The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  Women live too long, says Fran, spearing a scampi tail and dabbing it into the tartare sauce. We need a plan to get rid of us. A magic lozenge.

  Fran, somewhat perversely, lives in a high rise herself these days. She knows about high rise.

  We all live too long, says Paul politely, diplomatically, nibbling at his buffalo wings.

  A magic lozenge, a suicide booth, a one-way ticket to Switzerland, agrees Julia lightly, to whom old age and death are as yet unimaginable, although she knows so much theory about geriatric care.

  But care is for other people, it would never be for her.

  What do you think they put in it to make it this colour, Julia asks, staring in admiration at the napkin-resistant splatter on her chest. Agent Orange, Sunset Yellow, Allura Red, Carmoisine?

  Are those real words, asks Fran, and Julia says yes, they are, they are the names of food colourings, apart from Agent Orange, of course, and had any of them ever sampled the Bilston Chip? There’s a fish and chip shop in Bilston with the most brightly coloured orange chips you’ve ever seen. Lurid. Technicolor. Delicious. Best fish and chips in the Black Country. We ought to give them a whirl.

  Do you think preservatives make you live longer, or do they kill you off, asks Fran. She has often wondered about this. The environmentally correct answer is that they are really really bad for you, but maybe, in their own way, they are contributing to our disastrous longevity. E-agent manufacturers must be doing research on this, but they haven’t yet dared to start boasting about their findings.

  She tries to avoid cooking with preservatives, and takes care to provide wholesome meals for Claude.

  Fran, well turned seventy, has to her own surprise become a carer of sorts and a provider of sorts for her husband Claude, whom she had divorced in a fit of self-righteous rage nearly half a century ago. She spends a lot of time running across London to his flat with plated meals. Now, as she tucks into her scampi and chips, he will be enjoying a deliciously pure portion of fish pie on a bed of wilted organic spinach, topped with parsley sauce. He’ll probably be listening to Maria Callas, because that’s what he does.

  That night, in the comfortable Premier Inn bed that rashly guarantees a sound night’s sleep to all sojourners, Fran has a curious and interesting dream about Tampax. It is decades since she’s had to remember to supply herself with tampons, and these days she never gives them a conscious thought, but in her dream she was struggling to arrest with an inadequate bung a constant thin pale and surprisingly watery flow of menstrual blood: the blood flowed through the tampon and through her fingers and onto her bare legs. This sensation, this dream experience, was strangely undistressing in its mood and flavour and texture, indeed pleasant rather than unpleasant, and when she wakes and tries to question it, she wonders whether it has sprung from the redness of the meal of the night before, or from her motorway thoughts about Macbeth, or from some new and about-to-be-apprehended aspect of time and the ageing experience.

  For ageing is, says Fran to herself gamely as she presses the lift button to go down for her breakfast, a fascinating journey into the unknown. Or that’s one rather good way of looking at it. The thin flow was the blood of life, not of death, reminding her that she is still the same woman, she who had once been the bleeding girl.

  Over breakfast, her good mood continues, indeed intensifies. She has had to dodge the rain and pop out over the road to buy her newspaper, as the hotel doesn’t seem to cater for that kind of extra, but she likes the Asian mini-store and the bearded young chap behind the counter and his fine display of fizzy drinks and spicy snacks and sweeties. His friendly greeting is in itself a little adventure. And when she gets back and settles at her table by the window, she finds herself to be almost entirely happy. Fresh newsprint, good coffee, assorted texts, some messages on her BlackBerry, what more could the modern world offer? She has selfishly forgotten, for the moment, Christopher’s distress. As we age, yes it is true, it is true, we become more and more selfish. We live for our appetites. Or that’s one way of looking at ageing. Old people are very selfish, very greedy.

  One of the personal messages is from her old and onetime friend Teresa, who has re-entered her life after decades of separation and forgetfulness, and with whom she is enjoying a curious last fling of intimacy. Teresa is dying, but she is dying with such style and commitment that Fran is deeply impressed and encouraged by this last passage. The message is to confirm a meeting in a week’s time. Fran looks forward to it, and replies to say so. Yes, she is on for lunch as agreed, and will bring sandwiches.

  Teresa is uplifting. She isn’t greedy, like Claude, she is too ill to be greedy, but she does still enjoy a smoked salmon sandwich, and, if Fran gets round to it, she would take well to a little home-made chicken soup.

