The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  Claude had recognised that Jax was sexually ambiguous, yes, but not in any identifiable way. All was now clear, in the retrospective spotlight. Jimmy Savile had taken a lot of dead idols down with him into the Hades of eternal disgrace, as well as some sad old men still living.

  In the consulting room, Jax Conan had been humble and anxious to please. His showbiz ego had been almost touchingly subdued, as he groped to understand what Claude had to tell him. Jax was originally from Chingford, a neighbourhood Claude had known well, and for both of them the Romley accent was a default. Jax had found it hard to find a manner that was sufficiently everyday for the receiving of bad news. He looked down at his boots, he played with the rings on his fingers, he stared intently at the back of Claude’s folder of notes and X-rays, he slumped, then straightened himself, and then slumped again. He asked hardly any questions. His agent, who was sitting in with him in lieu of next-of-kin, asked all the questions, about dates, prognosis, bookings, cancellations. Jax just sat there, looking confused. At one point he plucked up courage to ask what the word ‘prognosis’ meant, but had been unable to attend to the answer.

  Poppet had been quite a fan of Jax. She’d been a very odd little girl. Lying there now, listening to an unearthly, inhuman, divine snatch from a Brahms serenade, Claude found himself wondering about Poppet. By the time he’d operated on the pop star, Poppet had long grown out of Jax and attached herself to different objects of worship, but she’d remained single and impenetrable. Maybe she’d fancied Jax because she was as odd as he was? Maybe a lot of the little girls who were attracted to and then abused by showbiz paedophiles had been a bit odd in the first place? You weren’t allowed to think like that, because a new orthodoxy has prevailed. You have to think that every child is a victim. But some children are very odd. Jax had probably been odd himself, when he was an infant at St Jude’s Primary.

  Christopher’s not odd. He’s a normal heterosexual, somewhat disillusioned but still highly ambitious middle-aged showman. Or that’s what his father thinks.

  Maria Callas, by dying at the age of fifty-three, hadn’t had to cope for too long with the humiliations of ageing. You can only escape old age by dying young.

  Christopher’s latest woman Sara had achieved this spectacularly well.

  Claude had felt a thrill of power at seeing Jax Conan, as it were, at his mercy. The operation had, in the event, gone very well, as well as it possibly could have done, and Jax and his agent Rafe had been immensely grateful and had showered Claude with hot tickets to hot events, with bottles of not-very-carefully selected but very expensive bubbly, with a de luxe hamper for Christmas. Claude doesn’t really like bubbly, and he can still remember the disappointment of the hamper. It had looked so promising, but its wicker and red satin treasure chest had been loaded with small tins and jars of pâté and confiture, with relish and bonbons, with small hard smoked cheeses and biscuits, and rather a lot of fake synthetic straw.

  Simon Aguilera’s house on the sandy island of Fuerteventura is as spectacular as Bennett and Ivor had promised and, as they had also promised, he seems to be very pleased to see them. Christopher Stubbs has been feeling slightly guilty about enjoying himself, but the friendly little port of departure at Playa Blanca, the heavenly weather, the blue Atlantic, the dotted islands, the gently abraded volcanic skyline, the friendly little port of arrival at Corralejo, all combine to give him a sense of physical well-being which is the very opposite of sudden death. One cannot but rejoice, on such a day, in such a light warm salt breeze, to be alive. Ivor drives them expertly down the ramp of the Fred Olsen ferry and onto the quay and through the little town and along the shoreline, past unfinished building projects and wind-carved white and yellow sand dunes and on towards a more rocky coast, then along a dirt track by the sea with a view of clear white-fringed turquoise and oddly tinted dark-red lagoons swaying with dense underwater vegetation, strange wine-dark lagoons, and on towards Simon’s house which stands high and alone on a level headland, looking out over the waters. It had been, said Ivor, a fishing warehouse, and from the ruined tower, once a grain store, (the tower which Ivor refuses to ascend), the fishermen had looked out for the approaching shoals, for the ruffling shades of blue and green and darker blue that indicated changes in weather, for the boats returning before the storm.

  Now Simon looks out through his binoculars of an evening for the immigrantes, the hungry and the thirsty and the dying, as they strain for the shore.

