The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  The circumstantial detail about the river was unsettling. It was the River Ouse, in York, and he had thrown the bits of paper off Lendal Bridge. His father had lived and died in York; he had spent his last years in The Retreat.

  There was no arguing with this kind of stuff, Jo said to Fran. There was some horrible logic at work in him, some strange insistent raw intelligence. He didn’t seem to have read any books of philosophy or logic or ethics, his ideas were all his own, but you couldn’t completely disregard them.

  You should kick him out of the class, Fran had said.

  And, the next year, Jo had done exactly that. With the connivance of her Principal, she had invented a ruling that prevented students from attending her class for more than two consecutive years. Mr Winters disappeared. The messages stopped. He had probably attached himself to some other love object.

  Yes, thinks Fran, Teresa would be interested in the story of Mr Winters, if she can remember to bring it up next time.

  The train comes to a halt outside a busy intersection, and Fran, momentarily intensely bored, plays with her mobile and picks up a text from Poppet, in response to a motherly or (faux motherly, interfering, intrusive?) text of hers sent earlier in the day. Poppet replies, indicating that the levels are rising, but it’s nowhere near the danger zone yet and she’s got sandbags.

  Fran has an embarrassment about Poppet, connected with her forthcoming Westmore Marsh project. She doesn’t like to articulate it, even to herself.

  Poppet, in her ceaseless monitoring of the planet’s activities, has noted with interest that there’s just been a violent submarine eruption in the Atlantic off the coast of El Hierro, the most remote, rocky and westerly of the Canary Islands, but she doesn’t think it will be threatening her brother Christopher, who is on the flatter easterly and more African camel-farming isle of Lanzarote. He’s been there for a week or two now, what can he be doing out there?

  Poppet doesn’t tell her mother about the eruption.

  She never knows whether her mother worries too much about her children, or not enough. She’s never known.

  When Fran gets out of the Tube at King’s Cross, to catch her bus home to the Towers, the London weather has worsened. Torrents of white slanting rain are pouring down from the blue-black neon-lit winter sky, and high-speed gusts are tormenting the garbage on the Euston Road. Umbrellas are being blown inside out, their broken ribs like the wings of dead crows. A large branch has blown off a plane tree and is obstructing the pavement. Pedestrians cluster at bus stops, stoically, with their backs to the wind. Those who have hooded garments pull their hoods miserably over their heads. Fran does not have a hood or a rain bonnet, but she has a beret, which is better than nothing. She squeezes herself under the roof of the bus shelter, and tries to think of higher things.

  It would be bad to envy Teresa Quinn, who does not have to go out in this stuff, who will never again have to go out in this stuff, who has only the dark storms of the spirit and of the morphine-moderated pangs of the dying body to torment her. But sometimes, even though fit and well, Fran does feel like throwing in the sponge and going to bed for ever.

  It would be bad to envy Claude (who will get his portion of the chicken soup tomorrow), although it has to be said that Claude, who is as far as Fran knows devoid of religious faith, of uplift, or of higher thoughts, does seem to have made a pact with mortality, and to be as happy in his confinement as a man may be. She would be bored out of her mind if she had to stay in bed.

  Though maybe, if it goes on raining until the end of time, one could stop struggling and go to bed with honour.

  It will be really annoying to Fran if she cannot get to inspect the housing development on Westmore Marsh as planned. Trivially annoying, not life-and-death annoying, but annoying. Westmore Marsh, as its name indicates, has been built on a West Country flood plain, but it incorporates various interesting and experimental anti-flood features in the form of ponds and hollows to hold run-off water. It would be ironic if flooding prevented her from getting over there to inspect these features. There is also, at Westmore Marsh, a unit of sheltered housing that has been of interest to the planning and architectural journals. Fran is hoping to get to chat to some of its residents, to see if they admire it, and if they have any view on the ponds and the hollows.

