The Umbrella of Small Mercies

Pim had mended one thousand and six umbrellas, and not one of them had ever rained on the inside until the morning he found the grey one. He travelled with the weather, which is to say badly, in a cart that creaked like an old joke and held everything an umbrella-mender requires: whalebone ribs and bamboo ribs, waxed silk in nine colours, a tin of tiny brass rivets that he loved more than was sensible, and a kettle. He went where the rain went, because rain is where umbrellas come to grief, and a man who can put them right is always, eventually, welcome. He was a small man with large pockets and the particular cheerfulness of someone who has decided to be pleased by things on purpose. The grey umbrella was wedged at the bottom of a junk-stall's bin between a one-legged stool and a portrait of a stranger's aunt. It was the most apologetic object he had ever seen — colourless, drooping, its handle worn smooth by some long-gone hand. The stall-keeper let him have it for the price of fixing her gate, which Pim did, whistling. He opened it that night in his cart to inspect the ribs, and it rained on him. Not water. Or — water, yes, a soft warm drizzle falling out of the canopy from nowhere at all, pattering down inside the dome — but the rain smelled of bread, and where it touched his cold hands it left warmth, and at his feet, where it pooled, there was suddenly a thick slice