All creatures of our God and King . . .
Morning has broken like the first morning . . .
There she is again, older, college-age, sitting on a bench with Annie in a formal summer garden.
And there is the little Baby Jesus that she’d made in her first year at Rowbridge. It is a miracle, the little Baby Jesus. She’d never thought she was any good at art or crafts, she’d been hopeless at St Jude’s Infants, but at Rowbridge she had made, as it were by mistake, this wonderful thing. She had made the reverse journey from the norm – usually children who are good at art in Infants forget how to do it in Junior and Secondary, but Poppet, briefly, had travelled the other way. He had just made himself, the Baby Jesus, out of clay and bark and bits of cloth and wicker and nutshells and stitching. He was a wonder. Miss Sullivan, sprightly butch big-chested Miss Sullivan, with her tufted skull-sprouting boot-black hair and her glitter-spattered cardigans, had been amazed by him. Why, Poppy, how wonderful! she had exclaimed. And so He was. Poppet could see He was a serious success. But she also knew that she would never be able to repeat this miracle.
She turned her back on art, as she had turned her back on singing. As she had turned her back on dark-browed Annie, deep-voiced, ambiguously seductive Annie Stokes.
As Annie had turned her back on Poppy Stubbs.
Baby Jesus, she now thinks, contemplating Him, resembles a piece of Aboriginal Australian art. Or, as she would now say, First Nation art. He had welled up from the earth below. Somehow she had tapped her way down and back into the roots of time, but had never been able to return again. It was not permitted to her to go down there again.
She had been to Australia, a few years ago, just before air travel became a recognised eco-crime. To a conference on climate change. And in Adelaide, she had visited the museum and made her way up to the long gallery of Aboriginal art, and gazed, surprised to be so affected. It wasn’t the (to her) incomprehensible dotted dreamtime paintings that struck her; it was the artefacts and the wide-eyed ghostly faces on the artefacts. The shields, the posts, the cylindrical bark coffins.
Big Sister. Young Child. Old Man.
They had a look of her Baby Jesus. He had a look of them.
Baby Jesus had made himself.
She touches him, gently. He has wide eyes and an ashen face.
He watched over her and her ashen dreams.
In the cabinet, her favourite objet trouvé is a little polished wooden box with a brass monogram, ‘JSS’, which contains geological specimens from Tenerife. They rest on a crumpled crimson velvet cushioned bed, a collection of fifteen neatly labelled lava stones garnered from Mount Teide. The ink of the handwritten labels is fading but she can still read the words azufre, pozzolana, basalt, phonolite and obsidian, and the information that the first eruption on Tenerife was ‘recorded by Genoese sailors’ in 1393. The stones that had spewed up from the depths are enchanting. Some are minutely or coarsely pitted, like pumice; some are more rough and rugged in texture; some have smooth shining planes of cleavage like jet or coal. One is an astounding pale yellow, like a pale stick of Edinburgh Rock, one is sage green, one is as white as snow, one is black flecked with white, and three are of a mottled dried-blood clay-red.
The brown water laps, the muddy brown water of the Levels rises, and beneath the Atlantic Ocean to the west of the island of El Hierro, as yet but not for ever the most westerly of the Canaries, the crack in the earth widens.
The chicken soup that Fran presents to Claude is of the same stock as the soup she gave to Teresa, gently rendered from the same plump allegedly free-range fowl, but it is thicker, and reinforced with vegetables and macaroni. It has got more bits in it. Claude is a man, and he has more of an appetite than Teresa. He needs bits. Claude looks polite and appreciative as she puts the plastic box in the microwave and tells him he can warm it up later when she has gone. She stacks other labelled items into the freezer. She has come on the Tube, with her burlap bag. There’s nowhere to park in Kensington. Her car is safe at home, home and dry, resting underground amongst the Kentucky Fried Chicken cartons and the fox-chewed carcasses of less fortunate birds. In a couple of days it will be allowed an outing to the west, for a good long battery-charging drive to Westmore Marsh.
