The Sun Between Their Feet by Doris Lessing Page B

delicious cooking, the nights and nights of nursing. A week after she had left would arrive the inevitable parcel, containing presents so apt that it was with an uneasy feeling that we sat down to write thanks. How did she come to know our most secret wants? And, imperceptibly, the unease would grow toresentment. She had no right, no right at all, to give such expensive presents when she was dependent on relations for her support.
    So it was that after every visit a residue of spite and irritation remained. And perhaps she intended that the people she served should never have to feel the embarrassment of gratitude? Perhaps she intended us – who knows? -to think as we sat writing our thank-yous: But after all, she has to live on us, it is after all a kindness to feed and house her for a few weeks.
    It is all intolerable, intolerable; and it seems now that we must march into that bedroom to ask: ‘Aunt Maud, how did you bear it? How could you stand, year in and year out, pouring out your treasures of affection to people who hardly noticed you? Do you realize, Aunt Maud, that now, thirty years or more after you became our servant, it is the first time that we are really aware you were ever alive? What do you say to that, Aunt Maud?
Or did you know it all the time
 …’ For that is what we want to be sure of: that she did not know it, that she never will.
    We wander restlessly in and out of her room, watching that expression on her face which – now that she is too ill to hide what she feels – makes us so uneasy. She looks impatient when she sees us; she wishes we would go away. Yesterday she said: ‘One does not care for this kind of attention.’
    All the time, all over the house, people sit about, talking, talking, in low urgent anxious voices, as if something vital and precious is leaking away as they wait.
    â€˜She
can’t
be exactly the same, it is impossible!’
    â€˜But I tell you, I remember her, on the day the war started -the old war, you know. On the platform, waving good-bye to my son. She was the same, wrinkle for wrinkle. That little patch of yellow on her cheek – like an egg-stain. And those little mauvish eyes, and that funny voice. People don’t talk like that now, each syllable sounding separately.’
    â€˜Her eyes have changed though.’ We sneak in to have a look at her. She turns them on us, peering over the puffs of apink bedjacket – eyes where a white film is gathering. Unable to see us clearly, afraid – she who has sat by so many deathbeds – of distressing us by her unsightliness, she turns away her head, lies back, folds her hands, is silent.
    When other people die, it is a thing of horror, swellings, gross flesh, smells, sickness. But Aunt Maud dies as a leaf shrivels. It seems that a little dryish gasp, a little shiver, and the papery flesh will crumble and leave beneath the bedclothes she scarcely disturbs a tiny white skeleton. That is how she is dying, giving the least trouble to the niece who waited sharp-sightedly for someone else to use the phrase ‘a happy release’ before she used it herself. ‘She might not eat anything, but one has to prepare the tray all the same. And then, there are all these people in the house.’
    â€˜Before she retired, what did she do?’
    â€˜Taught, didn’t you know? She was forty when her father married again, and she went out and took a post in a school. He never spoke one word to her afterwards.’
    â€˜But why, why?’
    â€˜He was in the wrong of course. She didn’t marry so as to look after him.’
    â€˜Oh, so she might have married? Who was he?’
    â€˜Old John Jordan, do you remember?’
    â€˜But he died before I left school – such a funny old man!’
    Impossible to ask why she never married. But someone asks it. A great-niece, very young, stands beside the bed and looks down with shivering distaste at such age, such