A reprieve came when Nancy was needed by a customer at the other end of the counter, and Gayle put her spoon into the cherry pie, catching a nice bit of pastry and a cherry as well as a scraping of cream.
As she’d got older, Gayle had noticed that her writing wasn’t as good as it once was, which was why she’d had Louisa, the newcomer to the island and to her life, write out all the names and addresses onto envelopes for the invites.
Louisa Miller had come looking for Gayle a few weeks ago and had stayed on the island for almost a week. During that time, they had been getting to know one another. Gayle knew it was probably down to not having family around her that made her so receptive to Louisa, but more than that, she enjoyed the young woman’s company as much as when a fresh wind blew in off the English Channel to cool you down and remind you that you were still alive. For now.
Gayle had never been one to be bossed about, but once Louisa knew some of the intricacies of Gayle’s relationship with Susanna and Addie she’d said to Gayle,you can’t leave things the way they are.The words had struck a chord. She wasn’t getting any younger. And her health, like anyone in their eighth decade, wasn’t what it had once been. If she didn’t do something and soon, those girls would never return to the island, they’d never know her regrets, they’d never know how much she wished things had turned out differently. She was sorry for what she’d done to Susanna, and she was sorry for what she’d done to Addie too.
Louisa had gone on to apologise for overstepping, but in the days following, Gayle had come to realise that Louisa had said what needed to be said. And when she saw a piece in the local newspaper about the passing of Jeffrey Sutton, the man she’d once been married to, she realised that time wasn’t on her side. Jeffrey had been the love of her life, and she would have given anything for one more conversation with him if only to know that he was happy. It sounded like he had been. The piece in the newspaper honoured the work he’d done at the school he’d worked at for almost five decades. He’d made a mark on others’ lives as much as hers.
Nobody had forever – she certainly didn’t – and that day she knew she had to do something.
By mere coincidence she’d picked up the magazine insert that came with the same newspaper that day and inside was an interesting article about a lady in France who had organised a living funeral. Gayle had thought it a rather peculiar thing to do, but the idea began to grow in her mind when she read about Jeffrey. She’d started to wonder whether maybe it was a way to get the Rafferty girls back on the island and maybe, just maybe, they could try to salvage their family.
She’d looked into the idea further online, found examples for the wording she could use, and had utilised cut and paste and tailored invites to her taste. Louisa had written out the envelopes for her and between working at the Sweet Life Café and trying to get the invites out as soon as possible, Gayle had somehow missed a close proofread of the wording.
The envelopes and the legibility of the addresses had turned out to be the least of Gayle’s worries because she’d made a mistake. A big one. One very small, butveryimportant word had been left off: ‘living’ should have preceded the word ‘funeral’.
Gayle felt some comfort from the cherry pie Nancy had served her, although not as much as usual because her appetite these days was nowhere near what it used to be and she’d hardly made a dent in the pudding.
She basked in the soundscape of the business she’d built – the staff chattering, the laughter of customers, the clattering of utensils and pots and pans as puddings were baked, served and enjoyed. She inhaled the sweet smell surrounding her that always had a calming effect, and looked around at the inviting space she’d created. She’d wanted the Sweet Life Café to be a little retro and different. Stools were positioned at intervals in front of the long counter, each with a turquoise leather seat and chrome body. A few booths were dotted along one wall beside an enormous window, and each one had a table in the middle with turquoise leather upholstery on the seats. Round tables and chairs were dotted across the chequerboard tiled floor of the café, and wide glass shelving behind the main counter held vases of flowers and a host of certificates the Sweet Life Café had earned over the years. Gayle had kept it the same way as it had been when she first opened the café’s door to the public, with just a little spruce here and there.
As she overheard a gentleman excitedly order a passionfruit cheesecake to take away, Gayle thought about the hours she’d spent in the kitchen, not just here but at her cottage and back in Oxford as a young girl. She’d adored baking ever since she could remember. At first, she’d helped her mother as she made puddings for the family, but her mother had soon left her to her own devices when Gayle’s enthusiasm and capability proved she didn’t need to be supervised.
The feeling she got when she baked hadn’t changed at all over the years. Pulling out ingredients, taking a big mixing bowl, sieving, stirring, pouring and beating, all of it delighted her and soothed her. Gayle needed to bake like some people needed to go on a run or do a yoga class or have a holiday. If ever she felt stressed or that things were getting too much, she baked. It didn’t matter that she did it all day long in her job and had done for the last five decades, it didn’t matter that she had no one at the cottage to enjoy the fruits of her labour… She’d do it anyway.
She remembered being caught by Susanna once, baking ginger steamed pudding in the middle of the night. It was a couple of months after the girls had come to the island and Gayle had felt particularly stressed that her nieces were never going to feel at home. Susanna had come downstairs and when Gayle looked up her niece was watching her from the doorway. Gayle had claimed she was baking the pudding for Nancy to sample and decide whether it would go on the menu, but she’d told her eldest niece that she could spare some and handed Susanna a fork before picking up one for herself. They hadn’t talked that night, but there’d been a companionship in their silence, and Susanna had even thanked her before she went back to bed.Thank youwasn’t a phrase her eldest niece used often. Gayle had sat at the table a while longer before going to bed herself and she’d realised it wasn’t only Susanna’s determination and her resistance to settling in here, the poor girl was being held back by something so much deeper, the hurt that had scarred her forever losing her parents so young. She’d thought that night might have been the start of getting to know each other, and for a while it had been. Things had never been what Gayle would call rosy, but they’d been calm, she’d really thought they’d turned a corner. Perhaps they had right up until Gayle ruined things by telling Susanna’s boyfriend, Mateo, that he needed to put a stop to the relationship if he really cared about Susanna and her future. Susanna had fallen for him, she’d stopped working so hard at school, and Gayle had worried she wouldn’t get into university with Mateo as such a big distraction. And university, life on the mainland, had been what Susanna had wanted for a very long time. She’d never said otherwise.
