.’
The kettle switched itself off. Leo rummaged in a cupboard for mugs, his back to his father-in-law. He said, ‘Want to talk about it?’
‘Not really.’
‘Suit yourself. How was Stoke?’
There was a further silence. Jasper sat down on the low table next to Fred, who was frowning at the remote and determinedly pressing its buttons. Then he said, with deliberate energy, ‘It was good. I went round the factory. I haven’t been round the factory in five years. It was amazing how many of the same people are still there – same old faces. Lovely, really. I found myself promising to go and do a gig up there some time. Of course, there’s a worry about the future, about the skills gap. The girl apprentices will stay on the whole, but they have awful trouble keeping the boys. They’ll do three or four mornings and then they won’t get up. They can’t take the discipline of an early start – it’s easier to stay on benefits than get up at five in the morning and learn a skill.’
Leo carried the cafetière and a couple of mugs over to the table where Jasper was sitting. Fred looked up at his approach and grunted urgently.
‘What’s up with you, Freddy?’ said Jasper.
‘He wants a biscuit,’ Leo said. ‘Coffee for us means a biscuit for him. He thinks.’
‘Can he have one?’
‘No. He can have a carrot or an apple.’
Jasper looked down at his grandson. ‘Poor old Freddy.’
Leo said, ‘What about the cottage?’
Freddy gave an experimental roar. Leo went across to the fridge, opened it and took out a packet of carrot sticks. He extracted one and held it out to Fred. Fred looked outraged and glared at his grandfather. Leo said, ‘It’s all you’re getting.’
‘Wow,’ Jasper said to Fred. ‘Tough old daddy love.’
Fred began to wail.
‘Ignore him,’ Leo said. He put the carrots back in the fridge. ‘Bring your coffee over to the big table.’ He picked up the coffee pot and his own mug. ‘What did you think of Susie’s cottage?’
Jasper followed him, leaving Fred indignantly on the floor by the television. He said carefully, ‘Her vision. Her need. Her thing, you know.’
‘So you didn’t like it?’
‘I’m no good outside a city. I can’t see rural potential.’
‘So you didn’t like it,’ Leo repeated.
Jasper shifted his mug, not looking at his son-in-law.
‘Not my thing. No, I suppose I didn’t.’
‘Nor did Ashley,’ Leo said, ‘if that’s any comfort.’
Jasper was still staring at his coffee mug. He said, ‘I don’t want to fan flames.’
‘So you’ll say nothing? To Susie?’
‘Not sure yet.’
Leo got up from his chair and went to stoop over his son and fish something from his mouth. He held it up. ‘A hazelnut. Where did he find a hazelnut, for God’s sake? We haven’t had hazelnuts in the house since Christmas. Jas, what have you come to say?’
Jasper gave his coffee a nudge. He said, ‘I was getting to that.’
‘It’s taking you a bloody long time.’
‘I’ve got a suggestion …’
‘Have you? For me?’
‘Well, yes.’
Leo came back to the table and sat down, dropping the hazelnut into a nearby bowl left over from breakfast. He said, ‘Come on!’
Jasper turned his head slowly and looked at him. ‘You might think I’m off my trolley.’
‘Try me.’
‘Brace yourself,’ Jasper said. ‘It’s about Morris.’
Cara lay on the sofa in the sitting-room part of their large open-plan flat. It was an Italian sofa, which she and Dan had spent as much time researching and sourcing as they had his bike. It was angular and sleek, upholstered in soft dark-blue fabric, with brushed-steel legs, and it was long enough for Dan to lie on although he was more than six feet tall. So Cara could stretch out quite flat, as she was now, her head on a cushion, staring out at the twilight sky visible behind the roofs and chimney pots of the houses behind their block of flats. It was a greyish-mauve sky, without stars, and every few minutes an aeroplane crossed it, surprisingly slowly, with winking red and white lights and a roar of engine noise subdued by double glazing.
Dan was out. He was having yet another meeting with the management consultancy – oiled this time by alcohol. The man who had started the consultancy had been a colleague of Dan’s in their early years at a major chainstore, so there was the advantage of mutual liking and respect, and the disadvantage of embarrassment over the number of delays and cancellations there’d been in arranging meetings with Susie Sullivan pottery. Dan had first approached Rick about how to expand the company, as well as rebranding it – this being Rick’s new area of expertise – without losing core customers or the integrity of the initial vision. The company, Dan felt, was stuck. Not irrevocably, but halted at a crossroads. He had wanted Cara to go with him for a drink with Rick that evening, but she had said that he should go alone.
‘Because you think it would be better if it was just me and him?’ Dan had said. ‘Or because you don’t want to?’
Cara had hesitated. Then she’d said, ‘Both, actually.’
Dan had opened his mouth to protest.
