Mae Hart Declines the Weather

Mae Hart lived above a shop selling colanders in five sizes.

The stairs to her flat were steep, narrow and completely unsuited to the arrival of a person carrying cake with one hand and thirty years of unfinished family history with the other. Agnes made it to the top without dropping either, though she muttered about the building's attitude towards knees.

Mae opened the door before we knocked.

“Your step still gives you away,” she told Agnes.

“Your stairs still punish visitors.”

They looked at each other for a moment. Then Mae hugged her, cake and all.

I stood behind them holding the photographs, suddenly conscious that I had treated their past as something I could research without considering that they might still be inside it.

Mae had dark hair threaded with silver and a green stone at her throat. Her face was familiar from recordings but less polished in person, with a little flour on one sleeve and reading glasses hooked into the neck of her shirt. A keyboard stood beside the window. Laundry dried on a rack near a shelf of books. Being famous had apparently not solved where to put damp socks.

“June,” she said. “You have your mum's eyes and Agnes's suspicious way of looking at a chair before sitting in it.”

“Chairs have betrayed me,” Agnes said.

We put the papers on the table. Mae studied the photograph without touching it at first.

“I haven't seen this in years.”

“Gran had it.”

“Of course she did. Your grandad pretended he never cared about photographs, then asked everybody whether they'd got a good one.”

She smiled, but the smile changed when she read the work slip.

“I should tell you something before you start trying to return it to me.”

“We weren't going to bring it here,” Agnes said. “It would be a very wet visit.”

“I didn't want it.”

I looked up.

Mae met my eyes.

“Not because it wasn't beautiful. It was. He'd worked so hard on it. But I tried it on once, in that photograph, and it felt like being given a place I was no longer allowed to leave.”

I glanced at the line on the slip: A day from home, suitable for departure.

“What had you asked for?”

“Something small. A bit of the air at the house, perhaps. I was eighteen and terrified. I'd been offered a place to study music. Everybody kept saying how lucky I was, which left very little room to admit I wanted to hide in the pantry until September went away.”

Agnes cut the cake. She did it slowly, listening.

“Edwin said he could make a whole day,” Mae continued. “Kitchen warmth, garden air, the wind off the landing. Something I could put on in a strange city and feel less far away.”

“Could he?”

“Not reliably. The warmth kept restarting. It wouldn't reach the evening properly. He said he'd improve it. Then I realised the improvement I wanted wasn't really in the coat.”

She looked towards the window.

“I needed to leave badly and be miserable for a while. Not carry a permanent afternoon that made me feel I was doing leaving wrong.”

“Did Grandad mind?”

Mae's mouth tilted.

“Your grandfather was a lovely man. Lovely people can still be difficult when you decline something lovely they've made for you.”

Agnes put a plate in front of me.

“He took it personally.”

“For a bit,” Mae said. “We were all dramatic in less fashionable ways then.”

The two of them laughed. I didn't know the joke beneath it, but I liked being allowed to hear the surface.

Mae fetched a small ticket wallet from a drawer. Inside were programmes, folded letters and a list in her younger handwriting. She had written the conditions she wanted to remember: the kitchen window before anyone was awake; the garden just after rain; the changing air above the tide; the upstairs room as a storm moved away.

Grandad's notes beside some entries named brighter or calmer conditions.

“He kept choosing the nicest bits,” Mae said. “I wanted the changes. The house wasn't sunny all day. Nobody's was.”

I photographed the list with her permission. Agnes asked about the testing order, whether a cold interval had appeared before or after the last warmth, and how the lining had felt along the left sleeve. Mae answered what she remembered and said she didn't know the rest. None of us filled the gaps with confidence for her convenience.

Before we left, she asked about my course.

“I make things people can mend,” I said. “Or change without throwing the whole object away.”

“That sounds useful.”

“That's what I'm hoping.”

“No. It sounds useful now. Getting admitted won't travel backwards and make your earlier work count.”

I looked down at my plate. There was one forkful of cake left. I ate it rather than trying to answer elegantly.

Agnes asked about the fair. Mae said she might sing, provided nobody promised the audience perfect weather on her behalf.

“Noted,” Agnes said.

At the door, Mae caught her hand.

“Come again without bringing a problem.”

Agnes seemed, for a moment, to have forgotten how hands worked.

Then she squeezed Mae's fingers.

“I might bring worse cake.”

“I'd still let you in.”

On the stairs, neither of us spoke. I had come looking for a lost commission. I left with permission to stop treating an unfinished gift as a debt the recipient had failed to honour.