The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  Fran finds a space to park outside a run of four late Edwardian three-storey red-brick terraced villas that had been done up in startling style, with bizarre ornamental stained-glass panels let in to some of the front windows and doors, and modern iron gates with ornate designs picked out in gilt and turquoise and scarlet. These houses must, she surmises, belong to an extended family group or to a cluster of an ethnic minority with pronounced and eccentric views on decor, or indeed, most probably, to a combination of the two. One of the front windows has an image of a not very English running deer surrounded by white blossoms engraved upon it or set into it. She can’t begin to think what it is doing there. She points it out to Paul, who doesn’t seem as surprised by it as she is. He’s seen it all before.

  Asian? Eastern European? Bizarre.

  She loves it. She loves how it all is.

  And there is Chestnut Court, the modest care home that says it specialises in schizophrenia. Unlike Josephine’s Athene Grange, it obviously isn’t purpose-built. It is a rather shabby spreading asymmetrical 1930s terrace house, on two floors with two wide bay front rooms, and above one of the front rooms a wide bay-windowed bedroom, the master bedroom, the room with a view. It doesn’t have a local authority look about it, even though it is largely funded by the local authority. It is quiet, it is calm, a backwater amidst the changing waves of demolition and renovation. And there Aunt Dorothy from Brasshouse Lane has lived becalmed for many years.

  Each room its own TV, home-cooked food with the menu changing weekly, access to local church and local shops, medical attendance, visiting chiropodist. All for £358–£420 a week. It is very reasonable. Compared with Claude’s outgoings, this is very reasonable.

  Dorothy is petite. She is small and perfect. She is very old but she is perfect. Her skin is clear, unblemished and almost without wrinkles, her eyes are a lucent blue, her lips are pink with a perfect shade of carefully applied pale girlish lipstick, her silver hair is thin but arranged to perfection in gentle but neatly controlled curls and waves around her perfect brow and her heart-shaped face. Once a fortnight she is taken in a taxi to the hairdresser for a shampoo and set. She had been a beauty. She is still a beauty. She is fragile. She is delicate, a porcelain figurine. She is beautifully preserved and presented, in the overheated upholstered lounge of the very homely home. Grey skirt, a prettily embroidered cream blouse, a pale blue cardigan, silver earrings and a pearl necklace. Rings on her fingers, proper rings, not mail order trinkets, and a silver bracelet.

  She has been beautifully presented to reassure her nephew Paul, Fran assumes, but she cannot detect any hint of hidden or underlying neglect. This is a very small outfit, a domestic operation, a ‘home from home’. There are only five other residents, two of whom are up in their rooms, while the other three are somewhat slumped and dozy in recliners at the other end of the lounge, watching a muted TV. Paul, Fran and Dorothy sit upright in the little bay window with their tea and shortbread biscuits, while Dorothy tells Fran the story of her life. Fran is a new audience, and she listens politely and attentively.

  She cannot understand much of Dorothy’s tale. She is familiar with various forms of dementia and confusion, and knows people who cannot carry a conversation or remember a thought sequence for more than two or three minutes at a time. Dorothy is not like that at all.

  Dorothy wanders from past to present seamlessly, in a stream of consciousness that loops and circles and turns in on itself. Albion Road, the war, the air raids, the gas light with a mantel, West Bromwich Albion, bread and dripping, my father, he was always so angry, Junior Mixed and Infants, the old Board School, her bouts of pneumonia, her TB, her colostomy (she pats the bag, affectionately, softly swelling under her grey skirt). The church, the vicar, that time she spoke at her friend’s funeral, her son who came to see her when he could, her husband, she married him when she was seventeen. Her father was angry. God was so good to her. Her plans for her funeral, her favourite hymns, the first time she’d been put in hospital, Suzette the manageress, Claire the stylist at the salon, the new shopping mall, the darkies have taken over everywhere. The day thou gavest Lord is ended. Darkies are everywhere. Look, this is the ring he gave me, my Charlie, it’s sapphires and diamonds. Hopscotch in the street and dancing to the gramophone. Her father was angry when she did handstands, he didn’t like her showing her knickers, he gave her the strap if she showed her knickers, he bought a coat for £2 at the pawn shop but he didn’t live to wear it, but her mother lived to be ninety-four.

