‘All I’m asking,’ Jeff said, ‘is that you give me a bit of a break.’
It was seven thirty in the morning and the design studio was empty, save for the two of them. Ben and Michelle, Grace’s assistants, would not be in until eight. Jeff, who normally avoided coming to the factory, as if merely being on premises owned by Grace’s family would somehow contaminate him, had known that he would catch Grace there alone, on a Monday morning, if he was early enough.
He was not only early, but also shaved, and bearing flowers and a round golden box of chocolate truffles. Grace was in her weekday uniform of jeans, battered knee boots and a fisherman’s sweater, with no make-up and her hair held back by an old bandana of her father’s. She had never felt less like smiling.
She stood by the window, with its checked curtains, where she had been when Jeff walked in, and looked past him. He was still holding the flowers. Pink oriental lilies. Where had the poor things been flown from? He held them up.
‘If you aren’t even going to speak to me, babe, then I might as well put these in the bin.’
He made a move towards a galvanized dustbin that stood at the end of the display table. It had ‘Paper Only’ painted neatly on the lid in black.
‘Not in there,’ Grace said automatically.
He dropped them on the floor. ‘You don’t want them, do you?’
Grace said nothing.
He held his empty hands out in supplication. ‘Please, babe.’
She slowly turned her gaze to look at him and said, ‘Please, what?’
‘Please gimme a break.’
‘Why?’
‘Because—’ He stopped, and then he said, dropping his hands, ‘Because you mean the world to me.’
Grace waited a moment, and then she said levelly, ‘No, I don’t.’
He took a step towards her, over the flowers.
‘Please don’t come any nearer,’ she said.
He stopped a yard from her. ‘I mean it, babe. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about the weekend. I don’t know what got into me. I missed you. I missed you all the time. It … it just felt kind of … pointless, being there without you.’
Grace moved backwards, away from him, and put the central unit between the two of them.
‘I’m not interested, Jeff.’
‘Let me explain a bit more—’
‘No.’
He waited a moment. Then he bent, picked up the lilies and put them on the nearest surface, in front of Michelle’s computer. He said, his voice catching, ‘Don’t say this is the end, babe.’
Grace sighed. She folded her arms. ‘I’m the one who needs a break.’
He said, suddenly eager, ‘I’ll give you anything you want.’
‘I don’t trust you. I need time away from you. I need not to see you.’
His smile was hopeful, boyish. ‘Anything you say. I’ll do anything you say.’
The door to the studio opened. Michelle, wearing her quilted parka and an enormous knitted bobble hat, like something from a Scandinavian fairytale, came in on a gust of cold air and chatter.
‘Oh my God, it’s Arctic out there, and icy. I was sliding all the way from the bus. I mean—’
She stopped. She looked at Grace. Then she looked with visible interest at Jeff. ‘Whoops. What have I walked into?’
‘He’s just leaving,’ Grace said.
Michelle’s eyes slid from Jeff’s face to the lilies lying across her keyboard.
Jeff said to Grace, ‘OK, he’s leaving. If you promise he can come back again.’
‘I’ll have you back,’ Michelle said. ‘Any time.’
Grace stepped sideways and picked up the lilies. She held them out to Jeff. ‘Take them.’
‘Only if—’
‘I need space,’ Grace said. ‘I need time to think. I don’t know.’
Jeff took the lilies. He said with fervour, ‘I’ll take that as a yes.’
‘Just go.’
He walked to the door and paused, his free hand on the handle, turning to look back at Grace with meaningful ardour. Then he let himself out and they heard his booted footsteps resounding down the outside staircase.
Michelle dropped her bag. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘And all that before breakfast.’
‘Sorry that you—’
‘Don’t mention it. I like to start the week with a bit of drama. So that’s the famous Jeff?’
Grace nodded.
Michelle said, ‘Handsome is as handsome doesn’t?’
Grace said, ‘It wasn’t a very good weekend.’
‘He works for that garden centre, doesn’t he? Out Trentham way?’
‘Yes,’ Grace said shortly.
‘What does he do there?’
Grace didn’t look at her. She said, ‘It’s a bit vague …’
‘Depressing, you mean,’ Michelle said. ‘It must be one of the most depressing garden centres in England. And plants are supposed to cheer you up, aren’t they? Living things, and all that.’
