Poppet does not care much for the present, but she cares about the future of the planet and its inhabitants. She has transferred her allegiance to a vanishingly distant point. She has what some of her friends and acquaintances consider an almost mystic capacity to personalise the planet and dehumanise her own concerns. Maybe, they think, she has no concerns? She does not seem very concerned about any of her friends, and it is hard for them to stay close to her, although some, loyally and on the whole thanklessly, continue to insist on maintaining a relationship with her. Cold though she is, she is also compelling. She is worth one’s while.
Poppet is physically strong, in a muscular sense, but she is also neurologically hypersensitive to pollution, plastic bags, bad air, bad noise levels, overflying aircraft, the humming of air conditioning, muzak, artificial flavourings. She is sensitive to Agent Orange, Sunset Yellow, Allura Red and Carmoisine.
She has not dulled or heightened her senses with alcohol or nicotine or aspirin or red meat or glue, and she lives, unprotected, in a state of perpetual exposure to the jarring forces of daily life. London had been too much for her. It had attacked her too violently. She has tried to live and work in the capital and had failed. Now she is based near a village near a small county town in the West Country, and works from her computer. (She spends most of her time trawling data and processing it: her boosted broadband is speedy, her computer sophisticated. Stats are her pulse, her lifeblood.) But even in the country, on the calm Levels, she feels at times raw and besieged. Her skin is too thin for normal intercourse. She has reduced her way of life to what she considers an elegant minimalist routine: bicycling along the tow path to the village shop two miles away, growing her own vegetables, walking, talking to her cat, watching the birds, listening to her radio. She has a television, for work purposes, because she needs to see what is going on in the world, but she rarely watches it for pleasure. She watches conferences on climate change, logs into debates on the melting ice cap and coal emissions in China and log-burning in Malaysia and earth tremors on the mid-Atlantic ridge. The jazzy highlights of her viewing are Greenpeace and other ecological protests, which sometimes hit the international news bulletins. She knows people who are out there, on the front line. She is the eye that watches them.
Sometimes she watches The Antiques Roadshow, but that’s for different reasons.
She is fond of her little house, and of the surrounding water meadows and eel-rich waterways. Her little house is low and modest. She likes the washed pink and white-ochre of the pitted brickwork, the pink roof tiles, the faded painted peeling pale blue of the woodwork. She feels close to nature, in her solitary little dwelling by the canal, with the sky and the water, and the sky reflected in the water. Much of her furniture is made of local willow. She loves the willow too. She has a friend living not far away who built and planted herself a willow cabin on a hillside, after a Stone Age pattern. Its curved walls sprouted in the spring and came into overarching leaf.
Poppet’s house is much less eccentric than that. It is a standard nineteenth-century farm labourer’s brick and board cottage, inhabited in earlier years by crowding families, but now her own domain, where she lives alone, old-maidish, spinsterly, secure.
Her mother Fran has often commented on the inadequate housing stock and the growing numbers of people choosing to live alone, and once remarked, provocatively, that Poppet’s way of life was not as ecologically sustainable as it might look: she is sole occupant of a space that in the past would have been inhabited by many, and if she took sustainability more seriously she should in theory be living in a commune and taking up (said with emphasis) a lot less room. This line of reproach didn’t quite reach Poppet, who was adroit at explaining why her damp and lonely canalside cottage in a flood plain would be deeply undesirable to any local families.
She is a casuist. Most statisticians are.
She sits by her log fire, with her super-powered laptop on her knee, and her little black cat at her feet, and an old chipped patterned china soup plate of leek salad vinaigrette and chopped hard-boiled egg and chives on the little wooden table by her side. The fire sings and whistles and spits flashes of green and purple salty colours at her, little sparks of marine wood. She is trawling through the weather of the world, making bookmarks, making footnotes. Strange new areas of light pollution have been recorded in Mongolia. She has already noted that, more locally, yet more torrential rain is on its way to the Levels, in the next day or two, and has wondered if she should collect more sandbags from the Lamb and Flag. She could wheel them along the towpath in the barrow, or Jim would drop them by. He is always willing to help, but she doesn’t much like being helped.
