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That doesn’t mean we’re not from different worlds, only that the differences are more about our accents and experiences, not the things that really matter. That’s why I do give him full marks for trying to fit in, even if the slang sounds wrong with his plummy pronunciation. Besides, he totally ruins it with his next remarks.
‘I’ll just put the seeded bloomer in to toast, yah? It’s the last of the loaf before Waitrose delivers again. I think we’re out of hummus too.’
He sounds straight off the estate, doesn’t he?
I stop wringing the sopping cloth into my half-drunk coffee cup. If I’m ever kidnapped, the police will be able to trace my last movements through the string of unfinished hot drinks I’ve left behind. ‘Having your seeded bloomer toast before or after you fold clothes won’t make a difference to your lateness, you know.’
When his face breaks into a cheeky smile, one dimple appears on the left side. That dimple! It hints at a mouth that’s usually lopsided with merriment. He can make me laugh at myself like nobody else. It’s one of the things that’s always charmed me. It would probably work now, but I’m too tired. ‘I think I’ll be more efficient, energy-wise, if I eat first,’ he says, glancing at his phone. ‘You’re right as usual, though. Just let me answer this one email. I’ll be quick.’
But he’s not quick enough. By the time he finishes his toast I need him to change Grace while I do Oscar. Our children are messy at both ends. So the laundry will sit in a heap for another day as my award for Homemaker of the Year slips further away.
Daniel waits till he’s at the front door to break his news casually to me. He thinks it cushions the blow to kiss me when he does it. Kisses or not, it feels like an ambush.
‘I’ve got to meet with Jacob quickly after work tonight.’ He nuzzles my neck. ‘Are you wearing a new perfume? It smells so good.’
That would be the tea tree oil for the spot that’s come up on my forehead. ‘But you were out just the other night.’
‘That was last week, darling.’
‘Was it? Still, do you have to? I’ll be working at the café all day with Mum. I thought you could do tea for us tonight.’
‘Yah, I could have if you’d told me before now, but I’ve already said yes to Jacob. He says it’s rahly important, otherwise I’d cancel. I won’t be late, though. And don’t worry about supper for me. If it’s easier, I can grab a bite with Jacob while I’m out. I love you!’
Yeah, sure it’s easier. Easier for him. ‘Love you too,’ I say quietly.
And I do. I’m crazy about him. I just wish he was, I don’t know, more helpful. No, that’s not the right word, because he is almost always ready to help. It’s his follow-through that needs work.
When the twins were tiny we were such a solid team: cuddling, changing, feeding, fussing, staring for hours in wonder and bewilderment. We did it all together. Even though he hasn’t got the feeding equipment to be of much practical use, he’d sit with us while I nursed our babies so that I wasn’t the only one awake.
Now that they’re toddlers, he sleeps through the night even when we don’t. He will do what I ask of him, usually without grumbles. But I’ve become more of a lead singer to his backing vocals and the thing is, I never wanted a solo career.
Grace raises her arms and mewls for a cuddle as soon as Daniel leaves, fixing me with the same long-lashed blue-eyed stare that he has. She’s as irresistible as he is, with her golden hair and dimples. Oscar’s got my family’s red tinge, which thrills Mum. It would be nice, though, for one of my children to have my dark hair or even the cowlick at the front that I can’t do anything with. Not that one should ever wish a cowlick on their children.
There’s no time on the walk to my parents’ house for a proper grizzle about Daniel getting to go out tonight. Even walking slowly, it only takes fifteen minutes, plus time to stop for the toys, dummies and shoes the twins jettison from the pushchair along the way.
It’ll be no use whinging to Mum when I get there either. She didn’t manage to hold our family together – raising me, making ends meet and looking after Dad while working her cleaning jobs – by being soft. She’ll only be her usual sensible self and tell me that I’m overreacting. It’s not like Daniel is out every night or comes home pissed. You heard him. It’s a once-a-week thing at most. And the world won’t end because he didn’t fold our pants. I’m just overtired. Looking after the children is a lot harder than I imagined.
