But it’s odd that Dorothy has been here-and-not-here for so long. It’s puzzling.
Her guests had enjoyed the outings, and so had she. It’s harder to organise them now, there are so many regulations and so much worry about health and safety, and there have been one or two spectacular coach disasters, it’s fair to say. But the family firm of Judges Coaches had kept going. She thinks they won’t last long when Bill Judge gives up, but she’s booked those who are fit to go onto the Easter outing to Chillington Hall. Dorothy will go. She loves an outing.
Dorothy will go, if she lasts that long.
Christopher Stubbs, Simon Aguilera and the sure-footed Ishmael climb the shallow steps of the winding stair of stone inside the famine tower. Ivor has stayed at the foot of the tower, sitting on a warm stone slab in the late afternoon sun. He’d been up there once, a couple of years ago, to please Simon, but never again. Bennett had stayed behind on Simon’s terrace, dozing and reading and dozing again, but Christopher had agreed to go to look at the murals-in-progress that Simon had commissioned, although he is almost sure that he will not like them, and that his lack of enthusiasm might be embarrassing.
La Fortaleza del Hambre. The Famine Tower, the Tower of Hunger. It’s old, it’s ageless, it’s probably medieval. It’s undocumented. It may have been built at the time of de Béthencourt, the Norman knight, the first invader. It was mentioned by the explorers von Humboldt and Richard Burton, both of whom had called by: one on his way to the West, the other on his way to the East. The tower had stored grain, it had kept watch for pirates, it had kept watch for sardines and whales, and now it keeps watch for the immigrantes.
Christopher thinks there may be more in Bennett’s notion of writing a little history of the Canaries than the weary and protective Ivor can allow himself to hope. He has picked up Ivor’s guarded scepticism about the project, and also his need to humour Bennett, but he has also been much affected by what little he has so far seen of these islands. It is not Sara’s angry political vision that has held him captive here. It is the place itself. Its topography, its geography, its geology, its strange palette of dark sand, pale earth, red iron. Its palette of the grey-blue-green of cactus and aloe and lichen and euphorbia. Its calm beyond all anger, all desire.
The soft dry light is of uncanny beauty and clarity and purity, it has an unearthly radiance. No wonder astronomers make this their home, for they are nearer here to the unveiled heavens than in most places on earth. The air meets the skin gently here, it lingers with a soft beneficence, it breathes into the body calmly and sweetly, it is temperate and benign.
The Isles of the Blessed. Circe’s Island.
A painter’s light, a painter’s landscape. But the Canaries do not seem, as Simon has acknowledged, to have produced much of significance in the way of art, apart from the ubiquitous and highly visible works of César Manrique, and the collectable burlap works of Millares, which may or may not have been inspired by the Guanche mummies. De Chirico had never been here, as far as Christopher knows, although one of his paintings hangs in Simon’s gallery, although the little white towns and chapels and beaches and colonnades of the islands seem to have been created with his approval and in his style.
Back at La Suerte, Christopher has had time for a late-night laptop search (quite a strong signal) for visual arts links with the islands, but has not as yet found anything of interest. He cannot get beyond César Manrique, who crowds the screen. He has only just heard of Millares and his stitchings, and will look them up when he gets back. He has a nagging recollection that somebody once told him (a Welsh chap called Gareth Morgan with BBC Wales?) that the Welsh artist James Dickson Innes, dying of tuberculosis, had visited the Canaries for the sake of his health: could Innes, in his last days, have painted these scrub-spotted, dotted grey-green volcanic landscapes, these large skies, these turquoise lagoons, these scrawls of tufa? They do have a look of his work. They imitate his style. He made Wales look like the Canaries. And if he had painted here, does any memory of him remain, hovering, embedded, or wandering the foothills? Christopher had thought of asking Bennett about him, for Bennett is knowledgeable about the visual arts, and seems to know or have known quite a few artists, although none of them go as far back as Innes, who had died, if he remembers rightly, during the First World War. Before Bennett’s time, before Chopping and Wirth-Miller’s time, before Francis Bacon’s time, before Stanley Spencer’s time.