  She has had an interesting talk over the phone with the warden of the sheltered housing unit, followed by various email exchanges. The warden is called Valerie Heritage. Fran thinks this is a splendid name. She wonders if she is robust and highly coloured, like Suzette Myers at Chestnut Court, or thin and iron-grey like the warden of Athene Grange, or black and generous, like Persephone Saint Just, whose name is almost too splendid to be true. You can’t tell from Valerie’s voice what colour she is. She has an ambiguous accent, something overlaid by something else. Fran’s not very good at placing accents. And so many people are keen on concealing themselves these days.

  Claude sits in his large armchair with his feet up and his cat asleep on his lap, waiting for his ex-wife to arrive with his supplies. He is, as usual, watching daytime TV with half an eye and with the sound off, and simultaneously reading The Times on his Kindle. Cyrus so much prefers the Kindle to the print version of The Times, because it doesn’t rustle and disturb his nap. On TV there is coverage of the deteriorating weather, and shots of railway track in the West Country under water. Claude has only the vaguest notion of where his daughter Poppet lives, but he thinks it’s somewhere near these brown flooded fields and drowning cattle and weeping willows.

  In The Times, he reads that his old colleague Andrew Wetherill has died. Andrew had been a madman, a joker, with a braying neighing laugh which had frequently resounded distinctively and often inappropriately around the auditoria of theatres and opera houses, a laugh that would wake the dead. He’d had a colourful career, some of it literally on the battlefield, and had led a colourful private and semi-public life of considerable eccentricity. Married and the father of now grown sons and daughters, and (to Claude’s certain knowledge) bisexual, he had in his later years usually been accompanied by a much younger woman, whom he would introduce at social gatherings as ‘my fiancée’. There had been a succession of fiancées, whose function had never been wholly clear.

  Claude hasn’t seen Andrew for some years, though they once used to belong to the same dining club and to meet there almost regularly. The last time he saw him in person was at Glyndebourne, at a performance of one of Mozart’s more frequently presented operas, and in the interval Claude had been introduced to Camellia (that can’t have been her real name, surely, but that’s the name that Claude thought he had heard), a tall thirty-year-old with a very long neck and very bare shoulders which rose upwards inexorably from a shimmering strapless short crimson ball gown. Camellia was a flamboyant accessory, and Claude can see her clearly, her gleaming ash-white marble flesh, her white teeth, her red lips, her flashing smile. He can see Andrew’s curious expression, of mingled pride and bravado and collusion. Where is Camellia now?

  Andrew had never divorced, despite the string of fiancées, and his obituary states, sedately and no doubt correctly, that his wife Marion and his two daughters survive him. How many scandals subsumed in that prim sentence. Claude, like most of his contemporaries, finds himself fascinated by the language of these brief retrospective résumés, by these truncated lives, with their ellipses and their hints and their double entendres.

  Jax Conan had been bloody lucky to have predeceased Jimmy Savile.

  Claude had divorced Fran because he had got himself into a position where he had to marry Jean, though his obituary won’t divulge that. But it’s Fran that looks after him now. It’s Fran that comes with her hessian bag full of plates in cling film and filled plastic boxes. She’ll be here soon, she’ll let herself in, she’s the chatelaine, she’s got the bunch of keys.

  Jean’s still alive, and she’s still costing him money, but he hasn’t seen her in years and doesn’t wish to.

  He swi
tches off the television, which, as the light fades and the early night thickens, is moving from daytime TV to early evening TV. He switches on Classic FM: a Dvořák piano trio, melancholy, reassuring and not too long. He is grateful to Classic FM. He is impressed by the trouble they take, whoever they are, to entertain him, him personally, in a manner that he finds acceptable. He’s not a grateful or humble kind of person, but he is becoming more appreciative of small things than he ever thought he would be.

  Will Fran stay for a drink and a chat? He rather hopes she will.

