The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  Fran is still earning her living and paying her taxes. Josephine is living on pensions and occupying herself with tapestry, absinthe and Deceased Wife’s Sisters. She also teaches a weekly morning course on poetry (currently On Old Age and the Concept of Late Style, with reference to Yeats, Hardy, Dylan Thomas, Peter Redgrove, Robert Nye and others), but the fee for that would hardly keep her in tapestry needles, and certainly not in tapestry wool, which has become very expensive. Her teaching is an indulgence. But it is a way of keeping in touch with the best.

  Deceased wives’ sisters are interestingly unknown, but they are not the best.

  Josephine crosses the cold quad, she hears the drizzling of the feeble fountain.

  When, at ten, she climbs into her bed for her half-hour of bedtime reading, she picks up The Fatal Kinship and reads a page or two, but decides she will delay its denouement until the morning, when she will be more alert and will enjoy it more. She doesn’t want to miss any carefully planned surprises. She turns instead to Owen’s friend Bennett’s book about the Spanish Civil War, The Reaper and the Wheat, which she has for so many weeks been intending but failing to tackle. It’s supposed to be a classic and has been several times reprinted and updated. She stares again at the enigmatic dedication, handwritten in faded blue ink some forty years ago, and wonders what young Bennett Carpenter had meant by ‘with higher hopes’?

  Maybe Owen and Bennett had been lovers, all those years ago. Owen’s private life, if he has one, has been very private and is largely unknown to her. As she didn’t meet him until they were both in their early seventies, this isn’t surprising.

  She has a feeling that Fran’s son Christopher is now in the Canaries. She’s known Christopher all his life. He used to play football with her sons Nat and Andrew in the Romley Marshes when they were little, and she thinks they now occasionally Facebook one another, whatever that may mean. He was a very attractive and friendly little boy, young Christopher.

  She is too tired to embark on reading about General Franco and North Africa and POUM and the NKVD and George Orwell and Tom Wintringham and Esmond Romilly at this time of night, but she leafs through the illustrations, which include a poor reproduction of Guernica, some maps of battle locations and a portrait of Miguel de Unamuno. There are also photographs of Stephen Spender, Julian Bell, John Cornford, Jessica Mitford and other now well-known British figures associated with the period, some of whom she recognises. Amongst them is an arresting and accomplished pencil drawing of an unfamiliar and handsome young man, in an open-necked shirt, wearing an unassuming air of nonchalant gallantry. She glances at the caption, and finds that his name is Valentine Studdert Meade, an unusual name which in itself has no resonance but which nevertheless strikes her with a jolt of recognition. There can’t be all that many Studdert Meades, so he must be connected with her Deceased Wife’s Sister novelist. (The drawing is by Augustus John, but she doesn’t bother to note that yet, nor does she register that it had been commissioned by the Artists International Association in aid of Republican Spain.)

  Here must be a clue to Alice Studdert Meade, in this fairly unlikely place, discovered more or less randomly.

  This, she says to herself, sadly but with some satisfaction, is Scholarship, in all its triviality. She turns to the index, to discover more about Valentine, and notes that there are several scattered early references and one little mid-volume cluster that presumably marks his death. There is also, helpfully, a biographical index: thank you, Bennett, she says aloud to the old man in the cactus garden in the Canaries, thank you. She has always approved of biographical indexes and depends on them increasingly as her memory becomes, as she puts it, less retentive.

  Studdert Meade, Valentine (1911–1937), diarist and artist, born in Cambridge, younger son of the classicist Hubert Studdert Meade and minor novelist Alice Studdert Meade. Educated at Saffron Walden and King’s College, Cambridge. Studied at the Slade and worked as an ambulance driver for Spanish Medical Aid in the Spanish Civil War. Killed in uncertain circumstances in February 1937 in the battle of Jarama, just east of Madrid.

  Here, so unexpectedly, are clues. There’s a lot to work on here.

  Work box. Women’s work. Needlework.