  Bennett’s house on Lanzarote is modernist and low, an organic architectural fantasy hollowed and expanded into garden and cellar, a mushroom of the earth, but Simon’s dwelling on Fuerteventura rises ancient, uncompromising, expensively restored, expansive and austere. It is built of great industrial historic slabs of raw eighteenth-century stone, with huge windows, lofty ceilings, grand views.

  The tower is said to be older. It is agelessly old.

  Simon shows Christopher around while Ivor settles Bennett into a well-cushioned wicker chair on the terrace, where he accepts from Pilar a glass of light Spanish wine, places it carefully on a little glass table, and nods off into a light pre-luncheon doze. Ivor sits by him and also shuts his eyes but he does not snooze or accept a glass of wine. He is the driver. He glances through the European edition of the Daily Mail, which he had purchased at Playa Blanca, looking for news about people back home that they know.

  The Mail is often critical, sometimes in Ivor’s view libellously critical, of the people that they know, but he misses the gossip and he likes to keep up. Although not a linguist, he does know the meaning of the useful word Schadenfreude, and it often sneaks uneasily into his mind.

  Simon Aguilera wants Christopher to see his gallery, his collection. The walls of the long room are high, white-washed, uneven. Christopher had expected the artworks to be theatrical, even loud, in keeping with a murderer whose plays and life had featured gore, a man whose mother, uncles and wife had all died violently, but they are not loud, although some of them do evoke the stage. Simon has some good North African Paul Klee, and some early and surprising Mondrian. There is a sequence of Gordon Craig designs, with actor-dwarfing pillars and staircases. Empty places, empty spaces, with an echo of the grand inland Canarian style. Awaiting animation, awaiting a caste of players that never arrives. And there is the de Chirico, in front of which, in Christie’s in London, Simon and Christopher had first met. The painting portrays a pale golden sandy beach with two horses, rose and gold and grey and muscular horses, arrested in movement, their nostrils flared, their thick curled carved heroic manes as solid as stone. Behind them, the orderly white ruins of a classical temple and at their feet a broken fluted column and a solid giant starfish of a tender fleshly white-dotted orange-pink. They rear up, the horses, with a sense of eternal suspension and apprehension, strong, menacing, motionless, on the mythic shore with its curled waves and frozen foam.

  Christopher stares at the horses with respect. De Chirico is out of fashion, his oils go relatively cheaply at auction, for a mere few hundred thousand pounds, yet he is so obviously a master that he gives one pause.

  ‘You remember them?’ asks Simon.

  ‘Of course,’ says Christopher.

  The two men stand and stare for a short while at the horses, temporarily transfixed and frozen by their trumpet nostrils and their Medusa manes.

  The only work by a Canarian-born artist, in Simon’s view the only collectable Canarian-born artist, is a medium-sized mixed media exhibit by Manolo Millares, a collage made of burlap and sackcloth and twine and tar, with stains as of rust or old blood. It is a good example, says Simon, of his work from the 1960s, it’s one of what he called his arpilleras, his cloths of memory.

  ‘He was influenced by the mummies of Tenerife,’ says Simon.

  It is a sombre, human piece, with rents and with stitching. Christopher thinks his mother would like it, and wonders if he will remember to tell her about it.

  He asks Simon if he may photograph it on his iPad, and Simon s
ays of course, of course, but don’t reproduce it without permission. Wouldn’t dream of it, says Christopher, as he carefully frames his shot for future reference and possible future use.

  Simon says that he has mixed feelings about Spanish art, about the artists who survived under Franco. He doesn’t collect them, although he admires Tàpies. He bought the Millares because he thought the Canaries ought to be represented here, in his little gallery, on the island. During their association, Millares worked in burlap and sackcloth, Tàpies in cardboard. The Tàpies, he says, are much more expensive. He prefers his Millares.