  I hope I don’t last that long but God disposes, they help me to change the bag, there’s always a helper on duty here.

  He didn’t like me showing my knickers. I was always the pretty one, my little sister Emmie she was the clever one.

  As she mentions her sister Emmie, she looks in a puzzled way at Emmie’s son Paul, as though wondering who he is and what his connection with this narrative.

  The pumping station, it’s all bricked up now. My dad worked, he worked for the water board. Yes, God is very good, they wheel me to church every Sunday. Our church is one hundred years old. I like to read, I like stories, we get these magazines.

  It’s a very vocal form of dementia, if dementia it is. The three residents at the other end of the room speak not at all. They must have heard Dorothy’s stories innumerable times. She is the talker, she speaks for them all, she is the muddled memory of their generation.

  Fran tries to follow, picks out the recurrent motif of the angry father, wonders if he was the explanation of why his daughter is here, year after year, unageing, unchanging, living it out to the end.

  Dead at forty-eight, he was, it was his lungs.

  Paul’s grandfather, that would have been.

  After an hour, manageress Suzette joins them to break it up, for they had dutifully done their stint. Dorothy recognises the nature of the intervention at once, and makes no attempt to detain her visitors. She is well-mannered, docile. She presents them each with a parting gift, a card from a children’s play pack, which she has coloured in with bright acrylics. One shows a butterfly, the other a country cottage. She has worked them carefully, not going over any of the edges, none of the colours overlapping one another.

  She seems to have taken to Fran, and urges her to visit again when next she finds herself nearby. Just pop in, says Dorothy, you’ll always find me here.

  ‘She loves colouring in,’ says Suzette gaily as she ushers them out into the hallway. Dorothy remains sitting at the table, gazing not after her guests but out at the street, her frail mauve beringed hands neatly folded in her lap.

  Suzette is a stoutly confident tawny-blonde sixty-year-old with a short sharp defiantly razored hairstyle, all points and tips and highlights. No shampoo and set and hot curlers under the hood of the dryer for her. She is dressed in a bold tight fuchsia and black geometric print stretchy fabric dress with a scooped neckline. She is brisk and breezy, supplying the movement and energy in the house that her charges lack. Her parting handshake is powerful. She is a strong woman.

  Who owns the premises? Who is making money out of this? Who employs Suzette? Is anyone making money out of it? It looks more like a break-even one-off situation to Fran. Not a chain, not part of a lucrative exploitative string of Chestnut Care Homes, just this one homely house hanging on in Sandford Road. Too low-profile for a scandal. Just surviving, as best it could.

  There had been a scandal recently, in another much larger Sandwell care home. Several residents had fallen ill with food poisoning and a twenty-three-year-old care worker had been arrested and detained in a secure mental health unit. She was suspected of having deliberately contaminated their food.

  Leave the mad to feed the mad, let the dead bury the dead.

  Fran drives Paul back to the Premier Inn, where he says he’ll ring for a cab to get to Birmingham New Street. He has to get back to Colchester. She doesn’t even offer to drive him to the station. She is far too tired.

  And Paul is subdued.

 
‘She must have been a beauty,’ offers Fran.

  ‘I don’t think she’s unhappy,’ says Paul, unhappily.

  He had volunteered, earlier in the day, that his mother hadn’t seen her sister in thirty years. They had quarrelled, terminally. Emily in Hagwood and Dorothy in Chestnut Court. Both their husbands were dead. Dorothy has a son, the son she had mentioned, he isn’t a fantasy son as Fran might have supposed. But he had emigrated to Australia, a fact which she doesn’t seem to have wholly grasped. He wasn’t much use, her son Ralph, on the home front.

  Fran is thinking of the bouts of childhood pneumonia, of the TB, of the bowel operation, of that occasionally vocal colostomy bag, of all the skilled surgery and intensive care and nursing and expense that have gone into keeping this confused old woman alive and smiling and putting on her jewellery and being wheeled to church and colouring in and looking at fashion pictures in magazines and wandering softly in her wits. She realises she’s been thinking of Dorothy as belonging to the ultimate generation, to the phalanx of the truly old, but Dorothy’s wartime memories had marked her as being only a very few years older than Fran herself. Fran can just about remember the war. Dorothy is in her seventies, not even in her eighties. She could live another twenty years.

