Eight Days in Bellweather

Mae had kept the ticket for thirty-eight years, although the train company printed clearly that it was valid for one journey only. She found it while looking for a spare button, tucked inside a guidebook whose cover showed a city she had never reached.

The ticket cost less than she now paid for a haircut. At twenty-three it had represented most of her savings and an idea of herself she had never quite managed to throw away.

She put it on the kitchen table. Then she rang a small hotel in Bellweather and booked eight nights.

Her daughter assumed she was joking.

“On your own?”

“Unless the hotel supplies somebody.”

“Mum.”

“Yes. On my own.”

Mae was sixty-one. Her husband had died three years earlier. Before that there had been six years when his illness arranged both their lives, and before those years there had been children, work, bills and a succession of reasons to go somewhere familiar for a long weekend rather than somewhere she had wanted since she was young.

She did not regret caring for him. She regretted how thoroughly she had learned to wait.

At twenty-three she had planned to spend a summer in Bellweather with a school friend. There would be temporary jobs, a room above a shop and long evenings in a city famous for its bridges. Then her father fell at work. Mae returned home, the friend travelled without her, and life filled the space so efficiently that the plan began to seem childish.

The friend sent postcards for a while. Mae kept them until moving house, when she threw them away in a fit of practical cruelty towards herself.

Now her daughter, Ellen, offered to come for the first three days.

“You don’t have to,” Mae said.

“I know. I’d like to.”

Mae almost agreed. She loved Ellen. They travelled well together, provided Mae accepted that Ellen would arrange everything and then ask whether she was comfortable with the arrangements.

“I want to find out how I do by myself,” she said.

Ellen was quiet. “I wasn’t trying to stop you.”

“I know. I’m trying not to stop myself.”

They talked about sensible preparations. Mae booked trains she could change, wrote down the hotel’s number and agreed to send a message when she arrived. Ellen stopped suggesting luggage and began asking which bridge she most wanted to see.

Mae opened the old guidebook. The answer, she discovered, was complicated by the fact that she remembered the photograph better than the name.

Her neighbour, Yusuf, offered to water her plants. Her manager at the charity shop approved the holiday dates. Nobody fell ill. No pipe burst. The ease with which the world accepted eight days without her made Mae feel both relieved and slightly insulted.

The night before leaving, she packed three times. She removed two dresses, added a jumper and considered cancelling because the weather forecast looked poor. Then she placed the old ticket inside the guidebook and closed the suitcase.

At the station she boarded the correct train and sat in the wrong seat. A young man checked her reservation, pointed to the next carriage and helped move her case. She thanked him more warmly than the small service required.

For the first hour she watched the landscape with the anxious attention of somebody personally responsible for keeping the train on its route. By lunchtime she was reading. When the connection was announced, she gathered her things before anyone else stood.

She reached Bellweather in rain.

The bridge outside the station was covered in repair scaffolding. A diversion took her past a loading bay and three bins before she found the hotel. Her room faced a wall. The bed was clean, the bathroom small and the window difficult to close.

She sat on the edge of the mattress and cried.

It was not grief exactly. She had carried the imagined city through decades of ordinary work, and here it was being somewhere with bins. She had arrived too late to be twenty-three in it and too early to know what being sixty-one there might mean.

Ellen called. Mae said she was tired and the journey had gone well. Both were true. She did not want to turn the first disappointing hour into a rescue request.

After the call she washed her face, asked reception for help with the window and went out for dinner. The woman at the desk recommended a nearby place where people commonly ate alone. Mae nearly said this would not bother her. Then she realised it did, and accepted the recommendation.

At a small table she ordered stew. Nobody looked at her. A man by the window read a newspaper. Two women discussed a school project. The waiter brought her bread without asking whom she was waiting for.

She ate slowly. Afterwards she walked to the river and found a bridge that was open. Lights trembled in the dark water. It was not the picture from the guidebook. She stayed a long time.

The next morning she attempted an itinerary. Museum at ten, cathedral at noon, market after lunch. By eleven thirty her feet hurt and she had looked at so many painted faces she could no longer remember any of them.

Outside, she sat beside a woman eating an orange. They began talking because the woman offered her a tissue for a blister. Her name was Berta. She lived nearby and came to the museum courtyard to eat lunch because nobody tried to sell her coffee there.

“What are you doing next?” she asked.

Mae showed her the list.