Her brother Christopher is in the Canaries. There are websites that say that the predicted grand event will happen soon in La Palma, that a new eruption is on its way. But these are apocalyptic websites, longing for the end and for the submersion of Manhattan, and they are not to be trusted.
Poppet is fond of Christopher. She thinks he likes her too, despite everything.
Poppet’s life is in the past. This is why she seems so old, for she is living a lengthy and extended afterlife. The most important events of her life happened before she was twenty-three and she lives in their wake. She has endeavoured to make that wake a placid level pathway. The brimming of the still canal mirrors it.
We don’t know what happened to Poppet in that most important and most disastrous relationship. Maybe one day she will tell us. Maybe one day she will tell her mother, or her brother Christopher, or someone else who knew her long ago. But maybe she will keep it to herself until she dies. It is unlikely that she will tell her father Claude, as she disapproves of him, but who knows, life and narrative have many tricks and surprises. Maybe Claude and his dusky paramour Persephone will be the first to hear an account of her disastrous, scarifying and destructive passion.
No, we don’t think so. But don’t rule anything out. Poppet is still young.
Poppet doesn’t drink much, but she sometimes has a half-pint at the Lamb and Flag, to keep in touch with the neighbourhood and with Jim. She quite likes the building’s unredeemed rusticity, and its basic vegetable bake. She can’t believe that her mother Fran actually likes an aggressively cheap urban chain called Weatherspoons. She can’t, she must be faking it, nobody could like a pub belonging to Weatherspoons.
The chain is really called Wetherspoons, but Poppet doesn’t know that. She spells it Weatherspoons, in her head.
Fran’s been to visit Poppet a couple of times, she’s even been to the Lamb and Flag and met Jim. But she never feels she’s very welcome, by the flat canal.
Fran is on her way to visit Teresa, with a plastic box of homemade chicken soup and a readymade smoked salmon and soft cheese sandwich in her handy hessian bag. She sits on the Tube, on a seat which she had managed to claim from a slower but younger rival who had been keeping a competitive eye on it as their crowded compartment approached the busy junction of King’s Cross. Fran had read the eye and body movements of the previous occupant correctly, and had moved forward smartly as soon as he arose. She sat down with relief. She didn’t mind standing, but it is pleasanter, at her age, to sit.
She had become familiar with this Tube journey, since her recent reunion with Teresa Quinn. It is a good few stops, and it always gives her time to reflect on the strange ways of old acquaintance, and the patterns of renewal that seem to be so arbitrary, although they surely cannot be entirely so.
Fran and Teresa had been for a while neighbours and school friends, long, long ago, in the years of austerity just after the war. Their families lived in adjoining houses, in the two halves of a semi-detached building in an industrial Midlands city that had been heavily bombed. The genteel dull residential Edwardian neighbourhood had been spared, and the two families, after a period of evacuation in the safer countryside, had returned at much the same time from their different billets (one in Cheshire, one in North Yorkshire) to resume their pre-war lives and occupations. For the four parents, it
had been a homecoming to a place of reclaimed safety, but to Fran Robinson and Teresa Quinn and their four siblings it was a disruption, an upheaval, an enforced new beginning in an unfamiliar, dangerous, blackened domain.
Fran, of late, with Teresa’s assistance, has been trying to reconstruct those post-war years in Maybrook Park, and of one thing both are certain: the Robinsons and the Quinns really really did not like each other.
‘I wouldn’t say they loathed each other,’ Teresa had asserted, with her ever-youthful ready laughter, clutching her mug of green tea, ‘but they sure as hell despised each other.’
Joined by party walls, their deep back gardens separated by a high privet hedge, the Robinsons and the Quinns had fought a discreet, well-mannered and largely silent war of disapproval. There were many points of dissension and causes for contempt, connected with washing lines, garden maintenance, choice of newspaper, expenditure patterns, child-rearing, and attitudes to the potato man who came round once a week with his nose-bagged pony. But the chief division was of religion. The Robinsons were C of E, the Quinns were Catholic. They weren’t very Catholic, but Catholic they were, and moreover with Irish blood in their ancestry. Illogically, the Robinsons managed to despise the Quinns for not sending all of their children to an RC school: they’d tried it with their eldest, David, found it wanting, and had sent the other two to the C of E primary school, which they thought was better.
