Balancing Act by Joanna Trollope

immediately fascinated by people management and, even more, by customer service and the sales floor. Like him, too, she had seen the fearsome old-school managers in the company as providing an admirable set of ethics rather than merely some kind of outdated authoritarianism, and had been keen to learn from them. After ten days and only one tentative date, he had known that he wanted to marry her when she turned to him at work and said earnestly, ‘Dan, what does success look like?’
    Well, he thought now, tramping steadily round the boardroom table, his iPad in his hand in case anyone knocked, success does
not
look like haring up to Stoke to fan the flames of a histrionic family farce. The priority this week – long-planned and the culmination of months of preparation – was the final decision about whether to engage a management consultancy to outline the best way to take the Susie Sullivan brand to another level. Would they, as Dan and Cara wanted, consider finally exporting their stoutly defended Made in England product after two decades of rigorously focussed home sales, or would they, as Susie wanted, put their energies into consolidating and extending the home market they already had? (Ashley, he thought, would waver until the last moment and then side with her sister and brother-in-law.)
    But Susie had just swept the meeting aside. It had fallen to Dan to ring the management consultancy team and tell them that the meeting – planned for months and with considerable difficulty given the complexity of everyone’s commitments – was now cancelled, owing to an unforeseen family crisis.
    ‘But it isn’t a crisis, is it?’ Daniel had said to his mother-in-law. ‘It’s a shock and it changes the personal dynamics, but it isn’t something that needs instant action. No one’s in intensive care, after all.’
    Susie had looked at him with an expression he was familiar with, from board meetings.
    ‘He’s in Grace’s
flat.
In her spare
bedroom.
It’s a crisis for Grace, Daniel, at the very least, every day it goes on.’
    Daniel had held her gaze. ‘Put him in a hotel. I’ll organize it, if you like. I’ll deal with it.’
    Susie had dismissed the suggestion with a single gesture of her arm. ‘I can’t do that. He’s my father.’
    ‘You
can
do that. He’s been a disgraceful father.’
    ‘Stop it, Dan. Stop it. You are the last person to have an opinion about family, having virtually no dealings with your own, as far as I can see.’
    He’d leant forward very slightly and said, without raising his voice, ‘You’re going to Stoke, Susie, because you want to, aren’t you? Isn’t that the truth? You want to dash to Stoke, and you want the girls to go with you, as validation. So that’s what’s happening. What you
want.
’
    He’d waited for her to be angry, but instead her shoulders had slumped and she had said sadly, ‘Oh Dan, if only it was that simple.’
    But she’d gone anyway. And so had Cara and Ashley, and the atmosphere in the office beyond the closed boardroom door was as unconducive to his usual steady application to the task in hand as it could be. He left his circuiting of the table and went to stand by the window that looked down, past other buildings, old and new, to the river. In the cold light it shone like a sheet of steel, gleaming even under a dull sky. The company was, at this precise moment, flat on budget, two per cent up on last year. But it should be more. It
could
be. He reached out the hand that wasn’t holding his iPad and beat it lightly against the glass. If he had anything to do with the future of Susie Sullivan pottery, it
would
be. Whatever the obstacles.
    ‘You don’t want me here,’ Morris said.
    His tone was entirely without reproach. He was sitting on Grace’s sofa, still wearing his strange assortment of outdated hippy clothing, with the addition of pale-blue woollen socks on his bony feet.
    Susie, sitting opposite him on one of Grace’s Italian plastic