Balancing Act (8 page)

Cara and Dan arrived simultaneously from their separate desks, and put their BlackBerries down next to the coffee pot.

Dan said, nodding at it, ‘Thank you for that, Ash.’

Cara looked at Ashley’s mug. ‘What are you drinking?’

‘Green tea.’

‘Are you detoxing or something?’

‘No. Just trying not to overload the system. Now that life is going to be rather different.’

Cara made a face, misunderstanding her. ‘Oh, I do hope not.’

‘I didn’t mean him. I meant at home.’

‘Wow,’ Cara said. ‘What’s happened?’

Dan poured coffee into two small mugs from the A for Apple range. He pushed one towards Cara and glanced at Ashley. ‘A good thing, from the look of you.’

Ashley said proudly, ‘We’ve sacked Cheryl.’

‘Great,’ Dan said.

Cara paused with her coffee mug halfway to her mouth. ‘You always said she was lazy about everything except dolling herself up.’

‘It was the children, really. She was feeding them such
rubbish, all packet stuff and sugar. One of the reasons we took her on was that she said she could cook. Well, she didn’t, and so Leo fired her, and we’re going for a totally new regime.’

Cara took a sip of her coffee and put the mug down. ‘Like what?’

‘Leo,’ Ashley said carefully, ‘is going to be a full-time house husband. He’s going to look after the children, and cook, and do the laundry. He suggested it. He said it was what he wanted to do.’

‘Good for Leo,’ Dan said. His tone was faintly hearty, as if he knew he should applaud Leo’s choice, but couldn’t quite believe in it.

‘That’s wonderful,’ Cara said, ‘if that’s what he wants. Wonderful for the children—’

‘And me.’

‘Yes, of course. And you.’

‘Because,’ Ashley said, looking down at her tea, ‘it sort of … frees me, doesn’t it?’

‘Frees you?’

‘Yes,’ Ashley said. She looked straight at her sister. ‘It frees me up to have a much greater commitment to the company. And if I have a greater commitment, then it follows that I should have a greater say.’

There was a small silence. Dan made as if to say something, and Cara reached across to squeeze his forearm to restrain him.

She said to her sister, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ Ashley said, ‘that I’ll have more headspace. For marketing. More time to analyse the website. More time to spend on the data from the Collectors’ Club. More attention to give to advertising and partnerships with other companies. Increasing the number of catalogues from four to eight, say, with two or three around Christmas.’

‘All good,’ Daniel said, too quickly.

‘But?’ Cara said.

‘But?’

‘You implied that all this increased application on your part should somehow be recognized …’

‘Yes,’ Ashley said.

‘We do recognize—’ Dan began. Cara tightened her grip on his arm. She said, ‘What are you saying?’

‘I’m saying that you and Ma don’t regard me as equal. And I think you should. Merchandizing and marketing should be equal.’

‘In – in standing?’

‘And remuneration,’ Ashley said.

‘Ash, we get paid the same—’

‘But there’s two of you. And no children.’

‘We can’t compensate you for having chosen to have children.’

‘No,’ Ashley said. ‘But you can recognize that I am as professional as you two and Ma. I am as crucial to this company. And what I do for the company – and even more, what I
will
do, now that Leo has made this amazing offer – should be acknowledged, both in how I’m treated in the company and what I’m paid.’

‘But Ash—’

‘This is a
family
company,’ Ashley said. ‘The money it gives Ma and Pa is pretty ad hoc. I don’t mind that, but I do mind being treated as a lesser contributor than you two. Especially now.’

Daniel looked at Cara. He said, slightly impatiently, ‘May I speak, please?’

She took her hand away. ‘Of course.’

‘Ashley,’ he said, ‘we can’t magic marketing into more than it is.’

She held his gaze. She said, ‘I’m not asking that. I’m just telling you that I’ll be adding value.’

‘Could you—’

‘Listen,’ Ashley said. ‘The brand used to depend on Ma and Pa’s home life, didn’t it? When we were little. All those photoshoots of us eating toast and catching tadpoles and doing the Christmas tree. Well, Ma doesn’t really have a home life now, does she, whatever she says? So it could be
my
home life instead – mine and Leo’s and the children’s. Our lives are very much like an updated version of how we used to live, and that’s crucial to customers, you know it is.’

