Mae

Mae is Sarah’s mother, remembered first through the care she gives her daughter and then through the losses that shape Sarah’s life. Alex Stafford refuses to acknowledge Sarah as his child, and Mae’s isolation and death leave Sarah carrying the conviction that her own birth caused her mother’s unhappiness. In the novel’s later recollections, Mae’s tenderness remains a counterpoint to the rejection and exploitation that follow.

Identity and Family

Mae is Alex Stafford’s mistress and the mother of their daughter, Sarah. Alex makes clear that he does not want another child, calling his children with his wife legitimate and telling Mae that Sarah should never have been born. His refusal is not a private disagreement alone: it denies Sarah recognition as his daughter and places Mae in the position of raising her without his acceptance.

Mae tries to give Sarah a sense of being wanted despite that rejection. When Alex visits, she dresses Sarah in a blue frock and white pinafore, braids her hair with pink and blue ribbons, and asks whether he sees how beautiful their daughter is. Sarah watches for his approval, but his frown and anger replace the welcome she has been prepared to receive. The scene establishes the gap between Mae’s hope for recognition and Alex’s repudiation.

Isolation and Maternal Care

Alex tells Mae that he has bought her a cottage and gives her money, but material provision does not protect her from the social consequences of their relationship. She tells him that people know who he is and what she is; no one looks at her or speaks to her, and Sarah notices the exclusion too. Mae has tried to explain their difference from other people to her daughter, but admits that she did not know what else to say. She also fears that her life has condemned her, while Alex resents her guilt and blames Sarah for damaging their relationship.

After Alex leaves, Sarah believes that she is responsible for Mae’s sadness. Mae’s earlier hopes that things would be different for her daughter persist in Sarah’s memory, but the child also hears Mae say that love is a curse rather than a blessing. That painful contradiction—Mae’s efforts to comfort her daughter alongside the despair surrounding their circumstances—becomes part of Sarah’s inheritance.

Mae later attempts to return to her childhood home with Sarah. At the door, she tells her mother that she has come home and asks to be allowed back; her mother answers that it is not so simple. Mae says she has nowhere else to go. The exchange makes her estrangement concrete: even the family home offers no immediate refuge.

Death and Sarah’s Grief

When Sarah is eight, Mae becomes ill and refuses a doctor, saying that rest is all she needs. Her breathing grows more labored, and she asks Rab to take care of her daughter. Mae dies the following morning, with the first sunlight of spring on her face and her rosary in her hands. Sarah initially has no tears; then she lies beside her mother, tries to warm her, and begs her to wake. Her grief breaks into a plea to die with Mae.

At the burial, Rab says Mae is better off dead because she is free. Sarah turns that word inward: she understands Mae to be free of her, and imagines that without Sarah her mother would still be alive and happy in a cottage surrounded by flowers. The rosary, pried from Mae’s fingers and placed in Sarah’s lap, is a final physical link to her mother. Sarah runs the beads through her cold fingers while staring into nothing.

Memory and Lasting Significance

Mae remains present in Sarah’s adult memories as both comfort and pain. When those recollections return, Sarah forces them down, preferring emotional numbness to reliving the hurt. She remembers Mae hugging, rocking, and humming to her, and promising that her daughter’s life would be different; Sarah’s later conviction that life never changes stands in stark contrast to that maternal promise.

Mae’s death also gives Sarah’s later fear of intimacy and hope a formative context. Sarah carries forward the child’s belief that she was the cause of her mother’s suffering, while Mae’s tenderness survives in memory as evidence that Sarah was once cherished. The novel thus makes Mae’s role more than that of a lost parent: her care and her deprivation together help explain the defenses Sarah builds against love.