The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  The ‘wider interests’ that are meant to keep us from falling down the funnel.

  Lying there on her wide white plump bed in the Premier Inn, she realises that she has knocked back too much of the Spanish wine and is feeling hungry, but is too drunk to go out for a meal. They don’t seem to do room service, and anyway room service sometimes takes hours and hours. She could go out and buy herself a slice of pizza. But she is too tired to go out to buy herself a slice of pizza. She has left it too late to go out to buy herself a slice of pizza.

  She could go downstairs and order a plate. A hot plate. Scampi and chips with loud Muzak. A glass of red. She is sick of this Spanish white.

  Valentine’s Day. Shrove Tuesday. Good Friday. Easter Sunday. We measure it out.

  See the water and the blood from his riven side that flowed.

  Poor Hamish. He had died at Easter, on Easter Saturday. A sombre day to die. A disproportionate number of people die in hospitals at weekends, for obvious reasons. He had been a statistic. But at least he had died on a serious day.

  Claude had enjoyed cutting people up, and he’d been exceptionally good at it.

  W. B. Yeats, her friend Jo’s favourite poet, was good on old age and our insatiable dissatisfaction, as Jo keeps telling her. She doesn’t really need telling, she read Yeats for herself, in the days when she read poetry. ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’, that had been one of the great songs of her youth. She used to play it to herself loud loud loud, it was the only song she really liked, though the Beatles she could tolerate.

  Sex, food, satisfaction.

  I can’t get no satisfaction.

  She’d meant to text Christopher a routine good will message, HOW R U LOVE FX, but why bother, her fingers are too stiff and clumsy at this time of night, and she is redundant both to Christopher’s life and to Sara’s death.

  She heaves herself up and forces herself to go downstairs for a Red Meal. She thinks with longing of the potato and anchovy bake, and of the chicken and tarragon, with their paler shades and more subtle flavours. She does make them for herself, sometimes. But sometimes she just can’t be bothered. She often thinks she should always cook double quantities of everything, and freeze half for Claude, half for herself, but there is something wrong with that as a concept. She can’t work out what it is, but maybe one day she will. She’s cooked double occasionally, but she’s never made a habit of it. She thinks of Paul, Julia, Graham, Ken of the robots, and the strong-armed sixty-year-old Suzette, who could have tossed the frail little body of Aunt Dorothy, colostomy bag and all, over her shoulder and carried her up the stairs without missing a step. Suzette had seemed to be a kindly woman, but who knows what motivates her? Maybe one day she too will lose the plot and poison all her brood.

  There just aren’t enough strong younger people around these days to infuse the energy into the elderly. The feeble, as never before in society, in history, are outweighing the hale. The balance is wrong. The shape of the bell curve is a disaster. It’s a dystopian science fiction scenario, a disaster movie.

  The hunter gatherers wouldn’t have let themselves get into this kind of predicament. They abandoned the elderly, or drowned them, or clubbed them to death, or exposed them on snowy mountainsides. They kept on the move.

  Fran is on the move too.

  Nor know that what disturbs our blood

  Is but its longing for the tomb . . .

  Ivor Walters sits on the little low balcony of the familiar bar overlooking the promenade that runs along the curving bay. He sips his warming beer. He is filling in time before meeting Christopher Stubbs at the airport. A pastel-pretty pink and beige and pale blue collared dove perches on the back of the little white bistro chair at the table on the next balcony, looking at him from time to time. It puts its head on one side, and looks at him. The sun, predictably, is setting. It is a very reliable sun. Sunset and sunrise do not vary much in these climes. He watches the slow march of the people on their daily pilgrimage. They are walking back from the beach to shop for their supper in one of the many small and almost identical supermarkets, or to eat fish or burgers or pizza in one of the many small and almost identical restaurants, or to spend an evening watching football in one of the many English pubs, where they will get drunk on beer or on Canarian or Spanish wine or (in the case of the ladies) on recklessly dispensed tumblers full of sweet holiday liqueurs.

