Chapter 12
SUSANNA
Susanna had thought Gayle would’ve gone to work by now and, not ready for a confrontation, was caught by surprise when she went into the kitchen to find her aunt sitting at the table.
‘Did you sleep okay?’ Gayle asked, flicking on the kettle and finding a tea bag to drop into the awaiting mug.
‘Fine.’
‘I thought you’d sleep in,’ she said, as she passed Susanna the mug of tea.
‘I wanted to get outside for some fresh air.’ Rather than shower straight away she’d slipped on yoga leggings, a T-shirt and a zip-up hoodie.
She wanted to get out of the confines of the cottage before she had to deal with any of it.
Unfortunately, the fact that her aunt was still here had ruined that idea.
‘I’ll get the milk for you,’ said Gayle.
‘No need.’ Susanna opened the fridge before her aunt could do it for her. ‘I thought you’d be at the café by now.’
‘Nancy is the early bird these days; the arrangement suits us. Mind you, I’m still up before most. It’s just a habit I suppose.’
Susanna reluctantly sat down at the table.
‘How are you this morning?’ Her aunt watched her cautiously.
‘Apart from the shock of finding you alive?’
Gayle didn’t flinch; she’d likely expected the terse reply.
‘You wouldn’t have come if I’d have invited you to a party.’ Gayle waited but Susanna wasn’t going to deny it. She was right. ‘It’s nice that you and Addie came here together.’
‘You already said that last night.’ She was being pedantic, but she couldn’t help it. ‘And why wouldn’t we come together?’
‘I wasn’t sure how much you saw of each other.’
‘We both have our own lives, but we’re still close.’
‘Sometimes siblings drift apart, that’s all.’
‘Like you and Dad?’
Aunt Gayle declined to answer and instead asked, ‘Is your sister up and about yet?’
‘She used the toilet then went back to bed.’
‘She always slept well here. I think the sea air helps.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Do you ever see the sea?’ Gayle asked.
‘I live in Cambridge,’ Susanna sniped, then immediately felt petty in her rudeness. It was the same way she’d been the day she arrived on the island, waiting for Aunt Gayle to put a foot wrong, waiting for her to say something she could latch on to and criticise.
The sound of the post dropping onto the mat took her aunt from the kitchen to the hallway and gave Susanna a brief reprieve, although it didn’t stop her memories from flooding back.
She could still remember her first day here.
She’d sat in her bedroom – well, a room anyway – at the top of a ramshackle cottage far away from the mainland, her school, her friends.
She and Addie had lost everything – their mum, their dad, their home.
It was just the two of them now. No matter that Aunt Gayle was their guardian, she would never take the place of either of their parents.
She was fourteen years old, she was here, but she had a plan.
When she was eighteen, she could do what she liked and she was going to get far, far away from here, from a woman who was a stranger, a woman her dad hadn’t seen eye to eye with, from the place she’d never wanted to come to.
That day she’d opened the little velvet pouch she’d kept in her rucksack and took out her mother’s brooch.
Her dad had given it to her, and another brooch to Addie, when their mum died.
Susanna could still remember the first time she wore it, long before it belonged to her.
Her mum had given it to her to wear when her nerves were frayed one night when she was about to perform with the school orchestra.
She played the violin, usually well, but not with an audience and that night she’d been convinced that she would mess up.
Her mother had simply unpinned her brooch from her blouse, pinned it on Susanna’s school shirt, and told her she could never mess up in her mother’s eyes.
The day she arrived on the island she’d held on to the brooch like a talisman as she curled onto her side and let her tears soak into her pillow.
Susanna had stayed in her bedroom a lot when she first came to the island.
Inside its blue walls at least the room was a place of her own, a place she could be herself.
She’d started school, she’d begun to make friends and she started to try to find some sort of happy, even though it wasn’t the same here as it had been in Oxford.
One morning, a few weeks after their arrival on Anchor Island, Aunt Gayle summoned the sisters downstairs and into the kitchen.
