Balancing Act (10 page)

He said, ‘Anything,’ too quickly and instantly regretted it.

Grace looked at the door. ‘Does it shut?’

Neil manoeuvred his way further round the desk and nudged at the lever arch files with his foot. ‘Let’s try.’

‘I don’t want to be furtive …’

‘But?’

‘But I really just want
you
to know. In case …’

He shut the door with difficulty, and stood leaning against it. ‘In case?’

‘Well,’ Grace said, ‘I think someone should know where I am. If you don’t mind being that someone.’

A spasm of fear clutched him. She was about to tell him that she was going away for the weekend with Jeff, and Susie had made it very plain that she disliked and disapproved of Jeff. So Grace was about to ask him not to tell Susie—

‘I’ve got to get away,’ Grace said. ‘Not for long. Just a few days. I’ve—’ She stopped.

He waited.

‘I’ve just got to be by myself. No family, nobody. I feel completely …
pummelled
by them all.’

Neil was almost giddy with relief. He said cautiously, ‘Why are you telling me? Don’t get me wrong, I’m very flattered you are – but why me?’

Grace gave a little sigh. She glanced up at him with a small
smile. ‘Well, you see me coming and going more than anyone. You’re in daily touch with Ma. You can fend any of them off, if there’s a fuss.’

‘A fuss?’

‘If anyone wants to know where I am.’

He relaxed against the door. ‘And where will you be?’

She said slowly, ‘The Lake District. A hotel. I’ll give you the number.’

‘And for how long?’

‘Just the weekend. Maybe a bit longer. I’ll see. It depends on whether I can sleep.’

‘Grace,’ he said, ‘are you not telling your mother?’

She glanced at him again. ‘No, I’m not telling anyone but you. I want to slip out, and then slip back again. I am absolutely exhausted with everything being such a big deal.’

‘Are you asking me to cover for you?’

Grace looked slightly startled. ‘I don’t think anyone will even notice I’ve gone.’

Neil took the plunge. ‘Not even Jeff?’

She put her hands in her hair again, and pushed it back. She said, ‘It won’t hurt him to wonder.’

‘So this is really—’

‘No,’ she said quickly. ‘No, it’s not a game. I wouldn’t ask you to be part of a game. I shouldn’t have said that – I don’t mean it. I just mean I need to get away from all of them.’

Neil stood more upright, an inch or two away from the door. He said, ‘So, if anyone asks me, what do you want me to say?’

‘That I’ll be back by Wednesday. Latest.’

‘Is that all?’

She got slowly to her feet. ‘Yes, please. That’s all you know. That’s all I’ve told you. Just delete everything else.’

He said, ‘They’ll ring your mobile.’

She looked at him. ‘And I won’t answer it. I’ll only answer it if you ring me, because then I’ll know it’s an emergency. OK?’

He smiled at her. Her sudden confidence was like an unexpected present.

‘OK,’ he said.

‘If you eat that,’ Jasper said to Maisie, indicating the cubes of cheese and discs of cucumber on the plate in front of her, ‘then I might find you something special.’

Maisie regarded him. She had already inspected the contents of his pockets and found a bus pass, a crumple of old receipts and a button. She said sternly, ‘You haven’t got anything special.’

He picked up a cheese cube and held it out. ‘Not in my coat, I haven’t.’

Maisie leaned forward and took the smallest possible corner off the cheese cube. She said, ‘Where’s Grandma?’

‘Working.’

‘Like Mumma.’

‘Yes,’ Jasper said. ‘Very like Mumma. Eat your cheese.’

Maisie folded her arms on the table. She said, ‘Cheryl gave us Jammie Dodgers.’

‘And your dad and I are giving you cheese.’

Maisie made a face. ‘I want Cheryl back. I want Cheryl to be here
now.
’

Jasper smiled at her. He said, ‘Fred’s eaten
his
cheese.’

‘Where’s Dadda?’

‘Gone to check something.’ He turned and looked at Fred, in his high chair. He said, ‘Hi there, big boy.’

Fred, his cheeks packed with cheese cubes, beat his hands on the tray in front of him, setting cucumber discs jumping.

‘I want a Jammie Dodger,’ Maisie said.

Jasper bent to pick up a fallen slice of cucumber. He said indistinctly, ‘One, that’s no way to ask. And two, not a hope. This house is a Jammie-Dodger-free zone.’

Maisie gave an experimental roar. Fred imitated her, his mouth full of cheese. Jasper straightened up and put the food in both his hands down on the table. He said, ‘If you’re hungry, you eat what’s in front of you. If you’re not hungry, you don’t need to eat.’

