The Second Chance Café in Carlton Square

by Lilly Bartlett

  ‘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

  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.

  ‘Daniel’s out tonight,’ I tell Mum as we pull up the rest of the carpet together. Despite my promise to myself, the words are out before I can stop them.

  She halts her ripping to glance at me. Her gingery bob has come loose from its hair tie and she keeps swiping it back behind her ears. She is pretty, though she doesn’t usually wear much make-up. Only when she’s doing things like trying to impress Daniel’s parents. Then she goes for full-on slap, even though my mother-in-law doesn’t bother with it herself.

  ‘And you hate him a bit, right?’ she asks.

  Instinctively I want to deny it, even though I’ve just brought it up. ‘I’m trying not to, Mum, and I know you’re going to tell me I shouldn’t.’

  But Mum shakes her head. ‘I was going to say that I understand. After you were born, when your father got to go out in his taxi every day, I wanted to puncture his tyres. I wanted to puncture him sometimes. He used to complain about how hard it was driving around all day. I would have bloody loved to trade places. Believe me, you ’aven’t got the monopoly on resentment.’

  Resentment. Is that what I’ve got? ‘It’s just so hard,’ I say.

  ‘I know, love, but it gets easier when they’re in school.’

  ‘Nursery?’

  ‘University,’ she deadpans.

  I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Mum understands. She and Dad didn’t wait long after their wedding to have me either. Everyone keeps telling us how lucky we are to be young parents. We’ve got more energy, they say. We’ll still be youngish when the children are grown. But what about the decades in between? At the moment, it looks like a long time between now and then.

  Mum gathers me into a carpet-dust-filled hug. ‘It’s always harder than you think it’s going to be. Thank goodness I had your Gran and Auntie Rose. Your Granny Liddell was no help.’

  ‘Thank goodness I’ve got you and Dad and Auntie Rose now,’ I say.

  Mum nods. ‘Your Dad’s a dark horse, isn’t he? He’s so much better with the twins than he ever was with you. He’s got more confidence now than he did then. He was terrified of making a mistake with you.’

  ‘Weren’t you terrified?’ I’m constantly worried that I’m doing it all wrong or that I’ll damage the twins somehow. I could be feeding them too much, or not enough, leaving them to get too hot or too cold, smothering them with cuddles or not paying them enough attention, pushing them to learn new things or being too laid back, letting their faces get too dirty or wiping them so much that they’ll end up with allergies. They might be underdressed or overstimulated, under-cuddled, over-coddled, disgruntled or disappointed. Just off the top of my head. I could give you another ten lists like that every single day.

  ‘Of course I was afraid to mess up,’ Mum says, ‘but I didn’t have a choice. You had to eat and be held and changed. If I didn’t do it, who would?’

  That’s exactly how I feel. It’s not that Daniel can’t do it too. He’s just not as good at it as I am. And lately he’s seemed to leave more and more to me while he gets on with his life.

  I always seem to have toddlers hanging off me when I try getting on with my life. Just try being glamorous with ladies who lunch when you’re saying, ‘Get that out of your mouth,’ every two minutes.

  Not that I’ve ever been glamorous. And my friends aren’t ladies who lunch, but you see my point.

  Today it’s my turn to host everyone at the house, so despite having had to shove most of the toys under the sofa and the unfolded laundry into the closet, I’ve got the easy part. Just try going anywhere with the twins. Trying to move a circus is less challenging.

  ‘Maybe if they didn’t act like they’d invented nuclear fusion every time they changed a nappy, I wouldn’t mind so much,’ my friend Melody says, talking about husbands as she shifts her child to her other breast. Speaking of having children hanging off you.

  Melody and Samantha, Emerald and Garnet – four women w
ho at first had no more in common with me than leaky boobs and sleepless nights – are the reason I’m holding on to my sanity. But when your world has shrunk to leaky boobs and sleepless nights, that can be enough.

  We’re covering our usual ground – what we’ve done since we saw each other last week and who’s aggrieved about what – and, also as usual, I’ve got to keep my eyes glued to Melody’s face and away from her feeding daughter. Not because breastfeeding embarrasses me. Not at all. When I was breastfeeding my boobs came out anywhere the twins needed to feed, and we’re only in my house anyway. When they legislate against boys wearing their jeans so low that you can see their bollocks from the back, I’ll agree that we should be hiding feeding babies under tea towels and tablecloths to protect the public’s sensibilities.

  It would be perfectly normal for Melody to feed her toddler, Joy. Which she does. She just happens to also like to feed her five-year-old, who’s not even sitting in her mother’s lap. She’s got her own chair. Her feet nearly touch the floor.

  ‘Because it’s such a huge favour to care for his own child,’ Samantha throws in.

  I’m not the only one who thinks that nearly school-age children really ought to be drinking milk from cups. Samantha doesn’t bother trying to hide her eye roll. Melody doesn’t bother pretending to ignore it. Samantha won’t say anything with Melody’s daughter here, though. She may be one of the toughest women I’ve ever met, but she’s never cruel.

  ‘Well, that’s not really fair,’ Emerald points out, brushing a non-existent speck of something from her pristine top. Not that a crumb could have come from any of the food on the table. She never eats the buttery croissants or packets of biscuits that the rest of us scoff. ‘The men do work all day.’

  I wince at her terrible choice of words. What is it that we’re doing all day – and night – if not working? But Garnet, Emerald’s sister, nods, adding, ‘My Michael works late into the night sometimes.’

  ‘Boo hoo,’ Samantha bites back.

  ‘Not to mention weekends.’ Emerald ignores Samantha’s dig at her sister. ‘Anthony’s a workhorse too.’