Balancing Act Read Online Free Page A

and their hair tied up in nets. She’d be respectful of that legacy, she thought. She’d empty out this warren of gimcrack little rooms and turn the ground floor back into a single space, with the steep stairs rising unrailed out of the centre, and a solid fuel cooker and a wood-burning stove, and families of jugs on the windowsills. Maybe rag rugs on the floors – modern rag rugs in bright colours. Waxed stone floors, with modern heating pipes underneath so that when you came down to make tea in the morning and let the dog out and the cat in, and you noticed that the yew tree in the garden was spangled with new spiders’ webs—
    Stop, Susie thought. Stop there. The girls do not want me to buy this house. Daniel does not want me to buy this house. Leo has not expressed an opinion, and Jasper, as usual, has said if you really want it, doll, you go right ahead and buy it. Neither of which is a satisfactory response in any way, because all Leo and Jasper mean is that they’d like to side with the girls and Daniel, but they don’t quite dare. Evenso, I hear them. I hear what they don’t say as loudly as what the others do say. Even Grace, who I think had been crying when she rang, although she insisted she was fine. I thought she was going to Edinburgh, but she seems to have changed her mind. And she wouldn’t come this morning. I wanted her to come with me to the Parlour House, but she wouldn’t. She said I had to make up my own mind on my own. She said that’s what I’ve always done. I suppose I have. Only child, absent parents. No, correction: only child, hopeless parents, as well as absent. It teaches you to know what you need. What you want. And I, standing here on a Saturday morning with the winter sun shining on the dirty windows of the building where my great-grandfather worked most of his life, want this.
    Susie went slowly up the stairs, a narrow cottage staircase, the walls marked with faint rectangles where pictures once hung. The upstairs rooms were what her grandmother would have called poky – a favourite criticism from a woman whose husband installed her in a large and solid Edwardian house in Barlaston, which he had designed in imitation of one of the Wedgwood family houses, right down to the flying stone staircase in the portentous central hall and the proliferation of red and blue Turkey carpets.
    Susie had loved that house. It was her childhood home, after all, as her grandparents had brought her up. Her grandmother had been born in a back-to-back in Burslem, and had found herself transported to become the mistress of Oak View, in Barlaston, well south of the six towns and the pits and the pots of her growing up. She’d met Susie’s grandfather when he’d interviewed her to be an apprentice fettler for his newly opened pot bank in Hanley. She’d left school on the Friday, and her mother had found her a job at Snape’s pottery on the following Monday. Young Mr Snape chose all his own staff in those days, liking as he did to know everythingabout everyone who worked for him. And he’d looked at Jean McGrath, and imagined the silica dust that was so difficult to extract from the fettling shop in the factory getting into her unquestionably precious lungs and causing the horrors of emphysema, that infamous potters’ rot, and had decided then and there that he had other ideas for her.
    Susie had adored her grandfather. He had known even as a boy that his spirit could not bear to follow his father into agriculture. He apprenticed himself to Royal Doulton, working his way swiftly up the ranks, trading on the side as he went – local coal, local barge transport along the canals, imported china clay, imported pit props, machinery imported from Germany to make porcelain, from Birmingham to make flatware. By the time he was thirty, he was able to open his own pot bank in Hanley, making pottery spongeware. By the time he was forty, he was married to Jean McGrath, and had installed his wife and infant son