The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  Ivor can tell that Christopher’s professional eyes and ears are turning towards the possibilities of different lines of Lanzarotean drama, set in this temptingly warm, scenic and sculptured land. He has been seduced, as his hosts had been some years ago, by this blessed abandoned dwelling place. A keen, an almost professional observer of other people’s behaviour, Ivor guesses that his new friend, even in the throes of alleged grief, cannot prevent himself from dreaming up new ideas to pitch at commissioning committees. What is he planning? A documentary about the strange life and ironically tragic death-on-the-roundabout of artist César Manrique, about whom he has asked several questions? A satirical portrait of the island as a sunset refuge for the émigré elderly? Perhaps he could be persuaded to make a biopic about Sir Bennett Carpenter, the white-haired Grand Old Man of Anglo-Spanish letters? Bennett would love that, and could probably cope adequately with the attention. They could rope in the more picturesque of their neighbours to dress the set.

  Or perhaps a film about civil partnership? A film about the surviving younger partners of ageing or deceased homosexuals? A film about this ludicrous new concept of gay marriage?

  We are a dying breed, reflects Ivor. The very thought of us is old-fashioned.

  It’s a pity Christopher probably won’t stay long enough to see this year’s Mardi Gras carnival, with its bizarre and extreme gaieties. Drag queens tottering on lofty platform shoes with eighteen-inch heels, wearing tinsel headdresses three feet high, and jewelled brassieres, and ostrich feathers. Fuchsia, lilac, orange, turquoise, silver, emerald-green. As a sixteen-year-old, pre-Bennett, Ivor in closet secrecy had liked to apply a little very pale pink lipstick, a seaside summer lipstick, to his handsomely curved Adonis-Antinous lips. But he hadn’t developed that aspect of his personality. Bennett had saved him, captured him, imprisoned him.

  Over the last few years he and Bennett had enjoyed watching the gala in its extensive live coverage on the many island channels of local TV. It was too tiring these days to go in person, the roads were too crowded with spectators, one might slip and fall. The shows were amazingly bold and amateur. One of the young men at the big event in Gran Canaria had fallen off his platform shoes and off the platform itself, into the crowd, all captured live on camera, to the drunken amusement of the spectators. Bennett had been a wee bit worried. He hoped the poor boy hadn’t injured himself. ‘His poor mother, I do hope she wasn’t watching!’ he had said. This had been one of his catchphrases, over the years, dating from a moment of high drama at a 1970s party in Notting Hill Gate.

  Ivor refills Christopher’s glass, attentively but not over-attentively. Christopher has started to drink faster and faster as the meal progresses, and worldly-wise Ivor can see, as through an airport scanner, the shape of the plastic vodka bottle lying in wait for him, concealed in his suitcase. He knows Christopher will be wanting to get back to it soon.

  Ivor and Bennett have never been heavy drinkers, but they have known some in their time. Bennett is old enough to remember Francis Bacon and Denis Wirth-Miller, the Wild Man of Wivenhoe.

  Denis Wirth-Miller, to Bennett’s astonishment, had married his lifelong lover Dicky Chopping in a civil partnership when they were both in their nineties. Bennett had found this unseemly and grotesque. The old scarecrows, the old death’s heads, the old skeletons, he had loudly protested.

  Tomorrow, Ivor and Bennett will take Christopher out to dinner in the restaurant at Nazaret. The food’s not up to much, but the building is theatrical. Bennett and Ivor like its many corridors and catacombs and its lamp-lit caverns cut deep into an old quarry in the hillside, although Bennett is too nervous and wobbly these days to explore its steep hinterland.

  They’d better not go back to Las Caletas, where Sara ate her first and last limpets. That wouldn’t be a good idea.

  And, as we have said, it is not a good idea to look too closely at Ivor. He wouldn’t like it, and we do not have the right to get too close to him. We have no permitted access to the inwardness of him. We know a lot about him, and we can describe his public behaviour, which is polite, circumspect, considerate. We can describe his public and even some of his more private actions, such as his new found church-going, and the lipstick he tried on as a boy. But we can’t get too close. He wouldn’t want us to see the dark shadowy violet-grey blotch on the right of his hardly wrinkled forehead, a blotch sitting above his eyebrow. It may or may not be spreading month by month. It is a handsome shadow, it decorates his handsome palely tanned visage, as an artificial beauty patch used to highlight the features of a Regency buck.