Claude asks her if she has time to stay for a glass of wine and, if so, would she like to pour one for him too. She hesitates, selfishly, because she’d really rather go back to her flat and cross the strange high perilous thin bridge into the evening with a stiff stunner of a killer whisky, before embarking on the milder palliative glass of the corner shop Sauvignon that awaits her with her supper. Before settling down to her planned viewing of the borrowed DVD about The Tibetan Book of the Dead. But she is feeling indulgent towards Claude and pleased with the look of her chicken soup, so she agrees to stay for a chat. She pours the Chablis, sinks down into the dark-red well-worn Parker Knoll armchair, kicks off her boots, and puts her feet up on the old oak javelin box that for some reason lies at the end of Claude’s bed. It hasn’t got any javelins in it. It’s full of old copies of The Lancet and the New Scientist and The Spectator and Private Eye, of old programmes from Glyndebourne and Covent Garden and ENO.
The oak could do with a polish. The carved and knotted wood looks dry and thirsty and in places it is patchy pale. But she’s not going to start feeding Claude’s furniture for him.
She longs to nourish the famished wood.
Fran has been known to water drooping pot plants in airport lounges and in the Ladies’ toilets in motorway service stations.
Claude asks after Josephine, as he often does. The Romley days had been intense although disastrous, and they speak to him still. Like his son Christopher, he had fancied Jo, though he had not gone further than a squeezed hand and a fulsome compliment. He had been slightly frightened of Jo.
Fran hasn’t really got much to say about Jo, so she contents herself with telling him that they are booked to go together to see Happy Days at the Young Vic, God knows why. Perhaps because Jo thinks it might illuminate the Adult Education course she is teaching? She immediately regrets mentioning this outing, even in a suitably deprecating tone, for in her view the semi-bedridden predicament of Claude is not unlike that of the half-buried Winnie in Beckett’s play. But Claude doesn’t seem to register this, for, rather like Winnie, he tends to ignore or deny the most inauspicious aspects of his condition.
So that’s all right then, Fran says to herself, as Claude maintains that wild horses wouldn’t drag him to see a Beckett play, or indeed any play, on any stage, ever again.
You always preferred the opera, says Fran, diplomatically or provocatively: at this stage in the game, who could say? I didn’t really enjoy opera, or not enough to justify the cost.
One of our differences, says Claude, amicably. One of our many differences.
If Fran remembers rightly, Winnie quite often remarks, during the course of her monologue, on her gratitude for being free from pain.
At least. Free from pain. At least.
Great mercies. Great mercies.
She must look out for the lines, when she goes to the theatre with Jo.
Claude tells her about the obituary of Glyndebourne-frequenting Andrew Wetherill. It has been puzzling him, its tone had been a bit odd, and he didn’t know the chap who wrote it, though he feels he should have done. Fran doesn’t recognise the obituarist’s name either. There’s a new generation of potentially vindictive and almost certainly ignorant obituarists taking to the page these days, suggests Claude.
Fran doesn’t expect an obituary, although Claude can’t avoid one.
She had known Andrew, very slightly, but hadn’t really moved in the circles where she might be likely to bump into him. She was aware, however, of his eccentricities. She listens to Claude’s reminiscences about Andrew’s selfish and piggish behaviour at the Marsden, his gross eating habits, his penchant for the double entendre, his abuse of his patients’ vulnerability and confidentiality, his deafening bray of a laug
h. His laugh frightened his assistants out of their skins and made them drop his instruments on the sterile floors.
She retaliates with her recollections of the elegantly raddled Stella Hartleap, and her irritation with the Schadenfreude of the press coverage of her death. Stella had been a star, in her way, an avant-garde sculptor of the old school whose Modernist works adorn many a public building.
Stella’s London pad was in Highgate, and Fran had known her through Hamish.
Stella’s flat had overlooked that deep leafy urban gulch that runs under the Archway, beneath the Bridge of the Suicides. Hamish and Fran had been there once or twice for drinks. Fran had liked the plunging view. She had always liked a view from a height. (Why? Will she work out the answer one day? Love of heights, love of movement, eating problems, cooking problems, sex problems, not much time left to work all that out now, and not much point in doing so, even if one could. But she must keep trying, she notes to herself.)
