The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  He would never get to grips with the gay general. The subject was beyond him, too big for him, and too distant. He would never be able to give a proper account of his own attraction-revulsion relationship with the swashbuckling sabre-rattling French and Spanish in Morocco, and their aesthetic cults of violence and beheadings. The Foreign Legion and Beau Geste were beyond his narrative reach. (Bennett had loved Beau Geste when he was a schoolboy, but Ivor had never read it.) He’d never be well enough to go to Morocco again. Morocco wasn’t very far away, just a short hop over the ocean, as the Berbers and the Mauritanians had found it, but it was a short hop too far for Bennett. They could go by boat, perhaps, Ivor wondered? There were passenger ferries, there were cruises. That’s what old people do these days, they go on cruises. Ivor tried to work out the possibilities, but he wasn’t happy about the Lyautey dream. Neither, he could tell, was Bennett.

  Lyautey was famous, or infamous, for his passions for the handsome young soldiers under his command. Had Bennett wanted to whitewash him, to justify him? Ivor didn’t even know, as the project hadn’t got that far.

  They’d been to look at his tomb in the Invalides in Paris: a pompous manly erection, where his ashes had been reinterred in 1961. De Gaulle had given a speech on the occasion. Bennett was interested in military and military-style monuments. Unamuno, Lyautey, the tomb of Franco in the extraordinary Valle de los Caídos.

  They don’t erect statues to historians. Or not very often.

  Ivor didn’t like to watch Bennett becoming a disappointed old man, fearing oblivion. He deserved better than that, and Ivor deserved better than that.

  Bennett, Ivor knew, had felt professionally discomfited by developments in Spanish historiography, by archaeological revelations on the Spanish mainland. The recent laws on Historical Memory, on the right to excavate the mass graves and the cemeteries and the battlefields of the past, had provided an excess of new material which he would never be able to assimilate. He had gallantly welcomed the new openness, but it had made him feel lamentably out of date. A whole new generation of historians, writing both in Spanish and English, had taken over the much-disputed and still embittered field. His work wasn’t rejected or derided, it was still cited, but it was being steadily supplanted.

  Somebody was even writing a book about why, allegedly, the Spanish Civil War had attracted the attention and indeed participation of so many English homosexuals. An exploration of the A. E. Housman syndrome, of the beauty of doomed youth. Bennett had refused to be interviewed for it, and Stephen Spender had (just) pre-empted an interrogation by death. He’d lived to a good age, had Stephen. (Bennett could do some wicked parodies of Housman; his party piece was Hugh Kingsmill’s ‘What, still alive at twenty-two, A clean, upstanding chap like you?’)

  The next project Bennett dreamed up, after the waning of the Lyautey dream, was more manageable, more within his reach, and Ivor encouraged it, with a sense that it would fill the time pleasantly, even though the book would never be written. It would give their excursions an illusion of purpose, and Bennett loved to have a purpose.

  Bennett had decided to write a short, scholarly but popular history of the Canaries. There was surprisingly little in English or even in Spanish about this volcanic group of small islands sitting in the Atlantic, not far off the North African shore: a mirror image of the Galapagos, which they had visited in the days before it was considered an ecological crime to go there. The Canaries, the Isles of the Blessed. The history of the islands was short and at the same time mysterious. Bennett believed, or pretended to believe, that the millions (yes, literally millions) of English-speaking visitors who poured in and out each year would welcome some reading matter more stimulating than the tedious selection of magazines and mass-market English and German paperbacks available in the mini-markets. There were some guidebooks on sale, but they were very basic. There were one or two little books on Canarian food and on Canarian flora and on the history of the indigenous and intriguing Guanches of Tenerife, but they consisted more of captioned pictures than of text. The best guides written in English were by an intrepid British walker, who advised on climbing volcanoes, crossing dunes and barrancos and lava pans, finding casitas and goat tracks and avoiding dogs, but even he didn’t offer much historical information. Bennett thought he could fill a gap.