  There is something robust and cheering about the sight of the Premier Inn Full English Breakfast and those who are devouring it. It is even better than the bright red dinner. Fran doesn’t go for the Full English herself, but requests a soft-boiled egg with toast. She would quite like to go over to the side table to make her own toast, but the not-so-young young woman labelled Cynthia, Cynthia with her chalk-white face and her raven-black hair, is so helpful and eager to please that Fran surrenders and allows herself to be waited on. All around Fran, younger people in their thirties and forties and fifties tuck into fried eggs and bacon and beans and hash browns and mushrooms and fried tomatoes and fried bread, all wielding their cutlery with an air of gusto. Condiments flow, the red and the brown and the mustard-coloured, and loud piped music resounds. Both Claude and Hamish would have hated the piped music, but Fran doesn’t mind it at all.

  Her egg, when it arrives, is perfection. The yolk is soft, the white is firm. How is it, how is your egg, my angel, tenderly asks the kindly not-so-young woman.

  Perfect, says Fran, with emphasis. Perfect, she repeats.

  Yes, perfection. She reads the headlines and the lead story, moves to the continuation of the story on page two. She feels a powerful surge of happiness, a sense that all is well with the world, that she is in the right place at the right time, for this moment in time. She has had a good night, comfortable, pain-free, in a big white wide premier bed. And now she is at one with these munching people, she enjoys their enjoyment, as she spoons her chaste and perfect egg. And she is at one, through her almost-reliable friend of a newspaper, with the miscellaneous events of the turning world.

  The conference is not quite as jolly as the Premier Inn, but it has its highlights. The paper on the long-continuing fallout from the Thatcher ‘Right to Buy’ in the 1980s and the affordability of social housing and the chequered history of Housing Choice and the motivation of registered social landlords is routine, and routinely depressing, but the paper on the new technologies is fun, and is meant to be fun. It is light relief, the comic slot. It ignores finance, decay, demolition and death, and goes for the future. The lecturer is young and sparky and fast-talking and mid-Atlantic of accent, although his CV claimed he’d been born in Walsall. He’d studied in the States and in South Korea, and he is an enthusiast for the robot. Robots would save the elderly from the woes of the ageing flesh. He runs through some of the more familiar low-tech gadgets with which the elderly can already defend themselves from starving amid plenty or perishing on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor. Screw tops and tins and jam jars, bath taps and door knobs, socks lost under the bed, telephones and remote controls could all be attacked by humble devices available to all. But, Ken says, the Brave New World offers electronic and digital wonders that could achieve much, much more.

  On Ken Walker’s screen, darling little green articulated, not-quite-anthropoid monkey climbers with agile prehensile sensitive fingers mount walls and retrieve objects from high shelves, or bustle beneath chairs, beds and sofas to recover possessions dropped or mislaid (mobile phones, medication, peppermints, e-readers? Cigarettes, death lozenges of Nembutal from Brazil, marked for Veterinary Use only? Half bottles of whisky?). The delegates are show
n an old-fashioned pack of playing cards being eased and pincered out from beneath a bookcase, a scenario that gives out a perplexing cultural message: surely nobody plays with a canvas deck these days? A discreet little scarlet ground-level scooting saucer, a flying saucer of the floor, launches itself from a dock under a comfy automated reclining armchair and bustles around the skirting boards and fitted carpet, ingesting crumbs and fluff. A more sophisticated bright lime-green highly laminated robot cleaner with a smiley face is seen vacuuming dust from every orifice of a superbly high-tech upmarket elderly person’s apartment, as the elderly person lies serenely in bed doing a jigsaw of Windsor Castle on a tray. Is there an allusion here to the extraordinary longevity of the royal family? And we do know that our poor Queen likes doing jigsaws.

  There is a robot to feed your cat or groom your dog. We are all aware, says young Ken, that having a pet adds years to your life. They are studying the neuroscience on this even as I speak, says keen Ken.

