In Pursuit of the English by Doris Lessing

the nurse briskly, and flung open a door. There was a dim space before us, filled with jostling furniture. The colours were dull crimson and purple, with a dark plummy wallpaper, and so many armchairs, buttoned pouffes and small hard tables that it was difficult for the nurse to move in a straight line to the window, where she jerked back heavy curtains. They were red damask lined with black silk, which absorbed the filtering light so that the room became only slightly less obscure than before.
    ‘There!’ she exclaimed with pride, turning to gaze lovingly at the oppressive room. ‘This used to be the old lady’s room before she got too ill to climb the stairs. She liked it for the view. It’s a lovely view.’ At the window I saw crowding roofs, and beyond them, the tops of trees shadowed with cold sunlight.
    ‘Has she been ill for long?’
    ‘Thirty years,’ said the nurse with pride. ‘Yes, I’ve been nursing her for thirty years. She won’t have anything changed up here, even though she can’t come up herself It was her room she used to sit in when she first got married. She used to paint. No one was allowed up here, not even her husband.’
    The way she spoke, diminishing those thirty years to the scale of a long convalescence, made the fruity room congeal around us; the thick curved surfaces thrust themselves out aggressively in affirmations of changeless comfort. ‘You won’t find many rooms like this at the price. Not good things like this. Can’t buy them these days.’ She gave a proud stiff glance around her. ‘She won’t have just anybody up here. Except when there are mistakes.’ The little foxy face stared at a point immediately before her; it was a table gleaming in the rufous light from the curtains. With an angry movement she jerked forward and picked up a brown, sticklike object which I took to be a cigar. ‘Incense,’ she said indignantly. ‘What next!’ Holding the thing between thumb and forefinger, little finger crooked away in disgust, she nosed her way warily through the angles and shoulders of the furniturelike a fish at the bottom of a pool, and flung open another door. ‘I suppose you’ll want to see the bedroom,’ she said, as if this was unreasonable of me. ‘The other people aren’t properly out yet, remember.’ This was a tiny room, more like the usual run of let rooms. It had a large jangly bed with brass bedballs, a fireplace that was occupied by an electric fire, and a single yellowing chest of drawers. The climate of this room – a thin bleakness, with a narrow shaft of colour-less light directed over the bare floor from a high window – was as if I had accidentally opened the door into the servants’ quarters from a lush passage in an old-fashioned hotel. The nurse was staring down at the bed, which was in disorder, the bottom sheet stained and crumpled, a single dent in the pillow, which held several glinting yellow hairs. Furs, flowers, dresses and underclothing lay everywhere. She picked up an empty scent bottle and flung it, together with the spill of incense, into an open drawer. ‘You can cook on this,’ she said grudgingly, pulling a gas-ring from behind a small curtain. ‘But this suite is not arranged for heavy cooking. My old lady won’t have cooking in the house. You’ll have to go out if you want to eat fancy.’
    ‘How much?’
    ‘Twelve guineas.’
    ‘A month?’
    Her face creased into suspicion. ‘A week,’ she said affrontedly. ‘Where do you come from? I might as well say now that the old lady won’t take foreigners.’
    ‘What do you mean by foreigners?’
    She looked me up and down, a practised, sly movement. ‘Where do you come from, then?’ She moved slowly backwards, her hand pressed against her chest, as if warding off something.
    ‘Africa.’
    The hand slowly dropped, and at her side, the fingers clenched nervously. ‘You’re not a black?’
    ‘Do I look like one?’
    ‘One never knows. You’d be surprised what