  We don’t want to be privy to Ivor’s thoughts about this omen.

  Fran Stubbs doesn’t mind our looking into her head, indeed she insists that we do so. She’s keen on the confessional mode, not necessarily with other people, but with herself. Ivor is not.

  Josephine Drummond, settled in Athene Grange, prides herself on having made herself comfortable. She has domesticated fear. Like her friend Fran, she observes the varied ways we find of dealing with old age. Like Fran, she takes both a detached and a personal interest in these matters. Their views on what is best differ. They exchange notes on their progress, and on the progress of their friends and neighbours. Josephine supplies Fran with literary allusions and case histories from her residency, and Fran supplies Josephine with sociological anecdotes from the Ashley Combe files and with notes on and from her colleagues.

  Josephine, although in excellent health, has met Old Age halfway by moving to Athene Grange, and is determined to make friends with her. La Vieillesse, that is what she sometimes calls Old Age, after the title of a terrifying book on the subject by Simone de Beauvoir.

  She thinks Fran is crazy to have moved to Tarrant Towers. A Gothic adventure, and surely unwise. It will come to a bad ending, predicts Jo. In her view it was a decision taken in haste, after Hamish’s death. She does not voice this view to Fran. She has been to Tarrant Towers a couple of times, and has not liked them much. They are the other extreme. When she thinks of them, those lines on death by one of the Graveyard Poets, she forgets which, come unbidden to her mind:

  In that dread moment, how the frantic soul

  Raves round the walls of her clay tenement.

  She doesn’t impart these lines to Fran.

  Fran, she reflects, as she takes a pause from the small print to drink the last dregs of her cold tea, has bravado. She dresses with bravado. Whereas Jo believes in erring in the direction of discretion and safety. One of the phrases that has upset her since girlhood is ‘mutton dressed as lamb’, and she avoids this accusation, without much effort, by wearing easily available sombre colours – greys, fawns, ochres, dark blues and many shades of black. Her steel-grey hair is luxuriant and long and she secures it with an enamelled clasp or a bone pin, in an amateur kind of bun. Fran, in contrast, has her short and thinning hair cut regularly and dyed in subtly gradated layers of grey, white, bronze and gold. Jo admires the time and money and effort she puts into this, for she could not be bothered to go so often to a hairdresser, and she does not fancy the rather institutional person that comes fortnightly to Athene Grange. She washes her hair once or twice a week, in the bath, enjoying the feeling of it floating free like weeds in the water. She likes to lie on her back, almost submerged, and run her hands through it as it floats around her, and to tug gently at its roots, taking satisfaction in its continuing abundance. She massages her scalp, vigorously, under the water, and thinks of forests of kelp and of sea anemones.

  She lets it dry by itself as she wanders around her apartment. She has got a hairdryer, but she doesn’t often bother to use it. ‘By itself’, that’s a curious grammatical construction, she sometimes reflects, as she gives words, as she sometimes does, to the process of drying her hair. The phrase gives her hair a fine independent agency.

  Fran Stubbs has taken to wearing garments with many-coloured stripes – T-shirts, jerseys, cardigans, jackets. Jo thinks the stripes daring and wonders if maybe stripes are in fashion
.

  Fran would be surprised to hear that her stripes are daring. She buys what she likes, and there seem to have been many striped garments on offer over the last year or so. She bought what she saw in the shops. That’s her take on fashion.

  Josephine may fancy that she looks like a regular grey-haired old lady, but in fact she doesn’t, she looks striking and eccentric. She isn’t humble enough to look regular. She doesn’t look apologetic, although her clothing is sombre. She looks too confident, too indifferent.