But he’d felt uneasy about asking Bennett. It’s not a good idea to ask old people questions they may not know how to answer. He’ll bide his time, see if the right moment for reminiscence comes.
A colouring of Ivor’s solicitude for Bennett has reached him. There is something affecting and poignant in Bennett’s game sprightliness, in his eagerness to entertain, to make the best of his last years for himself and for others.
The murals are, as he had feared, distressing, and not likely to enhance the painterly profile of Fuerteventura. They are bold, blue, expressionist, exploitative, melodramatic, public, ghastly, and appear to have been crudely slapped onto clumsily erected panels of a kind of rough plaster hardboard. They are supposed to begin with the story, Simon explains, of the original conquest in the Middle Ages: that unfinished scene shows the arrival of three ships from Lisbon in the quattrocento, with their mixed crew of Florentines, Genoese, Castilian and Portuguese adventurers, with their warhorses.
The islanders, says Simon, had never seen either horses or ships.
The next panel sketches the welcome and the feast, and the next shows the four innocent and guileless Canary islanders embarking – not as captives, not slaves, but as honoured guests – for their voyage to Lisbon. Handsome, free, elegantly clothed in embroidered goat skins. The history of enslavement has not begun. Slavery was yet to come, centuries later.
The painter had become bored by all this history, and had leaped ahead to splash away at his final and more topical panel, of a twenty-first-century shipwreck, of a sinking patera and drowning immigrants.
It is clear that Simon’s protégé is familiar with the works of Delacroix and Géricault. The Raft of the Medusa and the Senegalese patera spring from the same source, welter in the same waves. It is also clear that Ishmael has been used as a model, for there he is, recognisably himself, standing at the helm (if that’s the word) of the sinking vessel. Not a bad likeness, it must be admitted. A heroic figure, signalling hopelessly to shore, to the beach and the lighthouse and the walled cemetery of Gran Tarajal. There are bodies in the water, faces of men, women and children looking up through the water. The piece is declamatory and lacking in finesse.
Christopher, Simon and Ishmael stare silently at the image of the wreck. Ishmael shrugs, in a faint disclaimer, as though the whole thing has nothing to do with him. Although it has. ‘It had a Yamaha motor,’ he offers, as some kind of apology, some kind of explanation. Christopher can’t think of anything at all to say, in the face of this tragedy.
A brand from the burning, a soul rescued from the surges.
It is Simon who speaks. ‘Good Time and Bad Time,’ he says, enigmatically. Christopher nods, knowingly, but at a loss.
As they trudge silently down again, Christopher works out that Simon’s words remind him of Ghalia Namarome, sitting colourfully on her carpet at the airport, on hunger strike amidst the ignorant, indifferent and incurious tourist tribes. And he thinks also of some extraordinary YouTube footage he and Sara had watched together, in Queen’s Park, W10, not long before they’d come out here. YouTube had delivered to them an immigrant who had struggled ashore onto a holiday beach in Fuerteventura from a sinking vessel, as Ishmael had done: he can be seen sitting, slumped, exhausted, expressionless, amidst the parasols, and a holiday-maker had calmly filmed him as he sat there, breathless, staring at nothing. Some person had seen fit to film this moment, and then had posted it, as far as Christopher and Sara could see, without comment, for all to see.
You can see it now, unless it’s lapsed.
Holiday footage. Good Time, Bad Time.
Malta. Lampedusa. Mare Nostrum. Fuerteventura, Lanzarote, El Hierro. The Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The Pillars of Hercules. Frontex of the Frontiers. The Great Berm. The Wall of Shame.
Christopher’s daughter Amy, at the University of Sussex, is writing a 10,000-word dissertation on walls, partitions, frontiers. A big subject, for an English girl, an island girl.
Christopher has tried not to build a high wall between himself and his daughter Amy and his ex-wife Ellie. There is no wall of shame dividing them.
Sara and Christopher, late at night, safe in bed together in Queen’s Park under their duvet in a miserable and increasingly wet January, comfortable and warm, had watched the miseries of others on their little screen, not knowing that they too, or one of them, was in the firing line, on the last stretch.
