For a while she didn’t admit her thoughts to her brother. Whenever he brought up the notion of them taking on the café, she simply stayed quiet or at least didn’t contradict him and carried on with what she was doing. Eventually, however, she hadn’t wanted to lead him on and so she’d admitted to both Harry and her parents the vision she had for her future. All of them had urged her to think very carefully before taking a leap.
After her admission, she didn’t take much of a leap at all, not in any aspect of her life, until Jeffrey Sutton started to work at the café one summer. Jeffrey was working to fund his university studies and Gayle won him over with her chocolate self-saucing pudding. His love for the pudding had led to a love for her, and when she’d shared her dreams of running a place solely dedicated to puddings they’d put their heads together and he’d helped her make a plan. Harry took it better than expected when he realised her dream might actually come into fruition. He simply said that he would run the café by himself. No big deal. Everything seemed sorted.
Jeffrey, who was studying to be a teacher, found his first job on the island of Jersey and Gayle didn’t hesitate to leave Oxford and go with him. Her dream of starting her business was some way off, so in the meantime she found work as a typist, which was good pay and long hours, but it helped her with her living costs and allowed her to save.
Life on Jersey chugged along steadily for a while until Gayle saw an advertisement in the local newspaper for a premises on Anchor Island. The potential site for a pudding café was perfect. It was spacious enough without being too huge, it was in a great location and a suitable commute from Jersey for the time being, it had an attractive frontage and even had a balcony. Within seconds of seeing the advertisement, Gayle imagined herself inside, in a kitchen with every piece of equipment she needed, with a counter she would stand behind and pass the time of day with locals as they chose what pudding they wanted. That day she’d run all the way from work to Jeffrey’s flat and showed him the advertisement. It felt like serendipity, and the sale price wasn’t sky high either, not like it would have been back in Oxford.
She bought the premises and slowly, with Jeffrey’s help and the loan she’d secured with some of his backing, she’d made her dream a reality.
The pudding business, which she’d chosen to call The Sweet Life Café on account of what she intended to sell and the feeling she got at this new-found existence, wasn’t an overnight success by any means. It took ages to turn a profit. It was a slog. Gayle rented a small flat prior to the launch of the business and as it was on the other side of the island, like many of the locals, she bought herself a bike to get to and from her place of work. To be fair, she loved the bike from the moment she got on it for the first time. Cycling everywhere made her feel so free and filled her with more energy than she’d expected.
Gayle worked hard. Her days often melded into the night. She rarely took any time off, but with Jeffrey by her side, albeit some distance away, life was going in the right direction. And when Jeffrey proposed, Gayle didn’t hesitate to say yes. It felt like she had everything she ever wanted. She called Harry and he’d been delighted at the news. He was happy, so was she. Brother and sister had gone in different directions and that was okay.
Gayle and Jeffrey looked at a few houses on the island but the second they saw the cottage on Evergreen Close they fell in love, particularly Gayle. It was the smallest cottage and stood out because it was neglected, but the first time she walked through the front door she hadn’t seen the dilapidated insides, nor the damaged tiles in the kitchen, and she hadn’t seen the overgrown unkempt garden either. She’d imagined her and Jeffrey moving in and their children growing up within its walls. Their children – maybe a boy and a girl if they were lucky enough – could play in the garden, make daisy chains from the patch of daisies on the front lawn, chase each other with water pistols in the summer, just like she and Harry had done, or build snowmen in the winter. She would bake in the kitchen, meals as well as puddings, she would call her children downstairs from their bedrooms at the top with the dormer windows. She and Jeffrey could live out their future here on Anchor Island, him as the headteacher of the local primary school so he no longer had to commute to Jersey – because he’d get a position there eventually, she had no doubt of that – and her with her successful pudding business.
Not all of their dreams came true, though. The Sweet Life Café began to get regular customers and started to make a decent profit, they bought the cottage and it had taken no time at all to get it looking like a home, and then Gayle found out she was pregnant. They were over the moon. They married quickly, but their dream was shattered when she miscarried at ten weeks. What had followed was heartbreak after heartbreak with the pain of never being able to carry a baby to term, and it had ripped them apart in the end. The cottage on Evergreen Close wasn’t occupied by a young couple head over heels in love for very long at all. Gayle and Jeffrey divorced. He returned to Jersey, the cottage became Gayle’s, those two bedrooms at the top stayed empty, and she never found love again. She put all her energies into the Sweet Life Café; it made it easier to forget everything else.