Maisie stopped roaring. She said, in a perfectly normal voice, ‘What about the special thing?’

‘If you’re not hungry,’ Jasper said, ‘there’s no need for specials.’

Fred leant forward, grunting urgently, his mouth still open.

‘Eat up,’ Jasper said to him. ‘Swallow.’

Fred gulped.

Maisie said, ‘If I eat my cheese?’

‘Then we’ll see.’

‘Why aren’t
you
working?’

‘I am,’ Jasper said. ‘I’m helping Daddy look after you. That is most surely work.’

‘When I’m a princess,’ Maisie said, ‘I can have wings. And eyeliner.’

‘Only if you eat your cheese.’

Fred gave a final gulp and roared again.

‘What does he want?’ Jasper said to Maisie.

She picked up a slice of cucumber and took a tiny nibble.

‘Probably a Jammie Dodger,’ she said.

There were feet running down the stairs to the basement kitchen, and Leo appeared. He looked to Jasper’s eye both collected and cheerful. He’d looked like that when he’d opened the door to Jasper, two hours ago. He’d looked, it occurred to Jasper, as he had probably looked himself,
twenty-five years ago, with the kitchen full of little girls, and Grace on his hip, eating a breadstick. He’d been a rarity then, an oddity, a commented-upon phenomenon, a man at home competently coping with two little girls and a baby, and seemingly never happier than when the kitchen was full of children finger-painting and plaiting each other’s hair, children whose attention he could command in an instant, just by picking up his guitar. Leo didn’t have a guitar. But he had, it seemed, a presence. The kitchen was not the kitchen of a man out of control or even a man who wanted to be somewhere else. It was the kitchen of a man with a plan.

Jasper said to him, ‘We haven’t given up on the cheese. But it’s taking a while.’

Leo looked at Maisie’s plate. He said, ‘I’m not impressed, chicken.’

Maisie flopped back in her chair. ‘I’m too tired to eat.’

‘Fine.’

Fred was packing cucumber into his mouth with the flat of his hand.

‘Steady on, Freddy,’ said Jasper.

‘Thank you for holding the fort,’ Leo said.

‘I like it, you know.’

Maisie said, ‘I need Mumma!’

‘You’re an old hand, Jas.’

‘A bit out of practice.’

‘I need a biscuit!’

Fred choked, and a mass of cucumber flew out of his mouth and landed wetly on the tray of his high chair.

‘You’re such a twit,’ Leo said to him, thumping him gently on the back.

‘I said,’ Maisie shouted, ‘that I need Mumma!’

‘We heard you.’

‘Now!’

Leo lifted Fred out of his high chair and sat down opposite his father-in-law with Fred on his knee. He said to Maisie, ‘Where do you think Mumma is?’

Maisie glowered at him. ‘Working,’ she said witheringly.

‘Where?’

‘At the office!’ Maisie shouted.

‘Why?’

Maisie jerked herself upright. ‘To buy me a
present
!’

Leo wiped Fred’s face. He said cheerfully, ‘Now you’re being silly. You know why she’s working.’

Jasper looked at his son-in-law. He said, ‘Do
you
know why? ‘

Leo unhooked Fred’s plastic bib. ‘She’s good at it,’ he said. ‘We all like doing what we’re good at.’

‘Don’t feed me a line,’ Jasper said. ‘Don’t fob me off.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Leo,’ Jasper said, ‘I’m not asking for no reason. I’m interested. I’m interested to know what you really think.’

Leo lowered Fred to the floor. Then he leant across the table, put a cube of cheese on top of a slice of cucumber and pushed it towards Maisie. ‘Eat up.’

She bent forward, and without using her hands began to nibble clumsily at the cheese.

Leo said, ‘What I really think is that you do as much of what you like doing as you can, and as much of what has to be done as you can stand. In my view, it’s better to get
something
done than try and do everything perfectly. So if Ashley likes what she does at work and can make enough money to support us, then I’m happy to make that possible. Or at least try to. It’s early days. I like this home stuff.
You
should get it, Jas. You liked it, too. God, man, you were a pioneer!’

Maisie quietly picked up her cheese and cucumber and put
it in her mouth. Neither her father nor her grandfather took any notice.

Jasper said, ‘Early days.’

‘I know.’

‘What about your own disappointment?’

Leo looked at Maisie. ‘Don’t feel any,’ he said.

‘I didn’t. Not for ages. I was glad not to be the breadwinner. Still am, probably. But not being the breadwinner and not fulfilling one’s personal ambition either – well, that’s something else.’

Leo looked embarrassed. He went on regarding Maisie, who was chewing ostentatiously.