On some days Susanna found herself tempted to reach out to her aunt for a comforting hug, to know that she was safe; on other days she thought of Aunt Gayle as the devil and wanted to keep her distance.
‘I have something for you both,’ Gayle announced.
The girls followed her to the back door and out into the sunshine.
Addie’s hand slipped into Susanna’s; she’d been clingy since they lost their dad.
She’d only just started sleeping in her own bedroom, having been sneaking into Susanna’s in the middle of the night ever since they’d arrived at the cottage.
They’d curl up together in the little bed and fall asleep that way and whisper that they’d always be there for each other.
With Addie’s hand still in hers they followed Gayle to the shed at the side of the cottage. In front of it were two bikes, one red, one blue.
‘Everyone cycles or walks on the island,’ Aunt Gayle told them. ‘I think bicycles are a lot of fun.’
‘Do you have a bike?’ Addie asked their aunt.
‘I do, and I ride it when I can. I love the way the wind rushes past me if I go fast enough.’
Addie giggled. ‘I like going fast. But I have to wear a helmet.’
‘Right… Do you each have a helmet?’
‘I outgrew mine. So did Addie,’ Susanna informed her.
‘Then I’ll order some from the mainland,’ said Gayle.
‘They might not fit,’ Susanna told her.
‘Then why don’t I take you both to Guernsey tomorrow and we can shop for them there?’ their aunt suggested.
Susanna kept Addie’s hand in hers. ‘We have school.’
‘Right.’ But then her face brightened. ‘I’ll bring Addie after school to meet you in Guernsey and we’ll get the ferry back together. How does that sound?’
Susanna felt Addie let go of her hand, and she watched as her sister went over to admire the smaller of the two bikes, the red one. She pushed one leg over the crossbar so she was straddling her bike.
Aunt Gayle opened the door to the shed. ‘I have a spanner I can use to adjust the saddle and handlebars.’ She briefly disappeared inside.
Susanna put her hand out for the spanner when Aunt Gayle joined them outside again. ‘I’ll do it. Dad showed me how.’
That day, Susanna had barely raised a smile, and she hadn’t looked happy when they went shopping for helmets either. And when Addie climbed onto her bike for the first ride and said thank you for about the twentieth time, Susanna’s mouth went dry and she couldn’t speak.
‘Stick to the trails,’ Gayle told the girls that day. ‘Avoid the roads, even though there isn’t traffic. The trails are better to start with.’
‘Okay,’ said Addie.
‘I’ll look after her,’ Susanna muttered, hitching her bottom onto her saddle, her bike slightly tilted, with one foot on the ground.
‘Is your saddle the right height?’ Gayle asked.
‘It’s fine.’ Susanna edged closer to her sister. ‘You can go in front of me, Addie.’
‘I’m the leader?’
‘Yes. I need to see you to make sure you’re safe,’ she said. ‘But don’t go too fast.’
‘I won’t speed.’ Addie grinned and turned to Aunt Gayle. ‘Why don’t you come with us?’
Aunt Gayle hesitated but then reminded them she had work. ‘Another time, I promise. Now I need you two to promise me something… I need you to come to the Sweet Life Café in one hour, so I know that you’re both okay.’
‘Yes, Aunt Gayle,’ Addie chimed.
‘We will,’ said Susanna, looking at the ground beneath her feet. ‘Thank you for my bike.’
She looked up to see an expression on her aunt’s face that she had never forgotten.
In the weeks and months to come, when she found herself wondering what it might have been like for Gayle to come out with them on bikes that day or any day after, she squashed the thought or perhaps the hope right down.
Good job, because Aunt Gayle never did come on a bike ride with them, and Addie eventually gave up asking.
Aunt Gayle had the Sweet Life Café and her life, and the girls had each other.
It was the Rafferty girls against the world.
Just the two of them. And if they stuck together, they would be just fine.