  Poppet has been watching the waters rise with interest and with a slightly diminishing degree of bravado. The swelling brown water has covered the towpath and submerged all but the tops of the gateposts, and is lapping at her steps. On the local radio, there is a programme about the Great Flood of Lynton and Lynmouth of 1952 and an angry interview with the Minister about dredging. The canal is breached upstream, and the tides are high at this time of the month, though not quite as high as they had been in January. Rain pours down from the Welsh hills and engorges the Severn, the flat salt sea floods up from Bridgwater Bay and the Bristol Channel, the River Parrett overflows its embankments. Many acres are submerged, and in the murky afternoon light she has seen the water level slowly approaching the lower boughs of the pollarded willows, the waving tips and fronds of the sedge and of the rushes and the reeds. Some villages have been marooned for many days.

  The water fowl enjoy the transformation of the landscape. It suits them well, it enlarges their territory. The birds of the air also seem happy. The small ones twitter and flock and dart, exploring new perches, new perspectives, new nesting sites. Mating time is upon them, despite the downpours. Valentine’s Day, the time of the Parliament of Fowls. Larger gatherings of ducks and moorhens and seagulls and Canada geese sail and swoop by and noisily crash into the water and soar up again, and her familiar pair of mating swans is liberated into a greater space. Graciously her swans float upon the fields, reclaiming the land as their own. She has seen the swans by moonlight, when the sky was clear. She sees them from her bedroom window, serenely adrift upon the flood.

  There is one odd bird she knows well, a clumsy goose-like creature, neither goose nor duck nor swan, a loner, awkward, a grubby scruffy white-feathered thing with pink feet, which sometimes comes to her to be fed. She has not seen it for some days. It has abandoned her. It has found, perhaps, new protectors.

  She thinks of Noah and his ark. She does not know many Bible stories, but this is one that everybody knows. They had had a Noah’s Ark, given to them by Granny Stubbs, a Galt wooden Ark with stubby archetypal brightly painted animals.

  She has a large egg, two years old, in a flowerpot on her soft damp flaking windowsill. It will never hatch now. She found it, abandoned, two springs ago, amongst her carrots and courgettes. A goose egg, she thinks, laid and abandoned by a foolish mother. She sometimes wonders what is in it now. It still weighs heavy in the hand. Will it burst, like the great ribbed dark-striped weighty orange gourd that her mother had used as a doorstop in the back porch of the Highgate garden flat, the flat where she had lived with Hamish? It had suddenly exploded one day and splattered into a fine dry vegetable dust. Hamish and Fran had laughed and laughed.

  Her mother can still laugh. She finds pleasure in life, her mother, even though Hamish is dead and she is old. Poppet admires this gift, this blessing.

  Poppet had shown the egg last summer to some children on a passing narrow boat. The holiday family was lingering by her waterside landing stage, their hired boat idling, the father taking a cigarette break, the mother pegging out multicoloured underwear on an improvised washing line. The children had a rabbit with them, a large blue-grey velvety thick-furred rabbit, sitting with them on the deck. She had waved at them, uncharacteristically sociable in the July sun, and asked them about the travelling rabbit, and in no time they were ashore, the three eager red-haired children, and she was proudly offering them lemonade (she made her own, from Taunton Co-op lemons) and showing them her egg. They enjoyed her lemonade and admired her egg. Might it hatch one day, they wondered? Might it release a tiny dragon?

  Poppet had not found this playful childhood fantasy annoying, although she did not, as a rule, much care for children. For in truth she had sometimes wondered herself if a little dragon, a baby dinosaur, a featherless dark-pink and yellow embryo, lay coiled in there, biding its time.

  The three red-haired children were special. She has forgotten their names, but she remembers that the travelling rabbit was called Mr Rex.

  It did not dawn on her at the time that he was called Mr Rex because he was a Rex rabbit, Oryctolagus cuniculus, a popular and hardy breed.

  One day she will break the egg to see what is waiting for her in there. One terminal day. But that day is a long and weary way ahead.

