The Sun Between Their Feet by Doris Lessing

you are my friend. But these people, they know nothing.’
    The Captain lay quiet. Fury was gathering in him. He thought of the General’s wife. He disliked her, but he had known her well enough.
    â€˜These people,’ said Michele. ‘They do not know a good picture from a bad picture. I paint, I paint, this way, that way. There is the picture – I look at it and laugh inside myself.’ Michele laughed out loud. ‘They say, he is a Michelangelo, this one, and try to cheat me out of my price. Michele -Michelangelo – that is a joke, no?’
    The Captain said nothing.
    â€˜But for you I painted this picture to remind you of our good times with the village. You are my friend. I will always remember you.’
    The Captain turned his eyes sideways in his head and stared at the black girl. Her smile at him was half innocence, half malice.
    â€˜Get out,’ he said suddenly.
    Michele came closer and bent to see the Captain’s face. ‘You wish me to go?’ He sounded unhappy. ‘You saved my life. I was a fool that night. But I was thinking of my offering to the Madonna – I was a fool, I say it myself. I was drunk, we are fools when we are drunk.’
    â€˜Get out of here,’ said the Captain again.
    For a moment the white bandage remained motionless. Then it swept downwards in a bow.Michele turned towards the door.
    â€˜And take that bloody picture with you.’
    Silence. Then, in the dim light, the Captain saw Michele reach out for the picture, his white head bowed in profound obeisance. He straightened himself and stood to attention, holding the picture with one hand, and keeping the other stiff down his side. Then he saluted the Captain.
    â€˜Yes, sir,’ he said, and he turned and went out of the door with the picture.
    The Captain lay still. He felt – what did he feel? There was a pain under his ribs. It hurt to breathe. He realized he was unhappy. Yes, a terrible unhappiness was filling him, slowly, slowly. He was unhappy because Michele had gone. Nothing had ever hurt the Captain in all his life as much as that mocking
Yes, sir.
Nothing. He turned his face to the wall and wept. But silently. Not a sound escaped him, for the fear the nurses might hear.

The Trinket Box
    Yes, but it was only recently, when it became clear that Aunt Maud really could not last much longer, that people began to ask all those questions which should have been asked, it seems now, so long ago.
    Or perhaps it is the other way about: Aunt Maud, suddenly finding that innumerable nieces and nephews and cousins were beginning to take an interest in her, asking her to meet interesting people, was so disturbed to find herself pushed into the centre of the stage where she felt herself to be out of place, that she took to her bed where she could tactfully die?
    Even here, lying on massed pillows, like a small twig that has been washed up against banks of smooth white sand, she is not left in peace. Distant relations who have done no more than send her Christmas cards once a year come in to see her, sit by her bed for hours at a time, send her flowers. But why? It is not merely that they want to know what London in the Nineties was like for a young woman with plenty of money, although they wake her to ask: ‘Do tell us, do you remember the Oscar Wilde affair?’ Her face puckers in a worried look, and she says: ‘Oscar Wilde? What? Oh yes, I read such an interesting book, it is in the library.’
    Perhaps Aunt Maud herself sees that pretty vivacious girl (there is a photograph of her in an album somewhere) as a character in a historical play. But what is that question which it seems everyone comes to ask, but does not ask, leaving at length rather subdued, even a little exasperated – perhaps because it is not like Aunt Maud to suggest unanswerable questions?
    Where did it all begin? Some relation returned from a longholiday, and asking casually after the family,