The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  Julia and Paul and Graham, in their middle age, are they happy, confident? They look it. She hopes they are. Paul is a bit of a worrier about small things – train times, punctuality, vouchers, that kind of thing – but he knows what he’s doing.

  Ken with his robots? Ken is a bit manic, she considers.

  Perhaps you need to be manic, to imagine his kind of future.

  Claude is walled up in the red-brick Kensington flat he’s lived in for some years, first with his second wife and now, ultimately, alone with Cyrus. Well heeled, well padded, well attended, well pensioned and retired from stress: bored, with the unalleviated boredom of inert old age, but comfortable. Or that’s how she sees him, she, forever on the move. A self-made man, a re-made man. If you met Claude these days, if you’d met him a few years ago in his prime, you’d never have guessed the lower-middle-class world that he’d come from. He’d been a striver, he’d made himself into a successful West Londoner, and as a Kensingtonian he would die. In red-brick Kensington, in a second-floor mansion block apartment with polished floors and brass fittings, where the lifts always worked. There would be hell to pay if they didn’t. With maintenance fees like those that Claude paid, of course the lifts worked. There was a concierge to see to that kind of thing.

  Fran’s only Romley friend Josephine, bizarrely but perhaps boldly, has recently moved to what Fran considers an extraordinarily quaint development in Cambridge, where, she says defiantly, she is very happy and very busy. It is a pretentious and expensive retirement home, built to give its residents the illusion that they are living in a Cambridge college. Its architecture is inauthentically but allusively Gothic, with pointed leaded windows and arches. The brick is a sober yellowish grey, the paintwork a crisp and holy white, and a church-like tower rises up over a recreation complex which houses exercise machines and an indoor swimming pool. The gardens are landscaped as though they were college courts or quads, with tidy lawns and weeping willows and little box hedges edging not very imaginatively planted parterres, and in the centre of the main quadrangle there is a stone-imitation plaster fountain with a boy holding a dolphin which spouts water. It looks as though it ought to be a copy of a Renaissance original, but it isn’t, Josephine says, it’s modern.

  Jo’s attitude to her new residence is an interesting mixture of haughty deprecation and proud affection. Fran believes and trusts that Jo may well be happy there, in a way that she herself could never be. She has visited Athene Grange a few times, from her hideout in Tarrant Towers in Cantor Hill, and been introduced to some of the more congenial neighbours, with whom Jo occasionally takes a morning coffee or an evening drink (though never, Jo says emphatically, a meal), and she has seen the games room where Jo not very often plays bridge.

  Josephine and her late husband had spent ten of their middle years in Middle America, in academe in Missouri, and Jo claims to have been impressed by the manner in which Americans are so much readier than the British to accept the concept of Twilight and Sunset Homes. They are far less attached to property and privacy than we are, she had asserted. They move house and home more readily, are much more realistic about their needs. They don’t stand on their rank and dignity, they go for what’s comfortable, for whatever works well.

  I’m much more comfortable here than I was in that big house in Norwich, says Jo. I didn’t like Norwich, I didn’t like the university, I never had any real friends there. I know more people in Cambridge than I ever did in Norwich. I’ve always had friends in Cambridge, and I used to have family here. We used to have Christmas here. I’ve known Cambridge since I was a child. Anyway, I couldn’t afford to go on living there on my own, the house was too big. I downsized, and now I’m living as I like. I’ve got selfish in my old age. I live as I like.

  Some retired dons in Cambridge still live in comfort and dignity in college properties, Fran knows. And she knows that Jo knows that Athene Grange is mimicking that comfort and dignity. But if it mimics them to her comfort and satisfaction, so what?