  Sir Bennett wouldn’t have got away with that phrase ‘minor novelist’ these days. And ‘the classicist’ Hubert, as far as she knows, is by now well forgotten. Classicists don’t count for much these days. They are even less favoured than minor Edwardian female novelists. They have had their day.

  She guesses that Valentine was from a Quaker family. Alice may have been a Quaker too. She hadn’t even known that. She has discovered very little about her so far, not even the date of her death. There is much still to find out.

  Bennett Carpenter must have used Valentine’s diaries. But they haven’t entered the mainstream; they haven’t made him as famous as John Cornford and Julian Bell and Esmond Romilly.

  One would never describe oneself as a diarist, would one? It is a posthumous label.

  She has never bothered to keep a diary.

  Josephine does not know if or for how long Alice had survived the tragically early death of her son Valentine. Maybe she had tried to persuade him not to go, as Julian Bell’s family had tried to dissuade him. She hadn’t written much in her later years. Most of her fiction belonged to the Edwardian and Georgian period. Had she written for money, or for pleasure? Jo doesn’t even know that.

  Josephine runs her fingers through her coarse and heavy hair and lays the books together on her bedside table. Mother and son. Reunited, they can whisper to one another through the hard covers, through the newly cut pages.

  The afterlife of letters.

  Too much reading has addled her wits.

  Francesca Stubbs stubbornly climbs the many flights of her concrete tower, marking the new graffiti as she goes. She clenches her teeth tight with fortitude, heaves her bag wearily from shoulder to shoulder, and counts her way up. Like a child, she encourages herself onwards and upwards with counting and climbing rhymes. ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’, ‘One Two Buckle my Shoe’, ‘Ten Green Bottles’, ‘The Lilywhite Boys’. She used to sing ‘Ten Green Bottles’ to Christopher and Poppet when they were babies, as she rocked them in the rocking chair. Hour after hour, hour after hour.

  On the other side of London, Claude Stubbs has lured Persephone into his bed. It is unprofessional, but she has succumbed to his charm and his authority and to the warmth and comfort of the bed on this cold day. He has not lured her very far into it, for she is lying next to him fully clothed under a mohair blanket, but on top of the duvet. They are Beauty and the Beast. Claude says, plaintively, in his grand old man, baby-boy style, that all he wants is a cuddle. She responds, firmly but flirtatiously, that this is all he’s going to get.

  They are eating some small but expensive ‘handmade’ almond biscuits from a kitsch decorative gift tin and sipping Madeira, and watching a game show involving a giant neon alphabet and some basic spelling guesswork. Persephone cries out preemptively from time to time. Claude doesn’t bother to join in, but he squeezes her in a congratulatory way when she gets it right.

  The biscuits and the Madeira are gifts from a grateful ex-patient. He gets quite a lot of those.

  Some of his patients are more grateful than he deserves. He didn’t take enough out of the Shadow Home Secretary. He should have been bolder with the shadow on his lung. He’d have been alive now if Claude had dug deeper.

  Persephone likes Claude. He is her favourite client, she tells him. He flatters her and makes her laugh. He’s generous, he’s funny, he’s no kind of a threat, and he’s not afraid of being ill or of dying suddenly whenever she leaves the room. He’s just an old-style lecher.

  She doesn’t like the fearful ones.

  When the show ends, she’s going to stick one of Claude’s ex-wife’s plated meals into the mike, and give it to him before she goes. He’s a lucky old sod, she tells him, from time to time.

  She has never met Frances
ca Stubbs, but she has seen plenty of evidence of her traditional middle-class slightly old-fashioned wholesome home cooking.

  Claude eyes the large-breasted game-show hostess and her strange protruding upper lip and her peculiarly toothy smile. Too much tooth, too much bright pink gum. Jolie laide, or is that the new look? He thinks of Fran.

  Fran, with her perfect twenty-one-year-old body and her taut firm small breasts. You don’t see those bodies these days. Girls now are either too thin or too fat, but Fran had been perfect. She’s withered and skinny and relentless now, but then she had been flawless. But for all that they’d been hopeless in bed together, hopeless. They’d never really got it together, the two of them, never got the timing right, and yet she’d got pregnant far too easily, far too early, twice in three years, and that hadn’t been good for either of them. He used to blame her for this, but now he’s past it all he feels big enough to realise it may have been partly his fault.