  Sometimes Fran thinks she can understand the impulse that makes a twenty-three-year-old want to kill off a lot of useless old people.

  We can all expect to live longer, but it’s recently been claimed that the majority of us can expect to spend the last six years of our prolonged lives suffering from a serious illness, in some form of pain and ill health.

  Fran found this statistic, true or false, infuriating. Longevity has fucked up our pensions, our work–life balance, our health services, our housing, our happiness. It’s fucked up old age itself.

  Fran can no longer wholly control her thought processes. As she lies on her guaranteed-good-night’s-sleep bed, watching the evening news and eating a packet of some novel kind of Gujarati mix (satisfyingly spicy but rather too many peanuts), washed down with a bottle of not-quite-cold-enough screw-top 13 per cent Spanish white purchased from the friendly bearded Muslim newsagent over the road, she finds herself planning Claude’s next week of meals. She doesn’t want to be doing this, but she can’t help it.

  He’ll be running out of plates and plastic boxes, he’ll be expecting her to turn up soon with some more.

  What about soup? She could make a thick vegetable soup, no, a vegetable soup with bits of bacon, no, a lentil soup with chicken pieces. Claude used to say he didn’t like soup, half a century ago, but he’s not in a position not to like it now, is he? He has to take what he’s given, now.

  She could get a good chicken, make enough soup for both Claude and Teresa.

  Lardons. That’s the word she’s looking for. Bits of bacon, ready chopped. Good in soup. Soup freezes well. There’s yet another word for lardon but she can’t quite get it.

  He used to get back from the hospital after the night shift, and she’d have made the healthy thrifty chunky soup and all he had to do was warm it up. But that wasn’t good enough. He wanted HER to be there to WARM IT UP FOR HIM. And she in bed and worn out with the children sleeping or not sleeping or waking or not waking and the sense of unutterable inadequacy, the sense of rejection, the fear, the panic, the sexual rejection identified with food rejection, the sense of not being that women have, you’d think she’d have grown out of it by now, by her age, at seventy-plus, but no, it intensifies, it gets worse and worse.

  So he’d say he didn’t like soup. Root vegetables, carrots, potatoes, no parsnips, he couldn’t tolerate parsnips, what other root vegetables are there? Onions. Celery.

  Bacon bits. Pancetta. Got it, that’s the other word, pancetta. Lardons. Pancetta. Foreign words for bits of bacon.

  The treadmill of the food mind, like a hamster in its cage. Sometimes she thinks she is going mad, really mad, she will end up in a home like Dorothy, mindlessly colouring in. She used to enjoy colouring in, she remembers a book of flowers and birds and butterflies she had when she was a child, a treat just after the war shortages, and how she’d cried when the water colours ran together into a muddy brown. The failures, the failures. The tough beef, the stew with frilled yellowy gristle, the bloody undercooked lamb, the disintegrating fish overcooked in the oven. He wouldn’t eat the fish, the guests wouldn’t eat it, they’d pretended they were allergic to fish rather than try to eat her fish, she hadn’t forgotten that, she hadn’t forgotten anything, and it had been good fish too, from the fish shop, in those days when there was a fish shop.

  She’d better snap out of this, she’s going downhill fast, down to that place that it was so hard to clamber out of.

  Lardons. They were the solution, the solution to everything. We didn’t used to call them that. God knows what we did call them. We didn’t call them that other word either, pancetta, we’d never heard of pancetta.

  Bread and dripping, Dorothy had mentioned. You couldn’t offer that to man or boy now, not because they wouldn’t eat it, although they wouldn’t, but because meat doesn’t produce dripping any more. The meat isn’t real meat any more. Even when it looks like meat, it’s something else.