It’s a pity that Sara’s months of research on devolution and repatriation had been wasted. It’s a pity that she never got to meet Tomás at the Spanish Red Cross in Puerto del Rosario. He’d been waiting for her. He’d had much to tell her, about asylum conditions, about the deportation treaties with Morocco and Nigeria.
It’s a pity she never got to meet Ishmael and hear him speak in French, English, Arabic, Wolof.
Senegal has no repatriation treaties with Spain.
The sun is warm on Bennett Carpenter’s papery creased eyelids and white eyelashes, on his tanned and freckled forehead and his bushy brows. His weathered straw hat rests idly on the table. He doesn’t worry about melanoma. He likes the warmth. He is dreaming, pleasantly, one of those strange levitating dreams of the late afternoon. At night, in deeper sleep, he dreams unpleasant, panicky but trivial dreams, of airports and lectures, of missed appointments and the malice of his enemies, dreams which reflect badly, as he sadly knows, on his lack of spiritual composure and magnanimity. But in the afternoons he sometimes wanders into better realms. Gardens, riverbanks, woodland, churches. He and Ivor, in England, in their middle period, had enjoyed visiting churches, sometimes deeply obscure and unimportant churches, humble churches hardly noticed by the county guides and Pevsner, a relief after the Moorish splendours and tragic baroque aspirations and grandiose Fascist war memorials of Spain. They did cathedrals too, but they preferred the out-of-the-way. Bennett was not religious, he was a free-thinking agnostic, and living so much with the Spanish Civil War had not inclined him towards a favourable view of the Roman Catholic or indeed of any Christian faith. He wouldn’t have said he was anti-clerical, but he was.
His parents had also been agnostics, although, when questioned or required to fill in a form, they meekly said they were Church of England. It was easier that way.
Ivor, ever faithful to Bennett’s beliefs, had, as it seemed, shared his conventional scepticism. But Bennett had once seen him crossing himself and mildly and reverently inclining his head, in an unassuming little Norman church on a dry knoll in the spreading flatness of the pylon-bestridden Midlands. Dry Doddington, that had been the name of the village. Ivor didn’t know Bennett had seen him, but he had.
Had he been saying a covert prayer for Bennett, whose health was limping unevenly downhill? Or praying for action, for release?
Not very long after this moment, they had moved to the dry Canaries, to a new life and to new townscapes for which Pevsner offered no guide. For which, in Bennett’s view, a guide would be very beneficial.
He doesn’t yet know he has a possible convert in the entertaining and lively young Christopher Stubbs.
Bennett, dozing on Simon’s terrace, dreams he is sitting on a riverbank by the derelict little flour mill near his grandparents’ home in Leicestershire. He had played and fished there as a little boy, with his big brothers, and sometimes returns there in his dreams, peaceably but with a sense of longing, always hoping that the great fish he once glimpsed there will swim up into the sunny shallows from the flowing sunlit electric-green weedfronded depths of the slowly flowing water. The fish never comes, and his brothers had never believed him when he told them what he had seen. A great broad-headed fish, as large as a baby. It had risen up, basked a little, then descended into the depths. A tench, a dace, a pike?
His brothers had teased him for years, for decades, about the large fish he said he had seen.
‘The fish that got away,’ they tediously teased him.
They had envied his professional success, his worldly acclaim, his honour. Sir Bennett Carpenter. They hadn’t liked that, though they had to pretend they did. They had fared well enough, but not as well as he.
They are both dead now.
These recurring dreams of a smugly archetypal fish are pastoral and full of yearning, but they are also light in spirit. They belong to a time before his life had been contaminated by ambition, competition, academe, success and sex. To the time when he first met young Owen English.
Owen is a romantic. His life has been lonely. It had begun well, but it had ended in a chilly loneliness. Owen, Bennett believes, lives in some sort of retirement home in damp and foggy Cambridge, at the mercy of the winds from the east, writing a monograph about clouds. It had been good to lure him over to the sun for a week or two at Christmas. He’d been an easy and appreciative guest.
Bennett has been blessed in the company and dedication of Ivor Walters. On some levels of his waking and dreaming, he knows this, and on other levels he resists the knowledge and feels he has been confined by Ivor’s fidelity.
