Chapter 11
GAYLE
Gayle was up early, the habit of a lifetime. She’d already called Nancy to ask if she could cover for her for a while, and Nancy hadn’t asked questions. Maybe she already knew it was because of the Rafferty girls.
She made a cup of tea and sat at the table.
She hadn’t expected the girls to stay the night, even though she’d told them their rooms were ready.
She’d spent the first couple of hours after she left them in the kitchen lying in bed looking at the clock, waiting for the slam of the front door.
Eventually, she’d fallen asleep and when she surfaced – much later than she’d intended – she could hear someone in the bedroom upstairs and the toilet flush on the upper floor.
She couldn’t believe they were both under her roof once again and she wondered whether today the tension would be as palpable as it was when they arrived last night, or even when they first stepped over the threshold thirty years ago.
As Gayle stirred her tea, she thought about her life then and her life now. There were things she would change if she got her time all over again, but she wouldn’t change everything.
Gayle had worked at her parents’ café in Oxford on weekends and during the school holidays when she was a teenager.
Harry already worked there full time and sometimes they would talk about taking on the Cuppas and Treats Café together when their parents retired.
Harry raved about having a family business, proud as punch that their parents had started the café and made it into such a success.
Having no idea of what she wanted to do once she finished school, Gayle had gone along with the idea, which sounded like it could work.
Gayle started to take charge of introducing puddings to the menu at the café – she’d suggested it to her parents, given they mainly made soups, sandwiches and other quick snacks, and they’d been happy for her to experiment for a while.
The experiment turned into so much more when customers returned over and over again to see what the pudding of the day was.
Gayle was in her element. She’d only ever baked at home for herself and her family, never for strangers, and slowly an idea began to form.
What if she stepped out on her own? What if she could do what she loved for a living?
It was the first time she’d ever felt a flush of ambition and suddenly, she could see nothing else in her future other than starting her own pudding business.
When she was alone in her bedroom, she’d sketch out rough pictures of what a pudding business could look like: she’d make up menu choices, think about customers’ faces when they got to eat what she baked.
She had no idea of the details, how or even if it would work, but that was the thing with ambition – it rarely stopped in its tracks once it gained momentum.
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.