Jasper said, ‘Wanting to do something and being driven to do something aren’t quite the same.’

‘Two more bites,’ Leo said to Maisie, ‘and then you can have the strawberries Grandpa brought.’

‘He shouldn’t have,’ Jasper said. ‘Flown in from Israel or somewhere. All those wicked air miles.’

‘And then a Jammie Dodger?’ Maisie said.

‘There aren’t any.’

‘There are! There are! Cheryl put them in the tiger tin!’

‘They’ve all gone,’ Leo said.

Maisie opened her mouth to roar again.

‘Stop,’ Leo said.

She glared at him, her mouth still open. But she didn’t scream.

‘Good,’ Jasper said admiringly.

Leo reached across the table and held out another cube of cheese.

‘As I said, Jas,’ he said, ‘we all like what we’re good at.’ He inserted the cheese into Maisie’s open mouth. ‘And anyway, what’s happening here is just as important as what’s happening in the office. In fact, if I wasn’t doing this, Ashley couldn’t manage to do what she does.’ He smiled at Maisie,
who was chewing, her eyes on her father’s face, then glanced across at Jasper. ‘Any more than Susie could have done without you.’

Jasper ducked his head. He stooped sideways to hand Fred a plastic train that was just out of his reach. Then he said, ‘I know, I know. But that – well, that was then.’ He glanced at Leo. ‘Early days, you know.’

J
eff’s flat was very small. It was on the first floor of a modest purpose-built block at the back of the garden centre where he worked, and the view was either of rows of container-grown shrubs, or of a car park beside a disused cinema now given over to bingo.

Jeff himself slept on the couch so that he was near the immense television whose screen dominated his sitting room. He was a tidy man, and during the day his bedding was rolled up and stored in the room that was to be Morris’s. It contained a headless bed, a built-in cupboard, a stepladder, a travel bag and no curtains. On the bed were two pillows and the fat roll of Jeff’s duvet. The walls were blank and the view was of the car park. It was as far from the ramshackle house at the back of a palm-fringed beach that had been Morris’s home for half a century as it could be.

Susie had driven Morris out to Trentham Gardens. Jeff had offered to collect him but Susie had been very firm in declining. She had borrowed Grace’s car and put Morris, his carpet bag and a box of groceries inside and driven out of the city. She told Morris, as if he was a newcomer to the area, that Trentham Gardens was lovely, really quite posh
for Stoke, having been the Duke of Sutherland’s estate, with the park laid out by Capability Brown. The park itself was now just a gorgeous playground, she said, attracting over three million visitors annually, and all free. But Jeff’s flat was not, as it turned out, in the salubrious part of Trentham Gardens. In fact it was only nominally anywhere near it. Susie’s positive talk, Morris noted, died away as they drove further and further from the park and the lake and the carefully designed chalet-style retail centre. They ended up beside a building which made Morris remember, weirdly, a fact he’d known when he was a boy, growing up in Barlaston, which was that all the hills in the Stoke area had once been coal-waste slag heaps. Industry had such a terrible gift for uglification then, and obviously still did. No wonder it was hard to be back.

Susie unpacked her box of groceries, made him tea and a ham sandwich, and found sheets for the bed in the curtainless room. Jeff had left a note to say he’d be back at six and they’d go out for a curry. She didn’t seem to want to talk much any more, and Morris didn’t quite have the nerve to encourage her. They inspected the bathroom – clean, but very small – and back in the kitchen Morris took an obedient but unenthusiastic bite of his sandwich. Then Susie said, with difficulty, ‘It’s only for a few weeks.’

Morris put his sandwich down. ‘And I’ll be helping out in the garden centre.’

Susie glanced out of the window. ‘Looks like all they sell is Leylandii.’

‘I’ll be fine, Susan.’

She didn’t look at him. She said, ‘I’d really rather you were in a hotel.’

‘I wouldn’t.’ He leant towards her, grinning, ‘Did you see that carwash place we passed?’

‘Where?’

‘On our way here. It said “Best Hand Job In Town”. Jeff told me they’re all run by Afghans.’

‘Oh,’ Susie said. She wasn’t smiling.

He shrugged slightly. ‘Only trying to cheer you up.’

‘I don’t want to leave you here.’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘But it’s … it’s not …’

‘Well, it’s not Grace’s flat, I’ll give you that. But it’ll do fine for now.’

He wondered, for a split second, if she’d kiss him when she left. But she didn’t. She didn’t even look as if the thought had occurred to her. She handed him a new mobile phone and an envelope of cash, but she didn’t come any closer than that. And then she said that Grace needed her car back, for some reason, and she must go. So she went, rather suddenly and quickly, and left him standing there in Jeff’s bleak little kitchen, with his mug of tea and a half-eaten sandwich.