  This dark late afternoon in February, in her cosy stress-free apartment, Josephine is struggling with the paperwork of her Personal Pension Plan, having temporarily despaired of understanding how to operate her new DVD recorder. Many things are taken care of in her new life, but some problems remain stubbornly her own, and stubbornly resistant to reason. The DVD recorder, for example, offers far too many options and it takes a very long time to do anything at all. It is infuriatingly slow. You switch it on, and for a long time it makes no response, apart from saying HELLO. Is this progress? The not-so-young man who delivered it had given her a quick demonstration, but she had received the impression that he didn’t understand it either and was eager to get away before his incompetence was revealed. He had pointed to the Return symbol and the Escape symbol, and told her she’d be needing those two, and then he’d run away. She’d been trying a bit of everything, jabbing at button after button, and had once or twice managed, as it were by chance, to record a programme – an episode of a Scandinavian thriller, a half-hour of Gardeners’ World – but she could never remember what sequence had produced which result, or indeed any result, and could never confidently repeat an occasional success. And she didn’t know how to delete. There must be some way of deleting, but she hadn’t yet found it.

  She’s had an email conversation with her son Nat about its uncontrollable behaviour, but it hadn’t got them anywhere. He says he’ll come and have a look at it, when he gets back from India or Australia or Sri Lanka or wherever he’s got to.

  Her Personal Pension Plan offers a different kind of challenge, of a more serious nature, but she can’t make head or tail of the wording of it. She has a very small regular academic pension, based on her many years of teaching English Literature, mostly in Adult Education, and she has her state pension, and she also has this private thing, into which she paid some of her savings long ago on the advice of a very boring man called Brian Fuller. Brian Fuller had set up her husband’s much larger pension, and had at the same time talked her into taking out a policy of her own. She had a sense that it was losing money, and couldn’t understand why she had to go on paying out a percentage of her savings to this man who had in other respects disappeared from her life when her husband died. Once a year he sent her something called a portfolio, but it seemed to go down and down, and anyway, her friends told her, it would only display a notional valuation – it didn’t mean what it said, it wasn’t worth what it said it was worth, it probably wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

  And was it taxed, this hypothetical money, did it count as income, or was tax on it pre-paid or deducted at a distant source by the invisible Brian Fuller? She had no idea.

  To be fair to Brian Fuller, he did occasionally express a written willingness to meet her for a consultation, but she could not think of anything she wanted less than to see Brian Fuller again. So she ignored these letters. She did not even file them, she ripped them up and threw them in the bin. She would have paid a great deal of money never to have to see him again.

  And, no doubt, was, indeed, over the years, doing just that.

  It was no good, she couldn’t get to grips with it. She began to shove the papers back into their ancient bulging brown canvas concertina file and heaved a loud and histrionic sigh at the empty room.

  Would she be sent to jail for tax evasion? She has a good friend who was sent to jail for assisting a suicide, and is always boasting about it. But tax evasion, or tax stupidity – they can’t be thought of as a noble cause.

  She switches on the television, and waits patiently for it to decide to do something. It should be the six o’clock news, if the TV set graciously allows her to watch it. She is slightly uneasy about falling into the category of women-hopeless-with-money, women-hopeless-with-technology, but only slightly. What the fuck, as Fran might put it, does it matter? She is in several dishonourable categories already, being elderly being the worst of them, and one or two more won’t make much difference.

  The phone goes, but she can’t be bothered to answer it. Her new phone, like her new DVD recorder, is a bloody nuisance. She used to feel neglected when people didn’t ring her, but now she is relieved. Silence is preferable to confronting its options. She knows how to ring out on it, and that’s good enough.

  At six thirty, because it is Thursday, she is going round for a stiff drink with her fellow inmate. It is her week to go to him. Next week he will come to her. They meet at this time of the day on every Thursday except when prevented, as they sometimes are, by more compelling invitations. They both consider this a ‘civilised’ arrangement. They vie with one another to provide yet more and more interesting beverages, a competition that requires little effort and no culinary input. Both are fond of Scotch, and in the last eighteen months they have sampled one or two fine brands, as well as testing themselves on less palatable but equally fortified snifters of bourbon and rye. (The word ‘snifter’ is occasionally deployed by Owen, because he knows it annoys and amuses Josephine.) Vodka they consider boring, though they occasionally attempt a dry martini. Pernod makes a change, and some of the Italian aperitivos are fun. And even vodka can be livened up with tomato juice or consommé and a heavy hand with the condiments. Brandy isn’t good at six thirty, although Owen sometimes talks affectionately about a Brandy Alexander, whatever that may be. Last week Josephine, having acquired a bottle of Martini Rosso, had proposed mixing a Manhattan, and that had gone down well. They had discussed, inconclusively, the purchase of some maraschino cherries, in case they ever made another attempt at this retro cocktail.

