The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  If she’d had a lever-type doorknob instead of an old-fashioned screw doorknob, she’d have been alive today. If she hadn’t shut the door after herself (and what on earth was the point in doing that, as she lived alone?), she’d have been alive today.

  Killed by a doorknob.

  For the lack of a nail the battle was lost.

  You have to be careful, when you’re old.

  And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

  Fran declines a beer. I’ll see you down here at seven, she says. And up she goes to her room, to kick off her boots and lie on her bed and gaze at the rich daily life of the Black Country and the West Midlands. It’s on the chilly side in her bedroom, there must be a thermostat somewhere, but she can’t find it. Never mind, you can’t die of hypothermia in a Premier Inn.

  She likes her bedroom. She likes the whiteness of the pillows, and the rich loud purple of the Inn’s informative boasts about its reliable facilities and its notable breakfasts. It’s very purple, the Premier Inn branding.

  There are several items of soothingly mild interest on the regional news – a promotional chat by some staunchly upbeat florist’s about a Valentine’s Day event, an interview with a volunteer at a food bank, a report of a non-fatal knifing at a bus stop in Bilston, and, most unexpectedly, an item about a small earthquake which had hit Dudley and its neighbourhood at dawn that day. It had caused little consternation and most people had not even noticed it, although one or two said their breakfast crockery had rattled or a standard lamp had fallen over. Cats and dogs and budgerigars hadn’t liked it, and had wisely seen it coming, or so their owners said. This was routine stuff, but Fran’s attention is caught by a lively account by an unlikely young woman who claims that she had been rocked on her moored narrow boat by a not-so-small and inexplicable wave. ‘It wasn’t a tsunami,’ says this spirited red-cheeked person, posing picturesquely and entirely unselfconsciously in a purple woolly hat, a padded red jacket and cowboy boots on the wharf just along the canal from the Open Air Museum, ‘but it was definitely a wave, and I thought it was coming out of the limestone caverns, I thought the quarry sides had given way, or the mining tunnels had collapsed, or maybe a great river beast was making its way out of there, been there for millennia waiting just for me!’

  Fran likes this person very much, she admires her relish and her imagination and her Wolverhampton accent, and she admires the interviewer and the cameraman for realising how eccentrically photogenic she is. ‘To tell you the truth,’ says this robust young person, ‘I’m always hoping something really really terrible is about to happen, like the end of the world, you know what I mean? And that I’ll be right there? You know what I mean?’ And she smiles, gaily, and then pronounces, ‘But it was only a very small earthquake, they say it was very low on the Richter scale, so it’s not the end of Dudley after all! I’m not saying I wanted a bigger one, but it would have been interesting. You know what I mean?’

  Fran does know exactly what she means. She too has often thought it would be fun to be in at the end, and no blame attached. One wouldn’t want to be responsible for the end, but one might like to be there and know it was all over, the whole bang stupid pointless unnecessarily painful experiment. An asteroid could do it, or an earthquake, or any other impartial inhuman violent act of the earth or the universe. She can’t understand the human race’s desire to perpetuate itself, to go on living at all costs. She has never been able to understand it. Her incomprehension isn’t just a sour-grapes side effect of ageing. She is pleased to see that this healthy and happy young person shares some of her metaphysical defiance. It is an exoneration.

  One wouldn’t mind dying of a cataclysm, but one doesn’t want to die young by mistake, or possibly by human error, as her son’s latest partner had recently done. Untimely death is intermittently on Fran’s mind, alongside housing for the refusing-to-die elderly and her more-or-less-bedridden ex-husband’s dinners. Christopher’s glamorous new love Sara had died aged thirty-eight of a rare medical event and Christopher believes that the doctors had done her in. Fran is not to know if this is true or not, as she has never heard of the rare condition that had killed Sara, but she feels that Christopher’s current mindset of blame is doing him no good. Maybe he needs it to get by. It is not much comfort to reflect that, like Antigone, Sara has escaped getting old by dying young, and she has not offered this palliative reflection to Christopher. It does not seem appropriate. She had not disliked Sara, but could not disguise from herself the knowledge that it is Christopher she grieves for, not Sara.