Cara said carefully, ‘Are you insisting, Ash? On something that should be a joint decision?’

‘No,’ Ashley said. ‘I’m just emphasizing how valuable I am. Forty thousand online mailshots increase sales about three per cent. Double the mailshots, using Maisie and Fred, thus keeping it in the family as we’ve always done, and we’ll double the increase. The Collectors’ Club will go wild – so many of them are grandparents. I’m just pointing out to you that you need me, and I want that recognized.’

‘By paying you more?’

‘By at least having a discussion about payment. For all of us.’

‘Including Grace?’

‘Of course.’

‘
Now?
While business is so—’

‘Now,’ Ashley said.

Cara sat back on her stool. She didn’t look at Daniel. ‘Wow. There’s so much to think about.’

‘No, there isn’t,’ Ashley said. ‘I’ve made it perfectly plain. It isn’t at all complicated, and it completely chimes with the brand ethic.’

Cara glanced at Daniel. She said, ‘I didn’t mean that.’

‘Oh?’

‘I meant—’ she said, and stopped. Then she said, ‘Ash, we were discussing something else, Dan and me. We were talking
about another shift of emphasis – something that would actually sit very well with what you were saying.’ She pushed her coffee mug away. ‘What Dan and I were discussing was, in fact, a bit of a change in direction for … for Ma.’

There was a note on the kitchen counter in Grace’s flat, in Morris’s curiously feminine hand. It merely said that he was out and would not be back till late. He would not be there for supper. He had signed the note with a flourishing M and a kiss, and left it under a jar of fig mustard that it would never have occurred to Grace to buy.

She sighed, and dropped her bag on the floor. Of course, she had given keys to Morris, and then Susie had given him some cash, and it was not up to Grace to monitor how he spent that cash. It was irritating not to know where he was, in the same way that it would have been irritating to have a wayward teenager in the flat who one was fundamentally responsible for, while acknowledging the need for them to have a degree of independence. It was a relief not to have Morris there all evening, shuffling about the sitting room in his blue socks, but at the same time it was mildly agitating not knowing where he was, what he was doing, or when he would be back.

She ran water into a glass and drank it, then filled the glass a second time and carried it into the sitting room. The room was tidy, but to judge by the dented cushions had recently been occupied. Grace told herself not to be neurotic about how many people had been in her flat, or to speculate as to what they might have been doing there, and sat down on her sofa with the remote control in one hand and her glass of water in the other. She would watch whatever came up on the screen, until her brain was sufficiently relaxed to be of use to her.

She was no sooner seated than the buzzer to the street
door of the flats sounded. Heaving herself to her feet, Grace put her water and the remote control on the coffee table and padded over to her front door, and the small security screen set into the wall beside it. The screen showed Jeff, in jeans and a leather jacket, holding a bunch of flowers.

Grace leant on the wall beside the screen.

‘Go away,’ she said into the speaker.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t want to see you.’

‘Babe, you always say that.’

‘This time, I mean it.’

‘I’ve got something to say to you.’

Grace said, ‘You’ve always got something to say to me. I don’t want to hear it. Where’s Morris?’

‘How would I know?’

‘Because he’s not here, and you are, and I suspect there’s a connection.’

Jeff leant towards the screen, his face distorting as he did so. ‘He’s in the pub. Drinking lager and lime, like a good boy, and playing darts.’

‘And you cooked this up between you?’

‘Babe,’ Jeff said, ‘we get on, your granddad and me. I need to talk to you. I need to see you alone.’

‘Go away,’ Grace said.

‘Let me in. Please, Grace, let me in.’

‘No,’ Grace said.

Jeff took something out of his pocket with his free hand, and dangled it close to the screen. ‘Look,’ he said.

She peered, then said faintly, ‘Keys.’

‘Your keys,’ Jeff said. ‘Your granddad’s keys. He lent them to me.’ He blew a kiss at the screen. ‘I’m coming up.’

‘A
m I hearing what I think I’m hearing?’ Susie said.

She was in the kitchen at Radipole Road, sitting at the table with Frida Kahlo’s roses on the wall above her.