Or, anyway, said the cynical Robinsons, nearer.
Both Fran and Teresa were middle children. This had seemed special to them. The other four siblings, all male, didn’t have much to do with one another, sticking most of the time to their own side of the family divide, but Fran and Teresa, the daughters in the middle, found one another quite quite fascinating.
‘I adored you,’ said Fran in her seventies, to her long-lost old comrade, who replied ‘And I adored you too!’
‘You didn’t show it,’ complained Fran. ‘I was always tagging along behind. You ran the show, you made all the decisions, I was just a – a follower.’
‘That’s rubbish,’ said Teresa, patently flattered, smiling beneficently. ‘You were always ahead, you could run a lot faster than me, and remember how good you were at rounders, I could never even see the ball, but you were in with the fast set. Do you remember Jenny Morpeth? She was a demon.’
‘It wasn’t smart, being in with the fast set,’ retorted Fran, ‘and Jenny Morpeth was a dimwit.’
‘We were two on our own,’ sighed Teresa, with nostalgia. ‘We were sui generis, we two. Or should that be some other grammatical construction, do you think? Nostri generis? No, that can’t be right. We never got to do Latin together, did we? I left before we got to Latin.’
‘I thought we both did a year with Miss Wilberforce?’
‘I don’t remember a Miss Wilberforce. What did she look like, Miss Wilberforce?’
And back they would go again, reconstructing a chronology, over the dates and the years and the names of their teachers, over their schoolmates and the numbers of the bus and tram routes, over their changing hairstyles, over their retrospective astonishment that their parents had allowed them to wander freely on public transport around the city, at the age of nine, at the age of ten, at the age of eleven.
They hadn’t been at all surprised at the time. Everybody did it. Children were more grown up then.
Plaits, bobs, bunches. Hair ribbons, rubber bands with dangling cherries, a treasured green plastic hair slide shaped like a mermaid won at a garden fete.
Teresa had been twelve when the Quinns left.
The seam of memory is richly loaded, and they explore it, in meeting after meeting, in the time that is left. Fran knows that it is good for both of them that they have found one another, and that Teresa has gained a new lease, not of life, but of a pre-life, of an extending and flourishing retrospect.
Over their conversations looms the structure of the dour tall semi-detached three-storeyed Edwardian stone building that had housed them all. The avenue was built on an incline, and their front gardens sloped upwards to their adjacent front doors and their adjacent porches, identically adorned with stained-glass fanlights of stylised art nouveau tulips and lilies. There was a side entry, into the kitchen and scullery, so the paths to the front doors were not often used, except, stubbornly, and with professional dignity, by the postman. The back gardens were on the level, with high end walls adjoining another identical row of gardens and houses, a row which the Robinsons and the Quinns united in considering subtly inferior to their own, though in no clearly identifiable way.
The building had been intensely occupied by adult frustrations and ambitions and worries and pettinesses and hopes and resignations, by adolescent fantasies and misdemeanours and triumphs, by pre-pubertal childish games and fears and delusions and frightening stories. By struggles with ration books and home helps, by making and mending, by the reassuring but often disappointing cycle of birthdays and Easter and seaside holidays and Christmases, by swotting for exams and the maintenance of bicycles. A thick, swarming, divided life had filled the stonework as honey fills the cells of a hive. It had permeated the crumbling mortar between the bricks and informed the plaster and the whitewashed walls of the conjoined cellars. Like the twin valves of a heart, they were, those cellars, beating side by side.
Fran and Teresa had discovered the cellars and made them their own. They had discovered a communication between them, a secret gap through the friendly coal dust and the spider webs. A removable brick, a pathway between Number 24 and Number 26, through which they could pass messages, through which they could reach out to touch one another’s hands.
The cellars were originally designed for coal, with a coalhole in front of the porch through which the dusky coalman would in the olden days drop his load, but both the Robinsons and the Quinns despised coal fires, and had moved on to the cleanliness of modern central heating, so the cellars went unused. There was no lack of storage space in those big houses, and in those days people had much less to store.