Grace looked away in silence.
‘OK,’ Michelle said, ‘I get the message. I can take a hint. I just like to know what’s going on, same as you do, if only you’d admit it.’
She took off her bobble hat and hung it on the bentwood coat rack in the corner. She said, ‘And a little bird told me that your mum’s buying a house in Barlaston.’
Grace stared. ‘What?’
Michelle unzipped her parka.
‘You can’t keep anything to yourself round here. You know that. Especially if it concerns your mum. So it’s true, isn’t it? I can tell from your face, just as I can tell that if your Jeff wasn’t so hot you’d have given him the Monday-morning push.’ She paused by the central unit and looked down at the golden box. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Chocolates! And I’ll have to eat them all, won’t I? Because you simply couldn’t face them, could you?’
There was nobody at home, in Radipole Road, except the parrot. Jasper had left one of his comical doodle notes on the kitchen table, saying that the cleaner couldn’t come because she had a child off school, and that he would be back about six, possibly with Brady and Frank, and if so, he’d get a takeaway for all of them.
Apart from the note, the kitchen table was empty, save for a Susie Sullivan jug of small, forced irises. The irises had no doubt come from Holland. The jug was from the Rise and Shine range, twenty years old and still selling.
Susie crossed over to the birdcage. Polynesia, busy investigating something under one wing, affected to take no notice. She was at the far end of her perch and, apart from the small clucking sounds integral to her search, offered no greeting.
‘Polynesia,’ Susie said, ‘just because I’m not Jasper—’
At the sound of his name, Polynesia extracted her head and eyed Susie sideways.
‘I’m sorry it’s only me,’ Susie said. ‘But it’s better than being alone, isn’t it?’
Polynesia clucked briefly. Then she sidled along her perch so that she was nearer Susie, but not near enough to be touched.
Susie said, ‘You’ve had him to yourself all weekend, after all.’
Polynesia considered this. Then she edged back the way she had come and put her head back under her wing.
‘It’s a bit much,’ Susie said, ‘to have a parrot that won’t even speak to me. I think I’ll get one of my own for the Parlour House, just to put your beak out of joint.’
‘You bugger off,’ Polynesia said, indistinctly but unmistakeably from among her feathers.
Susie laughed. ‘You’re a baggage, Polynesia Moran. You really are. Isn’t it lucky for you and me that Jasper seems to like baggages?’
Polynesia’s head shot up again. ‘Polynesia Moran,’ she said. ‘Jasper Moran. South-west six.’
Susie went across the room, by force of habit, to the kettle. Beside it, Jasper had left a pile of mail, the more interesting envelopes slit open with their contents re-inserted sideways, to indicate that he had read them. The girls – well, not Grace so much, but Cara and Ashley – had been saying for years that Susie should have an assistant, someone dedicated to running her life, from organizing her correspondence and the diary to collecting her dry-cleaning. But she had always refused. She had office staff both in London and Stoke, she said, and she had Jasper, who had been in at the very beginning of the company, which was more than any of the girls had been. In any case, she didn’t want more people in her life, more people to accommodate and consider.
‘What she means,’ Ashley said to Cara, ‘is that she doesn’t want anyone to know exactly where she is or what she is up to. And, situated as I am right now, I can’t blame her.’
Jasper never questioned anything. He knew she didn’t mind if his studio was full of sundry musicians, and by the same token, he didn’t mind if she was, unpredictably, somewhere other than Radipole Road. They had, she thought, and not without a touch of self-congratulation, reached a point of immense mutual respect and comfortableness, and the liberty they both cherished would only be diminished by the introduction of an assistant – however delightful – who would, of necessity, know every detail of their lives.
They had, after all, managed an overall harmony for the past thirty years that was nothing if not impressive. They were still in only the second house they had ever bought, and if it now boasted a hi-tech music studio and sound system and a lavishly enormous hot-water tank, it was still basically no more than a Victorian terraced house with a fifty-foot garden – now cunningly landscaped – and a paved patch in front where passers-by threw crisp packets and stringy wads of chewing gum. As they both had a horror of pretension in any form, this house and a mildly amateur way of approaching the nuts and bolts of Susie’s business life suited them admirably. Cara and Ashley and Daniel could chastise Susie for a lack of professionalism as much as they liked, but they knew that it was all about control. If you stayed in the house you knew, with domestic arrangements that weren’t just familiar but entirely manageable, with as few intimate human commitments outside the immediate family as possible, then not only were you free to concentrate all your energies on creativity, but you remained undeniably in charge.