  The Canaries were now a peaceful backwater. Their peoples weren’t obsessed, as so many on the mainland still were, by tales of revenge and violent death, by family vendettas, by the executions and defenestrations of yesteryear. They weren’t even very interested in independence, although you could occasionally spot graffiti demanding ‘Españoles Fuera’ or ‘Viva Canarias Libre’ or ‘Canarias no es España’. There had been betrayals and dispossessions, but they had been small in scale. The Canaries did not swim with spilt blood. Their dried mummies were very ancient and very dry.

  Bennett has accumulated a pile of cuttings and jottings, but he hasn’t yet got much further than typing out a beautiful epigraph from his fellow historian Gibbon, who had never visited the islands, though he had written feelingly about them in an essay entitled ‘On the Position of the Meridional Line’:

  A remote and hospitable land has often been praised above its merits by the gratitude of storm-beaten mariners. But the real scene of the Canaries affords, like the rest of the world, a mixture of good and evil, nay even of indigenous ills and foreign improvements. Yet, in sober truth, the small islands of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans may be esteemed as some of the most agreeable spots on the globe. The sky is serene, the air is pure and salubrious: the meridian heat of the sun is tempered by the sea-breeze: the groves and vallies, at least in the Canaries, are enlivened by the melody of their native birds, and a new climate may be found, at every step, from the shore to the summit, of a mountainous ascent.

  Gibbon made the islands sound very agreeable, as indeed they are, but Ivor suspected that very few tourists would be at all interested in purchasing a history of them. They were not great readers, the visitors. They preferred sunbathing and football on pub TV. They would not care about Plato and Plutarch and Atlantis and King Juba II and Juba’s physician Euphorbius, after whom the ubiquitous and various Canarian plant was named. (King Juba had married, according to Bennett, the daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, which to Ivor seemed surprising and unlikely: what kind of woman could she have been, this Roman-Egyptian queen, which parent did she favour, what kind of colour was she?) The surfboarders from Norway and Uruguay would not wish to learn about the Roman general Sertorius, ally of Marius and Cinna and adversary of the bloody Sulla, who had attempted to set up a Utopian colony on Tenerife. They would be even less interested in William Wordsworth, who had once planned to write an epic poem about Sertorius and the small, peaceful, dwindling band of his followers who had hung on in the islands until the Norman invasion. They would not want to read about the disputed ethnic origins of the doomed (but genetically surviving) Guanches, or to speculate about how they had got there in the first place. They would not share Bennett’s curious fixation with the fact that by the Middle Ages the inhabitants of the seven islands had lost the art of navigation.

  They must have had ships once, or they couldn’t have got there, could they?

  (Unless, suggested Ivor, they had been dumped: and it turned out that this was indeed one more than plausible historical hypothesis. Ivor wasn’t very well educated but he was good at lateral thinking.)

  Ivor could see that it was rather odd that when the Portuguese and the Normans and the Genoese rediscovered the Canaries in the fourteenth century, they encountered separate populations on each of the seven islands, all speaking different languages, and with no means of getting from one island to another, even though some of them could see their neighbours and wave to them, if they felt like it, over the water. As in the Galapagos, evolution had taken its own course.

  The seven islands: El Hierro, La Gomera, Gran Canaria, La Palma, Tenerife, Lanzarote, Fuerteventura – separated both by water and by
language.

  Bennett seemed gripped by what Ivor considered a childish or perhaps senile fascination with this aspect of island history. It was his King Charles’s Head. It had replaced the gay Lyautey as an obsession. It was, Ivor thought, connected with his pleasurable memories of swimming. Bennett had, until very recently, been a keen swimmer, ever eager to leap into any tempting stretch of water. Ivor, who was not so keen on the indignities and discomforts of getting wet, had watched his friend practising his slow and stately breaststroke in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean and the Pacific, in the Red Sea and the Black Sea and the North Sea, in the Danube and the Rhine and the Rhône, in the Thames and the Barle and the Windrush. He had seen him ploughing up and down the homoerotic blue lengths of hotel swimming pools in Los Angeles and Toronto and Melbourne and Rio de Janeiro. He had seen him jump into green and murky shallow ponds in the English counties and into unlikely and deeply anti-erotic algae-covered waterholes in the Midwest. Bennett still enjoyed their well-maintained turquoise pool at La Suerte, although he was less eager these days to attempt even the milder island bays of the Atlantic. He’d lost his footing and been knocked down by a wave on the curving beach at the little fishing port of Arrieta late one morning and that had put him off swimming in the sea.

