The Sun Between Their Feet: Collected African Stories Volume Two. Doris Lessing
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I think he is well on the way to recovery. And then I shall be delighted to avail myself of your kind offer. I will be with you by the middle of …’ Punctually to the hour she would arrive; the perfect guest. And when she left, because of the arrival of a baby or a sudden illness perhaps five hundred miles away or in another country, with what affectionate heart-warming gratitude she thanked us, until it was easy to forget the piles of mending, the 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 to resentment. 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.
‘She can’t be exactly the same, it is impossible!’
‘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.’
‘Her eyes have changed though.’ We sneak in to have a look at her. She turns them on us, peering over the puffs of a pink 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.’
‘Before she retired, what did she do?’
‘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.’
‘But why, why?’
‘He was in the wrong of course. She didn’t marry so as to look after him.’
‘Oh, so she might have married? Who was he?’
‘Old John Jordan, do you remember?’
‘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 death: ‘Aunt Maud, why did you never marry?’
‘Marry! Marry! Who is talking about marrying?’ she sounds angered and sullen; then the small eyes film over and she says: ‘Who did you say is getting married?’
The niece is banished and there are no more questions.
No more visitors either, the doctor says. A question of hours. A few hours, and that casket of memories and sensations will have vanished. It is monstrous that a human being who has survived miraculously and precariously so many decades of wars, illnesses and accidents should die at last, leaving behind nothing.
Now we sit about the bed where she lies and wait for her to die. There is nothing to do. No one stirs. We are all sitting, looking, thinking, surreptitiously touching the things that belonged to her, trying to catch a glimpse, even for a moment, of the truth that will vanish in such a little while.
And if we think of the things that interested her, the enthusiasms we used to laugh at, because it seemed so odd that such an old lady should feel strongly about these great matters, what answer do we get? She was a feminist, first and foremost. The Pankhursts, she said, ‘were so devoted’. She was a socialist; she had letters from Keir Hardie. There had been no one like him since he died. She defended vegetarians, but would not be one herself, because it gave people so much trouble in the kitchen. Madame Curie, Charles Lindbergh, Marie Corelli, Lenin, Clara Butt – these were her idols, and she spoke of them in agitated defiance as if they were always in need of defence. Inside that tiny shrivelled skull what an extraordinary gallery of heroes and heroines. But there is no answer there. No matter how hard we try, fingering her handkerchief sachet, thinking of the funny flat hats she wore, draped with bits of Liberty cottons, remembering how she walked, as if at any moment she might be called upon to scale a high wall, she eludes us. Let us resign ourselves to it and allow her to die.
Then she speaks after such long hours of waiting it is as if a woman already dead were speaking. Now, now!! We lean forward, waiting for her to say that one thing, the perfect word of forgiveness that will leave us healed and whole.
She has made her will, she says, and it is with the lawyer ‘who has always been so kind’ to her. She has nothing to leave but a few personal trinkets … The small precise voice is breathless, and she keeps her eyes tight shut. ‘I have told my lawyer that my possessions, such as they are, are kept in my black trinket box in the cupboard there. He knows. Everything is in order. I put everything right when people became so kind and I knew I was ill.’
And that is the last thing she will ever say. We wait intently, shifting our feet and avoiding each other’s eyes for fear that our guilty glances may imprint upon our memories of her the terrible knowledge let slip in the order of the words of that final sentence. We do not want to remember her with guilt, oh no! But although we wait, straining, nothing else comes; she seems to be asleep, and slowly we let our limbs loosen and think of the black box. In it we will find the diaries, or the bundle of letters which will say what she refuses to say. Oh most certainly we will find something of that sort. She cannot die like this, leaving nothing. There will be evidence of a consumed sorrow, at the least, something that will put substance into this barrenness. And when at last we look up, glancing at our watches, we see there is a stillness in the tiny white face which means she is dead.
We get up, rather stiffly, because of the hours of sitting, and then after a decent interval open the black box. It is full to the brim with bits of lace and ribbon, scraps of flowery stuffs, buckles, braid, brooches, cheap glass necklaces. Each has a bit of paper pinned to it. ‘These buttons I thought would do for the frock Alice was making when I was there last month.’ And: ‘To little Robin with my fond love. I bought this glass peacock in Cape Town in 1914 for another little boy.’ And so on, each of us has something. And when we come to the end and search for the diaries and letters there is nothing! Secretively each of us taps at the wood of the bottom – but no, it is solid. And we put back the things and we feel for the first time that Aunt Maud is dead.