Fran and Teresa, drinking their soup and eating their date and walnut cake in the twenty-first century, speculate: have those spaces now been excavated, converted into basement bedrooms, into dens, into TV rooms? Do the houses still stand? They can find out, they can probably look at them online if they try hard enough, but they are not sure if they wish to do so. It’s all too easy, now, to look at images of the street where you used to live and check the shocking property prices. It’s cheating.
Both agree about the indescribable thrill of their subterranean cellar life. They would descend, each with a stubby white candle, and whisper girlish secrets.
How old were we? Eleven? Did our parents know what we were doing? Was it sexual? Was it bad?
We were like the Montagues and the Capulets in our living tomb, says Teresa, happily, adding an erotic colouring.
We were like twins, says Fran.
There is too much to talk about. On their first meeting, they had talked about Teresa’s sudden and to them arbitrary disappearance from Fran’s life, whisked away by her father’s relocation to an engineering project in Canada. The children had been shocked but helpless, had sworn to keep in touch forever, as children do, had written pen pal letters for a while (‘I was always so disappointed by yours, I thought you would be able to say something important, but you never did’), a correspondence that had dwindled to birthday cards and Christmas cards, and then into years of silence, broken only by wedding alerts, dutifully acknowledged, which had been followed, on both sides, by the silence, as it were, of the grave. Fran had imagined the life of Teresa with her American husband from over the border in Vermont, Liam O’Neill, and Teresa had imagined the life of Fran with her English husband, Dr Claude Stubbs. And then they had begun to forget.
‘But to be honest, I didn’t think about you much,’ they both agreed.
They had not exchanged notifications of their divorces. Things had moved on, they had entered new adult lives.
; But neither of them, it emerges, had forgotten their solemn schoolgirl oath to meet on the eve of the new millennium. They had arranged an assignation in Piccadilly Circus, at the stroke of midnight, under the statue of Eros. They admit that, over the decades, the innocent folly of this dream had retained a certain charm, as a reminder of the hopeful children they had been, of their faith in lasting mutual friendship, of those meetings with old wax candles, of the lure of the great city which at that time they did not know except through books. Each, they now discovered, had thought of the pledge, perhaps once a year or every other year on New Year’s Eve, and more vividly on the Millennial Eve, which each had spent in London, Fran in Highgate with Hamish and friends and Christopher and Ella and their little children and fireworks, Teresa in London a few miles away, with her son Luke and his wife Monica and her loyal staff and her many little charges, for whom she had laid on a spectacular celebration, also involving fireworks.
They discovered that they had lived a few miles from one another for decades, unknowingly, in adjacent postcodes.
The story had unfolded, slowly, and to both of them thrillingly, over several meetings.
Teresa, after her divorce and her marriage’s annulment, had returned to England with her son and reverted to her maiden name. Having qualified as an infants’ teacher in Canada, she had retrained, taken a post in a school for children with special needs, some of them with life-limiting conditions, and had risen through its hierarchy to become its principal. She had become, as Fran was to be somewhat embarrassed to discover, a well-known and respected name in her field. An authority, often cited by others.
On retirement, she had been almost immediately diagnosed with cancer, which had been lying in wait for her to lower her guard, and, after submitting to the familiar routines of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, she had received a dismal prognosis. In effect, a death sentence.
It was at this terminal stage that Teresa Quinn had spotted Fran’s name in a report on sheltered housing published by the Ashley Combe Trust. She had been browsing through it on the internet, because that was the kind of thing she did. Francesca Robinson Stubbs, a name from the past, appended to a paper on mobility and public transport. Teresa had, for her own reasons, been professionally interested in these matters. And Teresa had Googled Fran, and although Fran didn’t belong to any social networks or have an academic website that gave out any personal details, it was easy to contact her through the Trust. Teresa knew several people on the board of the Trust. Those were the kind of people that she knew. One of them promised to forward a letter. And did so, promptly. Teresa had taken the liberty of pointing out to Professor Halligan that there wasn’t any time to waste. ‘Mark it Urgent, Samuel,’ she had gaily insisted, in her covering note.
The Dark Flood Rises Page 15