  So it is, with degrees of kinship and of mourning. If her son Christopher, bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, had died, that would have been another matter.

  She had not been confident that Christopher and Sara had a long future together, but had not expected it to be quite so brief. Their mutual past had also been brief. They hadn’t been together for long.

  Fran doesn’t meddle with her children’s lives, but she’d liked what she’d seen of Sara. Though she suspects that in Christopher’s life Sara had embodied something of what we now call a mid-life crisis. Mid-life crises, in Fran’s ageing view, are a luxury compared with what she has seen of end-of-life crises. But Sara hadn’t even had time for a mid-life crisis.

  Sara had been taken ill very suddenly in a very large bed in a large luxury hotel on the Costa Teguise on the island of Lanzarote. Christopher had been in bed with her and had witnessed the crisis and been landed with the consequences. She had been rushed to hospital in Arrecife, then flown back to a private hospital in South Kensington, where she had died twenty-four hours later, having been given, according to Christopher, the wrong medication. If she had stayed in Lanzarote, where he was told the medical services were first class, he believed she would not have died. The wrong decision had been made in repatriating her. He had not trusted the good advice offered by the islanders.

  Sara and Christopher had not been on holiday in the Canaries, as most visitors to those tourist islands are. They had been working, but who would believe that? Well, all those who knew the serious-minded and ambitious Sara would have known it, but it was true that Christopher had been there on a semi-freebie, as a freeloading partner, while Sara was engaged with her team in research for a documentary film about illegal immigration from North Africa. And, more or less fortuitously and it had at the time seemed fortunately, she had hoped to record an interview about the political goals of a woman from the Western Sahara who happened to be on hunger strike on the polished tiles of the departure lounge of Arrecife airport when they arrived. She was a surprising sight, holding court in the departure lounge, and was a gift to a film-maker. Or so Christopher had told his mother.

  Christopher had been keeping Sara company, being himself temporarily unemployed, and his presence in that bed that night during her attack had been for her a blessing, in its way. It would have been worse for her had she been alone. But on paper his role could not look heroic.

  Fran knows that Christopher is shortly to return to the Canaries, to find out what has happened to the Western Saharan contingent, to tie up loose ends, to sort out questions of medical insurance, to see some of the ex-pats who, he said, had gone out of their way to help in the crisis. She gathers that there was one elderly couple who, in the emergency, had been more than kind. Theirs was the advice he should have followed and did not.

  Fran had not at first been able to follow the politics of Christopher’s confusing account of the Sahrawi woman’s airport protest, which she was holding against the allegedly brutal Moroccan domination of a largely unrecognised North African state which called itself the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. Fran had never heard of this state, and finds it hard to retain its name, but it does indeed exist. She has looked it up. It is a cause of little interest to the British or, initially, to Fran, but after Sara’s death, out of respect to Sara and Christopher, Fran has tried to get to grips with its unrecognised existence. It is a story of nationalism and political activism, a
nd the heroine of it is a Sahrawi woman called Ghalia Namarome who is fighting for the independence of her homeland. Christopher’s film-maker partner Sara, who specialised in human rights documentaries for an independent company called Falling Water, had been taken by the manner in which Namarome had materialised at the airport before her very eyes.

  Fran’s son Christopher, when he is in work, is, more frivolously, a television arts presenter, known for his colourful clothing and his idiosyncratic manner, which had, of late, gone a bit too far.

