The Grandmothers by Doris Lessing Page A

light and air and good clean smells. When she could no longer bear it, she told her aunt she would be back in a minute and she ran through the streets and stood outside the Staveney house and thought about what was inside. Space, room for everyone. She had understood by now what had been so confused in her mind, and for so long: in that house was one family, the fair woman, who was the mother, and Edward, and Thomas. She had never questioned that there hadn’t seemed to be a father. None of the families she knew had fathers, that is, real fathers, who stayed.
    Her aunt Marion had never had a husband. When she had been well enough to be interested in her own story, she had said to Victoria that she had no man in her life but then she had no grief either. And that was as far as her explanations had gone. But if there had been a man around, Victoria thought, even an uncle, he could have helped her. She had to do everything, remember rates bills and the electric and the gas and the water, staying at home from school so the meters could be read, fetching her aunt’s money from the post office. ‘You’re a good girl,’ Phyllis Chadwick told her. ‘You are a very good girl.’
    But surely she was getting too old to be told she was a good girl? She was nearly fourteen. She had breasts now. She was not a little girl, but she was sleeping on the day-bed, with her possessions, such as they were, in a suitcase that had a cloth over it to make it look like a seat, and her clothes on a rail in a corner of her aunt’s room. One day, prayed Victoria, I’ll have my own place, my own room. Her aunt would die and then she would move into her aunt’s room, and this would be her place.
    For the last few weeks of her aunt’s dying Victoria did not get to school. She was simply there, by the deathbed, and so much identified with the illness that she even had pains in her stomach: stomach cancer. It was all a long dark bad-smelling bad dream, the nurses coming and going, medicines, making cups of this and that which cooled untouched by her aunt’s bed, while she cried with pain and Victoria measured out another dose of painkiller. Victoria said to Phyllis Chadwick, ‘Why can’t aunt go into hospital?’ but it was put to her that this wouldn’t happen until the very end, and meanwhile Victoria was being such a good girl. ‘And she gave you a bed and a place. Don’t forget that, Victoria. She did that for you.’
    At last aunt Marion was in hospital and Victoria visited her, for most of the day, though it was doubtful if her aunt knew she was there. ‘But you never know,’ said Phyllis Chadwick, and the nurses agreed. ‘You never know these days if they are conscious of what is going on or not.’ These days referred not to a recently acquired
    capacity of dying patients, but to new ideas about patients, who could be suspected of knowing everything that was going on around them, even if in a coma or half-dead. Or even dead?
    Aunt Marion died and it seemed it was Victoria’s responsibility to see to the funeral arrangements, supervised by Phyllis, though the actual signing of forms was done by a social worker, because Victoria was too young. She thought, If I’m too young to sign the forms, how is it I wasn’t too young to look after her?
    Victoria was in the empty flat, and she opened windows to let out the smell of dying and of medicines. When everything was fresh again she would move into her aunt’s bedroom , . . there arrived a man who was consoling and respectful about aunt Marion’s death, and her being all alone in the world, but asked where she planned to go, and she said, ‘I’m staying here. In auntie’s flat.’
    ‘But you’re only fourteen,’ said this man. ‘You can’t be by yourself
    Victoria was not really taking it in that she couldn’t have this flat, have her own place, until Phyllis Chadwick came to say she had better come home with her. ‘We’ll make some room,’ she said. ‘We’ll put you in