  You cannot really call their slow march a passeggiata, a camino, a paseo, for these pilgrims are too humble and lacking in style for such words. He observes them as they plod and trudge: the fit, the fat, the brown, the red, the weathered, the wizened. Cleavages, thighs, shorts, sandals, walking sticks. Wheelchairs, mobility scooters, buggies. Half term is over and most of the larger children have flown away and gone back to school, but the little ones in their pushchairs are always with us, accompanied by a few truant siblings. A sunset procession, a slow pedestrian parade. Occasionally a jogger varies the rhythm of the procession, but there are not many joggers. The pace is slow.

  The surface of the path is hard and trim and newly laid and neatly bordered. He knows the island well and he has seen its improvements and its upgradings. Much public money has been spent on footpaths and roadways and viewpoints. He knew this path when it was rock and sand and mud and grit and spume, when it was raw and painful to the sandalled foot. He is slowly ageing with the island, he has watched it adapt itself to the ease and the pleasure-seeking of the perpetual procession. This is a good country for babies in buggies, and a good country for old men. Ivor is not yet old, as others are old, but he has lived here long enough. If Bennett dies soon, which he may, Ivor can go back to England. But if Bennett survives into his late eighties and nineties, which in this mild climate of mummified and everlasting life he equally well may, it will be too late for Ivor to go home. It is a common story.

  Bennett is here for his health and Ivor is here because Bennett needs him to be here. Bennett is slowly drying out like a Guanche mummy of the caves and dunes. Ivor needs Bennett because Bennett holds the purse strings. It is too depressing, and yet not ignoble. They are bound together by the needs which succeed love, by the needs which succeed sex and affection. Ivor does not like thinking in these terms, but it is hard to avoid them. They sit by him, these considerations, looking at him from time to time, as does the pretty collared dove with its pale and pearly plumage.

  Ivor tries to keep Bennett entertained, he is loyal to him. Ivor is a good man, at the very least he tries to be a good man. Most would call him a good man, but, by his own high standards, he might fail.

  It is better not to look too closely at Ivor these days, in Ivor’s view. He is, or was, a strikingly handsome man, and he still attracts flirtatious attention from men and women alike. Blond, bronzed, with the bluest of forget-me-not blue eyes, and the most even of features. A pin-up boy, a collector’s item. Bennett had collected him long ago, when Ivor was only seventeen and knew no better. Ivor worries now about his wrinkles. He is proud that he still has a full head of hair, white now rather than golden, but you can tell that it once was golden for it has that light silvery radiance, the white-gold thistledown brightness of the birthright blond. He keeps it just very slightly on the long side. Dashingly, but not effeminately long.

  Bennett and Ivor have engaged with the life of the island. They know some of the local celebrities and intellectuals, most of them also elderly, some of them ancient, many of them also here for reasons of health (and at least one of them in retreat from scandal). A few are indigenous, but a very few. Bennett is himself now something of a local celebrity, and he speaks good Spanish, so he can participate more fully in the cultural and social life of the island than Ivor. Ivor is not a linguist, although he is good at small talk, at seeing to drinks, at opening bottles, at pulling up chairs for older guests in his own and other people’s houses. He is an asset. People cheer up when they see Ivor is of the party.

  Bennett knows a good deal about Spanish and Canarian history, for he has written
about the Spanish Civil War and Lorca and Franco and Guernica and Picasso, and about the now-forgotten but once-celebrated philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, whose ambivalent political affiliations have for many years intrigued him. He has written a famous essay about Unamuno’s brief Canarian exile to Fuerteventura, under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. That distinguished Spanish academic had unwisely made a public protest about the preferential treatment of one of the dictator’s courtesans, La Caoba, ‘the Mahogany Girl’, and Unamuno had ended up on a boat from the mainland to what was then the dullest and scruffiest and least visited of the islands. Ivor and Bennett have been several times to pay homage to him in his humble dusty museum-house in Puerto del Rosario, a port formerly known as Goat Harbour, and they have seen his carved wooden desk and his carved wooden bed with its white lace coverlet.

  Unamuno’s white, massive and strangely Fascist statue rises up on the lower slopes of the great and stately Montaña Quemada. That too they have seen, from the vertiginous road, many times.

  Unamuno’s sojourn had been brief, to merit such memorials. A matter of months. But Fuerteventura had lacked celebrities, and it makes the most of him.

  Ivor has never been able to follow the ups and downs of Unamuno’s posthumous reputation. He remains an ambiguous figure. He knows that Unamuno symbolised for Bennett something about the caprice of fortune, the humiliation of academics, the dangers of political vacillation, the neglect of posterity, but Ivor has never known precisely what, or why.