  Fran, at this point in the presentation, has a very clear picture of her ex, Claude Stubbs, settled plumply on his day bed, with his handsome tabby cat Cyrus upon his knee. Cyrus is good for Claude, but Fran has taken on some responsibility for both man and cat, and they are a worry to her. Fran likes Cyrus, indeed she often says to Claude that she prefers Cyrus to Claude, and she would have liked to have a loyal cat of her own, but on balance she prefers driving restlessly around England, from conference to conference, from housing estate to housing estate, from sheltered home to sheltered home, from gadget to gadget, from Premier Inn to Premier Inn, from soft-boiled egg to soft-boiled egg. She is not ready to settle yet, with a cat upon her knee.

  She’s not very good at concentrating on one subject at a time. She never has been. Her mind wanders, in an endless stream of consciousness. Perhaps everybody’s does, but she suspects not. Some people have an ability to concentrate, to focus. She lacks this. Her mind wanders now, back to Claude, back to her early married life, and onwards to a never-ending succession of plated meals.

  Her mind never or hardly ever wanders now to sex, as it once did, though the fact that she is able to make this inner observation means that she has not forgotten about sex altogether. The menstrual dream had been a reminder, a link to the past of sex and the tampon.

  She has read in newspapers, indeed in an article in her favoured upmarket newspaper, that ‘surveys’ show that some men, many men, think about sex every three or four minutes of their waking lives, whatever they may be doing. At work, at play, in transit, writing reports, giving public lectures, studying in libraries, waiting at tables, unblocking drains, mowing lawns, shouting in the stock exchange, fitting new tyres to old cars, changing in the locker room, climbing mountains, at the checkout in the supermarket, they think about sex. Not about love, or a loved one, but about sex, sex in the abstract, sex as an act, sex as sensation.

  She doesn’t think that even at her most libidinous she had thought about sex per se that often. Women are different from men, although we must not say so.

  She now finds herself thinking far too often about food. She blames Claude for this, perhaps unjustly.

  Fran frequently finds herself newly and repeatedly astonished to have become, so late in the day, Claude’s minder and carer. She can hardly believe that she has slipped into this stereotypical womanly role. She had been married to Claude so briefly and for most of their marriage so acrimoniously, and they had both lived so many other variant lives since their four embattled procreative years together. And yet she finds herself imprinted, enslaved, imprisoned, and in more ways than one. The habits of her body and mind had been marked forever by those four short early years.

  No, she says to herself sharply, as she doodles snowdrops and daffodils in the border of Ken’s robot notes, imprisoned she is not, no, far from it, but this restless wandering, this inexplicable wandering she surely owes something of that to those four years. Imprinted yes, imprisoned no.

  Claude has no rights in her at all, no claim on her at all.

  It’s the cooking and catering that have done her in. Claude, who is indeed physically somewhat imprisoned, thinks about food most of the time, although he wouldn’t admit it openly. And as a consequence Fran thinks about it too. She has been infected by his greedy dependence. She is thinking about food even now, even while watching Ken’s robots and listening to statistics about mobility problems in the over-nineties. She is infuriated by the way food, shopping for food, and cooking the stuff she’s bought have re-infiltrated and taken over her consciousness. It’s not that she doesn’t enjoy eating, she’d quite enjoyed her scampi and had been in love with her soft-boiled egg, it’s just that she doesn’t want food to be on her mind so much. How has this happened to her? Is it guilt, greed, reparation, preparation for her own death, an attempt to salvage the past?

  Prepare your ship of death for you will need it. Prepare it, O prepare it. Stock it up with viands and with wines.

  Chicken soup, if she has time, and a smoked salmon sandwich for Teresa.

  Here in the Black Country they call good food ‘bostin’ fittle’. Fittle means vittles. Good vittles, bostin’ fittle. They have their own language here. It hasn’t been knocked out of them yet.

  The orange Bilston chip, the fluorescent nasturtium-coloured deep-fried potato chip. The pure and perfect egg.

  She wonders briefly about Namarome’s hunger strike, and what is happening to her now. Had Namarome thought with longing about food, as she sat there defiantly on the polished tiles of Lanzarote airport, watching the queues of holiday-makers from northern Europe, many of them very large, some of them obese, with their plastic bags full of crisps and snacks and duty-free? Had visions of deliciously spiced North African meals, of couscous and lamb, of chermoula and harissa, of coriander and cumin and pickled lemon, floated deliriously past her as she sat there starving, or had her mind been on higher things?

  Fran sometimes thinks of trying some Moroccan cookery, but she’s not sure if Claude would like it.