  Fran is fond of her flat in Tarrant Towers, although it is a bad address, a bad postcode, and the lifts often break down. But the view is glorious, the great view over London. She likes to watch the cloudscapes assemble from afar, the great galleons of cumulus sailing her way on the approaching storm; she likes the red-streaked clouds of evening, the pierced and the torn caverns beyond the beyond of the everlasting blue, the rents and the gashes and the intimations. She endures the lowering blanketed greys of winter, the monotonous dull skies of February, and waits for the opening drama of the spring. Elevate, sublimate, transcend, that’s what the view tells Fran. And climbing up the concrete stairwell once or twice a week is good for the heart.

  She likes Tarrant Towers. She likes its insalubrious garage space. She couldn’t do without a garage. She needs her car, she needs to keep moving.

  Imagine Claude Stubbs. Imagine him released from Fran’s controlling vision of him, if we can. Yes, he is there, he is occupying his own space. Cyrus the stout tabby is settled on the end of Claude’s day bed, his softly rounded white-tipped front paws curved comfortably inwards towards one another in a slightly camp submissive gesture that Claude finds deeply endearing. The claws are sheathed and amply padded. Cyrus is not a young cat and he enjoys the circumstances of Claude’s confinement, he is pleased that Claude is not well. Claude hardly ever goes out now, except on forays to the hospital, so Claude is almost always there to be with Cyrus. Cyrus approves of this regime. The radio is playing, the television is on although the sound is mute, and Claude’s mind moves towards the next plated meal, which he thinks is potato, egg and anchovy bake, a dish he believes to have been invented by Fran, though in fact it is a debased version of a recipe she once read in a Jane Grigson book in the 1970s, in the far-off days when she used to hope that one day she would learn how to cook.

  Claude has little notion of Fran’s increasingly vexed relationship with food. He has never had to cook anything, ever, except toast and an egg. He likes the anchovy bake, so he won’t have it for lunch, he will save it up for supper. Something to look forward to. His minder, who is called Persephone, has already been in to see to him and has left him a plastic box containing chicken and avocado sandwiches on brown and an M&S tropical fruit salad. Claude is supposed to like mangoes, and most of the time he does, though perhaps not quite as often as they appear on his menu. Persephone is a tall good-looking black girl with expensively smooth dark gold hair. She says she’s from Zimbabwe, and she’s forty years younger than Fran. She makes him think about sex, but thinking about it is all that he can do. She told him this morning some rigmarole about the flowers that one of her beaux had sent her for Valentine’s Day. Orange lilies, and a huge golden metal heart sticking up out of them. A bit dangerous, a bit menacing, for flowers, said Persephone. More like a weapon than a love offering.

  Persephone is no fool.

  It’s bloody freezing out there, said Persephone, you’re better off here in bed.

  People often say thoughtless things like that to Claude. He doesn’t mind as much as he used to. He’s got used to it. He wouldn’t like Persephone’s life, no, not at all.

  Persephone likes Cyrus, or pretends to, and never complains about changing the cat litter. But she is well paid to do that kind of thing. At least she doesn’t have to change Claude’s litter or empty his bedpan. Not yet.

  He’s mobile enough to get to the kitchen, with the aid of his Chelsea and Westminster NHS crutches. He’s not on the NHS, or not wholly on the NHS, just as when in practice he wasn’t wholly on the NHS nor wholly private. He’s always been an opportunist. He acquired the crutches as an outpatient in an earlier and less terminal state of affairs, and although he was supposed to have returned them long ago, he hasn’t. They’ve been standing in the cupboard in the spare room for years. They’ve come in handy now.

  With the crutches, he can still get, very slowly, to the lav, as they used to call it in Romley. He doesn’t always get there in time, as he sometimes misjudges
the urgency and the difficulties of the journey, but he gets there.