Gayle came back into the kitchen, snapping Susanna out of her reverie. ‘Just a bit of junk mail and a couple of bills,’ she said, placing the pile of post on the bench near the sink.
Susanna attempted a smile. Her aunt had been trying to get a conversation going about the seaside before she was rescued by the sound of the post landing on the mat, and now Susanna was reminded of the look on her aunt’s face the day she’d thanked her for the shiny new bike.
It wasn’t the look as such, but the fact that in that moment fourteen-year-old Susanna had realised that it was an incredibly tough time for Gayle as well as them.
She’d tried to remember that over the years, she thought she’d managed to be a lot more pleasant, and there were moments when she felt happier.
But then Aunt Gayle had interfered in her relationship with Mateo, and any bond that had begun to form between aunt and niece had been broken once more.
‘You asked if I saw the sea,’ said Susanna, just about managing to lift her gaze. She and Addie had to sort through their dad’s things, and they had to decide if they were staying for the living funeral despite the deception, but she could be polite to make things easier all round.
‘Yes.’ The hope on Aunt Gayle’s face was almost too much to bear and conjured up all sorts of emotions for Susanna.
Matter-of-factly she told her aunt, ‘I like to visit the coast in Norfolk. Me and Alex love it there. It’s where we met.
’ She checked herself as if she’d said too much and took a sip of tea.
That was the way it had been as a teenager here – sometimes she’d let herself relax, smile, feel at home, and other times she’d remember that this wasn’t what she wanted, it wasn’t her life, and the emotional barriers came up.
‘How did you and Alex get together?’ Gayle asked.
‘I got into trouble in the water and he saved me. He was a summer lifeguard.’
‘Well I never. That’s some meet-cute.’ But her upbeat tone fizzled out when she saw that Susanna wasn’t smiling back. ‘Where do we go from here, Susanna?’
Susanna toyed with the sleeve of her hoodie. ‘I honestly don’t know.’
‘I really am very sorry that I inadvertently tricked you and Addie.’
‘What’s done is done.’ She knocked back the rest of her tea. ‘I have to go.’ She set the cup in the sink and went upstairs to retrieve her trainers.
‘Will you stay?’ Gayle’s voice was small but loud enough to follow Susanna. ‘For my living funeral, I mean.’
Outside the kitchen, she replied, ‘I don’t know.’ But then she turned round and went back to where Aunt Gayle was sitting. ‘I meant to ask about the young woman who was here when we arrived.’ It had been puzzling her in the night.
‘Louisa? Oh, she’s my tourist.’
‘Your tourist?’
‘She’s renting the garden room out back. I put it on that Airbnb site people use nowadays.’
‘Right.’ She turned to leave again but Aunt Gayle’s voice stopped her.
‘I needed to generate some more income,’ she said.
‘The business suffered during the pandemic.’ She continued to ramble as if she wanted to delay Susanna’s departure for as long as possible.
‘I got the idea from someone else who’d done the same.
Accommodation is in high demand here on the island.
I decided I’d get an outside room installed with a small bathroom and kitchenette to make it liveable, and I’d give it a go.
I decided if I didn’t like it then I’d have a lovely place to do my paperwork or sit when it rains. ’
Gayle looked down at the mug in her hands. ‘Susanna… I’d really like it if you stayed for the living funeral. I know I’m in no position to make demands, but it would mean a lot. If not, then I respect your decision. Yours and Addie’s.’
‘I’m just not sure,’ said Susanna before she walked away. The thought of staying here for another ten days and having to face a party, which after all was what the event really was, was almost impossible to imagine. It felt like such a farce given the state of their relationship.
But then she remembered how she’d felt when she opened the invite back at her house in Cambridge. She hadn’t been filled with satisfaction that her aunt had gone, and she hadn’t blithely thrown the invite away; she’d been upset that they had never worked things out between them.
Aunt Gayle had destroyed her confidence when it came to men, and it had taken a long time to recover from that. Could she really forgive Gayle when she’d been head over heels with Mateo, planning a future with him?