Balancing Act (5 page)

She said from behind her hands, ‘Ma, we never quarrel.’

Susie said, staring straight ahead, ‘I’m not quarrelling.’

‘But we must,’ Cara said tightly, ‘be able to discuss everything. Freely. We
must
.’

‘I know,’ Susie said. She was gripping her laptop now. ‘I
know we must. But I just can’t –
can’t
give up what I know is the heart of the thing.’

There was a silence. Then Ashley took her hands away from her eyes and said, ‘I wanted to talk about the late-spring catalogue.’

‘Of course.’

‘And some proposed partnerships for special editions.’

‘As long as they are a good fit for us.’

‘She knows that, Ma,’ Cara said wearily.

‘And I imagine,’ Susie said to Cara, ‘that you are waiting to tell me that mug sales are down sixty per cent—’

‘Forty-four, actually,’ Cara said.

‘But you won’t even acknowledge that I am buying this house. And that this house, in the heartland of what this company is all about, is also going to feed the creativity that lies at the very centre of everything we do.’

Cara and Ashley looked at each other. Cara shrugged slightly. Then they looked at Susie.

‘If you want it,’ Ashley said, ‘you have it.’

Susie picked up her laptop. ‘You’ll see,’ she said.

It was an hour before the factory workers clocked off for the day. Five days a week, they were in before six in the morning and gone by three in the afternoon, leaving behind them the ghostly racks of cast but undecorated ware to be fired in the kilns overnight.

Grace was always soothed by the factory. It was partly those long, dusty, brilliantly lit rooms dedicated to the steady application to making something; partly the people – the casters and the fettlers, the jiggers and jolliers, the girls cutting the sponge shapes with soldering irons, the women decorating and banding on their paint-splashed revolving tables, the glaziers dipping each piece into the lavender-hued tanks of glaze, all by hand, every piece touched by hand
and it was also partly being out of the studio, away from the telephone, away from problems. There was no point taking her phone into the factory. She couldn’t have heard herself think, let alone speak. And there was such a luxury in switching the thing to mute and leaving it behind on her desk, as if it were no more important than an empty notepad.

The casting shop was always impressive. Fourteen casters working between pairs of immense slatted benches, with the liquid clay slip in which they worked piped along the ceiling in great yellow hoses. Seven tons of it each day, seven tons of china clay and chemicals and water mixed each night in the blunger until it was the right consistency to run down the hoses and into those plaster-of-Paris moulds which produced the mugs and the jugs, the teapots and the vases, the bowls and the cups – over four hundred pieces from each man every day, lined up on the wooden trucks to be wheeled away for fettling.

Grace paused beside Barney Jilkes. He had a visible gold tooth, a snake tattooed around his neck and had left school at fifteen, following his father down the mines for a year – ‘Only a thousand feet down. I were too young to work the coalface’ – before taking a trade test to work at Wedgwood. His mother had been on the switchboard there; she was known as the Voice of Wedgwood. He’d applied for a job at Snape Pottery the moment Susie had taken it over, almost as a prank. ‘I’d never worked for a woman before. Thought it’d be a laugh. Best thing I’ve ever done.’

‘Bloody awful day,’ he said to Grace now, not pausing in what he was doing for a second.

‘Oh?’

‘Three losses! Three! I never have losses. I haven’t lost anything in months!’

‘There you go, then. Think of those months, not today.’

‘I’ve let myself down,’ Barney said. He reached forward to fill a mould and the snake on his neck rippled faintly.

Grace said, ‘Nobody’ll say anything.’

‘They don’t say. But they think it. They know. Me dogs’ll know, the minute they see me.’

‘Forget it, Barney. The rest of us will. You’re a brilliant caster.’

‘Five hundred and fifty-two pieces, me best day.’

‘How are the whippets, talking of dogs?’

Barney’s expression softened. He rubbed a plaster-flecked fist against his temple. ‘Champion, Grace. Especially the little blue.’

‘If it’s any comfort,’ Grace said, ‘I’m having a mildly shit day, too.’

Barney wagged a finger at her. ‘Now, now, language.’

‘You’re a fine one to talk.’

‘I’m a fella, Grace. And you’re a—’

‘Please don’t say lady.’

He grinned, and stepped sideways to set a small tureen on the truck beside him.

‘Dogs,’ Barney said, ‘is easier than this lady-and-gentleman malarkey. They don’t bother messing about. They’re just dogs and bitches.’