  Imagine Claude, imagining his first wife Francesca. Fran is at a conference up north somewhere. She’s always buzzing around the country, despatched by that Quakerly quango on geriatric housing that employs her. Quango, charity, NGO, he’s never been quite sure what it is, but it’s something to do with the elderly, and it does pay her a salary. She’s a busybody, a typical social-worker middle-class busybody type. And however public-spirited she may think she is, she is as utterly selfish as anyone he has ever known. She’s just as selfish as all his colleagues rolled together – the surgeons, the oncologists, the anaesthetists, the consultants, the chief medical officers, the professors, the heads of all the royal colleges. Everybody is selfish, and Fran is as selfish as the rest of them. She doesn’t work for the public interest, but because she likes doing it, because it keeps her busy, because it makes her feel important and on top of the game.

  What game? At her age? It’s tragic, it’s pathetic.

  He visualises the potato, egg and anchovy bake. He likes salt, and maybe his salt intake has contributed to his present lamentable condition. There’s probably double cream in there too. Too late to start worrying about all of that now.

  Maybe Fran is trying to kill him off. She had threatened to murder him several times, half a century ago, but there wouldn’t be much in it for her if he died now. She’d be let off the plated meals, but it’s Claude’s convenient view that, in her masochistic womanly way, she enjoys making them.

  She doesn’t know what’s in his will, and would never ask. She doesn’t even ask what provision he’s made for their two children and his grandchildren. But she knows Persephone is pricey, and his life expectancy is actuarially uncertain. Who knows how long he and a succession of Persephones could survive before he ran out of money?

  He knows, but she doesn’t.

  He will have half a bottle, perhaps a bottle, of the very good Chablis with the bake. He has resolved to drink expensive wine until he dies. Neither of his wives could tell one bottle from another, let alone one year from another, although both of them could knock it back. He has decided to enjoy what he can, while he can.

  Fran now lives alone in a high-rise council flat on a dismal North London estate, having recently moved from a much nicer ground-floor garden flat in Highgate where she lived with that man Hamish. He has never seen the council flat, but she has described it to him, briefly and provocatively. He has accused her of slumming, but she has denied this. She has used lofty words for her lofty eyrie. Atonement, absolution, amnesty. No, none of those words is quite right, his memory for words is going, but he’s sure one of those that she used to justify her choice of residence begins with an A. And she had mentioned the view, what she called the overview.

  Odd how one can remember bits of words, but not always the words themselves. Maybe it’s a word that he applied to it, not her. Anyway, it began with an A. Proper nouns go first, then abstract nouns, then nouns, then verbs. So he’s been told.

  It’s a damn sight nicer in Tarrant Towers than in Romley and Chingwell and Chingford, she had told him.

  He hadn’t attempted to defend Romley. Romley had been hard on her, he recognises that, though he wouldn’t admit it to her then or now. The Romley hospital had been a hard apprenticeship. It’s been demolished. It escaped the recent round of NHS scandals by getting itself pulled down and relocated further out in almost rural Essex.

  On telly, there is some kind of auction going on, a downmarket daytime version of the Antiques Roadshow. It is dumbly and silently failing to compete with Classic FM, a channel much loved by Claude. He discovered classical music as a teenager, and this daily programme is aimed at his level. He knows it can annoy seriously musical people but he is not seriously musical. Culturally, he has always enjoyed striking an unsettling pose between the philistine and the mandarin, and somehow Classic FM fails to annoy him at all. He used to enjoy it while driving, but now he likes to feel part of the stay-at-home family of the housebound, the housewives, the retired, the unemployed, the home-workers, the put-your-feet-up-you’ve-earned-a-rest brigade. The presenters speak to him pleasantly, with exactly the right degree of polite but friendly intimacy, cheerful and respectful but with a touch of irony, much less annoying than the feigned chumminess and barely disguised condescension and contempt of some of the Radio 3 clever chappies and well-spoken ladies, who don’t seem to be able to get it right these days. They’re culturally adrift on Radio 3, they don’t know who they are. The BBC as a whole has lost its way, that’s Claude’s view, and he thinks the licence fee should be abolished. It’s made some astounding mistakes, it’s dug its own grave.