  But Bennett remained fascinated by the fact that the indigenous Canarians, in the Middle Ages, didn’t build boats and didn’t swim and didn’t trade from island to island and didn’t speak a common language. In Ivor’s view, he was excessively fascinated by this. Ivor didn’t think of himself as an intellectual, but he did wonder in a Freudian kind of way why Bennett found this so interesting.

  It was interesting, of course, and the handsome lads from Senegal who propositioned tourist ladies to buy handbags these days, were, physically, very attractive.

  God knows how they got here, but they did.

  The survival of the fittest.

  These days, would-be immigrants from the mainland of Africa were frequently wrecked off the eastern shores of the islands. Young men, young women, children. The chancers. Some drowned; some made it to the detention centres; some survived to sell excellent fake handbags, until they were moved on or deported. One of them, one fortunate one plucked from the thousands, had been taken under the wing of a friend of theirs, the friend with the de Chirico, the friend with a chequered past and an eye for art, and he lived with him in comparative splendour in his rocky sardine fortress on the neighbouring island of Fuerteventura.

  Most of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century immigrants could not swim. They trusted themselves to the leaking vessels, but had never learned to swim. Bennett was unduly fascinated by this.

  Ivor was finding it hard to work out whether or not Bennett was, to put it bluntly, losing his wits.

  Bennett’s reaction to the news of Sara Sidiqi’s sudden and at first inexplicable death had been very odd. He hadn’t seemed to take it in at all, or not in any way that we would now call ‘appropriate’. He didn’t want to know about it. The subject of her death was not at first admitted as part of his conversational range. Yet, earlier, he’d appeared to follow in detail the whole complicated story about the Western Saharan protest at the airport, had spoken to the press about it, had signed the letter to El País, had seemed quite chuffed to be summoned to appear on one of the local TV stations with their Nobel Prize friend to talk about the hunger strike and Sahrawi nationalism. He’d been more than happy to give his views on Namarome to Sara, and to invoke the name of his late acquaintance, the novelist and useful public intellectual José Saramago. Saramago would certainly have stood up for independence of the Western Sahara.

  And Bennett had really taken to Christopher Stubbs.

  Ivor had been taken with Christopher too. He had seen some kind of gleam of hope, of escape, of unexpected support, or at least of temporary relief, in Christopher Stubbs, and that was why he was sitting on the balcony of the bar waiting, on his way to drive to greet him on his return.

  They’d met, the four of them, only once or twice, in Sara and Christopher’s short and dramatically curtailed stay on the island: Christopher had been given Bennett’s name as a useful contact by a college friend he knew in the Foreign Office, and when Christopher rang La Suerte, it was of course Ivor who picked up the phone. (Bennett wasn’t deaf, but he liked to pretend he was, and, although garrulous in person, he hated the phone.) Hospitable drinks at the magical black-and-white volcanic house had followed, and some briefing of Sara on local politics by Bennett, on local facilities and personalities by Ivor. They had all got on well: Ivor and Bennett were pleased with the influx of new young blood. They were cheered by the apparition of two handsome and healthy young people still in mid-career, still working, not yet tottering on the verge of retirement. They were impressed by Sara’s even younger research team and her Libyan cameraman. They were all staying in comfort at the big César Manrique-styled hotel in Costa Teguise.

  The foursome had spent Sara’s last evening together, the evening before she was taken ill. They’d had dinner, at Bennett’s recommendation, in the last old-fashioned fish restaurant right down by the almost abandoned rusting old port, a far cry from the developed strand and promenade of the new resort. Las Caletas still preserved an unfashionable dark Spanish wooden gloom, with plastic-sealed wooden-framed salt-stained casement windows jutting out and overlooking the waves. It had a history. It had seen the boats sail out.

