A Wedding at the Comfort Food Cafe

Cherie and Frank – known universally as Farmer Frank due to his magnificent acreage – married late in life after being widowed. The ceremony was held here at the Comfort Food Café, same as Laura’s will be – but unlike Laura and Matt’s, which will hopefully be sun-drenched and balmy, theirs was a winter wonderland.

Cherie passes the now slightly bent-out-of-shape Groucho specs to Katie, who looks borderline horrified at being thrust into the spotlight. Katie is in her late twenties, petite and blonde and pretty, and manages to combine both being one of the most blunt and honest people I know with being extremely shy. She also has rotten taste in men, clearly, or she wouldn’t be hanging around with my brother. Uggh. Sick in mouth again.

‘Ummm … okay …’ she says quietly, standing up and still barely matching Cherie while she’s sitting down. ‘I’ve never had a wedding. But I suppose when I was little, it maybe involved white dresses and Justin Timberlake. These days, I’d be happy with anything that involved a lie-in.’

She sits down very quickly, and Cherie pats her knee. I get where she’s coming from. Saul is a whirlwind of a child with endless energy and endless questions. I’m pretty high energy myself, but on the few nights he’s had a sleepover at our cottage, I’ve spent the rest of the day staggering around like a zombie. Last time, he jumped into bed with me at half five in the morning quizzing me about my favourite crustacean.

Katie passes the glasses along to Zoe, who inserts them into her masses of ginger curls, and stands up to her five foot nothing height. Us Longvilles are all tall and lean; we are giants amongst midgets.

‘I have never had a dream wedding,’ Zoe announces firmly. ‘As a child I dreamt only of running off with gypsies to travel the world in a brightly painted caravan, cursing unkind villagers and making friends with freaks. I found you lot eventually, so I suppose some of that came true. I still have no dream wedding, and don’t intend on conjuring one up. Thank you very much.’

I realise, as the glasses are passed on to my sister Willow, that it will be my turn next. I feel a churn in my stomach at the prospect – not because I’m shy, or because of the many espresso martinis I’ve consumed, but because this is not a subject I want to discuss. I plan to make a sharp and timely exit to the ladies as soon as Willow nears the end of her talk, or possibly to pretend that I’ve fallen asleep, and sit snoring and drooling in my seat while the glasses of doom pass me by.

Or maybe I won’t. Maybe this is the time. Maybe I should come clean. When I first moved back here, to help Willow with Lynnie, I had no idea how long I’d stay. It could have been days, or weeks, and now it looks like possibly forever. Things are different now – I have a small business, I have friends, I have a super-sexy man in my life. I’m probably not leaving Budbury any time soon.

I’m not sure what the right thing to do is, so I put off making any kind of decision until Willow has finished. I’m sure the right thing will come to me – a bit like when you’re in a restaurant and can’t choose from the menu, and can’t come up with a decision until your waiter is standing right there with his notepad, and suddenly your instincts tell you: ‘Yes! Spaghetti carbonara for me please!’, and all feels well with the world.

Willow has neon pink hair, which would have looked great at Laura’s wedding, and it dangles over the plastic glasses as she stands. It’s been in a kind of bob for a while, but she let it grow over the winter so she could keep her ears warm. Makes perfect sense to me.

‘Growing up as we did with Lynnie,’ she says, nodding towards me, ‘you can imagine that such traditional patriarchal nonsense as dream weddings was not encouraged. It was far more important to find love than to find a husband, and in all honesty I think that’s probably fair. But I also think that if Tom and me were to plan a wedding, it would most likely be at Briarwood, and have a zombie theme.’

There are nods and giggles at this. Tom owns a big old Victorian mansion on a hill at the edge of the village, where he runs a kind of school for eccentric inventor genius types. He also has a dog called Rick Grimes, named after the hero of The Walking Dead, so it’s a fair call. In fact it would be a great wedding. I’m pondering my costume when Willow continues.

