Balancing Act Read Online Free

back to Stoke.’

CHAPTER TWO
    T he Parlour House stood end on to the lane. It was built of softly coloured old brick, with a central door under a small pedimented porch, a white-painted window either side and three on the floor above. It had a reproduction coachman’s lantern beside the front door –
That’s going
, Susie thought – and an oval black iron plaque screwed to the end wall which faced the lane, with THE PARLOUR HOUSE embossed on it in white. There was a wicket gate, a brick garden wall, a square of rough grass and a yew tree. It was, to Susie’s eyes, deeply and uncomplicatedly satisfactory.
    It was also empty. The owner, tiring of waiting for a buyer at the house’s initial and unrealistic price, had given up trying to sell it occupied, and had gone to live in a bungalow near her daughter in the New Forest. She had left behind pink carpets, a fretworked fitted kitchen and the coachman’s lantern. She had not, the agent said, been a Staffordshire woman, but had come up to the Potteries when her late husband had got a job with one of the local companies making hotel ware, and had subsequently been marooned in Barlaston by his death only two years into retirement.
    ‘I was born in Barlaston,’ Susie said to the agent.
    The agent smiled at her. ‘Moran isn’t a very local name.’
    ‘It’s my married name,’ Susie said. ‘I was born a Snape.’
    ‘Ah,’ said the agent, who had been born in a suburb of Birmingham.
    ‘Barlaston was full of Snapes. And then I married a Moran.’
    The agent glazed over slightly. He had thought, judging by Susie’s jeans and boots and hair, that she was going to be one of his classier and more entertaining clients. But she was behaving more like the kind of people who researched their genealogy on the internet. He didn’t actually care where she came from or what she was called. He just wanted her to accept the reduced asking price, pay her deposit and get the sodding house off his books. The owner was a pain, ringing up from Lyndhurst umpteen times a week and demanding to know why he wasn’t presenting her with a fat cheque. He made an effort. ‘Barlaston must have been lovely back then.’
    ‘It’s lovely now,’ Susie said indignantly.
    He thought of the shop front in Barlaston’s tired little shopping parade which read RETIREMENT PLANNING LIMITED and said gallantly, ‘Well, if you were born here …’
    ‘It’s a gorgeous village,’ Susie said. ‘It was a very
deliberate
choice of Wedgwood to move their factory out here. For the workers.’
    The agent said nothing. He had stupidly handed the Parlour House keys to Susie, so he couldn’t even jingle them in a jolly way and suggest that they get a move on.
    As if she’d read his mind, Susie shifted the keys in her hand so that she was holding the main one ready. ‘Tell you what,’ she said. ‘You have my name and number, and I can hardly nick a whole house, can I? Leave me to look round it again on my own and I’ll drop the keys back at your office.’
    He hesitated. ‘If you’re sure …’
    ‘More than sure. In fact, I can’t decide with you hovering. If you want to have any chance of a sale, your only hope is toleave me to think on my own.’ She eyed him shrewdly. ‘You want a sale?’
    ‘Mrs Moran, I … Yes.’
    ‘Then scoot,’ she said. She glanced at him. Bad skin. Worse suit. She put her hand on the wicket gate and said dismissively, ‘The keys will be through your door by lunchtime.’
    Susie supposed, as she stood in the small, damp-smelling front room, that when her great-grandfather worked in this building, the whole ground floor would have been the dairy – stone-floored, slate-shelved, with a pump somewhere central and a long gutter for the water and waste to run away, and a milky, cleanish, sourish smell in the air that you could never get rid of. It would have been cold and draughty, clanking with churns, and the dairymaids would have worked bare-armed with chapped hands