  How Namarome had landed up in Lanzarote airport was a convoluted tale, involving the confiscation of her passport and her deportation from the airport of her home town of Laayoune. On arriving at Laayoune on her return from the US, where she had been presented with some kind of peace prize, she had refused to tick the citizenship box that said ‘Morocco’. She identified herself as Sahrawi and Western Saharan and would not acknowledge the Moroccan label. So she sat there in limbo, in the Spanish Canary Islands, in a modern holiday airport in no man’s land, this stylish protesting woman in her large dark glasses, with her shimmering headscarves and robes of turquoise and pink and gold, amidst the red-faced sunburnt British and German and Scandinavian tourists in khaki shorts and cotton dresses, queuing as they waited to check in for their flights home. She sat there, on a mosaic of patterned oriental carpets, of less than magic carpets, refusing to budge and accepting no sustenance but sweetened water.

  Namarome was the same age as Sara. Sara, although British-born, was of émigré Egyptian descent and spoke Arabic. Sara had been struck by the would-be martyr and her passive resistance. They had, Christopher told his mother, conversed, and Sara had managed to film a brief interview. They had spoken of the Oasis of Memory, the Wall of Shame. Apparently, Fran had learnt from Christopher, there is a great dividing wall of sand and berm and brick built across North Africa, rather like the barrier wall that separates Israel from the West Bank but much much longer. Few in the West know or care about it.

  It is ironic that Sara, who had seemed to be in such good health, was now dead of a rare tumour of the nervous system, whereas Namarome was courting a public death by hunger strike. No, ‘ironic’ is too light a word for the contrast.

  Fran is not at all sure how Christopher’s relationship with Sara had been faring before this abrupt end. He’d been with her, on and off, and a little tempestuously, for a couple of years: his first lengthy and publicly admitted affair since he and his long-term wife Ella had split up. But something in his most recent communications, both before and now after her death, had suggested they were already drifting apart.

  Christopher doesn’t talk to Fran all that much about his emotional life, but he drops hints, makes black jokes. She’d sensed he wasn’t very happy before Sara’s death, but he must surely be even more unhappy now.

  The melodrama of the present situation is unpleasing, distressing. Sudden death and a hunger strike. Fran is more at home with the real low-key daily world of sheltered housing, and yet she cannot deny that she had also been morbidly attracted by the aspect of public martyrdom attached to the Western Sahara case. Was Namarome preparing, had she perhaps already uttered her last words to the press? Would they rival those of Walter Raleigh, of Danton?

  She’s worried about Christopher, she’s upset about Christopher, but she’s not sure how deep her sorrow goes. She keeps forgetting about it. She can’t tell whether that’s good or bad, natural or unnatural.

  Some believe that our emotions thin out as we grow old, that we are pared back to the thin dry horn, the cuttlebone of selfishness. That is one well-recognised theory of ageing. Fran often wonders if this will happen to her, if it is already happening without her marking it. It seems to have happened to Christopher’s father Claude, Claude, her first husband, but that for him is excusable, in his present slowly deteriorating physical condition. Claude has retreated into comfort and laziness and selfishness. Into the search for comfort, which he cannot always find, though he does better than most of his age. He’s lucky not to be in pain. He knows he’s lucky.

  Claude does not seem to have fully grasped what has happened to Christopher, and he never really took in the colourful but distanced existence of Sara.

  Cuttlebone isn’t a good metaphor for Claude as he is now quite plump, but that’s partly the steroids.

  Occasionally Fran exercises herself by trying to recall the passionate and ridiculous emotions of her youth and her middle age, the expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Or in a waste of embarrassment, or of envy, or of anxiety, or of wounded vanity. The attempt to cheat in the sack race, the red bloodstain on the back of the skirt, the fart on the podium, the misunderstanding about the ten-pound note, the arriving too early at the airport, the mistake over the visa, the table where there was no place name for her, the overheard remark about the inappropriate cardigan, the unforgivable forgetting of a significant name. She doesn’t worry about some of the things she used to worry about (she doesn’t need to worry about bloodstains on the skirt, though she worries now about the soup stains on her cardigan, the egg yolk on the dressing-gown lapel), but she certainly hasn’t achieved anything resembling peace of mind. New torments beset her. Her relentless broodings on ageing, death and the last things are not at all peaceful. Lines of Macbeth, from Macbeth, repeat themselves to her monotonously, even though they are not particularly applicable to her lowly estate:

  And that which should accompany old age,

  As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,

  I must not look to have.

