The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  So here they now were, Teresa carefully and delicately extended on her day bed, with her bones in their best positions, lucky Fran curled up any old how on a heap of tapestry cushions in the old armchair, eating their Pret A Manger smoked salmon sandwiches and remembering past times. Fran had updated Teresa with news of Christopher in the Canaries, Claude in his day bed in Kensington, Poppet in her flood plain, and her own stimulating visit to West Brom and Birmingham. Teresa had been very interested in the description of Aunt Dorothy and her residential care home at Chestnut Court. Fran’s concerns for the elderly complemented her own interest in care homes for the young.

  Teresa (who led a very busy professional and social life in her retirement) had in turn recounted details of visits from old friends and colleagues and from her local priest. Teresa has many visitors, eager to book themselves in for a session of chat and uplift. She is rarely left unattended. She lives alone, but with a succession of district nurses, friends and cousins in constant attendance. There is always somebody ready to sleep over, though Fran has not been and will not be expected to do this. The situation is, as of now, in February, manageable. It will soon become less so, but for now all is under control.

  She has a promise of a visit from her son Luke and her grandson Xavier, who are in Mozambique. They have said they will come soon.

  The priest is a bit of a worry to Teresa, Fran suspects. But she may be wrong: she herself would so dislike a visit from a priest that perhaps she is over-reacting on her new-old friend’s behalf. On the other hand, there had been the tiniest hint of exasperation, perhaps, in Teresa’s description of his inability to dispose tidily of his umbrella.

  The February weather has turned nasty, they agree. Torrential rain and high winds. Hence the concern for Poppet on the marshes.

  Teresa, of course, has never met Poppet and, barring some unexpected turn of events in the very near future, never will. But she takes an interest in all Fran’s doings, past and present, as Fran take an interest, an intense interest, in Teresa’s lifework.

  They agree that it is not surprising that both found themselves working in the caring professions, because that’s what women do, and had they not both, in their cellar days, had visions of themselves as cup-bearers, as martyrs, as messianic saviours? Oh, how lofty some of their infant notions had been, as they crouched together, sometimes in Number 24 on the Quinn side, sometimes in Number 26 on the Robinson side, their arms around their scabbed knees, their hair full of coal dust, with their treat packet of unrationed glucose tablets, which disintegrated and melted so sweetly and deliciously upon the tongue! Precociously they had discussed the plight of the sorry world and resolved to make it a better place. They had been morbidly fascinated by misfortune, and by the more extreme manifestations of the human condition – paraplegia, leprosy, blindness. They had discussed God, and whether or not he existed. Teresa, in those days, had been a believer, but even then a challenging believer. Fran had been more cautious in her speculations. Or that’s how Fran now remembered it.

  Fran had already been interested in last sayings. She doesn’t think Teresa is now rehearsing hers, she is too busy recalling the trivia of the late 1940s and early 50s, and too discursive and too chatty to come up with an epigram.

  Teresa had more than fulfilled her spiritual ambitions. Her special school had been a home and a haven and sometimes a hospice for some of the most disadvantaged children on earth, or at least, to make a more modest claim on her behalf, a claim which she would never have made for herself, for some of the most disadvantaged children in the Greater London area (but there were, of course, plenty of those, and far more than Teresa’s school could accommodate).

  Fran’s childish veneration of Teresa has returned one hundredfold, fortified by the manner in which Teresa, now, in extremis, is willing and eager to discuss pain, families, public transport (Oh, how I miss it! cries Teresa plaintively, I never would have known how much!), rude young people, multicultural London, grandchildren, climate change, the ways of God to Man, and death. Their conversation flows, uninhibited by social niceties.

  Fran is curious about Teresa’s ex-husband Liam and their son Luke and his Angolan wife Monica and their grandson Xavier, and interested though not surprised to learn that Luke has also entered the caring professions. He is an anaesthetist, and he is currently working in Africa. Teresa does not spell out any connection between his career and her own, but there must be one. She is also interested in Teresa’s brothers, and is astonished to learn that David Quinn has made himself into the world expert on the works of Jacopo da Pontormo.