Says every parent in the world. Still, I wouldn’t trade them for anything. Well, maybe I would, just for half an hour so I could have a bath without an audience. I’d want them back, though, as soon as I was towelled off.
‘Good morning!’ I call into Mum and Dad’s house as I let myself in with my key. ‘You have a special delivery: two toddlers, fairly clean and ready to play!’
They’re all in their usual spots in the lounge – Mum and Auntie Rose on the settees and Dad in his old reading chair that Mum has tried to get rid of for years.
Dad’s face creases into a broad smile when he sees his grandchildren. ‘Come ’ere, me loves!’
It’s hard to unbuckle them with all the wriggling. They’re in Dad’s lap as fast as their little legs will carry them across the lounge floor. ‘There’s me angels,’ he murmurs as he kisses the tops of their heads.
‘Hah, you should have seen them at breakfast.’
‘They’re angels to me.’
He means it too. I don’t know what happened to the strict father I had to deal with growing up. He’s turned into a giant marshmallow of a man. ‘How come you never spoiled me like that?’
‘I would have if you’d smelled like biscuits,’ he says.
‘That’s not what they smelled like an hour ago.’
You’d have thought Mum and Dad had won the lottery when I asked if they’d look after the twins for a few hours a day till I can get the café ready to open. Mum had the whole house baby-proofed, including Dad. She saw her chance with his chair, reciting a litany of childhood diseases that might lurk in its nubbly striped fabric. But Dad offered to get it cleaned and she hasn’t thought up a way around that. If she ever does manage to get rid of it, I just know Dad’s going to go too.
He glances up. ‘How are you, love?’
‘Okay. Just tired, Dad.’
‘She’s burning the candle at both ends,’ Auntie Rose says. ‘It’s too much, if you ask me. Not that anybody ever does.’
Auntie Rose likes to say that, but she knows how important she is in our family. We joke that that’s why we keep her under lock and key. It’s not really the reason. It’s just nice to have a laugh about it with her. Otherwise it’s a bit sad. ‘You’re right, Auntie Rose, but I can’t stop now. Besides, it’s not for much longer. Mum and I are stripping the tables and chairs today. We’re nearly there.’
‘You’ll be just as busy after the café opens, you know,’ Mum reminds me as she goes to tidy up around Dad’s chair. She never sits still for long. ‘You keep talking like it’s all going to calm down suddenly. I just hope it’s not too much.’
Of course it’s too much, but Mum knows what it means to me to open this café. I didn’t spend five years getting my degree not to use it just because my uterus decided it suddenly wanted to play host to a couple of embryos. There’s a lot at stake. Not least of which is the wodge of my in-laws’ money that’s going into the business.
Being as rich as they are, they invest in all sorts of things, though Daniel doesn’t like to rely on them. We didn’t even accept help from them for our wedding. But that’s another story.
When they offered to loan me the money for the café officially, there was a lot of discussion about it before Daniel and I agreed. I thought it would be better to borrow money from family instead of an impersonal bank. Now I’m not so sure.
They’re not putting pressure on me or anything. I’d feel better if they did. But every time I promise to pay them back, Philippa waves me away with a cheerful ‘Don’t worry about that’, like they’ve already kissed their investment goodbye. Sometimes I think I should have risked the bad credit rating with the bank manager. At least I wouldn’t have to spend every holiday at his house worrying that he thinks I’ll never come good on the business.
I know I can do this. I’ll have to, won’t I? A year ago I wouldn’t have thought I could handle having twins and look at me now. Frazzled, exhausted and barely managing, but I haven’t screwed them up too badly yet.
When we hear the knock at the door, Auntie Rose says, ‘That’ll be Doreen.’
Mum opens it with the key from around her neck. I wasn’t kidding about the lockdown around here.
‘Where are the babies?!’ Doreen exclaims, not waiting for an invitation inside. ‘’Ere, for elevenses.’ She hands Mum a carrier bag full of biscuits. ‘They were on special, two-for-one. Ha, like these two!’