Ivor had been the most beautiful young man anyone could ever have desired to see. He was a pure calm blond Aryan beauty from Staines. Whereas Bennett had been squat and comic and verbose, clever and impetuous and colourful, witty and adored. Highly coloured, highly charged, high blood pressure, bad lungs.
Beauty and the Beast.
In his later years, the mildly demented poet Alphonse de Lamartine often escaped after dinner and they would find him wandering in the fields. Bennett sometimes thinks of this, as he thinks of Unamuno. They were both, in their way, casualties of revolutionary politics.
Bennett occasionally puzzles Ivor with a phrase which he cannot decode. ‘I apprehend caducity,’ says Bennett. He says it in the same mournful but dignified tone in which he announces, ‘I’ve lost my alacrity’.
Ivor doesn’t understand the word ‘caducity’. He can’t even find it in his dictionary. Maybe that’s because he doesn’t know how to spell it. And he doesn’t like to ask.
Fran, sitting in her stationary little Peugeot, unable to advance or retreat, says to herself: you’re a fucking idiot, you’re a fucking stubborn old fool, what the fuck do you think you’re doing? Are you mad?
Valerie Heritage had emailed the night before to tell her that the road was risky and the forecast bad. But that hadn’t put her off, oh no, not at all. It had egged her on. She’d set off, well before dawn, to drive westward to the marshes, and here she is, where satnav has brought her: to a standstill on a country road that isn’t even a B road.
She reflects, angrily, that she is here because of that fucking awful depressingly stupid and yet mesmerising production of Happy Days, which she and Jo had clocked up three nights ago. Jo had doubled it with an appointment with a foot surgeon, to see if anything could be done about her hammer toe.
It couldn’t.
Fran can’t understand why Jo couldn’t have seen a foot surgeon in Cambridge, which must have both demand and supply for this specialty, but apparently the best man for the job is Mr Sillitoe at St Luke’s in Chelsea. The choice of Sillitoe, she gathers, also had something to do with Jo’s late husband’s medical insurance.
Claude had approved the name of surgeon Sillitoe, when Fran had mentioned it. He’s a good man, Claude said.
The name is bizarre. Had the name affected his career choice? Samuel Beckett had a hammer toe. He also had an obsession with the slow processes of dying. Fran had really really disliked this. He’d lived to a good old age, hadn’t he, so what had he been on about?
His mother, the Second World War – she k
new the theories.
Sitting grimly upright on a small hard insecure seat through the mercifully short Happy Days, watching Maroussia Darling playing Winnie buried up to her neck in sand, Fran had been through torments of resistance and denial, on her own behalf, on behalf of all the ageing women in the land. Boredom and rage had combined and accumulated in her, minute after minute, as Maroussia sat there, trapped beneath the pitiless lights of the stage sun. It didn’t help to know that Maroussia Darling was herself in poor health, and that this would probably be her last bravura stage performance. This was not general knowledge: she had had it from Jo, who had it from Jo’s friend Eleanor, who had been Maroussia Darling’s friend and neighbour in Highbury for forty years. Why Maroussia would agree to play such a death-confronting role at her time of life and in her state of health was another mystery. It could hardly be an accidental or arbitrary choice. It couldn’t be very cheery, going through that stuff night after night, knowing you weren’t going to leap up rejuvenated when the curtain fell.
Of course, at the end, there was the applause, indeed a standing ovation. Maybe, at the end, what we need most, in order to make a good exit, is applause. Applause, in a showy part. Going out bravely. And, for Maroussia, this grim evening was also work, paid work. Work is a saviour, of sorts. Fran had thought several times, during the short but interminable stage performance, of her Ashley Combe contract, of the smallish but honourable sums of money that would slide silently into her bank account. She always checked online to see if they were there. They always were. They were a lifeline, in more ways than one.
‘The theatre is so uncomfortable,’ Jo had conceded to Fran over their post-show plate of pasta. ‘I’m glad we went, but it really is an endurance test.’
‘It’s our age,’ said Fran, who didn’t want to be too negative, as Jo had bought the tickets. ‘The young people didn’t seem to care about comfort at all. There were a lot of young people there, I thought. Is Beckett in fashion?’
The Dark Flood Rises Page 19