Chapter 11 #2
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.
‘I don’t really know what to say,’ she told the nurse.
‘Some people talk about the weather; others start spilling their deepest, darkest secrets.’ The nurse’s forehead rose up and down suggestively before she added, ‘You’ll think of something.’
She started talking about Anchor Island. He’d been hellbent on resisting her business success and too preoccupied with jealousy to ever come and visit and see what it might be like.
‘It’s so windy on some days,’ she shared with him as she wittered on.
‘It’s still beautiful, don’t get me wrong, but when that wind whips up it’s not so pleasant.
I don’t like going out on the balcony, I think I’m going to get blown away.
Do you remember the terrible storms when we were little and on holiday in Brighton, how we begged Mum and Dad to take us closer to the beach so we could see the sea? ’
Before she could go on, she watched his mouth open slightly and out came a murmur. ‘Waves,’ he said.
‘Yes!’ A tear pooled in the corner of her eye.
He had heard her after all. ‘Enormous waves! Oh, they were so big, weren’t they, Harry?
’ She felt like she was that little girl again, him that little boy, that none of their conflict had ever happened, like this was all that mattered now.
‘As tall as skyscrapers, we reckoned. Or maybe that was the way it felt when we were three-foot nothing, or four-foot in your case. Mum didn’t like it; she only relaxed when we were back at the campsite wrapped in blankets and sipping on hot cocoa. ’
She rambled on about the seasons, talked about the crowds in the city come summer, how they’d have extra ice-cream from the café and be allowed to stay out long past their usual bedtime with their parents working later than normal.
Her memories stalled when she saw her nieces coming into the ward along with their maternal grandparents.
Gayle went over to them. They’d grown, but they looked so much like Harry and Cynthia, Adeleine with Harry’s curly hair he’d never liked, Susanna with Cynthia’s smile.
‘You’re both getting so big,’ she said, addressing Adeleine, a dainty eight-year-old who barely looked up from beneath her fringe, and Susanna, the fourteen-year-old whose gaze darted from her dad to the machines, her dad again and then finally to Gayle.
Susanna reached for her sister’s hand. She led her past Gayle and closer to their dad.
Gayle picked up her bag from the chair. ‘I’ll let you have some time with Harry,’ she told the girls and Harry’s in-laws.
Gayle hoped her beautiful nieces brought them some comfort, although she suspected nothing could really take away the pain that their daughter died before they did.
It wasn’t the natural order of things, was it?
The next day when Gayle returned to the hospital, Harry was still drifting in and out of consciousness.
‘Promise me…’ he said all of a sudden when Gayle was almost dozing off herself. He hadn’t said a word in the last hour, and she’d found her eyes closing as she sat at his bedside.
She stood, got closer to work out what he was saying. ‘Harry, I’m here.’
‘Promise me…’ he said again.
‘What, Harry? What do you need me to do?’
‘Girls…’ he said. And then he opened his eyes wider than he had in days. ‘Susanna… Adeleine… They can’t fall out.’
‘Oh, Harry, they won’t. Of course they won’t.’
‘Like us…’ he said. ‘My fault…’ he added, his voice croaky with dryness.
She shushed him, told him not to worry. Her bottom lip trembled, and she tried not to burst into tears. ‘Your girls will be together forever. I’ll see to that.’
‘Promise…’ His eyes were closed but he was determined with his request.
‘I promise. I will do whatever I can to make sure Susanna and Adeleine are the closest they can be.’ She felt a sense of relief when he squeezed her hand back in response.
He stayed quiet for another hour as Gayle sat processing what he’d said.
She wasn’t sure she had the power to steer two girls’ emotions, but she would do her very best. Things should never have gone this far with Harry.
She wished they hadn’t, but all she could do was be here for him now and let him go peacefully, knowing his girls would be okay.
A few days later, Harry passed away. Gayle lost a brother, Susanna and Adeleine lost their only surviving parent, and what she’d never realised was that rather than his daughters going to live with their maternal grandparents, Harry’s wish was for Susanna and Adeleine to live with her.
In all those years she’d thought he resented her, and yet his wish had always been for his girls to go to his sister if he died before they reached adulthood.
Gayle finished her tea when she heard footfall coming down the stairs in her cottage.
If she could change the past, she would have tried harder with Harry, even though he was stubborn.
She’d have turned up on his doorstep, forced him to listen to her and see that just because she didn’t want to run a café with him and just because her business was a success, it didn’t diminish what he’d done with the café.
Circumstances had played a part, she knew that, but she wondered had he ever realised it for himself rather than shouldering all that dreadful blame?
She wouldn’t change her pudding business if she had her time again – she loved everything about it – and she wouldn’t change meeting Jeffrey, either.
Their time together was special, and he’d been her one true love.
She wouldn’t have wanted to miss that, even though sadness ended up breaking them apart.
When Susanna came into the kitchen she rose from the table and took out another mug from the cupboard. ‘Tea?’
‘Yes, please.’
It was only a two-word response, but it was a start.
Today, wearing what looked like exercise clothes, Susanna looked a little more relaxed, but Gayle knew her mood could change in an instant.
The smile, however, was golden because it reminded Gayle of the girl she’d seen emerge every now and then over the years, in the moments when she went with the flow, or when she forgot to put up a front.
All those years fighting being here must have taken a toll on her oldest niece, but a moment ago when she smiled she’d looked so pretty, it soothed her seriousness as well as her features, showed off lovely straight teeth from those braces she’d hated so much in her teens, and it lit up her eyes too.
That was another thing she wouldn’t change – being a guardian to Harry’s girls. As hard as it had been all round, she was glad he’d entrusted her. What she would change, however, was the way they’d left the island and how she’d played a part in it, even though she’d felt she had no choice.