Stella Hartleap had also known Christopher, he had done a programme about her work, but Fran hadn’t bothered to watch it. She’d pretended that she had, but she hadn’t. She finds arts programmes boring, even when they feature her own son featuring a woman she likes, a woman whose work she admires. She can do without that kind of stuff.
Christopher had filmed Stella in the Black Mountains, not in her Highgate pad, because he thought it was more scenic there and he fancied a trip to Wales. Fran thought the mysterious layers and levels of Highgate were more scenic than Wales, although she had abandoned them when Hamish died. She had sold their flat and moved to the east. She hadn’t wanted to live in Highgate on her own. She’d wanted a new place, a new life, for what was left of life.
She doesn’t think very often of her happiness with Hamish, or of her sadness at losing him. It’s as though her twenty years with him had been an interlude in the struggle of her life, an unmerited interlude. She had been fortunate to have them, but they had been irrelevant.
Now she has returned to the fray.
These thoughts flit through her busy mind, as she watches Claude frowning at The Times within his Kindle, and listens to him complaining about the upstart unknown obituarist.
Claude and Fran live in the world of obituaries now, in the malicious crepuscular light of memorial services. Claude is more embedded in it than Fran, but she takes, as we have seen, an interest.
Christopher is still out there in the Canaries. He is basking idly in the sun, but the rain pours down on his sister Poppet. Fran thinks of them, her children, as she places her wine glass in Claude’s dishwasher, zips up her boots, and leaves Claude to his chicken soup as she goes out once more to face the weather.
Suzette is worried about Dorothy. Year upon year there has been little change in the uncanny sweetness of her charge Dorothy. Suzette has been running the care home for nearly fifteen years now and in all that time Dorothy, who has been there much longer, has been peaceable, grateful, amenable, easy to tidy and handle, a good advertisement for Chestnut Court. She has been no trouble at all. Sometimes Suzette gives her an impulsive hug, and says, Dorothy, you’re no trouble at all! But now Dorothy seems to be fretting, there is something caught in her drifting mind, some snag or tangle. Suzette sits by Dorothy in her room, patiently and gently massaging her thin shoulders for a couple of minutes, then brushing the silvery waves of her neat well-trimmed hair.
Dorothy is looking anxious, and she keeps repeating that she has ‘lost’ it. She doesn’t know where she has put ‘it’. It has gone.
Suzette can’t work out what ‘it’ is. Dorothy has accumulated few possessions over her lifetime, though those that she has are precious to her. In the little space of her neat well-ordered room there is nowhere to lose anything.
Her brush and comb, her necklaces, her rings. On her dressing table stands an old-fashioned toiletry set with a soap dish and a pale blue and white Wedgwood china ring tree and a Wedgwood thimble upon it, relics from her early married days. From padded coat hangers in her wardrobe depend her skirts and blouses and frocks, her summer coat and her winter coat. Dorothy had made the coat hanger covers herself, from pretty floral fabric remnants that Suzette’s predecessor Linda had picked up for a song in Beatties department store in Wolverhampton. Dorothy had been good with her needle, but her fingers are too stiff for sewing now. They can hold a pen but they can’t thread a needle. Her gilt-edged pocket Bible is on the little table by her bed. Her magazines are stacked in a cane magazine rack, and her pens and pencils stand in stencil-decorated jam jars on what she calls her work desk. She is kept well supplied with drawing materials, and has a bright variety of acrylic pens, crayons, glitter brushes and stick-on-stars, as well as colouring-in books. On the mantelpiece above the boxed-in 1930s fireplace are photographs in silver frames, of long dead family members, and of her late husband who had disappeared when she was in her twenties, and of Ralph, her son in Australia.
There is no photograph of her sister Emily, or of her nephew Paul, although Paul is the only person who keeps in touch with her and sees to her finances and paper work.
Suzette likes Paul: he is reliable, he is a professional. He knows the field, and she knows that he, in turn, relies on her.
But since Paul’s last visit, a few days ago, Dorothy has been unsettled. She’d seemed fine at the time, she’d seemed to enjoy chatting to Paul’s friend, that chirpy woman in the stripy jersey, and has mentioned her with approval several times. She’s even, so far, remembered her name. Fran. I liked Fran. But since then she has been fretful, worrying about whatever it is that she has lost.