  Fran takes another swig of the oaky Spanish, mutes the news, looks for her mobile, panics when she can’t find it. She’s just an old woman endlessly groping in the bottom of her bag, checking her keys and her mobile every ten minutes to see if they are still there, but there it is, in the wrong zip bit. Why can’t she remember always to put it in the same compartment? It doesn’t bode well, Christ, it doesn’t bode well.

  Claude answers within three rings. Hello, Francesca, how’s it going?

  Relief, hearing his voice so not unfriendly, so not at all hostile. He is pleased to hear from her.

  Fine, says Fran, good day, just checking you are OK, everything OK?

  Everything fine, says Claude, I’ve just finished the potato and anchovy bake, it was delicious. Persephone brought me a bit of green salad this morning so I’ve had my greens too.

  Oh good, potato and anchovy isn’t really your five a day, is it?

  To hell with five a day, it’s very nice. You do look after me, Fran, I don’t deserve it.

  No, you don’t, but we all need more than we deserve, don’t we? Oh reason not the need.

  How was your day, how was the conference?

  Good. It was fine.

  Good.

  I’m going home in the morning, I’ll come over and see you in a couple of days when I’ve sorted myself out, bring you some more supplies.

  Thanks, have you had your supper yet?

  No, I was just wondering whether to go down to the restaurant or to pop out for a pizza. The food here’s not great but the breakfasts are good.

  You were never a breakfast girl, were you?

  No, but here they do you a perfect soft-boiled egg, it’s a treat.

  How’s Cyrus?

  Cyrus is fine, aren’t you, big puss?

  Paranoia dissolves, retreats, thins out, but one day it won’t, will it? One day it will entrap her in its dark nets and fogs and she will sink under it. It would be a pity to die dismally, in that darkness.

  She wants to die in the light. Enlightened, in the light. Let there be light, oh God let there be light.

  Endgame. She and Josephine are planning to go to see Endgame, God knows why. Or is it Happy Days? She can’t remember which. Jo is in charge of booking the tickets, it’s Jo who has suddenly decided they ought to get to grips with Samuel Beckett.

  Some fear the approach of dementia. Fran is acquainted with many people with dementia, she has very recently inspected blueprints for dementia-proof housing designed by a team at the University of Watermouth, she has read books about dementia, she has helped out (but only once, she can’t boast about it) at a social event for dementia patients and their carers. But Fran doesn’t think she is on the road to dementia. Her parents had never shown any sign of mental deterioration, they had been conscious (althoug
h not always peacefully and happily) to the end. Her brain functions well, her connections are quick, her memory is serviceable and subject only to a well-within-the-normal-range of lapses about names and products and titles of books and misplaced objects. No, what she fears is paranoia and subjection and rejection, and a return to that sense of worthlessness that had gripped her when she was newly married to Claude and spent so much time worrying about ruining the food. Maybe these sensations are returning to her because she has re-engaged with Claude, or maybe she has re-engaged with Claude because she needs to return to them. Maybe this is a necessary stage.

  Food is a metaphor. But for what? She worries away at this. There is a deep entangled mystery. Sometimes she thinks she should go/have gone to an expert, to an analyst, to have this explained to her, but most of the time she thinks that she can work it out for herself in the end.

  The end is nigh, but she’ll keep on trying.

  It’s not too late.

  And she would be too ashamed to talk about food to an analyst. It is too trivial, too obsessively trivial.

  Food disorders are for the young. And this isn’t really a food disorder, it’s more like a cooking disorder.

  Fran hates media chefs. They proliferate, they spread fear and panic.

  She has somewhat half-heartedly developed her strategies for confronting and averting late-onset ailments. Walking, working, swimming. Climbing the tenement stairs, up and down, down and up, as though climbing up and down an Escher construction site. Networks, tasks, the occasional crossword puzzle. The discipline of plated meals for Claude, the new fortnightly vigils with Teresa. The renewals and transfusions of energy from Paul and Julia and Graham and other younger professional acquaintances up and down the land. The driving about, looking at projects, and the feeling of an occasional wave of oneness with the ordinary plight of the ordinary human race. The keeping-in-touch without-being-too-annoying with her son Christopher and her daughter Poppet and her ex-daughter-in-law Ella and her grandchildren.