And that, Susie thought, flicking through the envelopes, is what suits me. I’ve been in command of my own life since I got my first bank loan, and nothing – nothing – is going to take that away from me. She put the last envelope down on the stack – nothing there that needed any immediate action on her part – and carried the kettle over to the sink to fill it. Coffee first, and then a brisk walk to the office with the details of the Parlour House on her laptop. She wouldn’t explain or justify her decision; she would simply announce it. And add that she had had an offer accepted of forty-five thousand below the asking price.
Polynesia had shunted herself along her perch once more until she was as close to the bars of her cage as she could get.
‘You bugger off,’ she said again.
Susie was talking in the steady, unhurried way she had that was so difficult to argue with. Her laptop was open on the boardroom table, showing a shot of the Parlour House taken from the lane, with an improbable hydrangea-blue sky behind it.
‘It really was that colour on Saturday,’ Susie said. ‘And the house is so sweet – just a cottage really. I made the offer at lunchtime and Mrs Whatsit from Lyndhurst had said yes by mid-afternoon. Exchange of contracts by the end of the month and completion to suit me. Perfect.’
Ashley did not look across the table at her sister. She knew, from a sidelong glance, that Cara was looking down at the figures in front of her, and not at either the screen or her mother. Cara wanted a normal Monday meeting, as scheduled. She was trying to move on, round an immovable, immutable obstacle. Susie, on the other hand, only wanted to talk about the house.
‘I’ll use it when I’m in Stoke. I’m there a day or two a week, as it is, and maybe Jasper will come and join me sometimes.’ She paused, and then she said, ‘I’m longing to show it to you. And the PR people. It will be great for publicity.’
Neither Ashley nor Cara said anything. Cara was scribbling in the margins of her notes, her head bent. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, so that Ashley had a clear sight of the tautness of her jaw. It looked as if her teeth were clenched again. Ashley’s dentist had told her that she must make a conscious effort not to grind her teeth, and to relax her jaw and her shoulders. ‘Drop both,’ he’d said. ‘Your shoulders are not attached to your ears.’
Susie looked across the table at Cara. ‘Where’s Dan?’
Cara didn’t look up. She said, ‘He’s got a meeting, Ma.’
There was a brief pause. Then Susie said, ‘We always have a Monday meeting, the four of us.’
‘I know,’ Cara said. She put her pen down. ‘But it was the only time this particular management consultancy could see him.’
Susie sighed. ‘Not that again.’
‘Ma, it’s a recognized process of development. We’ve been through all that – you know we have.’
‘And I’ve accepted it. From fifteen to twenty is a logical progression—’
‘But not,’ Ashley said, ‘what we could do.’
Susie drew the laptop towards her and leant forward to study the picture on the screen.
Cara said, ‘Could we talk about gifting, instead?’
‘Of course,’ Susie said, not looking up.
‘It’s growing,’ Cara said. ‘The personalized stuff is just flying out, particularly on the internet. Can we—’
‘No,’ Susie said suddenly, shutting the laptop smartly. ‘No, we can’t. This will lead on to you telling me that I must delegate more, that it’s no longer all about me and I must recognize that. And I don’t want to hear it again.’
‘But you just said—’
‘Cara,’ Susie said, ‘I will talk about anything, but I am not going to be lectured. And it has nothing to do with family, before you accuse me of that, either. I am buying this house because I must have somewhere of my own – somewhere I can think, and draw, and plan, somewhere I am not badgered to let go of this, or change that, or delegate the other, until I sometimes feel that nobody remembers where this company, and all the people who depend upon it, came from in the first place.’
Ashley put the heels of both hands into her eye sockets and pressed until there were preoccupying explosions of colour behind her closed lids. This moment was not unlike today’s breakfast, in essence, when Fred, holding his plastic bowl of cereal out sideways, his round brown eyes fixed on her face, had slowly and purposefully tipped it upside-down. Watching the cereal fall to the floor was very like watching her mother breathe now, with deliberate regularity.
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.’