  On the end wall, in complete contrast, Christopher is shown two paintings that in his professional assessment are Old Masters from Italy: they are from well before his period, but his eye suggests to him they are the real thing. They are both images of women, but of women very unlike the flamboyant theatrical wife whom Simon had lost. The smaller of the two is a Virgin, a small pale tremulous quattrocento virgin in a gown of the palest eggshell blue, her golden hair beneath its slender halo swathed in a veil of the thinnest and airiest diaphanous gauze. The gauze is cream and beige and brown and slightly freckled like a speckled egg. And in her thin tapering hands she holds a moss-lined nest displaying a tender clutch of tiny eggs. She is, says Simon, the Virgin of the Nest: La Madonna del Nido. An unusual, possibly unique bit of iconography. She is Tuscan or Umbrian, officially ‘Anon.’, but attributed to various hands, including, though very unreliably, those of Piero della Francesca himself.

  The other woman is of a slightly later period, and she is older, heavier, more serious. She is tall, sandalled, robed in dark red and green, a pilgrim carrying a tall grey wooden cross. Her hair is grey and her feet are ugly and worn, but her pose is majestic, for she is St Helena, the mother of Constantine. She it was who travelled to the Holy Land and discovered the True Cross, fragments of which have over the centuries been discovered scattered throughout the Ancient World. She is imposing, and not heavily idealised. Her buckled feet look as though they have walked many miles through many realms. She reminds Christopher very strongly of somebody, and as they move through to the little chamber, through a door off the main gallery, he works out that she recalls to him his mother’s oldest friend, Josephine Drummond.

  Auntie Josephine, with her dignified air.

  Simon says the windowless low-ceilinged little chamber which they now enter is Ivor’s favourite room, and Christopher wonders if it will contain erotica or homo-erotica, but it doesn’t, although it does house some good pencil drawings of young men, including an elegant but rustic 1930s nobly throated open-shirted fellow by Augustus John, with a suggestion of a military vehicle or perhaps of a field ambulance in the background. And there is a short sequence of intimate Delacroix pastels of the turbaned head of a Moor or Nubian model: sketches, Simon says, for larger and more violent works of massacre and warfare.

  Bennett is very fond of the Delacroix, says Simon.

  ‘Very fine,’ murmurs Christopher, politely. He is puzzled by Simon Aguilera and his strange collection, but not uncomfortably so.

  Simon Aguilera’s three uncles had been shot in a Nationalist prison in Alicante. Or so the official story went. Their younger brother, his father, had survived the Civil War but had been forced to work as a labourer, with many other political prisoners, on the vast monuments of Franco’s war memorial. He had escaped with his wife and baby son to Paris, where Simon had been dandled on the knee of Ernest Hemingway. Or so the story went.

  When they rejoin Bennett and Ivor on the terrace, Bennett has woken up and he and Ivor are vying for the attention of a fine-looking young black man in a battered straw hat who is leaning on a wooden rake in a graceful and somewhat bantering posture. Teasing and laughter have been taking place. A handshake seems to be appropriate, and Christopher offers his hand to the young man, who is introduced as Ishmael from Senegal. Ishmael smiles, in a familiar way, as one who is much at home here, as one whose gardening implements pertain more to iconography than to hard labour.

  Christopher has heard the outline of his story from Ivor and Bennett, and he gazes at him with respect, as at one snatched from the jaws of death. He would like to hear more. It is a pity Sara is not here to meet Ishmael. He would have made a superb witness on camera.

  Simon expands on the story over lunch on the terrace. Ishmael had not joined them at table, though Christopher had thought he might (and hoped he would). He had drifted off, with his rake, to pose, perhaps, in another biblical courtyard. Christopher is much taken with the apparition of Ishmael, and wonders if Ishmael can possibly be his real name, or whether it has been bestowed upon him by his protector.

  Ishmael’s mother, says Simon, had loaned him a thousand dollars to make his way to Europe. He speaks good French and English, but his first language is Wolof. (What? ‘Wolof,’ repeats Simon firmly, as though he is himself familiar with this strange-sounding tongue and assumes that everybody else will be.) He had been washed up at Gran Tarajal on the shores of Fuerteventura from a sinking vessel from Mauritania, having survived the long sea voyage from Nouadhibou. Nouadhibou, once called Port-Étienne, is now known as the largest graveyard of shipping in the world.

