‘Am 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?’
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.’
Brady leant back. He said slowly, ‘And there’s me thinking the sun never went in for you.’
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ Jasper said, ‘I never wanted Suz to be different. I’d never have stopped her, because I never wanted to stop her. She’s amazing. She’s a force of nature. I’m proud of her. I admire her. But it’s me, Brade. I don’t know where I fit in now, with the girls in the business too. I thought of offering granddad services to Ashley, but then I thought, you sad old git, what are you, begging for favours because you haven’t pulled your bleeding finger out all these years? You haven’t made the effort, you’ve just lain dozing under the mango tree watching for lunch to fall off on to your stomach.’
‘Hey,’ Brady said, ‘steady on.’
‘Sorry,’ Jasper said. ‘Sorry.’ He tapped his glass. ‘It’s probably making me maudlin.’
Brady looked round the kitchen. He said, ‘You were a hell of a father. You brought up three kids here.’
‘Yup.’
‘Homework …’
‘The kids’ friends, toast, spaghetti …’
‘And now it’s you and the bird.’
‘Mostly.’
‘And this old boy …’
‘He hasn’t changed things, really. He’s just woken me up to it all, I suppose.’
Brady leant forward. He said, ‘You’re saying you’re lonely, Jas?’
Jasper took his reading glasses off his head and put them on the table. Then he rubbed his eyes. ‘I’m not lonely,’ he said. ‘I don’t seem to do lonely, really. It’s something else. It’s … it’s more that I don’t know what I’m for, any more.’ He looked across the table at Brady. He said, ‘Can you tell me, Brade, what the point of me is?’
For Christmas, Cara had bought Daniel a Boardman Performance Hybrid Pro bike. It had a super lightweight frame, and had been designed to use all the features of track cycling that would benefit the leisure or commuting rider. Daniel was just such a rider. Cara might prefer to commute by bus or on her feet, but Daniel had always, except in the foulest weather, cycled to work.
Since the arrival of the Boardman – carefully researched and selected by both of them – Daniel had wanted to do more than commute by bike. Most weekends he took himself off on a serious cycle circuit, one involving both distance and hills, and returned home on the kind of endorphin high that he knew benefited every other aspect of his life.
But today was rather different. Today, the prospect of a challenging bike ride was more welcome than usual, the psychological benefits being even more attractive than the physical ones. Cara was in the Fulham Road shop with Ashley and the marketing team, Susie was on her way up to Stoke to try and sort out the situation with Morris and Grace, and he, Daniel, was in the office in a deeply unsettled frame of mind.
The trouble was Cara. Daniel had never had any quarrel – well, not any quarrel of consequence – with Cara. He and Cara saw eye to eye on everything, really, and certainly everything of importance. It was a source of both pride and pleasure to him that they shared so much, morally and philosophically. They might fine-tune details rather differently, but they came at life and other people from a satisfactorily similar standpoint. In business and social life, Cara was Daniel’s best ally, as he was hers. They had got through many a tricky meeting by exchanging fleeting glances which confirmed to one another that they were neither mistaken nor alone.
But last night, Cara had returned from Radipole Road after an extremely important meeting with her mother, which they had carefully discussed in advance, and said that she wasn’t going to talk about it.
‘But you must,’ Daniel said unwisely. ‘You have to. It was a crucial conversation. We planned it. You must tell me what she said.’
Cara was in the middle of opening a packet of bresaola. She put it down on the kitchen counter. ‘I mustn’t do any such thing.’
Daniel came and leant on the other side of the counter. ‘Cara,’ he said, ‘this is a joint approach. You and me. For the future of the company. Our future. I thought you were for it.’
She looked at him. ‘I am.’
‘Well, then.’
Cara pushed the bresaola aside. ‘Ma was upset,’ she said. ‘Well, of course. Of course she was. We knew she would be.’
‘No,’ Cara said.
‘What do you mean, no?’
‘I mean that she was upset in a way I hadn’t reckoned on. Distressed. Angry, but personally angry.’
Daniel waved a hand. ‘Well, what did you expect? I mean, obviously she was going to react like that.’
Cara went on looking at him. ‘But I didn’t think it would make me feel like it did. It didn’t occur to me that I’d—’
She stopped. She looked down at the counter. ‘I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about Ma.’ She stopped again, and then she said, as if to herself, ‘Poor Ma.’
‘What?’ Daniel said.
Cara moved away from the counter. She said again, but louder, ‘Poor Ma.’
‘Poor? Your mother poor? When the only obstacle to our—’
‘Stop it!’ Cara shouted.
Daniel was startled. He stood still and watched her. She had her back to him now, and he wasn’t sure if she was crying. He said softly, tentatively, ‘Cara?’
She flung her head up, not looking at him. She said, ‘I’m going to have a shower,’ and then she walked past him, into their bedroom, without another glance.
He knew she hadn’t slept. He hadn’t, either. He had no idea how to resolve the situation, being a complete novice at not having Cara’s compliance, Cara’s support, Cara’s unasked-for solidarity. When the faint, late dawn began, he finally fell asleep, and woke to find Cara’s side of the bed empty, and a note by the coffee pot to say she had gone into work early. She had put an ‘x’ at the bottom of the note, but it looked perfunctory. It wasn’t a real kiss; it was just a punctuation mark. He had showered and dressed, made a double espresso – never a sensible start to any day – and cycled to work with a heart as heavy as lead.