  How can this be? How can an internationally renowned art historian have formed himself within the philistine and soulless bricks and mortar of Number 24 in the undistinguished suburb of Maybrook Park? There had been no art in Broughborough, or none that the Quinns and the Robinsons had ever seen. And David Quinn hadn’t been a latent aesthete or an intellectual; he’d been in love with his gleaming chrome and wine-red Raleigh bicycle, on the crossbar of which he’d once or twice, when in a condescending mood, taken Fran for a scary ride. She’d pretended not to be scared, as she was honoured to be asked, but she’d been glad when, her crotch aching from the pressure of the metal and the scratching and rubbing of her knickers, she’d been able to get off.

  Jacopo da Pontormo! Fran is not very good at art history, although some of her son Christopher’s easy media expertise has rubbed off on her, but she has heard of him and is more than happy to browse through the glossy, large and expensively produced volume of text and reproductions that bears his name, twinned with the name of David Quinn. Teresa pointed to it, in its place high on the top shelf of the crowded living room – she is too weak to get up there herself these days – and Fran had climbed onto the library steps and hefted it down (even to her it seems dangerously heavy) and had sat there for a while, turning the pages and gazing at otherworldly images of virgins and depositions and annunciations, at swirling drapery in the most heavenly yet worldly of shades. Pink, mauve, orange, apricot, saffron and the palest of greens, wonderful colours in the grey winter of North-east London, inspiring colours to carry in her memory back to Tarrant Towers. The subject matter is deeply religious, as it would be, and the manner is mannered, or, as the jacket cover informs her, Mannerist. This, she thinks, is Catholic art at its most devout.

  Is David Quinn still a believer? Was he ever a believer, that lanky boy with his acne and his side parting and his big bony hands and his bike? How on earth had he come across Pontormo? Fran hadn’t liked to ask about David Quinn’s faith. She thought that might be a step too far. It’s all right asking Teresa about hers, but David Quinn has a life of his own into which she ought not to intrude.

  He now lives in Italy, in Orvieto, Teresa says. With his partner.

  The thought of all that intensity, building up grey and grub-like and unobserved in an Edwardian semi-detached dwelling, smelling of boy and bicycle and football, waiting to hatch and swirl and shimmer and fly and float so weightlessly in all those glorious polychrome Florentine colours, makes Fran feel, intermittently, quite faint. How odd it is, how strange, how improbable!

  Fran has told Teresa about her long friendship with Josephine Drummond. It’s very satisfactory, she said to Teresa, Jo and I go right back to Romley days, we stayed friends even when she was in the States, our children sort of grew up together, and now thanks to you I can fill in the earlier years. What a bonus. I can colour in a bit more of my past.

  Fran thinks, rightly, that Teresa loves to think she is of use.

  Glucose tablets, pixie hoods.

  They both remember pixie hoods, knitted with the wrinkled speckled scratchy wool salvaged from unravelled wartime jumpers. What hideous little creatures we were, they joyfully agree.

  Peaky, wheezy, skinny, bronchitic, chicken-chested! Hideous!

  Teresa is even interested in the dull, everyday and slightly lowering subject of Aunt Dorothy’s colouring-in books, duly reported to her on this most recent mee
ting. They discuss the strange satisfaction of colouring in, remembered from long ago. Do you remember how we used to be made to pencil in a blue fringe around the islands on maps, and how we had to do the pencil strokes horizontally, all the way around, not vertically, or sticking out like a hedgehog, and how cross Miss Clay got if we did it wrong? It was called Geography! Scribble scribble scribble, neatly, all the way around the outline of the British Isles. What a waste of time, how utterly pointless, but what, in its way, what fun.

  Some of my children, sighs Teresa, used to enjoy colouring in. Some of them made a terrible mess, but some were obsessively neat. It depended.

