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do with it?’
    ‘They would like to have the kinds of kitchens and home lives where spongeware is just right. Handmade, but not as ritzy or formal as bone china. Accessible. Approachable. Pretty. Kitchen-table china you could eat your crumpets off.’
    Her grandfather watched her for a while. Then he said, ‘I’m not buying that factory back for you.’
    Susie put her chin up. ‘I’m not asking.’
    He grunted. ‘What’s your plan then?’
    ‘I’m going to London.’
    He grinned. ‘Of course you are. What else would you do at twenty?’
    ‘But I’ll be back. I’ll be back before I’m thirty.’
    He put a hand out and brushed her cheek. ‘I’ll be dead by then.’
    ‘Oh, I’ll be back long before you’re dead.’
    ‘I’ll be worth something to you, dead.’
    She said soberly, ‘I don’t want to think about that.’
    ‘No good not being realistic.’
    She dropped her hair and looked directly at him.
    ‘And there’s something else to tell you and Grandma. I’ve met someone. He’s studying industrial design, but that’s not where his heart is. His heart’s in music. He plays the guitar in a group. He’s called Jasper Moran.’
    Susie and Jasper set up their joss-stick-scented first home in a London basement, in Fulham. It was damp and chilly, and they adored it, festooning the ceilings and walls with Indian scarves and saris and cooking ferocious chilli con carne on a Baby Belling cooker which emitted blue sparks if you touched it with damp hands. Jasper’s group, the Stone Gods, had been signed up by EMI – their recording label, Parlophone, was to their profound gratification the same as the Beatles’ – and they were plainly bound for great things. While Jasper was out playing or recording, Susie had no intention of staying at home to water their infinite cascades of spider plants. She got a job in the half-hearted shop of a rundown pottery in Fulham, which made – to her mind – cod artisan pottery decorated with clumsy faux-naïf transfers. Within three months, she had improved the look of the shop, and within six, the sales figures. At the end of a year, she bearded the owner in the nicotine-thick fug of his disordered office and offered to buy him out.
    He winked at her. He had long grey hair tied back in a ponytail with a length of red woollen tape.
    ‘What with, ducky?’
    ‘A loan from the bank,’ Susie said.
    ‘And what bank is going to give a twenty-one-year-old a big enough loan to buy out a hundred-year-old pottery and retail premises?’
    Susie stared at him. She had no intention of telling him that the loan would come from her grandfather’s bank, in Stoke-on-Trent, and that her grandfather was tacitly underwriting the loan.
    She said, ‘I have the loan already.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Really,’ she said. She indicated the heavy black handset phone that sat in the muddle of his desk. ‘Ring them and ask.’
    Nineteen seventy-eight, the year Susie turned twenty-two and Jasper twenty-four, was momentous for both of them. The Stone Gods got to number four in the charts and played live on
Top of the Pops
; Susie bought the pottery and named it Susie Sullivan after her grandmother’s Irish mother, an immigrant to Liverpool whose family, along with hundreds of others, had been recruited to Stoke to work in the Potteries; and they got married in a registry office, Susie in a cream lace mini dress with trumpet sleeves and a floppy-brimmed straw hat wreathed in daisies. Jasper wore a purple velvet suit with flared trousers and took his bride off to Morocco for their honeymoon, whence she returned with ankle bracelets and the backs of her hands stippled with indigo. The basement flat was exchanged for a narrow, dilapidated house with mushrooms along the skirting boards and panels of Formica across the fireplaces, and when the cheerful chaos of their London life became briefly too much for them, Susie would drive her yellow Citroën 2CV, with its frog-like headlamps,up to Oak View,