The Big Little Wedding in Carlton Square

by Lilly Bartlett

  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 – some places in shreds – setting loose a cloud of God-knows-what into the air. ‘Open the windows, Mum!’ I shout through the mask.

  But 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, and 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 swipi
ng it back behind her ears. She is pretty, though she doesn’t usually wear much makeup. 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.

  That’s all right for Daniel, but I always seem to have toddlers hanging off me when I try getting on with mine. 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 nappie, 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 who at first had no more in common with me than leaky boobs and labour pains – are the reason I’m holding on to my sanity. But when your world has shrunk to leaky boobs and labour pains, 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 breast-feeding embarrasses me. Not at all. 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.

  I can’t watch Melody feeding her daughter because her daughter is five years old. She’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.’

  When Emerald and Garnet sit beside each other they look like someone has taken the same drawing and just coloured them in differently. Their eyes are almond shaped and they have identical long slender noses, angular faces and full lips. But Garnet’s got nearly black eyes and her thick straight shoulder-length hair is cut in a heavy blunt fringe and coloured a russet red. Emerald has the same haircut but her colour is even darker than mine – almost a true black – and her eyes are nearly black too. It’s very striking against her pale skin.

  ‘Poor Michael has even had to cancel holidays,’ says Garnet.

  Melody covers her daughter’s ears when she catches the look on Samantha’s face. Samantha doesn’t disappoint. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, at least they get holidays,’ she replies. ‘Not to mention sick days and bonuses and at least some bloody idea about all the hours they’ll have to work. I’d trade places in a heartbeat. They’re not sitting around with their friends feeling sorry for us, are they?’

  When I first met Samantha in antenatal class I mistook her abruptness for rudeness, but she’s just very honest and efficient. She used to be a high-powered consultant before her first child and she never really lost the drive. It was her job to go into companies and restructure them (efficiently, of course). Now she hasn’t got anywhere for all that energy to go so she channels it into everyday life and her marathon yoga sessions. The rest of us might dress to camouflage the baby tummies we haven’t quite lost yet. Samantha’s got thighs that could crack walnuts.

  Naturally, it gets Samantha’s back up when Garnet and Emerald try excusing their husbands, which happens a lot.

  It’s not just Samantha’s lack of employment that frustrates her. It doesn’t sound like her husband appreciates her thighs, walnut-cracking or not, any more than all the work she does. Like I said, she channels a lot into yoga.

  And Garnet and Emerald are very nice women once you get used to their rivalry. They only ever turn it on each other and have a long-running disagreement over which precious stone their parents think is more precious. That sums them up, really.

  Not only were their first babies due within days of each other, but their husbands work for the same bank and their houses are one road away from one another. Both think theirs is the better neighb
ourhood. And the better husband.

  Garnet was over-the-top smug about getting to the finishing line first in the maternity ward, pushing out her ten-pound daughter a day and a half before Emerald. But Emerald had the better time when her son was born in under six hours, and they’ve been competitively parenting ever since.

  The sisters are closest in age to me, twenty-seven and twenty-eight, and both think they’re the perfect age. Samantha is in her mid-thirties and Melody’s age is anyone’s guess, so of course we all do. I think she’s well over forty because of her long frizzy brown and grey hair, but since I’ve got a few greys too (thanks to Mum for pointing those out), maybe she is younger.

  ‘It will be all right, you know,’ Melody says, fixing me with her pale blue, wide-set eyes. Combined with a longish face and big-toothed smile, they make her look a bit like a goat. I don’t mean that in an insulting way. It’s just so you can picture her. Because her hair is salt-and-pepper though, instead of goat-coloured, the resemblance ends there.

  Melody is even more of a tree-hugging yogurt knitter than I thought when we first met, the kind of person who makes her own baby food and sews up holes in socks even though there’s usually an uncomfortable lump in your shoe after, instead of just buying another pack of twenty for a fiver.

  You won’t be surprised to know that she gave birth to her daughter in an inflatable paddling pool in her lounge, with the sound of wind chimes and whale noises for pain relief. All her friends were there to see it and it sounds like it was a bit of a party between contractions. She claims it was the most magical three days of her life, especially when her then four-year-old cut the umbilical cord and her husband made an afterbirth smoothie for Melody. I imagine the other guests stuck to the hummus and kale chips.

  I wouldn’t have been much of a hostess at my own birth party. I cried through most of my labour because, holy hell, it hurt. Daniel did too, come to think of it, in solidarity and helplessness at seeing me. We were basically that nightmare couple in labour for the first time. But anyone who tells you it’s not that bad is either lying or has had their memory erased by those post-birth hormones.