Chapter 7
GAYLE
When Gayle Rafferty decided to plan her own living funeral, she hadn’t expected it to backfire quite so spectacularly.
‘Oh, you’re in trouble.’ Nancy, her second in command at the Sweet Life Café on Anchor Island, put a dollop of cream on the side of a big triangular slice of cherry pie and pushed the plate closer to Gayle.
This café, conveniently situated only a short stroll away from the front door of Gayle’s cottage, was her life.
She’d built the business herself and knew that it would be with her until the day she died.
She hoped that would be later rather than sooner, but over the last month she’d begun to get a bad feeling that something sinister was brewing.
A couple of weeks ago she’d fainted at home, and came round, terrified, when nobody else was there.
She hadn’t told a soul what had happened, but she was always waiting for a repeat performance, especially as she’d had other symptoms. She often had tummy pains and she felt sick; she got through the days with a smile and the same air of control she’d always had, but inside she’d been breaking with concern about her health and whether her time would soon be up.
Her spoon hovered over the golden shortcrust pastry with cherries oozing from its centre.
She didn’t need Nancy to tell her she was in trouble.
‘Susanna and Addie are not going to be happy with me,’ she told her employee and very good friend, before a small smile tentatively formed on her lips. ‘But at least this way they’ll come.’
Nancy collected Gayle’s latte from the espresso machine. ‘They said that?’ When Gayle didn’t respond, she prompted, ‘You did call each of them to let them know your mistake, didn’t you?’
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, but very important 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 you wasn’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.