Balancing Act by Joanna Trollope Read Free Book Online Page B

away. He glanced up the stairs, longingly.
    ‘Not Fred,’ Maisie said indistinctly.
    Ashley bent down and scooped Fred up with her free arm. He protested at once. Ashley said to Leo, ‘I’ll take him to the bathroom with me.’
    ‘I thought you wanted to be peaceful.’
    Ashley climbed back up the stairs, Fred kicking under one arm. As she stepped round Maisie and Leo she said, crossly, ‘Fat chance of that.’
    Leo didn’t look at her. He put a hand out and took Maisie’snearest one. He said, ‘Maisie is going to help me clean the walls and the carpet. And she is going to think how to say sorry.’
    Maisie glared at him. She said again, but without conviction, ‘I didn’t mean to.’
    From the bathroom came the ringtone of Ashley’s mobile.
    Leo said, unnecessarily, ‘Your phone.’
    Ashley swung Fred into a different position. ‘It’ll only be Ma again.’
    ‘This cottage—’
    ‘I don’t want to talk to her about it. If she’s going to buy it, whatever we all think, why doesn’t she just get on and do it?’
    ‘She’ll have her reasons.’
    ‘She can always justify anything she wants to do.’
    Leo got to his feet and bent to pick Maisie up. He said, ‘I think that’s my line.’
    Ashley regarded him, the towel and Fred clasped awkwardly in her arms. She said dangerously, ‘Are you criticizing my mother?’
    ‘I wouldn’t dare. I know how much we owe her.’
    There was a brief silence.
    Then Ashley said, without looking his way, ‘But you resent it.’
    Leo adjusted his hold on Maisie. He said carefully, ‘No, I don’t resent it. I just think that sometimes all the good stuff comes at quite a price.’
    ‘For you.’
    ‘For us.’
    Ashley stood looking at him. Both children were still and silent. She said again, ‘For you.’
    Maisie put her face into her father’s neck. He took a deep breath. ‘Yes,’ he said, almost defiantly, ‘for me. But not exclusively for me. For
us.
It doesn’t help the dynamic between
us.
’
    Ashley hitched Fred a little higher in her arms. ‘So what are you going to do about it?’
    ‘I – haven’t decided,’ Leo said. He gave Maisie a brief kiss and then he added, with marked emphasis, ‘Yet.’
    Cara was making a salsa. She had assembled all the ingredients – an avocado, plum tomatoes, a small scarlet chilli – like a cookbook photograph on the breakfast bar in the flat, and had put beside them the huge stone pestle and mortar that they had bought during a holiday in Lombardy. The pestle and mortar didn’t come out of the cupboard very often: Cara had read an article on the arthritis that afflicted huge numbers of women in the Third World who spent hours each day grinding the ingredients for their basic food. Grinding was clearly only to be undertaken for reasons of occasional and specific authenticity.
    She had bought a rye sourdough loaf from an artisan baker to accompany the salsa. It sat at the end of the breakfast bar in a stout, gusseted brown-paper bag, and beside it lay a slab of Italian butter, on a small slate. There would also be olives and fennel-infused salami. It was the kind of deliberate and delicious Saturday lunch that she set herself to prepare almost as a therapy, as a way of winding her mind down from the intensity of the week, after Pilates had done the same for her body.
    It was hard, switching off. You could tell yourself that you were infinitely more effective at work if you had thoroughly re-booted at the weekend, but this was one of life’s many occasions when the theory was impossible to put into practice. After all, she and Dan were now, really, the engine of the company. Between them, they had rescued it from its hand-to-mouth state, and given it a promising future as well as a healthy present. There were now twenty-four people in the office and more than two hundred inthe factory, including an excellent new website guy in the former, and a factory manager, Neil Dundas, who didn’t, like his predecessor, want to