  Ivor knows less than Bennett about the Canaries, but he is learning, perforce. And he knows some aspects of the Canaries that Bennett does not know.

  He has learned a lot over the years by typing up Bennett’s mid-life works, published in the 1970s and 1980s. When Bennett was writing them, manual and then electric typewriters were still the favoured means of home-based reproduction. But Ivor has learned a lot more about technology since then. He is fairly good, very good for his age, on the email and the internet. They are his lifeline. Bennett has tried to learn email, but he is not fond of it and tends to leave it (and everything) to Ivor.

  Bennett Carpenter and Ivor Walters have made this island their home. They have invested in it. It would be hard for them to go ‘home’ to England now. The Spanish property market has crashed, and the island properties, even pleasant and remarkable properties like Bennett’s, are currently unsaleable. The English property market, in contrast, has soared, and even unpleasant properties in undesirable neighbourhoods are unaffordable. They’ll have to stick it out here. They’ve made their bed and they’ll have to lie on it, though, thank God, they’ve got room for plenty of beds and don’t have to lie together on the same kingsize mattress any more.

  They have burned their boats.

  Bennett’s house is, in fact, almost unnaturally beautiful, and most of the time Ivor loves it. It had been a find. He reminds himself of this, when he gets, as he does, restless. When he gets restless, he gets into his little car and drives off, as he has done now, to find a bar or a café or a beach where he can sit alone or exchange banalities with local characters or, decreasingly frequently, to solicit other kinds of contact. The last of these possibilities interests him less and less.

  Ivor sometimes looks back to the happier days when he and Bennett were house-hunting on the island. Bennett’s health was already impaired, but it was extraordinary how he perked up in a hot dry climate, and Ivor had driven him around gaily, as they fantasised about their new life in the sun. They had inspected the most bizarre and improbable dwellings: modern terraced apartments banked up high on hillsides above noisy Thomson Holidays resorts, old nineteenth-century white and green and blue street houses in desolate silent spacious inland towns, fishing cottages on pebbled beaches where the pure turquoise and white breaking waves of the Atlantic washed upon the whitened doorsteps and at stormy high tides surged through into the kitchens. A ruined medieval tower of rubble filled with sheep, a bright yellow Gaudi-esque house built perilously on the shifting sands, a farmstead on a volcanic slope overlooking a vineyard and a sea of lava. They had been entertained by estate agents of various nationalities and of engaging chutzpah (it was boom-time then) and they had met householders and tenants of mysterious ethnic and social origins. They had explored building plots of windswept scrubby grey-green plastic-bag-littered goat pasture, and rocky shores, and malpaís of many descriptions.

  Once, on their travels, lost on a cinder track as they circled through the swirling peaks of the black tormented tufa around the pale-brown wrinkled elephant foot of a volcano, they had seen the strangest of sights: a small, low stone cottage, all alone, planted in the midst of the waves of dark and frozen ash. It was surrounded by a low garden wall, a dry stone wall such as we know well in England, but the garden blazed with red and orange tropical blossom and sprouted with spikes of aloe and cactus and giant euphorbia. A stocky old man, naked, his broad back and shoulders towards them, was trundling a wheelbarrow full of weeds towards a small smoking bonfire. His back was the burned red brown of red clay, he was Adam, he was the first and last man in Paradise. The red sun was setting, tingeing his solid elderly ruddy flesh with its radiance. He was a sight not to be forgotten.

  A fortifying sight, an augury.

  Ivor had looked in vain, year after year, in a desultory fashion, for that cottage and that solitary gardener of the sinking sun, but he had never found them. They had been a mirage, a trick of the light. But the vision of the old man had encouraged him to agree to settle here. And the house, when they found it, was special. It was exceptional, it was beautiful.

  A man could die even here.