Grace moved on, smiling, down the casting shed, through the area where the dense great discs of china clay awaited the blunger and on into the fettling shop, where rough edges and seams were smoothed off with knives and sponges. She always paused here, among the regimented shelves of unfired ware and the blue-overalled women – always women, in a fettling shop – and thought of her great-grandmother, coming here in search of a job and finding herself in front of the great man himself, except that he was a youngish great man, and the assessing way he looked at her had little to do with judging the kind of fettler she might make. It was the
stuff of fairytales, really it was. Jean McGrath, from an Irish Liverpool terraced house in Burslem with no indoor lavatory, being asked out to tea, and then a country walk, and then the cinema, by Mr Snape of the pottery. Who then produced a ruby and diamond engagement ring from his pocket and went down on one knee in a field out at Barlaston, asking her to marry him and promising her a country house on this very spot if she said yes. Of course, she said yes. And she got a husband and a baby and Oak View. And even if the baby turned out to be a deep disappointment – so weird, Grace thought, to have a grandfather alive who was never spoken of – the baby’s baby more than made up for it. When she thought about that – when she thought about what Ma had done, not just for herself but for people like Barney, and Maureen here, in the fettling shop – she felt that … well, she felt that if she wanted fifty cottages in Barlaston, she could have them.

‘Grace,’ someone said.

She turned to see who had spoken. It was Harry, who had spent a lifetime working the kilns, and now, in retirement, took tours of schoolchildren round the factory. He said, ‘Michelle’s looking for you.’

‘Is she?’

‘There’s someone up there in the studio, looking to see you.’

‘Not—’ Grace said, and stopped.

Harry patted her arm. He smiled, showing the gleaming new dentures he was so proud of.

‘Not him, Gracie. Not lover boy. It’s an old geezer, Michelle said. Asking for you.’

‘You don’t know me,’ the old man said.

He was very thin, and tanned, and his white hair fell in a curious kind of bob on either side of his face. Michelle had
found him a chair, but he wasn’t sitting on it, he was standing behind it, his hands resting on its back. He was dressed in crumpled linen trousers and a long embroidered quilted coat over a tunic of some kind. There were silver and turquoise beads round his neck, and a sort of tooth, curved and whitish, threaded on a long leather thong.

Grace stayed where she was, just inside the doorway. ‘No,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Should I?’

The old man smiled, and raised a braceleted hand as if to wipe the smile off.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Of course not. You’ve never seen me. I don’t expect you’ve seen a photo of me, even. I’m your black-sheep grandfather.’

Michelle and Ben froze into sudden stillness in front of their computers.

Grace said stupidly, ‘What?’

‘I’m your granddad,’ the old man said mildly. ‘Morris. Your old granddad Morris.’

Grace took a huge gulp of air. She said, slightly breathlessly, ‘What … what are you doing here?’

He laughed, and waved a hand behind him. ‘When I walked in,’ he said, ‘you could see these kids thinking that.’

‘Well—’

‘I ran out of life, there. It just happened. After your grandmother died.’

Grace said wildly, ‘She died?’

‘Two years ago,’ Morris said. He had a disconcertingly unhurried manner. ‘Lung cancer. We flew her down to Mombasa, but it was too late.’ He paused and looked down sombrely at his hands. ‘Poor chick.’

Grace leant against the door frame. ‘I can’t think straight.’

He said, ‘Well, you could give your old granddad a hug, couldn’t you?’

She didn’t look at him. She said, ‘I don’t know you.’

‘Well,’ he said, unoffended, ‘there is that.’

‘How did you find us? I mean, d’you even know who I am?’

‘You’re Grace. And –’ he turned and gestured behind him again, ‘these kids are Michelle and Ben.’

‘How do you—’

‘The website,’ Morris said. He smiled again. ‘There’s everything on the website, isn’t there? Even photographs. You up here, your sisters down in London. I even have greatgrandchildren, down in London. It’s been amazing, that website. Told me everything.’

Grace took a step or two into the room. ‘Does – does Ma know you’re here, in England?’

He said calmly, ‘I shouldn’t think she even knows her own ma is gone.’

‘But,’ Grace said, suddenly intense, ‘what are you
doing
here?’

He looked surprised. ‘Doing?’

‘Yes,’ Grace said. ‘What are you
doing
– after decades of no contact, no responsibility, nothing – suddenly turning up here and imagining that any of us would be remotely interested in seeing you?’

