Balancing Act Read Online Free PDF

and climb under the Paisley quilts, secure in the knowledge that life in that solid household ticked on as comfortably and reliably as an old clock.
    And then, suddenly, her grandfather died of a stroke. One moment, it seemed, he was on the telephone in the room that had always been designated his office, rather than his study, and the next he was lying on his side of the marital bed upstairs, under a sheet, waiting for the undertaker. When he had fallen in his office, crashing against a bookcase, he had managed to cry out, incoherently but loud enough for his wife, watching racing from Doncaster on the television across the hall, to get to her feet and make her purposeful but unsteady eighty-four-year-old way to his side. He was conscious, but he could not speak. By the time Jean had manoeuvred herself on to the floor beside him and heaved his head into her lap, he had had a second stroke, and was dead. In the time it had taken for the final furlongs to be run at Doncaster, he had gone from being upright and articulate to dead. It took rather longer for Jean to reach a point where she could move his head to the floor, and get herself to her feet and a telephone.
    Susie wondered if her father would come from Lamu, for the funeral. Her grandmother said that she was perfectly indifferent.
    ‘If he comes, he comes. I wouldn’t turn him away, but I wouldn’t welcome him, either.’ She had not glanced Susie’s way. ‘And we’d neither of us thank you for trying to persuade him. He’s got the information and that’s all I want done.’
    He didn’t come. But it seemed half of Stoke-on-Trent did. St Peter’s Church was packed, and the service was relayed on loudspeakers into the churchyard, where the original Josiah Wedgwood lay under his table tomb, fenced in with iron railings.
    After the funeral, Susie and Jasper returned to Oak Viewwith Jean, who informed them that she was selling the house and moving to a bungalow on Barlaston Green, near the library. She said, looking straight at Susie, that she wanted no arguing. Then she left them at the kitchen table with the familiar blue-and-white Burleigh teapot and a ginger cake of her own making, and went slowly and alone up to bed.
    Susie had looked at Jasper across the table and said, sadly, ‘I never managed to tell her that I was pregnant.’
    Cara Moran was born in London in 1980. Her sister Ashley followed two years later, and then, after a further gap of six years, there was Grace. In the course of those eight years, it became plain to Susie, if not to Jasper, that the Stone Gods’ early promise was unlikely to come to anything much, and it became simultaneously evident to both of them that there was in Susie both an unstoppable force and a remarkable capacity to achieve. The old pottery building in Fulham was sold to a developer, and a purpose-built unit was rented instead on a small industrial estate in Lavender Hill. A new corner site was acquired for the shop, with a warren of haphazard offices in the basement underneath, and the pottery gradually transformed itself into a powerful, unmistakeable, fresh modern take on traditional spongeware.
    And then when Grace was eight, and the lower ground floor of their second Fulham house had been newly converted into a music studio for Jasper – ‘Don’t ask me about it,’ Susie said to her oldest daughter. ‘Just don’t ask me’ – Susie’s grandmother developed bronchitis and then pneumonia and died in the University Hospital of North Staffordshire. She left her pearls to Cara, her amethysts to Ashley, her cameos to Grace and her two platinum Swiss watches to Jasper. Everything else – which was nothing like it had been in her husband’s heyday – she left to Susie, including all the documentation relating to the purchase and subsequent saleof the factory where Jean McGrath had gone to apply for a job as an apprentice fettler all those decades before.
    For Susie, there was no decision to be made. She was in