‘And now I’d like to pass the sacred Groucho glasses to my darling sister Auburn, who as far as I know is currently enjoying her longest relationship ever with the lovely Finn. Can’t wait to hear about this dream wedding …’

Damn. I’ve been caught out – so busy planning my milky-lens zombie outfit that I didn’t duck out in time. Or maybe I subconsciously sabotaged my own escape plan. Gosh, I’m annoying.

There is a general buzz and shuffle and sounds of interest as she passes the specs along to me. She’s right on one count – I am loved up at the moment. She’s also right that Finn is lovely. I might even, in the dim dark recesses of my primeval girl brain, imagine being married to him one day – but that process would not be a simple one. Frankly, nothing ever is with me.

I scrape my chair back, gulp down the remainder of my espresso martini, and perch the glasses on my nose. I pause while they all refocus their attention. Might as well create a moment – show a bit of style. I’ve trapped myself in this moment, and this is the equivalent of the waiter hovering at my shoulder with his notepad – decision time.

I glance around at the smiling faces, the expressions of warm curiosity, and realise that I actually want to be honest with these people. Friends, family, community – none of it should be built on a lie. And none of this lot are going to judge me – it’s not that kind of place. Deep breath, and in I plunge.

‘Well, ladies and gentlewomen, Willow raises a good point,’ I say. ‘My dream wedding would be an elaborate cathedral of sound and light; a lightning storm in a haunted forest; a shipwreck off the coast of Zanzibar; a magical fairy glade inside a mystical stone circle. All of these things and more.’

I glance around at my audience – they’re hooked, so I decide to hit them with the punchline.

‘Sadly, none of these magnificent feasts for the senses are likely to take place. I won’t be marrying Finn – because I’m already married! Booooom!’

I make a ‘drop the mike’ gesture, pass the glasses to a confused Edie, and give a low bow as they all stare at me – Willow, in particular, has eyes so wide they might break her face in half.

I grab a bottle of cider, and head outside. I really need a ciggie now.

Chapter 2 (#u3bef74a5-1d94-5964-b984-19eddb0c3cce)

I find a perch on one of the tables and take a swig from my bottle. It’s been brewed by our friend Scrumpy Joe, who lives up to his name by brewing cider professionally – his parents must have had amazing powers of premonition. Or maybe it’s a nickname, who knows?

The garden of the café is higgledy-piggledy and laid out over uneven ground that makes balancing anything on the tabletops an interesting experience. I like sitting out here sometimes, waiting for people’s milkshakes to start to slip sideways.

The café is on the top of a hill on the top of a cliff on top of the world. Or at least that’s what it feels like, especially on a day like this, when the spring sky is a clear, vivid blue and the sea seems to stretch on for infinity.

The dogs let out a half-hearted woof when they see me, and I raise my bottle in acknowledgement as I count out loud. I’m counting because I’m curious to see how long it takes Willow to make it outside with her thumbscrews and eye-shining torch to interrogate me. I have a bet – with myself, so I’ll definitely win – that it’ll be less than thirty seconds.

Sadly, I’m all the way up to one hundred and eighty before she emerges from the café, pink hair blowing around in the breeze, striding towards me in her spray-painted silver Doc Marten boots. Her hands are on her hips, which tells me she means business.

‘What took you so long?’ I ask, tapping an imaginary watch on my wrist. ‘What time to do you call this?’

‘I had to listen to Edie’s story,’ she says, reaching out to punch me on the shoulder. For no good reason other than we’re sisters. She’s the baby of the family and, if I’m honest, was always the butt of our practical jokes and general twattery when we were growing up. Now she takes every opportunity to prove to herself that she’s not the runt of the litter any more.

The rest of us – me, Van and our other brother Angel – all took off when we were young, and she ended up at home with an ever-declining Lynnie, looking after her on her own until she told us what the situation was. Then two of us came back – and I suspect there’s part of Willow that thinks life was simpler without us.