  She thinks Namarome has by now been deported to the Spanish mainland. Christopher had tried to explain that Namarome had no quarrel with Spain. Her quarrel and her country’s quarrel were with Morocco, not Spain or the Canary Islands.

  Fran’s thoughts flit very quickly and briefly to the last meals of those on Death Row, a subject too recent and perhaps too indecent to be catalogued by Brewer, though she supposes it may feature in the Guinness Book of Records. As far as she can recall, cheeseburgers and pizzas feature high on the list. You really wouldn’t want your last meal on earth to be a cheeseburger, surely?

  Last time Fran had visited Claude, she’d left him six plated cling-filmed meals in the freezer, to be eaten in the correct order, marked with big red numbers on white freezer labels. 1 Chicken Tarragon, 2 Potato Anchovy Bake, 3 Kedgeree, 4 Lamb Casserole, 5 She Forgets, 6 Chick Peas with Bacon. She’s not always so organised. Claude can’t quite rely on her good will and her bounty, and it’s better that way.

  Call no man happy until he is dead. Claude can’t be very happy these days, cooped up as he is, although she has at times suspected that something in him gets a bit of a kick from being able to bully his ex-wife. But that had been an ignoble thought, and when she had aired it to her friend Josephine, one of the few survivors to have known her in the early days, Josephine had ticked her off, telling her that, on the contrary, she, Fran, was getting a kick out of being able to bully the old boy in bed, from playing Lady Bountiful to a chap who could hardly move for steroids and other medications. And maybe this was true.

  Josephine’s role as long-standing friend has involved some putting-down of Fran, and Fran, most of the time, has for many years appreciated and accepted this.

  Teresa is both older and newer in Fran’s life. But Josephine has been more consistent.

  Josephine had known Fran and Claude when Claude had been a junior house doctor and had been working the strange long late hours that had been so trying to Fran’s sleep patterns, career plans, soc
ial life, sex life and digestion. Fran had resented the demands of his profession with what now seems to her to be disproportionate rage, as the hours had not been of his choosing and had laid the foundations for a distinguished and lucrative career, but she can still remember that she had been driven nearly out of her mind with solitude, claustrophobia and baby-minding, stuck in the flat in Romley with two babies and no friendly human being in reach except Josephine, who was similarly isolated with her own two little ones. Romley was the back of beyond and neither of them had regular access to a car. Fran loved her babies, as most (but not all) mothers do, but although they were hard work they didn’t fill the time, and the evenings were very long and very lonely. You weren’t allowed to say so, but they were. The intensity of those years had scarred her for life, and seeing more of Claude in these his latter days brings it back to her, the anger, the sense of splitting, the giddy loss of identity, the waves of terror and inadequacy, the clinging to little splinters of her past more youthful more hopeful self. It hadn’t been post-natal depression, no, nothing as medical or nameable as that, it had been a kind of existential anguish, a terror in the face of adult life. Now, in the very different panics of old age, she comforts herself occasionally by reminding herself that she was even unhappier, more intensely unhappy, when she was young.

  It’s cold comfort, but it is a comfort. She wouldn’t want to go back there, into those swirling storms, that cosmic turbulence. She must be further on than that, in the long journey of existence. She must have moved on from there. She has moved on from there.

  The Tibetan Book of the Dead. There’s a thought. A strong thought. The Way of the Bardo. The journey after death. She has a DVD somewhere, with commentary by Leonard Cohen, which she’s been meaning to watch for a long time, but she’s a bit apprehensive about it.

  She cannot help but see a lifespan as a journey, indeed as a pilgrimage. This isn’t fashionable these days, but it’s her way of seeing. A life has a destination, an ending, a last saying. She is perplexed and exercised by the way that now, in the twenty-first century, we seem to be inventing innumerable ways of postponing the sense of arrival, the sense of arriving at a proper ending. Her inspections of evolving models of residential care and care homes for the elderly have made her aware of the infinitely clever and complex and inhumane delays and devices we create to avoid and deny death, to avoid fulfilling our destiny and arriving at our destination. And the result, in so many cases, has been that we arrive there not in good spirits, as we say our last farewells and greet the afterlife, but senseless, incontinent, demented, medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity. Old fools, who didn’t have the courage to have that last whisky and set their bedding on fire with a last cigarette.