Balancing Act by Joanna Trollope Read Free Book Online

flat, an empty fridge and several messages from her sisters telling her to ring Ma, and from Ma telling her to call, however late, her victory – if that’s what it was – suddenly felt hollow and pointless. She dumped her bag in a corner, had a hot shower and got into bed wearing socks and mittens and a T-shirt. Then she rang her mother.
    ‘Gracie! Safe in Edinburgh?’
    ‘I didn’t go, after all.’
    ‘Didn’t you? Why not? Where are you?’
    ‘I’m home, Ma. I just didn’t feel like driving all that way.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘And Jeff’s mates – it’s his weekend, really. He’s better alone.’
    ‘Well,’ Susie said, ‘I’m tucked up at the hotel in Staffs. If you aren’t in Edinburgh, sweetie, you can come with me tomorrow, can’t you?’
    Gracie snatched a tissue from the box beside her bed and blew her nose. ‘Don’t think so, Ma.’
    ‘Why not? I’d love you to come. I’d really like—’
    ‘I can’t decide for you. I can’t be anything to do with your decision.’
    There was a brief silence at the other end of the line. Then Susie said, ‘I imagine you’ve talked to the others.’
    ‘Of course I have.’
    ‘They don’t want me to buy it – Cara and Ashley. Nor does Dan. What about you?’
    Grace suddenly felt worn out by the general intractableness of everyone close to her. She said, wearily, ‘You have to decide alone, Ma. And you have to have good reasons for your decision.’
    ‘So it’s a no from you, too.’
    ‘It’s a can’t-talk-about-it-any-more-tonight from me.’
    She had turned the light off after that and lain awake forhours, not so much going over the evening as circling endlessly round it. In the morning, her phone registered three texts from Jeff – all saying the same thing, as if he had jabbed angrily and repeatedly at the Send button and thus sent the same message three times – and two missed calls. She dressed, tied her wild red curls up into a scarf, and went over to the Potteries Museum café for breakfast: lukewarm tea in a metal pot, yoghurt and a limp Danish pastry, served with a warmth of manner that threw Jeff’s behaviour into disagreeably sharp contrast. Then she went back outside and stood on the corner of Bethesda and Albion streets, and looked down the hill at the wide, shallow valley below, full of tumbling roofs, and considered what she should do with the day – or, even, the life – ahead of her.
    Behind her was the sturdy Victorian building, striped with lines and arches of sky-blue tiles, that hid her flat from view. Her flat. Her two-bedroom flat with its surprising reception space and magnificent north window which was ideal for drawing next to, and which had sold the flat to her. She had bought it two years ago, before she met Jeff, when she had been promoted to run the design studio at the factory. It had been a real achievement, both actual and symbolic. A flat, a company car, a serious position which gave her valuable independence from the rest of her family in London. So, what did she do? What she did was look at all those achievements, and then compromise them all by taking up with Jeff. Gorgeous Jeff, with his jealousy and insecurity and resentment making him as dangerous and alluring as Heathcliff. She stared at the complicated road junction ahead of her, as if it somehow symbolized her inability to choose a path and set off determinedly down it, without looking back. In her pocket, her phone beeped again, indicating another text. She pulled it out and looked at it.
    ‘Sorry,’ Jeff had written. And three kisses.
    Maisie had drawn, with a green felt-tipped pen, all over her brother’s face and then her own arms, and the backs of her hands. Then she had picked up a second pen, a brown one this time, and climbed the stairs with a pen in each hand, the tips tracing wobbly lines up the white walls to the very top. At the top, she sat on the carpet, dismantled the pens and smeared the contents all around her, including on her new