Cara, sitting opposite with her back to the room, was folding the arms of her sunglasses around the stem of the wine glass in front of her. She said steadily, ‘I don’t know why you sound so outraged.’

‘Because I
am
outraged,’ Susie said. ‘This is
my
company, conceived of, started and grown by me. I found the factory. I have been at the forefront of reviving English spongeware. I have grown the workforce from seventy to over two hundred and twenty. I
am
Susie Sullivan pottery. And now you tell me that I should step aside to be a sort of superannuated
president
, or something equally remote, and leave the running of the company to you and Dan?’

Cara unfolded her sunglasses and laid them beside her wine glass with precision. She said, ‘And Ashley. And Grace. And I didn’t put it at all like that.’

‘But that is what you
meant.
’

‘Ma,’ Cara said, ‘nobody is disputing what you’ve done, what you’ve achieved. In fact, nobody wants to do anything
but applaud and admire you for the amazing success you’ve had and the huge numbers of people whose lives have been transformed by you. But nothing stands still. What we’re trying to do is take the company forward. We’re trying to adapt it to be what our customers want it to be.
Now.
They’ve changed, as times have changed. As doing business has changed. There are things about Susie Sullivan’s way of doing business that have to change, too.’

Susie hadn’t touched her wine. She turned the glass now, restlessly. ‘You’re saying I’m holding it back, though, aren’t you?’

‘I’m saying that if we want it to grow – and I think we all do, including you – then we have to embrace, not fear, other people’s expertise.’

Susie took her hands away from her wine glass. ‘Which means you think I’m holding it back. Say it, Cara.
Say
it. I don’t trust other people to see what I see. This company is my baby.’

‘No, Ma. That’s just it. It isn’t a baby. It’s grown up, and it’s got all kinds of other relationships in its life, just like grown-ups do. It’s not – I hate saying this, but it’s not just your baby any more. And hasn’t been for ages.’

Susie pushed her glass away. She said, ‘Who cooked this up? Dan?’

Cara didn’t look at her. She said, ‘It was evident to all of us. It’s evident to everyone. It has been for ages. It – it just fell to me to talk to you. We thought that if Ashley came too, it would look like we were ganging up.’

‘Well, aren’t you?’

‘Having the same opinion isn’t the same as ganging up.’

Susie leant forward, put her elbows on the table and covered her face with her hands. From behind them, she said, ‘And all our old core customers?’

‘We’re not forgetting them,’ Cara said. ‘We’ll never forget
them. They’re crucial. But we need new customers all the time, and we need to show the old ones fresh ideas. That’s where you would be so brilliant.’

‘Please don’t stoop to flattery.’

Cara stood up and carried her wine glass over to the sink, to tip the contents down the drain. She said crossly, ‘It doesn’t help to make a business discussion personal.’

Susie took her hands away from her face. ‘How can it not be personal when the very essence of the business is personal? It’s the intimacy of my vision that makes the whole thing
work.
’

‘I know that. But it’s still a business.’

‘The minute you introduced Dan—’

‘Don’t start, Ma. I’m warning you.’

Susie said, more reasonably, ‘He can’t help it. Nor can you. Both graduates of the chainstore university break-out department as you are. So is Ashley, really.’

Cara said patiently, ‘It’s modern business practice, Ma.’

Susie looked across the room at her. ‘But we’re a family.’

‘Yes.’

‘A family currently rather besieged by its own problems.’

‘I know,’ Cara said.

‘It isn’t just Morris …’

‘I know.’

‘It’s Grace,’ Susie said. ‘She keeps stepping in to protect me, and I let her, and then it goes wrong, and I blame myself, and I’m right to. What am I doing? What am I going to do about Grace?’

‘Include her.’

‘In what? In marginalizing me to the edges of the very company I’m the centre of?’

Cara said nothing. She came back slowly to the table and picked up her sunglasses.

Susie brushed a hand across her face. ‘Of course we must
include Grace,’ she said. ‘It’s no excuse that we live here and she lives there and we’re bad at making sure she comes to London.’

‘No,’ Cara said.

‘But I’ll tell you something. If you propose to Grace what you’ve just proposed to me, she’ll side with me.’ Susie glanced up, without smiling. ‘I can guarantee that.’

