“Oh, it’s lovely, pet.  Thanks a lot”.  Aunt Betty turned the silky scarf over in her lap, admiring it.  Sara, her niece, positively glowed with pleasure. 

     “Try it on,” she urged, and helped her aunt up to the mirror above the fireplace.   

     “Och, I’m not dressed, hen”,  Aunt Betty protested, but she allowed the scarf to be draped this way and that, and took off her pinny for better effect.

     Sara’s good feeling lasted all the way through the shop-bought buns and rather strong tea, as she and her aunt caught up on the previous few years. 

     Sara had had a rough time of it, but she had come through, and was an intelligent and capable girl of twenty three.  The death of her mother in New Zealand, where the family had lived for four years, was largely survived through Sara’s happy relationship with Tom.  He was also Scottish and when he had finished his dentistry training in Auckland and they had married, they returned to Scotland to set up home.

     Sara had always cared for her aunt, now in her early sixties, and had resumed the relationship with pleasure.  Aunt Betty and her own mother had been best friends and Sara was anxious to be a help to the old lady, especially as her husband, Bill, was confined to a wheelchair.

     Yet when Sara said her goodbyes at the door of Aunt Betty’s dull little flat, her contentment vanished.  “There doesn’t seem to be much quality in her life”, she remarked to Tom.”

     “She seemed fine to me”, Tom replied, not sure what she meant.

      “It’s just that everything she has is brown or beige or grey.  Her sofa’s tatty and even her clothes are drab.  And those curtains, they’re hideous”.

     “Oh come on, Sara, they weren’t as bad as all that.  I think you’re exaggerating a bit.”

     Sara wasn’t convinced.  Her memories of her aunt were of a small living room brightened by ornaments.  Now the room seemed bare, and the little bedroom was as austere as a monk’s cell.  As far as Sara was concerned, the tough buns and stewed tea underlined her aunt’s resignation in the face of old age.  She resolved to do as much as she could to enhance her aunt’s declining years.