Doreen is one of Auntie Rose’s lifelong best friends. She smokes like a wet log fire and there are questions over exactly what happened when her husband disappeared back in the eighties, but beneath her over-tanned cleavage and lumpy wrap dresses there beats the heart of an angel. Just don’t cross her or try cheating at cribbage.
There used to be four of them, till my gran died eight or nine years ago. She was Auntie Rose’s sister. Now it’s Auntie Rose, Doreen and June, whose husband hasn’t disappeared, so she mostly does her visiting with everyone in the evenings at the pub.
Both twins scramble off Dad’s lap to see what Doreen’s got to offer. Oscar doesn’t come empty-handed, though. Shyly, he holds his stuffed duck out for Doreen’s inspection.
‘He’s just like you, Emma,’ Auntie Rose says.
‘Not Grace too?’ I say, though I’m just fishing for compliments. Greedy me, wanting credit for all the best traits of my children. But Grace has Daniel’s outgoing nature.
‘Nah, she’s a tearaway like your mother. It skipped a generation.’
Mum ignores my questioning smile. I love when Auntie Rose lets slip about Mum’s younger days. When I was a child it gave me useful ammunition against her rules. Now I’m just curious to know more about my parents.
Auntie Rose gathers Grace up onto her ample lap while Doreen settles next to her with Oscar, and Dad tries not to look too jealous that they’ve got his grandchildren. ‘Off you go now,’ Auntie Rose says to Mum and me. ‘That café ain’t opening itself. We’ll look after the wee ones.’
‘Okay, but we’ll be back at lunchtime,’ I say as Mum hands me a bag full of paint stripper and brushes. ‘I’ve got my phone if you need me. Mum does too.’
Mum manages to get me into the car after I kiss my babies about a hundred times and remind everyone about the nappies, bottles, extra clothes, extra nappies and the bottles again.
‘It’s only for a few hours, Emma,’ Mum reminds me on the short drive back to Carlton Square.
‘You were probably just as bad when you had to leave me.’
‘I couldn’t get away fast enough,’ she says, smirking into the windscreen.
‘Liar. I remember Gran telling you off for being a hover mother.’ My gran was cut from the same no-nonsense cloth as Auntie Rose and my mum.
‘Oh, she was a great one for repeating whatever she read in the Daily Mail,’ Mum says, still smiling.
‘The skip’s arrived,’ she notes as she carefully manoeuvres the car into the free spot just behind it. ‘Let’s take up those carpets before we do the furniture.’
Chapter 2 (#u05098df4-1b55-59c7-a878-a8a046e56c89)
The café isn’t much of a café yet, but it’s perfect in my imagination. In reality it’s still just the old pub that sits across the square from our house. It did have a brief life as a café before I took it over, but the owners never really got rid of its pubness. That’s a blessing and a curse.
The waft of stale beer hits me as usual when I unlock the double doors at the front, though it looks better than it smells. There’s a big wraparound bar at the back and shiny cream and green tiles running waist-high along all the walls. It’s even got two of those old gold-lettered mirrored advertisements for whisky set into the walls at the side of the bar. When we first came to see inside, Mum climbed up the ladder to inspect the ceiling. It’s pressed tin, though like the rest of the place, stained by about a hundred years of tobacco smoke.
She throws a pair of work gloves and a face mask at me. ‘Put your back into it. Start in a corner where it’s easier to get it up.’
That’s easy for her to say when she’s got muscles on top of muscles from all her cleaning jobs. She can even lift Dad when she needs to. Luckily that’s not too often these days.
The carpet pulls away – in some places in shreds – setting loose a cloud of God-knows-what into the air. ‘Open the windows, Mum!’ I shout through the mask.
When the dust settles, there’s no beautifully preserved Victorian parquet floor underneath. This isn’t one of those BBC makeover programmes where gorgeous George Clarke congratulates us on our period features.
The floor is made up of rough old unfinished planks.
‘That’s even uglier than the carpet,’ I tell Mum when she comes over for a look. ‘We can’t afford a whole new floor.’ Even if we had the extra money, there’s no way I’d hand that capital improvement to the council, who owns the lease.