  A perfect body, and a perfectly adequate brain. But restless, dissatisfied.

  She could never relax, that woman, she was always wanting more, wanting other, wanting something else. She had too much physical and mental energy and had never discovered what to do with it. But the children had turned out OK, sort of OK, very OK when you look at what has happened to other people’s children. When you look at a generation of drug addicts, disgraced bankers, disgraced or incompetent politicians. Of breast-implant con men, cosmetic surgeons with bad track records. Of stand-up comics, would-be media moguls, property thieves.

  Christopher Stubbs. Poppet Stubbs. His son and his daughter. They’ve survived.

  He wondered if Hamish had managed to appease the living body of Fran, if he had managed to calm her down. Meanly, he rather hopes not. But either way, Hamish is dead now and Fran has to keep going on her own.

  Christopher has made a career out of showing off. That’s his father’s caustic view. Good-looking, easy of manner, he’s a television natural. Poppet is another kettle of fish. Earnest, in his view humourless, and probably cleverer than her brother, she is obsessed by the imminent death of the planet. She works for an environmental agency, processing statistics. She tells him she’s a neo-Malthusian, whatever that may be. She has no children.

  Christopher has two, and an ex-wife whose name Claude has forgotten. Effie? Ellie? Something like that. Claude likes and even, grudgingly, admires Christopher and, though he doesn’t admit it even to himself, he wishes he’d come to see his old father more often.

  Their mother, his ex-wife Francesca, is preoccupied by what will one day prove to be the transitory problem of the ageing process of the human body, and by whether in the very short term the inconveniences of it can be from day to day ameliorated. She thinks this is worthwhile. She thinks the project of making old people more comfortable, less pained, less panicked, is worth pursuing. It’s inconsistent of her, because she doesn’t make herself all that comfortable, in his view. She drives herself. Too hard, too fast. She’ll be lucky if she doesn’t end up in a pile-up on the motorway.

  Claude doesn’t give a fuck about what happens to the planet when he’s gone. And the afterlife can look after itself. Poppet thinks we should all worry for future generations, and about the afterlife of the planet. Although, because, she has no children. She views the planet as a conscious creature with a life and rights of its own. This is clearly ridiculous. The planet is just matter. As are we.

  Claude’s arm is comfortable around the back of the warm and pliant and indifferent and supremely healthy Persephone. His hand lies in a friendly way upon the slope of her firm thirty-five-year-old breast. She is an armful. Her breasts are bigger than Fran’s had been, more mature.

  But Fran’s had been perfect. He doesn’t know why he is thinking of them now.

  Claude is certain that he is going to die with ease. He will die here in bed, comfortably, relinquishing consciousness easily, when the time comes. He will die in his sleep, like his father, from one of those painless, sudden extinctions, a nice sudden arrhythmia death. He won’t have a heart attack climbing up a dank urine-soaked plastic-bag-and-condom-littered stairwell, or crash into the back of a lorry on the M1, or linger on in a hospital bed moaning and muttering and baring his teeth and thrashing, pumped full of oxycodone and midazolam.

  You won’t find him starving himself to death on an airport or drowned on a distant beach.

  It’s strange that he has this confidence. In his professional life, he has seen more than most of pain, and of fear of pain, and of death. He has seen patients in agonising pain, with no prospect of a good outcome, clinging on to an unendurable existence, hoping to delay the end by any means, surgical or medical. Some are prepared to submit to anything rather than to surrender, and so, on their behalf, are their appalled and often appalling relatives. He knows that most surgeons operate too much, because they can, because they are expected to, because that is what they do. They chop and pare back and reduce until there’s not much of a person left to appreciate all the effort. Just a torso, like a ruined emperor. He’s done it himself, in his time. But he knows it won’t happen to him. He won’t be needing or requesting the too-clever interventions, the radical pruning. He’s filled in all the forms. He’s got his Magic Pill.