  Lakeland pencils, Caran D’ache crayons, pastels. The gracious forgivingness of charcoal.

  Come again soon, says Teresa, as Fran washes out and reclaims her useful plastic soup container, and bossily weeds out a few past-their-best crumpled-paper narcissi from the bunch in the jug on the mantelpiece.

  It is strange, she feels so at home in Teresa’s house, she feels quite settled there. Quite uncharacteristically unrestless she feels, during her hours with Teresa.

  Yes, of course, says Fran. I’ll text you when I’ve heard from Ashley Combe about the Westmore Marsh dates. It’s a bit weather-dependent, this outing.

  Teresa reaches out her thin white arms, and they embrace, carefully, tenderly.

  Unlike Claude, Teresa has to contend with a great deal of pain, some days worse than others.

  Teresa misses public transport, and envies Fran her uncomfortable and tiring journeys around the capital on her Freedom Pass. Like Fran, she’d enjoyed eavesdropping. Too much surrounded during her working day by people well known to her and deeply dependent upon her, she had relished the solitude and company of ordinary strangers on bus journeys, even on the less agreeable Tube.

  She also misses her gardening. She’d been pleased to see Fran sort out the narcissi, but she’d like to have been able to get out into the garden and see the snowdrops and the aconites and plan for the spring. There is a fine city view from her sloping terraced London garden, and she misses that too. Her houseplants are still doing well, she keeps an eye on them. Tender-hearted, she doesn’t like to give up on any of them, even when they look past their best, and she diligently waters unpromising greenery and unresponsive shoots and nodules that have been dormant for years. Who knows, they may recover, they may have a second coming. And, often, they do.

  Teresa is dying of mesothelioma. At first she told Fran she was dying of lung cancer, an allied affliction, and, as we all now know, commonly caused by smoking. Mesothelioma, in contrast, is a cancer of the lung and chest walls, and almost always caused by exposure to asbestos. Exposure often dating back many decades. Teresa had not wanted her newly found old friend to scroll back through time, as Teresa herself has been doing, in search of causation. She has been re-reading the past, trying to identify the source of the asbestos which has been at first slowly and secretly, but now not so slowly and very visibly and surely, destroying her. The school buildings, the semi-detached suburban houses, the cellars of coal dust, the Public Library, or the Woolworths in the town centre, where (they have agreed) tragic but invisibly unidentifiable old men would try to stick their fingers up their backsides? The council estate to which her family had been evacuated during the war? The school in Canada, the house in Vermont? Or latterly, the demolition of the outbuildings on the site where her new school was built? Who can say? She is not an industrial casualty, as were so many miners and shipbuilders. But she is a casualty. Of something.

  Not of smoking. She had smoked cigarettes, for a few years in her youth, when married, euphorically, to Liam. But she had not smoked seriously. She has been through this, on email, with Liam in Montreal, who is deeply concerned about her and who seems to be tormenting himself as to whether he would be welcome, if he were to offer to come to see her now. (She hasn’t given him much of a lead on this.) Liam hasn’t smoked for years, he tells her, as though, somehow, in some way, that might reassure her.

  Teresa had, after three or four meetings, decided that Fran was not a hypochondriac, and that she was also extremely fit, although, like most old people, she had a heightened consciousness of mortal peril. She could face the facts of mesothelioma. So Teresa had described the diagnosis and the prognosis, which had also released her to discuss with Fran the extraordinarily arbitrary nature of this particular affliction. It can be caused, apparently, by the inhalation, many years ago, of a single fibre, as well as by years at the coal face. A school teacher, pushing a drawing pin into a classroom partition, can release particles that, if inhaled, can kill. A single one of them can kill. Cause and effect seem to have no moral connection, no possible meaningful relationship.