  In the dying glimmer of a fitfully sunlit half-hour towards the early dusk, she notes the names of the colours of the floods and of the trees: brown, umber, sallow, gold, bronze, rust. A pink-tinged silver, a pale silvery grey-green, a tarnished copper. The subtle woody brushy winter shades of the wetlands, a spectrum of suspended but approaching growth. She has a good eye, and she likes the names of colours. This land has often flooded: whatever the locals say in protest, this inundation is nothing new. The water bides its time. Over hundreds and thousands of years the rivers have burst their banks, and then retreated. Her friend who built the Stone Age house knew all about the ancient ways, the wooden paths over the marshes, the timber causeways, the peat, the Sweet Tracks, the islanded knolls, the sacred eminences.

  The locals complain that there has not been enough dredging and pumping, but this flood is beyond dredging. The upper reaches of the rivers to the east should never have been deforested, the fields should never have been scarified, the tributaries should never have been straightened. The oxbows should have been allowed to form their slow and simple circles, the streams to meander at their own sweet will. It is too late in history to plant now, too late to halt the process now. The debate rages, in the press, in the pubs, in Parliament. Poppet, once so sure of her ideologies, does not know what will happen, what should happen. The landscape educates, but it does not bring full enlightenment.

  She knows that her mother has a date in the neighbourhood with the estate built on Westmore Marsh, on the flood plain. She is off to visit some exemplary housing. Poppet wonders how well it is withstanding what we call the extreme weather events. Her mother’s pertinacity and stamina are remarkable.

  She has not invited her mother to call in, and her mother has not suggested a visit. They respect boundaries. That’s what they say to themselves. But they do text each other nearly every day.

  Near Ouseby, five miles upstream, there is a house on stilts, like Baba Yaga’s. An expensive experimental ecohouse. It’s the spiritual twin of the Willow Cabin, at the other end of the spectrum. She wonders how it fares. In Holland, they are experimenting with floatable housing.

  This morning she saw the cranes, a majestic visitation. They sailed in, the great birds of the east, and settled half a mile up the canal, as though they owned the landscape, as though they have been here forever. But they have not. They are new. They have been reintroduced. They are at once strange and familiar, and from another era. They are partly funded by a landfill operator, as well as by various conservation trusts. The landfill operator is the company that, from time to time, empties Poppet’s septic tank. She finds this strangely pleasing. It’s quite an imaginative sponsorship.

  She hopes her septic tank won’t be breached by floodwater.

  When the light fails truly and thickens into darkness, Poppet thinks she should take her treasures upstairs. She has few treasures: she lives lightly. But in the little low many-drawered mahogany Victorian cabinet that she and Jim had rescued from the unofficial rural dump behind the Little Chef on the A303 there are some objects that she would not like to lose.

  She opens the drawers. She hasn’t looked in here for a long time. In the
top drawer there are shells and stones, collected long ago by the ancestors of the callous fly-tipping Little Chef depositor, but in the lower layers there are potent bits and pieces of her life that she has assembled over the decades. Photographs, letters, bits of jewellery, an anachronistic silver napkin ring with her initials engraved upon it, given to her when she was a baby by Granny Robinson. A photograph, taken by her mother, of the primary school play in which she had appeared as a fisher-woman, or was she a fishwife. There she is, a dumpy little shapeless old-young bundle in her plaid shawl and long skirts. It had been some kind of children’s opera, set in the Scottish Isles: they sang laments about herring. Why on earth had they been doing that, in inland Essex, in Romley? And there is her brother Chris, a buccaneer, with a silver dagger in his belt.

  Her mother had made the costumes. Her mother enjoys sewing and stitching and mending, she’s one of the few women left in Britain who likes to mend. She isn’t very good at it, but she still likes doing it. Poppet, who in principle should be good at this kind of thing, can hardly thread a needle.

  Poppet had a good voice, she could sing well and in tune, but she didn’t really enjoy singing. Her father had teased her once, very heavily, when he’d heard her singing hymns to herself in her bedroom. It had put her off. She hadn’t been singing hymns because she was religious, but because, when she was six years old, they were the tunes and the words that she knew best. She hadn’t wanted to explain that to him, she wouldn’t have been able to find the words. The primary school in Romley had been a Church of England school, where assembly was still held, where morning hymns were still sung.

  All things bright and beautiful . . .

  We plough the fields and scatter . . .