  Claude even enjoys the Classic FM commercials, as they attempt to sell him car insurance and medical products and barbecues and tickets to concerts and homely holidays in dullish English counties. The travel news, with its accidents and lane closures and roadworks, is a comfort to him, for now he is no longer driving or being driven, he is safe in his day bed, not stuck in the stationary fast lane or stranded on the hard shoulder. All over Britain, people are having a bad time at the wheel. Classic FM makes him feel part of the human race, without having to pay a high price for his inclusion.

  He will never drive again. He’s got over feeling that that is such a bad thing. He will never operate again, and that is a relief.

  Claude isn’t nearly as bored as Fran thinks he must be. He’s bored, but he has his resources. And one of them is Classic FM. It is all so surprising, its ever-present availability. Brahms, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mahler, Chopin, Berlioz, Gounod, Bernstein. The presenters are full of genuine and well-informed enthusiasm for their products. He loves Alan Titchmarsh and John Suchet. He hears Barenboim, Menuhin, Nigel Kennedy, Maria Callas. Greatness pours through the air and floods his apartment.

  Claude Stubbs is an impassioned admirer of Maria Callas. He has had an intense fantasy relationship with her for many years.

  He has half an hour of Callas on CD most evenings. He usually times it to coincide with the Pill. He has to take a lot of routine medication to stay alive, but the semi-legal Magic Pill which he prescribes for himself is something else. Others might think of it as an anti-depressant, but to Claude it brings psilocybin euphoria. It elevates him, briefly but unfailingly, to a sublime state. It’s better than all the drugs he took when he was a young physician. It’s the business, it does the trick.

  The conference is over and Fran has spoken, competently but in her view rather boringly, reporting on the Ashley Combe Trust’s continuing support of research into models of integrated housing developments for the elderly. Raised flower beds, patent window catches, isolation valves for gas appliances, key lockers for visiting carers – a medley of suggestions and possibilities, some of which she has inspected and tested in practice, some of which exist as yet only in theory, but most of them far less futuristic than Ken’s dapper range of robots.

  She is staying one more night in the refuge of the inn, at her own expense, as she doesn’t want to drive all the way back to London in the dark and face the possibility of a non-functioning lift on arrival. She can face the stairwell in the mornings, but not so well in the evenings. (Once, exhausted, she had slept in the garage, in her car.) And Paul has asked her to accompany him on his visit to his aunt in Chestnut Court in Sandford Road. For moral support, he said. He’d like to know what she makes of Chestnut Court and his aunt. Two people visiting makes it easier than one, he said. A platitude, he said, but she well knows it to be true.

  Fran doesn’t mind platitudes. A few platitudes, every now and then, are restful. They draw one back from the brink of the flames.

  Fran was pleased to be asked by young Paul, flattered that he valued her opinion and her company. They have become good professional friends, despite the age gap. Yes, of course, she had said, she’d be happy to give him a lift.

  She thinks, briefly, as she negotiates with the satnav’s help the tricky one-way system of Sandwell, of Ch
ristopher and Sara and the volcanic craters, and of unexpected death. No platitudes there.

  A small earthquake had shaken Dudley.

  The Canaries had been formed and transformed by volcanic activity on a massive scale.

  Sandford Road turns out to be one of those long curving streets that lack all architectural cohesion. It was cut off from the old dying shopping parade by a 1970s stretch of dual carriageway, over which arched a steeply sloping narrow flimsy pedestrian walkway. Sandford Road had found itself on the wrong side of the tracks. It had wandered and struggled through many decades of build and rebuild, juxtaposing cheap modern maisonettes with little ‘carriage houses’ with stretches of turn-of-the-century terrace with once-desirable 1930s semi-detached dwellings. Nothing grand, but many variants on the theme of decent inexpensive housing for decent folk, with the older buildings now in slow decline. Some of the houses are set back behind small front gardens, others front the street. One or two mature and as yet leafless trees from an earlier epoch rear defiantly upwards to the light, from painfully carbuncled and root-buckled pavements.