Free Balancing Act by Joanna Trollope Page B

shock.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘It’s awful, Dan, to have to be responsible for someone you really can’t bear.’
    Daniel had tightened his embrace. He had never had much time for his own parents, but luckily had always been deemed the difficult one, so leaving his filial obligations to his two sisters had merely provoked their resigned acceptance of the inevitable. They had, indeed, formed a small trade union of two responsible, concerned adult children, shouldering the consequences of a third – male, of course – ducking out of his duty. When he had married Cara, his sisters could add ‘gold-digger’ to his list of failings and cut another notch in their bedpost of virtue. Their general attitude was to be very sorry for him, for his lack of concern and sensitivity, but never to chastise him. As his elder sister, Sally, said to Cara at every opportunity, ‘He knows who he’s let down, Cara. He knows it perfectly well. As I expect you do. Neither of you need reminding by
me
.’
    Daniel let Sally’s attitude slide straight off him. As far as he was concerned, she was his sister in name only. She had not cared for his arrival when she was three, and she failed to learn to care for him subsequently. Indeed, she had extended that failure to appropriating their youngest sister, Julie, into her team, excluding Daniel to such an extent that when he met Cara he unleashed upon her all the emotion that had been banked up throughout his childhood with no outlet to offer release. He was like someone, Cara told him, delighted but also slightly dazed, who had a perfectly good home inside their head, but who desperately needed a house to put it into. He’d thought about this, and then he’d said, ‘The thing is, Cara, that you are everything to me. Everything.’
    He had been terrified that she would want children. He didn’t – not because he didn’t like them, but because he knew he lacked the capacity for sharing. He might regret that, but he didn’t think he could change it. But Cara was a girl, andgirls were different. Girls, he thought, wanted babies. They just did. They wanted a man, and then they wanted a baby. But Cara didn’t, actually, want a baby. She was very clear about it, and wholly unapologetic.
    ‘I don’t want children, Dan. I never have. What’s wrong with that?’
    He had been flooded with relief.
    ‘Nothing. I just thought—’
    ‘I really like children. I hope Ashley and Grace both have children. I’ll be a fabulous aunt. But I don’t want my own. I expect a shrink would tell me it had everything to do with Ma being so preoccupied with the business while I was little, so I always felt starved of her full attention or something. I don’t know. I’m not sure I really care. I just know myself well enough to know that if I had a baby, I’d be a martyred mother, and I wouldn’t dream of asking anyone, let alone my children, to look after me in my old age.’
    Dan had gazed at her. He’d said, ‘I’ll look after you.’
    ‘No, you won’t. We’re going to work to pay for our own old ages. And before you reproach me for being a selfish cow, I’d like to say that I don’t think my choice is better than other women’s choices, just different. My grass isn’t greener, it’s just another kind of green.’
    Daniel had reached for her, and held her hard against him. ‘I can’t believe my luck,’ he’d said.
    In many ways, and despite the familiarity borne of a decade of marriage, he still couldn’t. When she’d arrived in the sales department of the company where he was already on the buying team, having graduated there from a Saturday job on the tills, he had been immediately attracted both by her looks and her attitude. Her name, Cara Moran, meant nothing to him, but her serious focus did. Like him, she had been good at mathematics and physics at school – she told him quite seriously, early on, that she had consideredbeing an air-traffic controller – and she had, like him, been