  Owen had also been in the English Literature industry, though on a higher and better paid plane than she, and they like to talk about what they are reading, or about the books they had taught in the past. Josephine also likes to talk about her self-appointed research project, and Owen tolerates her discourse about her very small but (to her) intriguing discoveries. There is an element of forgivable because too-transparent condescension in his attention: he has published several volumes; she, so far over her whole career, only a couple of papers. He once pointed out to her, kindly and not unjustly, that many women have late-flowering careers and pursuits, so it’s all right for her to indulge herself comfortably with Victorian and Edwardian literature now, in her old age. He views her research as a hobby, not unlike tapestry.

  Josephine also does tapestry.

  Owen had been a Cambridge, Downing-bred Leavisite when young, and was still engaged in an arcane self-perpetuating and now inevitably one-sided dispute with the Master about Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy, T. F. Powys and John Cowper Powys. (Owen champions Hardy and John Cowper, against Leavis’s Conrad and T. F.) Josephine was a graduate of one of the first post-war plate-glass universities, which had exposed her to Marxist interpretations and early dawning glimmers of feminist readings. She is now working on deceased-wife’s-sister fiction, a sensational genre and peculiarly fascinating, she assures people, once you get into it. It’s much more fun than the fortnightly reading group at Athene Grange, which is too middle-brow for her tastes and favours novels by Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym. She admires Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, but she doesn’t need to discuss it, there is nothing in it that she anymore needs to discuss.

  She once taught a Taylor novel to her WEA class, in the early 1960s, when nobody else would have thought of teaching Taylor’s work. That, in those days, had been a revolutionary act. It wouldn’t be now.

  Elizabeth Taylor was a member of the Communist Party, but
she suspects the members of the Athene Grange reading group don’t want to know that. Some of Josephine’s family, in the 1930s, had been card-carrying Communists.

  Now she explores books with titles like The Inheritance of Evil and The Fatal Kinship and Hannah and With Feet of Clay. Sometimes they come to her in the university library with uncut pages and she has to take them back to the desk and ask for them to be cut. The novel she is now reading, she purchased, uncut, very cheaply, in one of Cambridge’s few surviving secondhand bookshops.

  Josephine had married the older brother of her first and not-very-serious boyfriend, which she thinks may, perhaps, some fifty years after the event, have led her back to this topic. There had been a bit of sibling skirmishing between the boys when they were students. Josephine had switched her allegiance to Alec from Terry, and Terry had been in her view disproportionately annoyed, the annoyance having been more to do with Alec than with her. She had been a pawn in their game.

  She and Terry hadn’t been all that bonded, they’d never got beyond the light petting stage, and Terry hadn’t become deceased until much later, when he was in his fifties. So the parallels with the deceased-wife’s-sister cluster of stories were far from close.

  But it’s an interesting subject anyway, at least to her, and Jo is happily exploring the reasons why marrying one’s Deceased Wife’s Sister had been made illegal (having once been, in some interpretations, mandatory) and why it had become such a contentious issue in the mid to late nineteenth century. Whereas marrying one’s deceased husband’s brother had never seemed much of a problem to anybody. Was there a connection with nineteenth-century attitudes to male and female sexuality and homosexuality? Or was it all to do with money, rather than consanguinity? Or stepchildren and housekeeping and unpaid domestic labour? What did Freud have to say about it, if anything, and had it been an issue in Paris and Vienna? In Edwardian Australia, it had been OK to marry your DWS, but your marriage wouldn’t be recognised if you came back to England. Tricky, but handy in a plot, as the lady novelists had found.