Morris said that he’d heard of a hotel on Winton Square where there were rooms to be had for forty pounds a night. The reviews online described the standard as being poor to fair, but he didn’t mind about that. He just thought it was time he got out of Grace’s hair.

Grace said she couldn’t think of him staying in a poor-to-fair hotel for forty pounds a night. ‘But nor,’ she said, ‘can you go on staying here. Not after giving my keys to Jeff.’

Morris said, wheedling slightly, ‘I thought I was doing you a favour. You and Jeff. I thought I was helping.’

Grace looked at the ceiling. ‘No, you didn’t. You were making mischief. You
liked
making mischief.’

Morris waited a moment and then he said, ‘Well, you got your keys back, didn’t you?’

Grace lowered her head again and regarded him. She decided neither to reply nor to smile. The scene with Jeff the night before had been, well, horrible. There had even been a brief appalling moment when she thought it might become physical, frighteningly physical, after she had stupidly made an attempt to snatch the keys from his hand, and had caught a flash in his eyes – only a flash – that had been distinctly chilling. In the process of trying to retrieve the keys, which he was holding out, teasing and grinning, she had tripped and fallen against the edge of the coffee table and banged her shin, hard. It had hurt at once, the sharp, deep pain of bruised bone. And it had made her cry out and double up,
and when she did that, Jeff had dropped to his knees beside her, dropping the keys in the same instant, and said, ‘God, sorry, babe. Sorry, it was only a game, honest. Only a bit of fun—’

But none of it had been fun. None of it. Not for weeks, with Jeff, and certainly not since Morris had arrived. It had, instead, been an increasing and debilitating strain, filling the days with a kind of tension that entirely obscured not just any pleasure in work, but work itself. Add to that the uneasy feeling that she had brought the current chaos on herself because she was too appeasing, too needy and – if Morris was right – too afraid to be left alone with the unwelcome reality of her own personality, and the mess she was in was unbearable.

It was equally unbearable to think of sharing it. The brief pride she had felt in assuming responsibility for Morris now seemed pathetic and impractical. The choice of Jeff as a boyfriend seemed to be nothing but the calamity Cara had always said it would be. The fact was that in the case of both men, she, Grace, couldn’t continue, let alone finish what she had chosen to start. She was stuck with a couple of wrecks, and the last thing she could face, in her predicament, was asking for help and admitting that she couldn’t cope with what she had elected to take on.

‘So you’re going deaf and dumb on me, now, are you?’ Morris said. ‘Can’t hear, won’t speak.’

Grace said, ‘You can’t stay in Winton Square.’

‘And you say I can’t stay here.’

‘I said I can’t have anyone staying here that I can’t trust.’

‘It was just the once,’ Morris said. ‘Just a joke.’

‘I’m not discussing it.’

He looked suddenly sober. ‘Have you told your mother?’

‘No.’

‘Are you going to?’

‘No.’

Morris sighed. He said, ‘You’re a funny one.’

Grace reached for her bag. ‘I’m going to work.’

‘And me?’

‘You can stay here. For now. Or you can go out. But if you go out, you can’t come back till I’m back. I’m not letting any keys out of my sight.’

Morris leant against the wall and folded his arms. He said, ‘I didn’t mean this to happen. I didn’t mean to be like this.’

Grace glanced at him. ‘Nor did I.’

‘Duck, what are we going to do?’

Grace moved towards the front door. As she reached it, she turned briefly and said, ‘I have no idea.’

Jasper spent the afternoon with Brady and Frank in his studio. He and Brady had known each other since the early days of the Stone Gods – those heady, promising days of the Parlophone signing, which had not so much come to an end as petered out almost invisibly, so that when it transpired that Brady had been playing his bass in another group for at least two years, there had seemed to Jasper absolutely no point in taking it personally. So he hadn’t. He had simply gone along to the gigs where Brady was now playing, and integrated himself comfortably with the other musicians, one of whom was Frank, who could really play any woodwind or even brass instrument you asked him to, and the three of them had settled into an easy routine of jamming together occasionally, mostly in Jasper’s studio, because why wouldn’t you use a great facility like that if it was available to you?