  He has seen so much of death that it doesn’t frighten him. He’s lucky there. It could have gone the other way. He’s seen it go the other way. Some of his colleagues are cowards.

  He’s come to the conclusion that it’s a matter of luck, not of character or virtue.

  Some people fear death throughout their lives. Others don’t think about it very much, except when they have to.

  Death has been his Bread and Butter.

  Why, he that cuts off twenty years of life

  Cuts off so many years of fearing death.

  Christopher Stubbs gazes down from the high viewpoint by the restaurant in Nazaret, where they have paused to admire the evening panorama before going in for their dinner. They lean on the low warm white wall and hear the raucously lively and incessant croaking of frogs from a pond somewhere along the darkening pathway. They can see the slopes of spent volcanoes, the lights of small resorts spreading below them, the level horizon of the Atlantic, the expanding and exploding stars of the sky above.

  It’s cold and wet in England, but here in Lanzarote the air is mild.

  Ivor points out the only high-rise building in Lanzarote, visible to their right, rising up from the skirts of the island on the bay of the port of Arrecife. César Manrique had managed to put a stop to high rise here, having witnessed the multiplying tourist horrors of Tenerife. This not very high tower block was built as public housing, says Ivor, but it didn’t work, it was abandoned and vandalised and eventually rescued and converted into a hotel.

  Ivor thinks of mentioning to Christopher that he suffers from vertigo, but he doesn’t.

  The theatrical restaurant is tunnelled into, scooped out of the hollows of the high hillside. It is like a larger, higher, more vertical version of Bennett and Ivor’s home. It is, as promised, spectacularly scenic. It has alcoves, little lakes, walkways, stairways, lantern-lit caverns. Omar Sharif is said to have won and lost it at a game of bridge.

  Bennett never met Omar Sharif, but he knows, more importantly, the Astronomer Royal, and has been shown by him around the observatory on the island of La Palma. Over his minimalist portion of filleted sea bass, Bennett holds forth on the possibility that the still very active volcano of Cumbre Vieja on the western coast of La Palma could erupt and propel a huge chunk of Canarian land mass into the Atlantic, thus causing a westward sweeping tidal wave seventy feet high, ‘as high as Nelson’s column’, moving at the speed of ‘a jet aircraft’. A falling slab of rock ‘twice the size of the Isle of Man’ would create a tsunami that would first annihilate Tenerife, then wipe out two thirds of the population of Casablanca and Rabat, then inundate Southern England and, before subsiding, engulf New York and most of the Eastern seaboard, says Bennett with relish. It won’t rest unt
il it reaches landfall, and landfall is death.

  It will be worse than the Lisbon earthquake, says Bennett, happily.

  After this animated little oration, Bennett lapses into a sudden silence. He is trying to locate a floating memory of a highbrow catastrophe novel he’s read or heard of recently, which he knows would be pertinent to this topic, but he can’t quite get hold of either the author or the title. He can’t get a handle on it. It’s annoying, he forgets too much these days, but maybe it will come back to him. The book is a drifting shadow, detached and loose in the back of his mind. He munches, abstracted, for a while, as his thoughts begin to drift back towards his childhood, as they so often do these days. As a schoolboy he’d been a fan of Jules Verne. Journey to the Centre of the Earth. The Mysterious Island. He’d hidden away in the boiler room for many safe and happy hours, avoiding sports, devouring these thrilling volumes.

  Ivor doesn’t like the way Bennett has retreated and drifted off, but he conceals his ever watchful anxiety.

  Christopher, who has never heard of this particular Cumbre Vieja catastrophe scenario, is intrigued by it. It is a satisfyingly extreme prospect, and a disaster that could not be blamed on human agency. The volcanic ridge is unstable, and that’s just the way it is. It’s not been made rocky by refrigerators or hairsprays or TNT or car exhausts or AIDS or over-population of the planet. It is as it is. The island has never been densely populated, and humans have had little impact upon it.

  Even Christopher’s sister Poppet, who blames human agency for most of the ills of the world, would find it hard to blame a volcanic eruption. A volcano is innocent and pure.