Suzette doesn’t like the suggestion that something has gone missing from Chestnut Court. She prides herself on running a secure outfit, a safe retreat, where everything is accounted for, even to those who can’t count and don’t notice. When she was younger, she’d worked in a care home where a lot of things went missing, as a matter of course, where clothes ended up in the wrong wardrobes, where the residents were dressed in whatever came to hand. It’s true that some of them didn’t care what they wore, but some of them did. And anyway, Suzette thought it was wrong, wrong in principle.
And worse things than missing clothes had happened. You couldn’t call it abuse, or even neglect. It was more like indifference.
It’s a mystery to Suzette, that Dorothy’s personality is so distinct, even though she is so confused. She’s a bit of a prima donna, in her own modest way. No, Suzette reconsiders, prima donna isn’t the right word, it’s too vain, too self-important. But Dorothy is special. She’s a character. She’s herself. She insists on being herself. Some of her guests (Suzette likes to think of them as guests) have lost themselves, have thinned out into speechlessness, forgetfulness, dormancy, a poorly remembered past. They’re hardly there, inside themselves, there’s not much of them left, they’re half asleep, waiting to wake up somewhere else or not at all.
Suzette thinks from time to time about where they might wake up, and as what.
Suzette was brought up as a Christian, as a sort of Christian, sort of as a Christian. Her parents didn’t go to church, except for weddings and christenings and funerals, but they paid lip service, and encouraged her to go to the Brownies and to promise to do her duty to God. She’d loved the Brownies. Their Tawny Owl had been her school dinner lady Mrs Rose, and she was a hoot, full of fun ideas, some of them quite risky, like that day at Dudley Castle with the treasure hunt. She’d put a lot of work into them, had Mrs Rose.
Suzette teases a few of Dorothy’s silver hairs out of the brush, drops them into the plastic-bag-lined wicker waste-paper basket.
Who could believe in heaven? It’s just too silly. Yet the church says it believes in heaven, the minister who comes regularly to visit has to say he believes in heaven, it’s part of his job. She’s seen too many people die to believe in heaven.
But if anyone is in heaven, Mrs Rose the Tawny Owl will be. They might make an exception for her.
Perhaps Dorothy is on the way out. Perhaps she’s had a pr
emonition. Suzette believes in premonitions.
Suzette has known so many final rooms, so many relicts, so many family photographs, so many lives shrunk into a little space. Will they ever burst out again into where they were before they were so diminished? Will they ever again walk free and unencumbered, in a different, perhaps even a better, element? How good it would be to think so.
She remembers a coach outing from West Bromwich they’d been on, a long day trip a few years ago now, when, after a stately home and a bit of shopping, they’d all been taken to see a chapel, or was it a war memorial, or a little gallery, she can’t remember now, but she can still see those paintings. Of churchyards, with leaning tombstones and graves, and solid stout cheery ordinary men and women in ordinary old-fashioned clothes like her Nana wore, clambering up out of the earth, greeting one another, all happy, reunited, ready for eternity. The tour guide said it was the Resurrection. They had stared at it, subdued.
There was another painting, by the same artist, of black and white cows. He was famous, or they wouldn’t have been taken to see his work. She can’t remember his name.
It was all too silly, to think we’d clamber up out of the clay. But some people are very fussy about wanting or not wanting to be cremated. They have views on what happens or should happen or will happen to the body.
Suzette knows how to cater for all these options, in a practical manner. She’d failed with the old boy who wanted to be buried at sea, but she’d arranged it so that his family could scatter his ashes, discreetly, off the pier at Penarth. He’d been a captain, he’d been skipper of the old pleasure steamer that went up and down the Bristol Channel. He used to like to talk about his seafaring days. You’d have thought he’d sailed the China seas, the way he went on. But he’d been a game old chap, for all that.
Her own view, despite the possible exception she makes for Mrs Rose, is that when you die, that’s it. That’s the end. This prospect doesn’t alarm her at all. You’re here for your lifetime, and then you’re gone.
The Dark Flood Rises Page 18