He carried them both into the sitting room and sat on Jeff’s couch. Things change, he thought, all the time – a great moving carpet of change that you can’t stop and you can’t get off. When I was growing up, the Wedgwood factory was in Etruria, right bang in the middle. Now the factory’s out in Barlaston and there’s a ski slope where it used to be. I left a baby and now she’s a complicated woman with a business and grandchildren. I don’t know the grandchildren. I don’t know her. I don’t know how to handle her, what line to take. But then, I haven’t known what’s what for as long as I can remember. I seem to have lost my bearings. I didn’t know Lamu any more, not once they started building the new port and all those roads and planning an oil refinery, and I could see all the beauty and remoteness just vanishing under concrete. But then, I’m just an old relic, an old has-been, aren’t I? I don’t really know what I know. I don’t know
what I think I’m doing, here or anywhere. Morris picked up the sandwich, looked at it and put it down again.

He lay back against the cushions and looked round the room. It was tidy, but in an unlived-in way. No pictures, no colour, nothing that didn’t serve the purposes of watching television. Jeff’s running shoes were together in a corner, and above them, on a hook, the hooded top of a tracksuit. Otherwise, apart from remote controls and a neat stack of magazines, there seemed to be no indication of personality. The man who appeared to be in focussed pursuit of Grace, and who seemed to possess some force of will, lived in this anonymous place in an equally anonymous way. It was dreary, Morris thought, dreary. Deeply dreary.

He tilted his head back and looked at the ceiling. It had been painted white once, but the corners and edges had now darkened to grey. He took a breath. He’d told Susan that he’d be fine in Jeff’s flat for a few weeks, and he would be. He’d make an effort to be. It struck him that he could actually put some energy into not being a problem, a nuisance. He felt suddenly rather surprised. He’d caught himself making a mental effort. That was novel. Very novel indeed. He raised his head and regarded the blank black glass of the television screen. He worked slowly backwards through his thoughts. Why had he determined to live with Jeff in this dismal flat until he could move into the Parlour House? Because, he realized, he was glad to do something for his daughter and granddaughter; he was actually pleased to be able to relieve their burdens, even a little.

Good God, Morris thought to himself. Holy Mother of Whatsit. He was smiling. He was sitting on a faux-leather couch in a disheartening room belonging to a man he had no feelings for really, one way or another, and he was
smiling.
I’ll be blowed, he said to himself; don’t know what’s come over me. He leant forward and picked up his sandwich.
It had been nice of Susan to make it, after all. Even if she couldn’t manage a kiss.

Michelle Knight had put quite a lot of energy over the last few years into making it possible for Neil Dundas to ask her out on a date. She’d had the same boyfriend since she was at school, and despite hoping that someone a bit more exciting than Mark would change things during her college years, it hadn’t happened, and Mark was still around, working now for a huge earth-moving-machinery company out towards Uttoxeter, and apparently content with the same friends and the same personal life he’d had since he was eleven.

Michelle was fond of him and exasperated by him in exactly the way she was with her two younger brothers. They, like Mark, still lived at home, and got their washing done and their lunchboxes filled, whereas Michelle shared a flat with a girlfriend, and preferred to meet her mother in town for a coffee, rather than get sucked back into all the old routines of her growing up. She thought her brothers were infantile, and said so, and tried quite hard not to think the same of Mark, who joined the men in her family for all the Stoke City home games at Britannia Stadium, and had found a framed photograph of Stanley Matthews on eBay, dated 1963, for her father’s last birthday. He was lovely, Mark: pleasant-looking, kind, polite and familiar – oh, so familiar – but something nagged at Michelle that a more adventurous and interesting alternative might be out there.

Neil Dundas had struck her as more interesting the moment he arrived. He was so very dark-haired and his accent was so very Scottish and he was so evidently approved of by Susie that he’d had a kind of distinction for Michelle all along. Also, at the beginning he had the faint melancholy glamour of being abandoned by his wife and of then seeming wonderfully unconcerned about replacing her. He’d
presumably
had
other girlfriends, but nobody had seemed to stick. And he hadn’t looked bothered. He hadn’t looked lonely. He looked like a man for whom a relationship was not crucial, which might mean he was still, uselessly, missing his wife, or it might mean something much more attractively complicated.