  It served, amongst other marine delicacies, limpets. They were plucked, living, straight from the public rocks of the cove below. Sara had never eaten limpets. They were horrible, warned Ivor, tough and leathery like whelks, worse than whelks, but she had wanted to order them, for fun: they looked so like little volcanoes, she pointed out, little ridged volcanoes, they echoed the strange conical shapes of the landscape, she had to try them. She’d never seen them on a menu before, she’d never have another chance.

  Ivor was to wish that he hadn’t remembered that she had said that.

  Sara was a confident quick-witted young woman, in the prime of life, full of vitality, with a handsomely curved strong fleshly nose and a wide clear brown brow and well-defined, well-arched eyebrows and long lashes and richly springing black hair tied back with a yellow scarf. She wore a décolleté heart-scooped white T-shirt.

  She had been much amused by the louchely infantile hand-painted ceramic gender signs on the wooden slatted doors of the restaurant’s primitive Servicios: a cherubic little boy standing and pissing into a chamber pot decorated with dolphins, the handsome back and bare bum of a woman with her skirts hoisted over a floral bucket. She’d photographed the signs, discreetly, on her mobile.

  Christopher, after a bottle of wine, had talked a little (but not too much) about his own career. He had made a name for himself as a presenter and co-producer of an arts programme, but had fallen out with his company and his employers and was looking for another niche. He said he was in the process of setting up his own production company. Ivor claimed to have seen him on screen, but Christopher thought Ivor was being polite.

  Ivor wasn’t sure whether he was being polite or not. Christopher did look and sound familiar, with his boldly balding bronzed head, his heavily framed tinted glasses (which he kept on throughout the darkened meal), his expensively coarse-fibred red-and-yellow striped-and-blocked shirt, his confident yes-it’s-me manner and his cultivated East London (or possibly Essex?) proletarian accent. He looked like somebody one might well recognise. But so did so many people.

  Bennett took to Christopher, regardless of whether Christopher would be of any use to them or not. He found him amusing. He egged him on to talk about television rivalries and programmes about Francis Bacon and David Hockney and William Tillyer and Joe Tilson (it seemed Christopher as a programmer and presenter had favoured the visual arts), and volunteered, though without any attempt to expand vaingloriously on the detail, that he had known some of these people. ‘Your shirt’s a bit Joe Tilson’, he interjected at one point, a remark which delighted
Christopher. Christopher in turn was more than willing to cede to Sir Bennett’s authority and seniority, to demonstrate that he knew his work and had even read some of it. He made gracious enquiring allusions to Goya and Lorca and Unamuno and Picasso and Tàpies, while confessing a little disingenuously that Spain was not his thing.

  Ivor was pleased by these interchanges. It always pleased him when Bennett received fitting and ego-calming recognition. And he was relieved that Bennett seemed to be responding ‘appropriately’ (that odd word again, so often these days in his thoughts) to Christopher’s anecdotes.

  Old age veers towards the inappropriate.

  Bennett, on form as he was that night, was very amusing. He was a good mimic (his Hockney was excellent, though Hockney was a soft target) and he made them all laugh.

  And to Sara, Bennett also responded well. He liked her style, Ivor could see. He was on the ball and gallant and eager to be helpful. He suggested locations, he spoke (but not too much) about his little project for an islands history. He recommended the monumental Museo del Emigrante, which told the other side of the emigration-immigration story, and he found she already knew about that, though she hadn’t yet had time to go there. She should try to get to Tenerife and La Laguna, she should see the mysterious pyramids praised by Thor Heyerdahl, and she must certainly go across to Fuerteventura – less than half an hour on the ferry, amazing to think that the indigenous peoples over so many centuries had never built a boat. She ought to see the cemetery at Gran Tarajal on Fuerteventura, described by its mayor as the graveyard of Africa. Not on the tourist route, obviously, but well worth a visit from your point of view, said Bennett.