  I must not look to have.

  What comfort would they be to her: honour, love, obedience and troops of friends: as night fell?

  La notte e vicina per me.

  Those were the words that an elderly Italian woman, an old crone who swept the stairs, had uttered to Fran when she was working as an au pair girl in Florence, a hundred years ago.

  La notte e vicina per me.

  But old age has its comforts, its recognitions.

  Fran’s Freedom Pass is a comfort, but they are threatening to take that away from her. She values it disproportionately. It is a validation of work, of worth, of survival, of taxes gladly paid over a lifetime. It is her Golden Bough, her passport from the world of work to the uselessness of old age.

  Venerable old age. Valued old age.

  My God, the bullshit and the claptrap.

  Honour, love, obedience, troops of friends.

  I must not look to have.

  La notte e vicina per me.

  The egg yolk on the dressing-gown lapel.

  The dining area of the Premier Inn is geared to dispel elderly apprehensions, not to reinforce them. It is noisy and colourful and full of large busy middle-era middle England middle-aged people talking loudly and cheerfully and eating highly coloured meals, most of them from the hot red end of the spectrum. The flagship paperwork of the Inn is purple, but its food, at least on this month’s menu, is red. Red-orange battered fish, scarlet spaghetti, tomato-red pizza, prawns and peppers and paprika, chilli and chorizo and cajun. Pale Paul, after some joshing with waitress Leila, has ordered a brave black bottle of dark red Merlot, which Leila pours with a generous flourish into vast globular glasses for the four of them assembled at the table. They will be needing another bottle in no time. Fran settles into her chair and inspects the menu with anticipation. She’ll go with the flow. She orders scampi and chips and a propitiatory side salad, which, when it arrives, features jolly surgical sections of not-quite-deseeded red pepper.

  Sipping her Merlot, Fran feels a transfusion as of the redness of young blood begin to course through her hardening veins and arteries, pumping life and youth back into her, flushing her cheeks and warming her stiff fingers and her cold, gnarled and bunioned feet. A transfusion of ketchup and wine, of colour and vigour. It is good to be with the younger people, and in a dining area full of mid-life folk tucking unashamedly into large plates of fodder. Paul himself, although full of a restless energy and
powered by a sharp brain, is in person rather a pallid, bloodless, colourless man, a celery and endive man, but Graham and Julia give out a warmer physical glow. Graham, a heavyweight fifty-something avant-garde architect from Sheffield, is almost gross, in a handsome kind of way – his hair is swept back in dark untidy old-fashioned waves, his thick neck bulges within his open-necked red shirt (he is more than a bit of a leftie, an heir to the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire) and a purple spotted handkerchief pokes its familiar and suggestive way out of his jacket pocket. Barbecued ribs had been his main order. Forty-year-old Julia is red of lip, with cheeks heightened by blusher as well as by wine: her thick glossy bell of dark hair has a henna sheen to it and her dimples are engaging. She is in the process of trying to wipe some startlingly orange curry sauce from her shiny white silk blouse, where it has spattered her bulky but shapely left breast. This mishap has hardly interrupted her animated gesticulatory discourse on the estate she’d visited the week before, an ageing high rise which boasted (as do so many) the highest proportion of trapped and isolated old folk in Europe – the usual story, non-functioning lifts, unlit stairwells, disabilities, gangrene, graffiti: children, grandchildren and great grandchildren all in jail: gangs in the shopping precinct, carers who didn’t care and didn’t show or wouldn’t stay more than five minutes.

  Asking for demolition, asking for a blow-down, the Heights, some of the old folk had said, but others had been loyal to them, didn’t want to budge, were fond of the view over the new shopping centre and the graveyard of the foundry where their men had worked. In the good old days when men had work. Most of those left stranded up there are women, the men died off early.