  Sara, Christopher remembers, had longed to film in Nouadhibou. She’d seen some extraordinary amateur footage of a departing patera, laden with the doomed. She’d been very taken with the idea of getting a crew over there, but visas were tricky and it would have been way beyond her budget. There are no cheap tourist flights to Nouadhibou.

  Some of Ishmael’s fellow voyagers on the overcrowded and unseaworthy ship of death had perished, but Ishmael was young and strong and could swim, and he had made his way to the beach, where the rescue teams had clothed him in gold foil, like an angel, and carried him to the emergency clinic, and revived him. A few years ago they used to wrap people in silver foil, like joints of roast meat, says Simon, but now they have promoted the immigrantes to gold. The gold foil has better protective properties. Ishmael had survived the open seas and the waves and hypothermia, and now he was comfortably ensconced with Pilar and his patron, Simon Aguilera. He does a bit of gardening and also makes himself useful to the Red Cross in Puerto del Rosario, as an interpreter for those arrivals from Senegal and Mauritania who speak mainly Wolof. And he’s studying IT online, with an American university programme. He’s ambitious, says Simon, and he’s smart. He’ll go far.

  ‘I’m trying to adopt him,’ says Simon. ‘Legally. It’s tricky, under Spanish law, but I’m trying. I guess it would be tricky anywhere. It’s good to have young blood around you, at my age.’

  Bennett and Ivor exchange glances. Bennett had once, long ago, suggested that he should adopt Ivor, for inheritance purposes, but the intention had drained away into baffled and frustrating legal correspondence. Under English law they could have a civil partnership now, like the old fools Wirth-Miller and Chopping, or even a gay marriage, but they don’t fancy it, it would seem parodic, ridiculous.

  Ivor hasn’t read Bennett’s will. He’s seen it, he knows exactly where it is; it’s in the left-hand top drawer of Bennett’s roll-top mahogany English writing desk in his spacious sunlit study at La Suerte. But he is too honourable to read it. Ivor’s notions of honour are not of this age. They may be the death of him, but he would prefer to die with honour than to live on disgraced in his own mind.

  The roll-top desk looks out of place in Lanzarote, but Bennett is very attached to it. He had written most of The Reaper and the Wheat on it, in his Cambridge study, in long ago longhand.

  ‘Yes, young blood,’ says Simon with relish, sticking his fork into the deliciously tender and thoughtfully home-minced burger that Pilar has provided for their repast. It is so rare that it could almost be described as steak tartare. Pilar knows that ilustrísimo Sir Bennett likes red meat.

  Simon Aguilera has aged well. He must be in his seventies, but the rugged dark-brown Mediterranean look becomes him. He is trim, athletic, takes much outdoor exercise, plays tennis, works out, swims i
n the raging waves and rides the rolling swell of the cerulean surf. His iron-grey hair is crisp and curled and erect. But his long lean face is deeply carved and folded. He looks like, and is, an old roué. The lord of the sardine factory, the assassin in his retreat, seeking absolution.

  Ivor thinks Simon is seeking absolution, but Bennett is not so sure.

  Poppet Stubbs is in her forties but she is not very young. Her blood is not young. She takes after her mother, in a certain wiriness of energy, in a physique combining thin shoulders and strong legs, and she also has her mother’s doggedness of purpose. Her brother Christopher has his father’s more fleshly nonchalance, and like his father is something of a bon viveur. But Poppet is austere, and it is considered that she wishes to impose austerity on others. Within the family, she can influence her mother, who, as a woman, is accessible to guilt. Also, born under wartime rationing, Fran is keen on small savings. But Claude and Christopher do not care about thrift.

  All of them drink too much, she thinks. Poppet drinks very little. She has witnessed too much drinking. She is of the view that alcohol is criminally cheap. Fran agrees, as a citizen, and as a person who can afford to get drunk in a Premier Inn or at home in her tower whenever she wants, but she always sees the other side of the argument. She sees from the perspective of poverty and would not wish to deprive the deprived. Poppet is ideologically austere and gives no quarter.

  Poppet has bad memories of her mother screeching and tramping around the house of an evening in Romley. Christopher thinks she exaggerates these memories, has made most of them up, but maybe she has her own reasons for doing that.