Warning Mateo off that day, however, had been the thing that came between her and Susanna once and for all. After that, they’d not talked about it, but she knew Susanna was only being cordial and visiting for Addie, and that once Addie left, Susanna wouldn’t be back again. It turned out she’d been right, and Addie had stayed so loyal to her sister that she hadn’t come back either.
Nancy was back and Gayle admitted, ‘I haven’t called them.’
‘You haven’t told them? Gayle… Those poor girls.’ She was looking at Gayle so intensely that Gayle began to shuffle in her seat. She pushed her hands into the front pockets of the turquoise gingham half-apron all the staff wore over dark-coloured bottoms teemed with a white shirt.
‘Those girls wouldn’t be coming otherwise. You and I both know that. And I need them to. I don’t want them coming for my funeral some day and clearing out my house before I’ve had a chance to talk to them. I need to make my peace.’ And she might not have long to do it, not with the way she’d been feeling lately. She suspected her fate was creeping up on her like a thief on her tail down a dark alley, and she wasn’t going to go out before she’d put the past to rest. This gathering would be her chance to feel alive while she still was, to see friends on the island smile and enjoy themselves with her as the host and see the business she was so proud of, but most of all she wanted to see the Rafferty sisters who had always had her heart even though they might not have realised it. She hoped she still had a little piece of theirs too, but she wasn’t so sure that was the case.
She was definitely playing with fire where Susanna was concerned. Susanna had her father’s tenacity, and while Addie was determined, she was gentler, a lot like her mother had been. She hoped that both girls would be relieved that she was alive. She suspected they’d be furious too, but when she’d realised her mistake she’d seen it as the best way to get them here.
Over the years she’d written to the girls a few times asking them to come and sort through Harry’s things. She’d contemplated making it easy for them by sending it all back to the mainland, but she knew that keeping her brother’s belongings meant she still had a tie to the girls, a tie that might mean they would come back some day. Perhaps she should’ve added in those letters that she wanted to see them too rather than hiding behind the pretence that it was all about their father’s things. Maybe that would’ve made them come. But instead, she’d left things alone as much as possible. Addie had replied once to say they would arrange a date. Susanna hadn’t responded to any of the requests, and so over the years Gayle had thrown her energies into running the Sweet Life Café, her pride and joy, and what remained between them all was a simple exchange of Christmas cards, or birthday cards, the contents of which grew more sparse as the years rolled on. In between those times it was radio silence.
As she tried to eat a little more of the pie so Nancy wouldn’t pick up on anything being wrong, she gazed over to the large window at the front of the café. Customers took up space in the outdoor seating area and as she’d approached earlier she’d noticed that plenty of people were still taking advantage of the mild September weather by sitting on the balcony upstairs, accessed from an internal door at the rear of the café. On a clear day, weather permitting, you could just about make out the Jurassic Coast from the edge of the balcony. She hadn’t been back to the mainland for years. What was the point? She was happy here, she had plenty of people around her, and she had the local news. Okay, so it was a bit blinkered, but the world could be a bitch of a place sometimes, and at her stage of life she’d seen enough doom and gloom. She wanted to spend her twilight years with nothing but the island, her friends and pudding for company. At least that’s what she’d thought. But she’d been kidding herself. As soon as she’d suspected her health was deteriorating it was Susanna and Addie she’d thought about more than anything. Her heart skipped a beat now thinking of the real world she’d closed herself off from. The real world where the Rafferty girls lived. Would they actually come back? Would they give her a chance to talk things through with them when they saw she was still alive?
Maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they’d be so angry they’d jump straight back onto the ferry and that would be that.
She set her cup on top of her plate along with the serviette, but before she could take it out to the kitchen herself Nancy appeared.
‘You all done?’ she asked as Gayle got down from the bar stool she’d just about been able to shuffle onto.
‘It was a big slice,’ said Gayle when Nancy noticed she hadn’t eaten all her pudding. ‘I’ll see myself out.’
Outside, she looked up at the little sign which hung from two short chains and swung slightly on the breeze. She could still remember the day it went up, telling everyone who passed that this was the Sweet Life Café, and it was open for business. The name was written in fancy lettering on the menus too, on the aprons the staff wore, on a blackboard detailing daily specials and placed outside in the sunshine on dry days, or beneath the canopied wide porch if it looked like rain. The tarmacked surface of the street today, like on other days, had a light layer of sand that had either been blown up from the beach or brought up by foot passengers or the minibus that transported visitors to their accommodation and Bay Street.
The Sweet Life Café had kept its character so well over the years. She wondered whether Susanna and Addie would see any joy in it at all. She doubted it. Susanna had been desperate to escape the island, and when Addie began to mellow and show signs of wanting to hang around and perhaps even bake like her aunt, Gayle had almost got excited until she remembered her promise. She’d pushed Addie away after that, not abruptly, but subtly over time, and it had been one of the hardest things she’d ever had to do.
In the hours before Harry had died, he’d asked Gayle to make sure that Susanna and Addie never fell out like they had, that his girls would always be there for each other. And with Susanna having never given up on her plan for them both to leave the island, how could Gayle have done anything other than take a step back so that she didn’t come between the sisters?
Back at the cottage she sat in the armchair for a while, fresh air floating in through the open window. Fatigue plagued her these days and necessitated frequent rest.
Her mind ran through the possibilities of what might be wrong with her. Heart problems? Those had killed her sister, Bernice, aged nine, the details of which they’d never known. Or maybe she had what Harry had died from – pancreatic cancer that had taken him quickly.