Michelle was not a girl to give up. Whenever there was a pretext to seek Neil out and ask him something, she took it. She was not prone to self-doubt, in any case, and because of Mark she had never known the peculiar humiliation of rejection. So when Grace was not in the studio on Monday morning, and Ben rang in to say that he thought he’d got the flu, Michelle decided that work could wait for the ten minutes it would take her to go and find Neil Dundas and ask him – all innocence – where Grace was.

She found him by the kilns. He was examining the computer panels that regulated timings and temperatures. He said, ‘Morning, Michelle,’ without looking at her.

‘How d’you know it’s me?’

‘I always know it’s you,’ Neil said, still looking at the keypad, and then added, before she could assume anything, ‘I can recognize the footsteps of all of you.’

‘All of us?’

‘All you girls,’ Neil said. He pressed a couple of keys. Then he stepped back and looked at her, and smiled.

She pushed up the sleeves of her sweater. ‘Where’s Grace?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘She’s not in the studio. And Ben’s got flu or something.’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘Well,’ Michelle said, ‘it’s not, as it happens, today. But why isn’t she here? Susie’ll be in later.’

Neil hesitated. He was wearing a deep-blue denim shirt under a V-necked sweater, and the blue looked really good with his hair.

Michelle said, ‘I’m not up for any more dramas.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Her granddad. The boyfriend.’

‘You love them,’ Neil said. ‘The dramas.’

She grinned at him.

He added, ‘And you’re hoping I’ll give you another one.’

She ran a hand through her hair, carelessly. ‘Anything to liven up a Monday …’

‘Well,’ Neil said, ‘she’ll be back by Wednesday. She’s fine.’

‘So you know!’

‘Only that.’

‘What about Susie? When Susie comes in, what’ll you say?’

‘Just that,’ Neil said.

‘Is she with Jeff?’

‘No,’ Neil said, too quickly.

Michelle paused. She folded her arms and regarded him, her head slightly on one side. ‘Neil,’ she said, ‘why do you know any of this? Why did she tell
you
?’

Leo, Ashley noticed, was asleep. He had been watching
Newsnight
beside her, talking desultorily, and then she was suddenly aware that his silence was more than just not speaking, and when she turned her head she saw that he was asleep, his head against the sofa back with his mouth slightly open. Her first thought was how like Maisie he was, and her second was that he never went to sleep in the evenings, that it was she who often nodded off, and had to be roused by him and pushed yawning towards the stairs.

She took a long look at him. He really was very like Maisie. The same tawny, curly hair, the same clear complexion, the same square chin. But Fred was more like him in temperament than Maisie was. Maisie was, in truth, very like how Ashley remembered Cara being as a child. Indeed, there were
moments now, even, in the office, when something Cara did or said reminded Ashley forcibly of Maisie.

She put a hand affectionately on Leo’s nearest thigh. He didn’t stir. No wonder he was tired. He had gone at this whole new lifestyle with such gusto, eliminating rubbish from the fridge and the food cupboards, sorting out the clothes that even Fred had grown out of, running a crisp new line of sealant along the back of the bath and the basin, and around the rim of the shower tray. All that on top of the chore – yes, it
was
a chore – of taking Maisie to nursery school, and collecting her, never mind sitting through those interminable children’s meals with their endless requirements of diversion and negotiation. But he said he liked it. He said he knew he’d only been at it a week, but he liked it.

‘And,’ he’d said, draining pasta over the sink in clouds of steam, ‘think of the money!’

She did think of the money. She’d thought of money all her life. Friends had assumed that because her mother had her own business, the Moran family had always had the luxury of not having to think about money, that money had just been there, comfortably, easily, perpetually, and that if it wasn’t, for some reason, Ashley’s mother only had to order five hundred more mugs to be made and it would magically appear again. But, as Ashley grew tired of saying, if you have a working
mother
, if it’s your
mother
who is providing for the family, and not traditional old dad waltzing out of the house for twelve hours a day to do something nobody’s very interested in, then you are very conscious of money, because it’s the need for money that dictates your mother’s absence.

And her absence had been, if not exactly painful, in Ashley’s experience noticeable. Jasper had been a fantastic father – always there, invariably tolerant, constantly accommodating. But despite all the warmth he generated, Susie needed to be
back for the family circle to be complete. Ashley had often wondered if Cara’s resolve not to have children stemmed from those years of Susie’s absence, although she had to admit that Susie’s presence, when it intermittently arrived, had not always been an altogether harmonious or completing element. She brought energy back into the house, certainly, but she also often brought a kind of jangle too, a crackle of unfinished and unresolved things. Evenings huddled up on the sofa with Pa, watching a movie on television with bowls of popcorn he’d popped himself in a saucepan the size of a bucket, were in truth a better recollection of childhood security.