There was a silence. Michelle and Ben were still staring stiffly at their screens. Morris took his hands off the chair-back and came towards Grace. He had moccasins on his feet, and no socks. He held his hands out towards her, just as Jeff had done earlier, and then dropped them again.

He said, ‘I was hoping, I s’pose—’ And then he paused.

She didn’t smile.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘Grace,’ he said. ‘I’m eighty-one. I just ran out of road.’

D
aniel had shut himself in the boardroom. As the office was otherwise open-plan, the boardroom door was the only door in the place, and shutting it made a resounding statement, particularly if you were the only person inside. If closing the door sent a slightly intimidating message to everyone else, then that suited his current purpose just fine.

His purpose was, in essence, to calm down. He could have gone for a walk, of course – into Bishop’s Park across the road, or over Putney Bridge with its satisfactorily huge view of the river – but something told him that his agitation might only be increased by leaving the office, and it would be better, really, to take his iPad as an acceptable accessory into the boardroom, where he could pace or gaze out of the window or – the most luxurious option of all – have a private
sotto voce
rant about his mother-in-law and her family and the state of the business.

With, as ever, the exception of Cara. Daniel was truly sorry for Cara. Cara was not in the office today because she had had to go up to Stoke by train with her mother and Ashley, to meet this outrageous old man who had suddenly turned up in Grace’s studio and announced himself to be Susie’s father, Morris. At first, when Grace had rung with this implausible
story, no one had believed her. It was insane, in these days of worldwide communication, that anyone so closely related could just turn up out of the blue, like a character in a soap opera, all melodrama and improbability. But then the inevitability of the facts began to emerge, never mind the physical presence of the man, and a creeping combination of acceptance and curiosity began to overtake their initial shock and disbelief. The old man in Grace’s spare bedroom – his possessions, such as they were, carried in a huge dusty bag fashioned from something indisputably African, patterned in deep red and black – was indeed, it seemed, Susie’s father, Morris Snape, returning like an elderly prodigal son to the place he had so emphatically and ungratefully rejected half a century before.

The horror and shock, Daniel had to admit, were – at first, at least – far stronger than the curiosity. Susie was appalled, as were her older daughters. Grace, with this profoundly unwelcome guest in her flat, was said to be despairing. At two in the morning after the revelatory first phone call, Daniel had been aware of Cara lying awake and churned up beside him. He had reached out a hand to take hers, and she’d gripped him as if he were a lifeline and hissed, ‘I don’t
want
this.’

‘I know.’

‘He left Ma. As a
baby.
He
abandoned
her.’

‘I know.’

‘He’s a selfish monster. He’s never grown up. He’s only back because he’s run out of options. He just wants to be looked after. And money. Of course, he wants
money.
’

Daniel edged further across their kingsize bed so that he could put an arm across Cara and hold her. ‘Your poor mother.’

‘She’s in shock.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s awful, Dan, to have to be responsible for someone you really can’t bear.’

Daniel had tightened his embrace. He had never had much time for his own parents, but luckily had always been deemed the difficult one, so leaving his filial obligations to his two sisters had merely provoked their resigned acceptance of the inevitable. They had, indeed, formed a small trade union of two responsible, concerned adult children, shouldering the consequences of a third – male, of course – ducking out of his duty. When he had married Cara, his sisters could add ‘gold-digger’ to his list of failings and cut another notch in their bedpost of virtue. Their general attitude was to be very sorry for him, for his lack of concern and sensitivity, but never to chastise him. As his elder sister, Sally, said to Cara at every opportunity, ‘He knows who he’s let down, Cara. He knows it perfectly well. As I expect you do. Neither of you need reminding by
me
.’

Daniel let Sally’s attitude slide straight off him. As far as he was concerned, she was his sister in name only. She had not cared for his arrival when she was three, and she failed to learn to care for him subsequently. Indeed, she had extended that failure to appropriating their youngest sister, Julie, into her team, excluding Daniel to such an extent that when he met Cara he unleashed upon her all the emotion that had been banked up throughout his childhood with no outlet to offer release. He was like someone, Cara told him, delighted but also slightly dazed, who had a perfectly good home inside their head, but who desperately needed a house to put it into. He’d thought about this, and then he’d said, ‘The thing is, Cara, that you are everything to me. Everything.’

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 the 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.’