  The house was inland and a little upland, but with a view down towards the sea. On the small island, nowhere is far from the sea. It stood on the outskirts of an undistinguished village, near a roundabout marked by one of the playful moving sculptures created by the island’s dead gay magus, the artist César Manrique, and it was built on one storey, spreading over a series of volcanic bubbles and caverns. The irregularity of the black pitted lava and the whitewashed walls enchanted Bennett. The shapes of the house were organic, fanciful, natural, devised by the natural surrealism of the eighteenth-century volcanic eruptions. It was the perfect house for a man who struggled for breath climbing stairs. It had been designed and built to a high standard in the good years, and was complete with pool, sun terrace, palm trees, a well-planted euphorbia garden of many colours, a fish pool, a tennis court. It had a gaiety and a lightness of spirit, and it seduced them both. Water from the desalination plant on the east coast of the island poured ceaselessly, merrily, from fountains and taps and shower heads. The sea was before them, and behind them the volcanoes, and their gardens were full of the music of running water. At night the sky was bright with the stars that had guided Columbus from La Gomera towards the unknown west.

  A man could die even here.

  Bennett had said this line when he first saw the house and he was fond of repeating it. Ivor knew it must be a quote, but had never worked out where it came from. He kept forgetting to try to find out. He didn’t really want to know.

  The house was called La Suerte, Good Fortune, and they kept the name.

  Bennett liked to say that you couldn’t say the house and its grounds were in bad taste, or vulgar. Anywhere else on earth they would have been monstrously so, but here they weren’t even camp. They were part of the fantasy of the landscape. They were ahistoric. They weren’t in any kind of taste at all. They were elemental.

  Bennett and Ivor were happy there, or for some years they were happy. Bennett was finishing what he said would be his last big book, a merging of cultural history and his later and enjoyably acquired scholarship of art history, and he was well enough to fly back once or twice to see his editor and his publishers and to check references and illustrations and copyright and to give diplomatic and convivial lunches to a colleague or two. The airport was hell, but the flight itself was not too taxing, and the island was in the same time zone as London, so
there was no problem with jet lag. And there was Ivor, to make the bookings, to see to the bags, to cajole the women at check-in and to chat up the air stewards about extra leg room for Sir Bennett.

  The island, away from the ceaselessly busy airport and the false golden sand of the tourist beaches, had a curious emptiness that was in itself soothing. The silence of noon in the unfrequented colonnaded piazzas of the small inland towns was profound. The green and blue shutters of the houses were perpetually closed, the expensive and extensive new sports grounds eerily deserted, the avenues of palms in stasis. No children played in the immaculate playgrounds. Where had all the children gone? Unnaturally long and hard shadows fell towards the evening, as in a painting by de Chirico.

  After Bennett’s first slight stroke, travel was not so easy, and Ivor began to feel more apprehensive about the future. But by then they had made friends on the island, Spanish friends as well as ex-pats, and Ivor had a few younger drinking companions whom he would meet in the bars in town. Bennett did not enquire about these relationships. He was well past his jealous years. The shouting matches of the past were over.

  They gave parties at the house, good parties. A Nobel Prizewinner, a distinguished and outrageous elderly actor, a few historians and other assorted academics, a notorious bridge player who had once partnered Omar Sharif, a man of the theatre who owned a de Chirico, a handful of Sunday painters – it was a very painterly landscape, though not many had done it justice – and a chorus of locals who specialised in being amusing. Convivial friends, most of them ageing but nevertheless convivial, and a few younger spirits who stuck by Ivor and looked out for him.

  People liked Ivor.

  When the book was published, to respectful if somewhat subdued acclaim, Ivor began to wonder how Bennett would keep himself busy for the remainder of his life. Ivor was busy looking after Bennett, but Bennett needed occupation. He was accustomed to hard work. He started to talk about possible projects in a way that made Ivor slightly uneasy. For years he had talked about writing a life of General Lyautey. He’d had the idea long ago on their first holiday visit to Morocco, but Ivor had never taken it very seriously, he’d thought of it as an after-dinner jeu d’esprit. A provocative notion: a gay biography of a right-wing gay orientalising French general written by a gay left-of-centre English Hispanist historian-turned-art-historian – surely not? But now Bennett had returned to the concept and started to talk about it again. He’d talked about it for a year or two and asked Ivor to order him up some books, but it wasn’t easy to get hold of the source material in the Canaries, and Ivor watched his old friend becoming gradually disheartened by his own incompetence, by his lack of grasp and intellectual vigour and attack. It wasn’t that his mind was going, but he’d lost his perseverance. (‘I’ve lost my alacrity’, he would sometimes say, mournfully, when down in the dumps.)