‘What was that like?’ I ask, frowning up into the sunlight. Edie’s fiancé died during World War II, and she never married. She simply convinced herself he’s still alive, and talks about him in the present tense, and even takes food home for him from the café. I’m not one to judge – we’re all a bit barmy, if we strip away the layers, don’t you think?

‘It involved a swing band and the village hall and nylon stockings she’d been given by an American airman. But anyway … you’re married?’

Her face is all screwed up, and I can tell she’s both intrigued and a bit angry.

‘Yeah. You want to say “WTF”, don’t you? Except you’re too old to use abbreviations, so you want to say the whole thing. I can see the battle raging within you.’

‘The battle raging within me isn’t about saying “fuck”, Auburn – I’m quite happy to say it! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!’

I laugh out loud – because any word, when you say it repeatedly, starts to sound silly, doesn’t it? Especially one that rhymes with duck and muck and yuck and other similarly amusing words.

I see her trying not to laugh, but that’s not really in her nature, and she cracks eventually. She sighs, and sits next to me, and steals my bottle of cider. That would normally be a strong reason for me to wrestle her to the ground and dribble spit in her face, but I reckon she’s had a shock, so I play nice.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asks, her voice quiet and a tiny bit hurt. I glance at her, shielding my eyes from the sun, and see that she is in fact hurt. I’d never considered that. When we were young, we weren’t close – in fact we were sworn enemies, forced to share a bedroom, where we re-enacted global conflicts every single day despite our lentil-loving mama urging us towards peace, love and understanding.

Now, though, as adults – bonded over Lynnie and the fact that we each have our own room these days – we’re closer. Almost friends, in fact. The fact that I’ve kept this from her has dented her feelings, and I’m sad about that.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, patting her knee. ‘I didn’t do it on purpose. I think I just kind of … decided to forget about it. I realise that sounds insane, and it probably is, but it was in a different time. A different life. A long time ago, in a galaxy … well, at least a few hundred miles away.’

‘Well now you’ve remembered, tell me about it. I can’t believe you’re married! Does Van know? Does Finn know?’

‘Nobody here knows. Like I said, I chose to bury it. I barely knew myself. If it wasn’t for Becca and her Groucho glasses, I might have chosen to bury it forever. But … well. Here we are. Me, an old married woman, and you, my spinster sister. Sitting in the sunshine. Sharing a bottle of cider in a fair and equitable manner.’

I reach out to grab it back, but she’s too fast, and holds it on the far side of her body so I can’t get to it without falling off the table. I shrug, and pull my cigarettes out of my jeans pocket instead. She crinkles her nose up in advance, and I say: ‘If you want to hear this story, you’ll have to tolerate the second-hand nicotine, okay?’

I’ve been trying to stop smoking ever since I moved back to Budbury, our tiny corner of the Dorset coast. I’ve tried vaping, and patches, and exercise, but ultimately never seem quite able to shake off the habit. I’ll manage for a while, but then as soon as something vaguely stressful happens – like stubbing my toe, or discovering my mother has cancer, or pretty much everything in between – I start again.I’m a little bit broken, and the ciggies are an external sign, I suppose.

I light up, and soothe myself with that first lovely inhale. I take two puffs, then stub it out on the tiny tin I carry around to use as a combined ashtray and butt collector. Nobody likes a litterbug.

‘That was quick,’ she says, blinking in surprise.

‘It’s my latest health kick,’ I reply, stashing the tin. ‘I only smoke a third of it. Expensive, admittedly – but you can’t put a price on good health, can you?’

Willow rolls her eyes in a way that says she knows I’m stalling, and folds her arms across her chest. Very negative body language, that.

‘Okay, okay …’ I say, realising that she’s tucking her hands away to stop herself throttling me. ‘Well, it was genuinely a long time ago. Eight years ago, in fact, when I was young and carefree and often off my head on various pharmaceutical products. It was when I was living in Barcelona, before I came to London to do my studies and became a productive member of society.’