‘Please,’ Cara had said, holding her hands up, as if at gunpoint. ‘Don’t push me, don’t ask me. Just go. Give him my love.’
Dan had leant forward and kissed her cheek. ‘OK.’
‘Thank you.’
He’d regarded her. ‘You all right?’
She’d nodded. ‘I’m fine. I’ll be fine.’
‘I’ll pick up something on my way back. Chinese?’
Cara had smiled at him. ‘Japanese,’ she said, and then again, ‘Thank you.’
So, here she was, on the sofa, Laura Marling on the iPod, green tea cooling in a mug beside he
r. Her mother was in town, as was Ashley. Grace was back in Stoke, with their father. She had no impulse to ring any of them; no desire to. She didn’t even, she realized, have any curiosity about them, about what the current difficulty was between her parents, or what her father had made of Morris or the Parlour House, or what Leo felt about being a house husband, or the state of Grace’s love life. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. It was more, right then and there, lying on the sofa with Laura Marling singing softly in her ear, that she couldn’t reach caring. It was as if, just for the moment, she was detached from all of them, like a helium balloon that’s escaped its tether and gone bobbing up into the clouds, above all the busyness. I can see them all, Cara thought, but I can’t hear them. And it isn’t bothering me.
Very occasionally, in childhood and adolescence, she had felt like that. In the middle of the hubbub of family life – in the middle, even, of organizing her sisters’ lives, which she had always been renowned for – she had suddenly felt detachment drop on her like a magic invisible cloak, distancing her from everything that was going on. When she was very young it had slightly frightened her, but she grew to tolerate and then to welcome it, this feeling of stepping out of the heat and din and action into a cool, calm place where one could just unaffectedly be. Her mother, for all her remarkable energy, could always create that effect, it seemed, just with her presence. The house would be in uproar, all those years ago – full of all of them, full of schoolfriends, full of music – and Susie would return, slam the door behind her, shout ‘Home!’ and the whirling kaleidoscope would still, and order would return.
Cara turned her head and looked at her mug. If she were to drink some tea, it would mean rearing up from the cushion to a sitting position, taking out her earphones, and reaching for the mug. From where she lay, that whole procedure just seemed to be too much trouble. She was quite content without tea, anyway; quite content just to lie there and think about drinking it sometime soon, when the prospect of sitting up seemed less of an effort.
She had loved it when her mother was at home, loved it to the point of craving it. When she was a child, she had always longed for Susie’s return, and felt an immediate settling of internal anxieties once she was back. But as adolescence dawned, so did a whole range of new feelings – feelings that were very much less docile and manageable. She had felt fury and resentment towards this other, clearly imperative element in Susie’s life, which presented such an irresistible alternative to the family. Her early teens were spent in a turmoil of hotly defending Susie in public, while raging at her in private: raging at her mother finding anything more compelling than her children; raging at what she saw as the bitter, unfair consequence of Susie’s choice – namely that she, Cara, as the eldest, had to do so much to compensate for Susie’s absences.
Jasper had been wonderful. He really had. He had been the most assiduous of fathers, the most loyal of husbands. Even at her most furious, Cara had known that she would only redouble the injustice of the situation if she took out her rage on him. And to take it out on Susie was simply pointless. Susie was impervious. Smiling, steady, consistently affectionate when around, and unreachable when not, Susie had been impregnable. So Cara, incapable of shaking Susie’s implacability about her work–life balance, had retreated to her own occasional detachment. Better in the end, surely, to distance yourself than to bloody your knuckles hammering on a door that would never open.
She remembered thinking, when she was about sixteen, that she hated the very idea of high-achieving women, that she wasn’t remotely interested in equal opportunities, and that, given her looks and her determination, she would marry a very rich man and spend her life without needing to prove herself to anyone. But her brain wouldn’t, in the end, allow her to surrender to this vision. Her own mental energy and appetite, her own urge for achievement wouldn’t let her rest for long in dreamy contemplation of a gilded cage. She found herself with excellent A-level results, and a propelling force in her personality which could only be called ambition.
So here she was, qualified, capable and effective, beached on the expensive Italian sofa that she had paid for out of money she had earned. The same could be said of the shoes kicked off on the floor beside the sofa and all the technology that lay within her reach – all those screens and gadgets of communication – as well as the copper pans hanging over in the kitchen, and indeed the very flat itself. She had taken advantage of everything that her mother had offered, and had harnessed her own talents to those considerable opportunities, to great effect. She had brought Dan into the company – possibly the best thing that had ever happened to the business, after Susie herself – and between them, they were responsible for most of the innovation and growth that had got the company to where it was today.