  Had God ordained, when Teresa was born, an innocent Broughborough babe, that she should inhale this particular fibre? Had the unknown and unknowing agents who had installed the asbestos in the wall been directly or indirectly or morally responsible for the now imminent consequence of her death? How would it affect her lot, and her acceptance of that lot, were it to be known that the builders had taken a known risk? It is an interesting conundrum. Teresa has always been attracted to such conundrums, and the casuistry with which priests and philosophers seek to explain them. Catholic though she be, after her fashion, she is also attracted to the more contemporary ethical notion of moral luck: it was bad luck that made her stick that drawing pin into the partition of the garden room, in order to display the list of supervised outings proposed for the summer vacation.

  Teresa is fascinated by the example of the drawing pin. A pin is so small, so innocent. How many angels dance upon the head of a pin? How many invisible fibres did the pin release?

  And would those hypothetical builders have felt guilty, or even sorry, if they knew that they had killed Teresa Quinn with a drawing pin?

  And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

  Teresa feels sorry for those unwitting killer builders and classroom fitters and wishes to exonerate them from any suspicion of blame. She is non-judgmental, and she doesn’t go for blame. She has learned not to blame the parents of grievously damaged children. She has learned not to blame her ex, though she’s not yet sure if she wants to see him again.

  She has learned not to blame.

  She has learned the hardest lesson, which is not to blame herself.

  Fran finds this mindset fascinating, and wonders what it may have to do with religion and faith in God.

  Nobody is to blame, but God.

  On the Tube home, Fran ponders the riddles of cause and effect and blame and the drawing pin, and manages to remember a vaguely pertinent case history which had been floating at the back of her mind for some days. She would have related it to Teresa this afternoon, had she managed to capture it in time, and its connection is so tenuous she fears she will forget it again before their next appointment.

  It’s not her own story, it’s a story Jo had told her, about a persistent member of one of her adult education classes, an elderly man who had become fixated upon Jo, his somewhat younger teacher. He had been inappropriately and tediously infatuated by her, writing to her, waylaying her in corridors, hanging around after class, sending her newspaper cuttings. (Luckily he never managed to get hold of her phone number.) He was too old and slow-footed to stalk, and Josephine, although much more agile and more mobile, was too old to be stalked, but in other respects he was a stalker. And he, like Teresa Quinn, had been obsessed by questions of agency and blame. In his case, unhealthily obsessed. He specialised in newspaper cuttings about accidents and crimes and misdemeanours with unintended consequences, interests which Jo found at once tedious and upsetting and yet curiously compelling. Some of his disquisitions were, unfortunately, prompted by the books they were reading in class: Thomas Hardy and, in particular, Tess of the d’Urbervilles had provided him with rich material, but he could also find strange readings in Tolstoy and Chekhov and Conrad.

  The cuttings, culled largely from the popular press, had headlines like
FATHER KILLS OWN CHILD WHILE REVERSING OUT OF GARAGE or WOMAN STABBED TO DEATH BY FALLING ON KNIFE IN DISHWASHER or BUTCHER LOSES ARM IN MINCING MACHINE or DRIVER KILLED WHILE ADJUSTING SAFETY BELT or MAN STABBED OVER DISPUTE OVER HEDGE. Old Mr Winters had been gripped by the subtext of such incidents. Why, he wanted to know, was it worse to kill your own child than anyone else’s? Was it worse or better to die after a quarrel? Was it worse to die while trying to do the right thing?

  It was curiously difficult to explain to him why it was so much worse to kill your own child than somebody else’s, Jo said.

  When he talked about his own life, Jo told Fran, he seemed to have a sense missing, a screw loose. He hadn’t attended his own wife’s funeral, which occurred during the middle of Jo’s course on Darwin and the Novel, and he had boasted about this omission to Jo. Why should he have gone to the funeral? She was dead, she wouldn’t know if he was there or not, would she? He’d preferred to come and offer up his ideas on Eyeless in Gaza. Many years ago, he told Jo, he had destroyed his father’s latest will; he’d torn it up and thrown it in the river. It was only paper, just a piece of paper, and he hadn’t liked its terms. His father was senile when he made it, he’d never know what had happened, and what difference would it make? He’d never have known which will had come into effect, would he?