‘Let’s have a think about this,’ she says, leading me to one of the booths by the open window where, hopefully, the slight breeze is clearing away whatever was in that carpet.
The booths are as knackered as the rest of the pub, but at least they’re wooden so they won’t need re-covering. Unlike all the chairs piled in a heap upstairs. I don’t even like to think about what’s stained their fabric seats over the decades.
Suddenly Mum reaches into my hair. ‘Hold still, you’ve got something– It’s a bit of… I don’t know what it is.’ Then she squints at my head. ‘Is that a grey hair?’
My hand flies to my head. ‘NO! It can’t be.’ I’m only twenty-seven.
‘It’s only because your hair is so dark that I noticed it. I started getting them at your age. Don’t worry, it’s only one…’ She reaches for my head again. ‘Or two. ’Ere, I’ll get them.’
‘Ow, don’t pull them out! You’ll make more.’
‘That’s an old wives’ tale. Let me just get–’
‘Get off me!’
As I twist my head away from my mother’s snatching fingers, I look out the window and straight into two strange faces. They look about as old as God and his secretary and as surprised to see us as I am to see them.
‘Oh! Excuse us,’ says the man. ‘We thought we saw someone inside…’ He grasps the woman’s hand. ‘We’re terribly sorry to disturb you.’
‘No, no, don’t be sorry,’ calls my mum through the window. ‘We’re renovating the pub.’
The man hesitates. ‘It’s been decades since we’ve been inside.’
‘It smells like it,’ I murmur, then realise how rude that sounds. ‘Since it’s been open, I mean.’
‘Would you like to come in?’ Mum asks. ‘You’re very welcome.’
‘We shouldn’t bother you,’ says the woman, but I can see that she’s dying for a snoop.
‘It’s no bother, really, come in. Just a sec, I’ll open the door.’
They’re even older than they looked outside, but they come nimbly through the door like they own the place. They’re both wearing long dark wool coats against the February cold snap.
‘I always hated that carpet,’ says the woman, seeing the pile I’ve made in the corner. ‘It stank to high heaven. But then so did a lot of the men who drank ’ere.’
‘Present company excepted.’ The man removes his flat cap and bows, showing me the top of his balding, age-spotted head. ‘Carl Brumfeld. Pleased to meet you. And this ’ere’s Elsie.’
Their accents are as local to East London as my family’s is. After I make introductions, Elsie asks, ‘Are you the new landlord?’ Her face is nearly unlined, but her hair is snowy white, spun into an intricate sort of beehive on top of her head. Auntie Rose would say she’d look younger with it coloured, but she says that about everyone because she does hair.
‘It’s going to be a café,’ Mum tells them. As she relays this, her pride even tops her bragging about me going to Uni. And that was monumental.
‘Oh,’ they chorus. ‘That’s a shame,’ Carl says. ‘We were hoping to get the old place back. This is where we met, you see.’
‘When was that?’ I ask. Just after the dawn of time, I’m guessing.
‘Nineteen forty-one,’ says Elsie. ‘We were children during the war. We used to sit together in that booth right there.’
‘Wow, seventy-five years.’ Mum whistles. ‘What’s that in anniversaries? Diamond is sixty. Of course you couldn’t have been married so young!’
‘We’re not married now either,’ Carl says.
‘Carl is my brother-in-law,’ Elsie adds.
Which does make me wonder why they’re holding hands. ‘You’ll come back when we’re open, won’t you?’ I ask. ‘Maybe you’d like to sit in your old booth for a cup of tea.’
Where I’ll be able to winkle their story out of them. A café is the perfect business for a nosey person like me to run.
‘We’d like that, thank you,’ Carl says. ‘You’re keeping the booths, then? It would be nice for someone to take account of history around ’ere instead of tearing everything down to build flats.’
‘The booths are staying,’ I assure them.
Carl’s words stay with me after they leave. It would be a shame to strip the pub of its history if we don’t have to. Except for the carpet. The history of spilled pints and trodden-on fag ends will have to go.
