Sweet Sorrow(56)

The closure of the first shop was presented as a consolidation of resources, a shrewd business move. The money they’d save from rent and wages could be used to pay down the interest, loyal customers would travel, especially now the shops were so much more appealing, so well stocked, so modern. This was the pitch I’d hear during Dad’s long, fraught phone calls to his parents in their bungalow exile; he knew what he was doing, and wouldn’t let anyone down. So keen was he not to disappoint that he found it impossible to make staff redundant, and instead they were relocated to remaining branches. We’d see great crowds of them on our weekend rounds, chatting by the tills, outnumbering customers three to one while Kind of Blue played over expensive speakers.

But the first closure also marked the start of the condition we refused to name. God knows, he’d never been an Olympian but coffee and insomnia gave Dad a confused, exhausted air, as if perpetually struggling to snap out of something. Somewhere between his shoulder blades he seemed to carry a great knot of tension, an object, a ball of clenched muscle that he would press and probe throughout the day, rolling his shoulders, cracking his joints. In the mornings, getting ready for school, I’d sometimes catch sight of him through the bedroom door, bracing himself against the wardrobe as if pinned to the spot by some awful realisation. I don’t think anything frightened me more than those moments of baffled stillness, and I’d stand on the landing, holding my breath, waiting for him to shake it off. Outwardly at least, he remained affectionate and loving and funny, but it was the artificially bright good humour that precedes bad news.

Six months later, the second shop closed. My mother began to take a more active role, persuading my dad that diversification, rather than specialisation, was the key. We began to stock batteries and cables, elaborate gift-wrap and greetings cards. For my father, this was the curse of stationery, a terrible step backwards, and he felt heartsick. Wasn’t music enough? Where was the love, the passion? Why couldn’t they hear it in the music he played? Confidence shaded into plucky defiance, then sour resignation. ‘You know what I should have gone into, Charlie? Carbon paper. Crinoline petticoats, lace doilies, inkwells. There’s more money in inkwells than this.’

My mother was having none of this self-pity and defeatism. The answer, she said, was coffee. On days off, she would sometimes escape to London to meet up with old friends and it was here, in a café near Berwick Street Market, that she’d hit upon her scheme. Soho was practically one big coffee bar. Why not shift the business sideways, invest in a second-hand espresso machine, bentwood chairs, some old school desks, and play music over the speakers. ‘What’s this we’re listening to?’ the customers would ask, and we would sell them the CD. If not, the mark-up on a cup of coffee was immense. With only the fusty Cottage Loaf Tea Rooms and an Orwellian greasy spoon for competition, there was no way we could fail.

‘You’d go, Charlie, wouldn’t you? And your friends?’

‘I don’t drink coffee.’

‘Quite right too. But you will, and when you do—’

‘I’m not doing it, Amy!’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s catering! I’m not a caterer.’

‘You weren’t a retailer either, but you learnt, didn’t you?’

‘Well, apparently not.’

‘But you can make coffee. How hard can it be to stick a bun on a plate?’

‘I don’t want to sell buns, I want to sell records.’

‘And no one wants to buy them, not any more, they’re too expensive. Just try it. I’ll help you, we all will. You’ll see.’

A meeting was arranged with the bank to approve a further loan. This was not the breeze that it had been the year before. It was no longer enough to simply stack high the piles of Brothers in Arms, and my father couldn’t hope to compete with the three-for-two offers at the megastores. So instead, they’d provide something new, a little slice of Berwick Street cool, tucked in between the Millets and the Spar. I remember them setting off to see the bank manager, my father in his wedding suit, my mother in a creamy ruffled blouse, like children in fancy dress. I remember them tumbling through the door, wide-eyed and hysterical with success like criminals after an audacious heist, and I remember the flurry of industry in the weeks that followed: stacks of second-hand chairs in the living room, multi-packs of frozen croissants – dense, dusty pellets like agricultural feed – and the toaster-oven to turn them into gold, and great catering sacks of oats, too, so that Mum might manufacture flapjacks in factory quantities, the profit margin on a flapjack exceeding even that of coffee and wrapping paper, and once again there was a kind of industrious harmony in the household. I remember the second-hand coffee machine, the Santorini Deluxe, all pipes and dials and valves like a model steam engine. Most vividly, I remember coming home from school and stepping into a kitchen that smelt of warm sugar and melting chocolate, a buttery condensation on every surface.

They stormed through money, yet for all the fear my parents must have felt, we still thought of ourselves as stable. ‘Poor but happy, but not that happy’, this was my mother’s joke, and the good humour we retained was down to her. I felt such love for Mum at that time, for her determination and resilience and ambition, the engine that kept us moving forward. Family life was unimaginable without her. She didn’t care about money or status or what the front garden looked like, she only cared that we were all fine. My dad adored her of course and relied on her, perhaps too much, but for all her teasing I never doubted that she still loved him. We groaned and looked away when they kissed or held each other, but secretly – what relief, what certainty.