And now, three hours into the working day, his heart was no lighter. Cara had scarcely acknowledged him – or, rather, had displayed none of the marked affection he was frankly longing for – and had then taken off for the London shop without saying, as she usually did, when she would be back. Daniel could settle to nothing. Disciplined, focussed, energetic Daniel could think of nothing at all except that, for some reason he could not fathom, Cara had elected to side with her mother for the first time in their lives together, and the result was that he felt utterly and painfully excluded.
Sitting here at his desk was plainly completely pointless. All he was doing was fretting, nagging and needling away at himself in a way which, on top of a bad night, was exacerbating rather than resolving the problem. He stood up. At the next desk down the room, beside Cara’s empty space, sat Kitty, their assistant, her smooth fair head bent conscientiously towards her screen.
‘Kitty,’ he called.
She gave a little jump. ‘Yes?’
‘I’m just going out.’
‘Oh.’
He knew she wouldn’t ask where. Or why, for that matter. He made himself smile at her. ‘I’ll be a couple of hours, OK? Can you field my calls? I’ll leave my phone here.’ He made a show of putting the phone down beside his keyboard, and smiled again. ‘In case Cara calls.’
The country-house hotel, just south of the six towns, where Susie often stayed on her visits to Stoke gave her her usual bedroom, and Morris a much smaller one at the back with a narrow, very basic bathroom and a bed covered in mustard-yellow candlewick. Morris said it was fine. There was a bed, hot water and a telly: what more could he need? He’d smiled at the receptionist and told her he’d grown up in a house just like this one, only a few miles away. She didn’t smile back, and informed him she came from Riga.
In the enormous lounge of the hotel – once a stately drawing room and now oppressively crowded with sofas – Susie had ordered tea for herself, and a brandy and soda for Morris. The receptionist from Riga had brought both in silence and Susie’s thank-yous had sounded unnaturally loud and forced to her, in consequence. There had been no other guests in the lounge but them, and the fire that had been lit in the grate much earlier had now burned down almost to silence too. Susie handed Morris his glass of brandy and the accompanying can of soda, poured a cup of tea, added milk, and then sat back and waited.
Morris decanted soda water into his glass very, very slowly. Then he set the can down carefully, took a considered sip, and put the glass down too. Finally he said, ‘I was trying to do something for myself, Susan. I was trying to spare Grace. After she told me she had no idea what to do with me.’
Susie said nothing. She drank her tea and looked at the dying fire.
Morris went on, ‘She likes that Jeff, you know.’
Susie took another sip of tea. She set the cup down on the nearest side table with a small bang. She said, ‘Well, we don’t like him for her.’
Morris crossed his legs. He was now wearing plum-coloured socks and his knitted waistcoat was garnished with an abstract ceramic brooch. ‘We can’t choose people for other people,’ he said. ‘We can’t dictate that. We like who we like and we don’t like who we don’t like. That’s human nature.’
‘It’s still not helpful,’ Susie said, ‘to encourage destructive relationships.’
Morris took another sip of brandy. He said, ‘I didn’t, Susan. I just accepted his offer of somewhere to stay, to get me out of Grace’s hair. I thought she’d be pleased. I thought you’d like me to solve the problem for you.’
‘It doesn’t solve any problem to have Grace or me in any way obliged to Jeff.’
Morris looked at her. He said, slightly piteously, ‘What was I to do, Susan, till I can move into your house?’
She gave an irritated little shrug. ‘I’d have done what everyone said I should have done in the beginning, and put you in a hotel.’
‘This’ll be cheaper.’
‘And more complicated. I bet Jeff leapt at the chance.’
Morris linked his hands around his knees. ‘I can help his boss, see. I’m good with my hands. He says there’ll be plenty to do out at Trentham Gardens, fixing things. I’d like to have something to do.’ He glanced at Susie. ‘You’re not listening to me.’
She withdrew her gaze from the fire. ‘No, I’m not.’
‘Thinking about Grace? Lovely girl.’
‘No, actually,’ Susie said.
‘What then?’
‘Nothing to do with you.’
Morris looked unoffended. He released his hands and picked up his brandy glass. He said, ‘It’s not like I thought it’d be, you know. I thought you’d have a big house up here, full of rooms, and everyone would be busy and sorted. I thought I’d find myself a corner somewhere and help out a bit somehow, and we’d all bed down together after we’d got over seeing each other again. But it’s not like that, is it? It’s not settled and sorted in the least, it’s all up in the air and you’re never in the same place for two minutes and I’m beginning to wonder if this husband of yours exists, or whether you’ve just invented him. And the girls don’t seem right to me, none of them – none of them quite, well, stable. Everything in motion all the time, everybody rushing everywhere—’
‘Please stop,’ Susie said.
He leant forward and said kindly, ‘You upset?’
‘No.’
‘Susan—’
‘Just don’t say any more. You’re in no position to say anything.’
Morris took another sip of his brandy. He said, ‘I know you think I’m the last straw, turning up like this. But maybe I’m not.’ He leant back again. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘I’m just what you need.’