Read Online Balancing Act by Joanna Trollope - Free Book Online Page A

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. ‘Iknow 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,