She shifted a little. The sky through the big window was now dark and reddish, the planes distinguishable only by their wing- and tail-lights and the peculiar high roar of their engines. Dan would be back soon, bringing those crackling translucent bags that the local Japanese takeaway packed their fragrant food into, and with him would come news of his meeting and the accompanying resultant energy, as well as affirmation of their chosen view of the future. Dan’s return would be both reassuring and confirming. And it might signal a new start for Cara, something of a breakthrough. It came to her, with a little thrill of excitement, that she might be able to let go of being constantly angry with Susie, if she didn’t work alongside her any more.
Jeff had persuaded Grace to go for a meal with him in a local pub. She had demurred at the prospect of dinner, but had agreed to lunch, and maybe also a walk, since the pub he had chosen was in a country park, on a canal, and was quite difficult to find. He said it was a great pub, serving real ale. Grace said she wasn’t interested in beer, he knew that, and he said he’d only mentioned it to give her a flavour of the place, to emphasize its individuality.
The pub was brick-built and in a complicated location, with a tree-covered hill behind, a canal and a railway line in front, and a crowded car park. Jeff said they could go for a walk, and then come back for a drink and a bite of lunch when there weren’t so many people.
Grace said, ‘It’s going to rain.’
Jeff was wearing walking boots and a tan suede bomber jacket that Grace didn’t recognize. It was the wrong colour for him. Too gingery. And his hair needed cutting. He pulled a huge commercial umbrella out of the Nissan Pixo and flourished it at her. ‘All prepared!’
Grace sat in the open doorway of the passenger seat, with her feet on the tarmac. She said, ‘Jeff, I don’t really want to go for a walk.’
He lowered the umbrella to the ground and leant on it, as if it were a walking stick. He said, ‘Do you mean with me?’
Grace gestured at the parked cars all round her. She said, ‘I don’t want all this. I don’t want today to be a – a date.’
‘Then why,’ Jeff said slowly, ‘did you agree to come?’
She looked up at him. She was wearing a cotton scarf like a headband, subduing her hair. She said, ‘You badgered me. You went on and on at me till I said yes. I shouldn’t have.’
‘I see,’ Jeff said.
‘Do you?’
‘You give in, you agree, because you haven’t got the guts to tell the truth. Ever. Have you?’
Grace pushed her scarf back an inch. ‘I was planning to tell you in the pub. In a public place. I don’t want to be in a country park with you – I want to be where there are other people.’
Jeff gave a snort. ‘Am I that scary?’
‘No,’ Grace said. ‘It’s just easier for you not to lose your temper when there are other people about.’
Jeff leant on the umbrella and squinted up at the sky. He said, ‘Here’s me, doing your family quite a favour, because one member of it – not your granddad – means a good deal to me, and all the time, this particular person is planning to dump me in the public bar of a busy pub on a Saturday lunchtime.’
‘It’s no surprise to you,’ Grace sai
d. ‘Don’t pretend it is. And I never asked you to take Morris in.’
‘Extraordinary how nothing is ever your fault.’
‘Yes, it is,’ Grace said. ‘Doing nothing is. Appeasing and placating and giving in is. I didn’t want to come out with you today, but I thought I ought to. I thought I ought to say we’re finished to your face.’
‘Are we?’ Jeff said, still staring at the sky. ‘Finished?’
‘Yes, we are.’
‘Suppose I don’t see it that way?’
‘You can’t have a relationship with someone if they don’t want one back.’
‘But you play games with me, Grace. You give me little hints, little chances, and then you turn your back. There’s a nasty word for girls like you.’
Grace stood up. She said, ‘I’m trying to do the right thing. But you can only ever see things from your own point of view, so doing the right thing is wasted on you. I’m going into the pub to ask them to call me a taxi.’
Jeff held up his hand. ‘Wait.’
Grace suppressed a sigh. She was waiting to feel the familiar clutch of fear. It was certainly incipient, somewhere in the pit of her stomach, but it wasn’t leaping up her throat yet. She looked at Jeff and said flatly, ‘What?’
‘I’m not a bully, Grace. I’m not unreasonable. But I have had a lot to put up with. You’ve messed me about something chronic. On top of all I’ve had thrown at me ever since I was a kid, I meet someone like you, who only wants to add to everything I’m dealing with already. You’re a massive stress, Grace. Massive.’
She waited.
He jabbed at the ground with his umbrella. ‘But I happen to think you’re worth it. I really do. I think you’re a girl in a million.’ He smiled at her. ‘That’s why I took your granddad in.’
Grace opened her mouth to say an instinctive thank-you, and shut it again. Instead she said, ‘Morris can come back to my flat tonight.’
Jeff stared at her. He shook his head disbelievingly. ‘You are a piece of bloody work. Didn’t you hear a word I said?’
Grace went on looking at him in silence.
He said in a different tone, ‘Is there someone else?’
Balancing Act Page 20