The Weight of Small Things

The following July the roses under the kitchen window bloomed as though they had something to prove.

Florence arrived first, as she had a year before — only this time not with a suitcase but with three boxes of photographs and a large frame wrapped in bubble wrap. The gate opened without a creak: Nigel had finished the hinges after all. On the hook in the hall hung the blue coat — Katherine had left it there over the winter, "so the house doesn't forget whose it is."

The house hadn't forgotten.

Katherine came down from London on the Friday, with a small bag and a tan Florence had never seen on her before. In March she'd left the firm where no one had asked how she was in twelve years, and now she worked for Mrs Hollis in Ashford — looking after the finances of elderly clients, "the ones people like Pierce could have cheated." She earned half as much. She smiled twice as often.

Derek Pierce's trial had ended in April: two and a half years. When the judge read out the sentence, Derek turned to look at Katherine. She hadn't looked away, she said.

Nigel arrived on Saturday morning, with Thomas and Lily.

From the window Florence watched her brother climb out of a dark green van with "Harlow Joinery" painted on the side, and after him, slowly, holding on to the door, her other brother.

Thomas had put on weight. His skin was no longer yellow but ordinary, lightly tanned after a week's holiday in Norfolk in May. He held his head slightly tilted, the way Mum had, and looked at the house for so long that Lily took his hand.

"I've never been here," he said, when Florence came out onto the step. "Can you imagine? Fifty-three years. And this is where she lived."

"Come in," said Florence. "She'd have wanted you to come in."

The operation had been on the sixteenth of January. Nigel had insisted on the date — "so the sixteenth means something else." The brothers spent two weeks in neighbouring rooms, and Lily scolded them both equally whenever they tried to get up before the doctor said they could.

Nigel showed his scar to anyone who showed the slightest interest. And to plenty who didn't.

In the afternoon they went to the churchyard. All five of them. Mum lay beside Dad under the old yew, and on her grave someone from the town — they never found out who — had planted a yellow rose bush. Mum's variety.

Thomas stood by the grave for a long time. Then he crouched and touched the stone with his fingertips.

"I read your last letter to them," he said quietly. Not to them — to her. "You wrote that I've got Flo's eyes. That's not right. Flo's got your eyes. What I've got is your stubbornness. You knew that."

Lily laid a small photograph on the stone — the hospital one, from 1974. Only in a new frame.

"So she can see he's here now," Lily explained. "With us."

In the evening they ate in the garden, at a long table Nigel had made from the boards of Dad's old shed. Katherine refused the tomatoes in the salad, and Thomas silently moved them onto his own plate. Florence watched them and thought that this was exactly what Mum had dreamed of. Not the house, not the money.

This table.

"I've got news," she said, once it was dark and Nigel had lit candles in old jam jars. "A gallery in Edinburgh is taking my exhibition. For the autumn."

Katherine put down her fork.

"Flo…"

"It's called The Weight of Small Things." Florence could feel her cheeks burning. "Photographs of Mum's things. The cup with the coffee ring. The coat with the button. The notepad with her to-do list. The letters tied up with ribbon. And…" She glanced at Thomas. "The sunset on Skye. In the middle. The biggest one."

No one said anything. Then Nigel got up, walked round the table and silently put his arms round his sister from behind, resting his chin on the top of her head, the way he used to when she was six.

The big frame in bubble wrap wasn't for the exhibition. The next morning Florence hung it in the kitchen, opposite the door frame with the height marks. The same sunset on Skye — printed, in a plain oak frame Nigel had made.

"Stop hiding beautiful things," Mum had written.

Then Katherine solemnly fetched a pencil from the sitting room and stood Thomas with his back against the door frame.

"Mum did this with every one of us," she explained. "Every year. You've missed fifty-three. We'll catch up."

She drew a line above the top of his head and wrote, in a neat hand very like Mum's: "Tom, 53."

Thomas looked at the words for a long time. Then he turned towards the window, and Lily gently put her hand on his shoulder.

On Sunday, when the others had gone to the Royal Oak for a farewell pie, Florence stayed behind in the house alone — to say goodbye until next summer.

She went up to her old room, Mum's sewing room. Sat down at the Singer. Pulled out the little drawer at the side — the one where Mum kept her thread and thimbles.

Under the cotton reels lay a folded sheet of paper.

Florence unfolded it, thinking it was a dress pattern. But it was a letter. Unfinished. Mum's handwriting — the same round, girlish hand as on the back of the 1974 photograph. So it had been written long ago. Very long ago. The paper had yellowed, and the ink had faded to the colour of weak tea.

"My dear Anne,

Five years have gone by, and I still can't believe you never wrote back. I know Mum and Dad forbade you. I know you were only a child when it all happened. But you're the only one who saw me that day at St Agnes'. The only one who knows what really happened there. And what they did with the other one…"

The letter broke off mid-word. As if someone had called Mum away. As if she'd never found the courage to finish it.

Florence sat perfectly still, holding the page.

Anne.

Mum had no sister. Mum had always said, "I was an only child." Grandma and Grandpa Ellis had died when Florence was still little, and no one had ever — not once — mentioned anyone called Anne.

"You're the only one who saw me that day."

"What they did with the other one…"

The other what? The other — who?

Downstairs the front door banged. Voices, laughter — Nigel telling some story, Lily laughing, Katherine saying the pie had been on the dry side but she'd had two slices out of respect for Roger. Thomas called up from the hall:

"Flo! We've brought you some pie!"

Florence folded the letter. Looked at it for one more moment.

And then she went downstairs — to her brother, and her brother, and her sister, and her niece, who were waiting for her in the kitchen under the sunset on Skye — and laid the yellowed page on the table, in the middle, between the mugs, where everyone could see it.

This time, no one in this family was going to hide anything.

"Has any of you," she asked, "ever heard of Anne Ellis?"