By the time Gayle and Jeffrey divorced, Gayle and Harry’s parents had fully retired from the café and Harry took over the full running of the place. He was in his element, happily married with two daughters. But then over the coming months every time she spoke to her brother Gayle could detect an underlying stress in his voice. Eventually he told her that the café was struggling but he made out the problems were minor and temporary.
It was only after their parents died a year later that Harry admitted quite how bad things were. He was in real trouble, struggling to make ends meet. The café had real competition, he wasn’t getting people through the door as easily as before, and he was trying to do the job of three people, so he didn’t have to employ anyone else.
To make matters worse, at the same time as Harry was having problems, the Sweet Life Café started to gain momentum and become a real success, earning Gayle write-ups in the national press, radio coverage, and an award for Women in Business. It had taken a long time for her café to get on its feet and even longer for it to thrive, and she’d worked so hard to get it to that point, but her brother resented it. She tried to keep in touch, to talk to him, but every time she did, she would hear the regret in his voice that they weren’t doing this together, the worry in his tone that he wouldn’t be able to turn things around, the blame that she had left him on his own with it. It wasn’t long before his finances took another blow due to a rent hike on the café and rising costs of supplies, and while his business slowly sank, Gayle’s forged ahead even more. It was the start of the irreversible tension between them both and they never recovered from it. They stayed in touch for a while, but over the years that contact faded away. Gayle knew he’d had to take a job in the travel industry to make ends meet when the Cuppas and Treats Café was sold, and shortly after that he stopped taking phone calls from her altogether. The only contact she got was when Harry’s wife, Cynthia, died. She went to the funeral, she watched her brother, a broken man, a widower. She reached out but he didn’t want her help, and she retreated. She hated that it had come to that.
Over time she often thought about going to Oxford, showing up on Harry’s doorstep, and she might have done if she didn’t think he’d close the door in her face. And so she’d stayed on the island. She occasionally sent Harry letters, but she never got a reply. She always remembered his birthday and the girls’ but again, she never had anything in return.
In fact, she never heard from him again. Not directly.
Thirty years ago, her world was knocked sideways when she got a call from the hospital in Oxford to say that Harry had been admitted, and that she should come immediately. The doctor didn’t want to give details over the phone and so Gayle asked Nancy to step in for her and run things at the Sweet Life Café, packed her suitcase, and off she went to the mainland.
The first time she’d seen Harry lying in that hospital bed, sick and vulnerable, had been incredibly confronting given how long it had been since they’d seen one another or even spoken. Prior to that moment she’d only even seen him full of life, whether happy and excited or moaning about her not wanting to run the family’s café with him, or that his life hadn’t turned out the way he’d planned. He’d woken up and smiled at her, and to be honest she hadn’t been sure that was the reception she would get, but when she saw not just the man but the boy she’d grown up alongside, free of the worries that came to you as an adult, she’d smiled right back and known that this was the moment they made their peace.
She’d covered his hand with hers. ‘How are you doing?’
He’d grunted a bit, then tried to speak, but she couldn’t make out the words.
She stood so that she was much closer. ‘Can you say that again?’ she asked him, hoping that lip-reading might work.
‘Louisa…’
‘Is she one of the nurses?’
‘Not here,’ said Harry.
Gayle smiled. She wanted to help. ‘Why don’t I ask around, find out when she’s in?’
‘Find Louisa,’ he said.
‘All right. Let me try.’
She went over to the nurses’ station but none of them had heard of a Louisa. Apparently, there was a cleaner called Louise, a midwife called Loulou but no Louisa on this ward.
She went back to Harry’s side but he was asleep. Maybe he was mistaken about the name.
As the days rolled on and her visits continued, Harry spent much less time awake. The beeping of the machines and the garish lights in the hospital made Gayle think how impossible it must be for the patients to get any sleep at all. Harry slipped in and out of consciousness. He wasn’t saying much, though occasionally he squeezed her hand back and she reassured him that she was there at his side.
‘Keep talking to him,’ a nurse at her shoulder encouraged during one of her visits. ‘When his daughters come in, they chatter away. They’ll be here again soon.’
His daughters. The girls she would have trouble recognising given how little she’d seen of them since they’d been born. It saddened her that Harry hadn’t shared that part of his life with her.