In any case, even if it was never mentioned, there was the kind of money in Jasper’s life that there never had been and never would be in either Brady or Frank’s. They had
been jobbing musicians all their lives and even if they didn’t actually envy Jasper his studio and the advantages of the life provided by his missus, they weren’t going to turn their noses up at what he had to offer, either. On those jamming afternoons, they brought a token handful of beers with them, but then they let Jasper crack open the red wine and go down to the Fulham Road for fish and chips. It was assumed, though never spelled out, that the two of them would take whatever work was offered in pubs and clubs anywhere within reason, and that Jasper wouldn’t, because he didn’t need to. The discrepancy didn’t stop them thinking he was a good guitarist; they just knew he was a guitarist who could play for pleasure and not for necessity, and that he would never know what it was like on the last tube home at night on the Northern line. Neither of them, out of tact, ever mentioned the fact that Jasper hadn’t actually been offered a gig in a decade, and that the continued existence of an agent was quite unnecessary.

That afternoon, they’d all been in a nostalgic mood about the death, a few months earlier, of Dave Brubeck, and had spent hours leisurely riffing on ‘Take Five’ and ‘Blue Rondo’, until Frank said he had to get back – his daughter was singing in a gig at a pub in Hoxton and he’d promised he’d go – and he’d taken himself off towards the Underground, carrying the clarinet and the piccolo he’d brought in an old nylon gym bag.

‘Don’t budge, Brade,’ Jasper said to Brady. ‘No need to go too.’

Brady put a final chip in his mouth and pushed the paper they had been wrapped in away. He said, ‘I’m in no hurry.’

Jasper leant across the kitchen table and poured more wine into Brady’s glass. It was an unspoken rule that even if drink was taken into the studio, food should never be. When it came to eating, they always trooped obediently up to the
kitchen, even if they never bothered with plates. It would have been disrespectful, somehow, to have contaminated the music and instruments with the odours of frying.

Brady said, ‘Of course, I was at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 2007. I saw him live.’

Jasper took a sip of wine. ‘You said.’

‘Did I?’

‘You probably told us a dozen times this afternoon.’

‘Jeez,’ Brady said, ‘Mo’s always telling me I drive her nuts, repeating myself. She says it’s quite boring enough the first time, let alone the tenth. D’you get that?’

‘Not really.’

‘Well,’ Brady said, ‘it’s different for you, isn’t it? I mean, Susie and Mo might both be women, but they’re from different planets. I can’t get Mo to budge from the house and Susie’s never in hers.’

‘No.’

‘‘Course, we only had the one lad, Mo and me, and what does he do but up and off to Vancouver. I often wonder if it’d have been different with girls. Girls stick around more, don’t they? As far as family goes, seems to me girls are a better investment.’

Jasper licked a forefinger and pressed it into the salty crumbs that remained in his fish-and-chip wrapper. He said mildly, ‘Not really. In my experience.’

Brady glanced at him. He said, ‘You must be so proud of your girls.’

‘I am.’

‘All chips off the Susie block. Success stories, every one.’

Jasper gave a small sigh. ‘Looked at like that, yes. Every one.’

‘Looked at like what?’

‘Career,’ Jasper said. ‘Ambition. Getting somewhere in business. Yes, all three of them.’

Brady waited a moment. He watched Jasper lick more batter crumbs off his finger. Then he said, ‘You OK, Jas?’

Jasper thought a moment, then he pushed his reading glasses up on top of his head. He said, ‘I dunno, really.’

‘Something happened?’

Jasper squinted at his wine. He said, ‘Well, yes. Susie’s useless old dad turns up, doesn’t he, out of the blue. But it’s not that. Well, it’s not just that. It’s what you said. She’s never here. There’s no life
here.
There’s me and the parrot –’ He turned and threw an affectionate glance over his shoulder towards the bird, who was apparently dozing on her perch, ‘– and we kind of wait. Except we don’t really know what we’re waiting for.’

‘Her old dad, eh?’

‘He showed up in Stoke. Grace took him in. I’ve never met him. I don’t want to meet him, to be honest. If I met him, I’d want to flatten him. And the girls all getting into a flap about him doesn’t help. It doesn’t help at all. It just makes me—’ He stopped. He said, ‘D’you know, Brade, it wasn’t wonderful before. And now it’s a whole lot worse.’