Berta considered it. “Do you want to?”

“It’s what I came to see.”

“That wasn’t the question.”

Mae laughed, then admitted she wanted to sit somewhere warm and look at nothing important.

Berta pointed out a reading room across the square where visitors could rest. Mae spent an hour there with a magazine she would never have chosen at home. At three, she walked along the river without checking anything off.

On the third morning she took a bus in the wrong direction. She discovered this after the river disappeared and the streets grew wider, with supermarkets instead of old stone houses. At home she would have turned the mistake into evidence that she should have prepared better. Here she asked the driver where to change, got off beside a small shopping centre and bought a sandwich while she waited.

Across the road, three women were arranging flowers outside a community building. Someone had dropped a packet of wooden pegs. Mae helped gather them and was thanked with a biscuit. By the time the next bus arrived, she had spent twenty minutes discussing the weather with strangers who had no idea she considered herself an inexperienced traveller. To them she was simply a woman who had stopped to help. She found that version of herself surprisingly comfortable.

Later that day, Ellen called to say Mae’s grandson had a small part in a school assembly on Friday. The family had only just received the notice. He had asked whether Gran would come.

Mae looked at her return booking. She could travel back two days early. She pictured his face, then the relief of being useful in a familiar way. The decision almost made itself.

“Would you tell him I won’t be there?” she said. “I’d like to hear about it afterwards.”

Ellen paused. “Of course.”

“Is he upset?”

“He’ll be disappointed. He’ll also have me and his dad there.”

Mae thanked her. She put down the phone and waited for guilt to reveal that she had made the wrong choice. Instead she felt sad about missing something. Sadness, she was beginning to discover, did not always require changing the plan.

That afternoon she took a boat along the river. The guide’s commentary was lively and almost impossible to hear above an engine. Mae stopped trying to catch every word. She watched people on balconies, laundry above narrow yards, a boy waving from a footpath. A woman beside her asked if she would take a photograph of her family.

When she handed back the phone, the woman offered to take one of Mae. Mae nearly refused. Then she stood by the rail, laughing because the wind kept lifting her hair into her mouth.

The picture was not flattering. She sent it to Ellen anyway.

On the fifth morning, the hotel receptionist said a room overlooking the street had become available. Would she like to move? Mae looked at her case, still mostly unpacked, and said yes. She had assumed asking for a better view would make her troublesome. In fact, it required a conversation lasting less than a minute.

She unpacked in the new room. Dresses in the wardrobe. Book on the table. Toothbrush beside the sink. She had spent half the trip behaving as though she might be called home at any moment.

On Friday she received a video of the assembly. Her grandson stood beside three other children holding a painted sun. He delivered one sentence with tremendous seriousness. Mae watched twice, sent a voice message praising the sentence and went out to find lunch.

She met Berta again in the courtyard. This time she had brought her own sandwich. They spent an hour talking about their husbands, both dead, and the small adjustments nobody thought to mention when describing widowhood.

“I still buy the biscuits he liked,” Mae said. “I don’t even eat them.”

“Stop buying them.”

“It feels disloyal.”

Berta peeled another orange. “He married a woman, not a shopping list.”

Mae laughed until she cried a little. Berta waited without trying to change the subject.

They did not become lifelong friends in an afternoon. They exchanged numbers, and Berta wrote down the name of a quieter bridge Mae had missed. There was room for the meeting to matter without promising more than either could know.

On her last evening, Mae found that bridge. There were no grand lights, only a low parapet and steps down to a towpath. She opened the old guidebook and looked at the photograph inside.

This was it. She recognised the curve of a building on the opposite bank. The photographer had stood lower down, perhaps on a boat. For thirty-eight years she had imagined a view that would never look quite the same from where she was standing.

She took her own photograph. In it, a delivery bicycle leaned against the rail and somebody’s red glove lay on the stone. She preferred it.

At home, Ellen met her at the station. Mae let her take the suitcase, not because she could not carry it but because accepting help had never been the real problem.

“Was it everything you hoped?” Ellen asked.

“No,” Mae said. “It was a city. I had a very good time.”

The following week she returned to work, watered her plants and bought biscuits she actually liked. She put the two photographs beside one another on the kitchen shelf: the old printed bridge and her untidy new version.

Then she wrote eight dates on next year’s calendar. She did not yet know where she would go. The dates were enough to begin with.