The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  ‘I suppose he is,’ said Jo, poking suspiciously at a foreign body in her linguine.

  ‘I used to be able to stand, at the back of the cinema,’ said Fran. ‘I couldn’t do that now.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ said Jo.

  Yes, that’s how much of their conversation had gone, reflected Fran. There’d been some asides about Jo’s discovery of some Spanish Civil War diaries, but she had not quite got to grips with why Jo found them so interesting. She couldn’t really follow the meanderings of Jo’s research project, which seemed of late to have changed direction. She’d been more absorbed with the Beckett theme. And here she is now, stuck on a flooded road, with a useless satnav, wondering what on earth she was supposed to do next. She’d been so angry with Samuel Beckett and Winnie that she’d ignored all the weather warnings and set off defiantly. She’d rather die fighting, like Siward the Dane, than lying in a ditch, like a cow, or buried up to her neck with a handbag, like Winnie. But now she is in a predicament. It’s a narrow road, and she can see three stationary vehicles ahead of her, before a curving corner around which she can’t see, and behind her there are a couple of cars. Everything, over time, has come to a halt. There is standing water on the road, inches of it. If she could get moving, she could drive through it, at whatever risk to her gear box or exhaust or whatever parts of the car are most vulnerable to water, but she can’t move. She has switched her engine off, and looks down at the pedals. It’s hard to see, in modern cars, what connects with what, or where the water would rise, if it were to start to rise. Everything is concealed, sealed off, hidden away. Where’s the air intake, which presumably will turn into a water intake if this goes on? She’s no idea.

  Is it called the footwell, this place where her feet and the pedals are? What an odd word, one she’s never had cause to use. It won’t be good if it starts to fill up with water, as wells do.

  It’s still raining, no longer heavily, but persistently. She’s always thought of herself as a competent driver, but she knows she’s not a mechanic. She wouldn’t know what to do with a submerging car. Will her engine and her electrical system be ruined? She seems to remember reading that one should never drive into water that is more than four inches deep, or flowing, or more than half way up the wheels. She opens her window and stares down. Is it already halfway up the wheels? Is it rising? She can’t see. She’s in no danger, no danger at all, she could easily (well, quite easily) get out and wade through that brown weed-filled ditch of reeds and teasels and clamber up that muddy willow bank and make an AA rescue call, but she doesn’t want to abandon her poor vehicle. If she gets out, she’ll be really and truly stranded, in the February countryside, with her handbag. Stranded, stupid, feckless.

  Bloody old fool.

  There hadn’t been any ‘Road Closed’ notices. These other fools, young and old, had gone ahead as well as her, and followed her from behind. Why the fuck hadn’t they kept moving? What’s stopping them? Is there some disaster around that corner, stopping them all in their tracks? If you keep moving, you don’t get stuck. Should she get out and ask the driver in the car in front what’s going on? Should she make contact with the chap in the car behind? She doesn’t like the look of him in her mirror. He’s youngish, red-faced, with ginger sideburns, and is wearing a grey and white striped woolly hat. He looks cross (she can’t blame him for that) and is talking angrily into his mobile phone. His car (she peers) is, she thinks, a Toyota. A metal grey not-so-new country-style Toyota.

  French cars are better made than Japanese cars. Or they used to be.

  She doesn’t really fancy getting her feet wet. She’d rather drown than get her feet wet. Her comfortable smart fawn red-laced suede shoes are far from watertight. She’s got wellies in the boot, but she can’t get at them without wading. Should she ring Valerie Heritage? She’s only been here five minutes, nothing by London traffic-jam standards, but it seems like hours. It won’t matter if she’s late, it won’t matter if she doesn’t get there at all, but she doesn’t want Valerie Heritage to be cross with her. This delay is constructing in Valerie Heritage’s name a figure of authority and disapproval, a superior being who will look down on Fran as an incompetent idiot.

  Fran hates reversing. She’s bad at reversing. She really really doesn’t want to have to reverse out of this impasse, back down this narrow road. She wants to go on.

  At the moment she has no choice. She can’t move.

  She’d switched off her engine, but now she turns it back on to make contact with her radio. So far so good, everything still working. Woman’s Hour! Wonderful! Jenni Murray! Wonderful!

  They are talking about assisted suicide, which isn’t quite so wonderful. She’s all in favour of it, of course. But not yet. As St Augustine said, not yet. Not now, not yet.

  She switches it off.

  She thinks of her new-old friend Teresa, who probably doesn’t approve of assisted suicide, because she is a believer, of a sort, although she would be far too polite and considerate to argue unpleasantly about it with Fran.

  Irritation and frustration are building up in Fran, along with the increasingly large and portentous figure of the judgmental Warden of Westmore Marsh Sheltered Housing. She can hear a bit of hooting and engine revving ahead, as though some movement were about to start to happen, but it dies down again. She thinks there’s probably a little bridge a bit further on, one of the many little low bridges in this watery flatland of the Levels, and maybe that’s what’s stopping them.

  Gripped by boredom, depressed by the brown, bare and hardly budding twigs of the hedgerow and by the dead wood of yesteryear, she starts to text everybody she knows, or everyone with whom she is on texting terms. She doesn’t want to ring them, she doesn’t want to speak to anybody, she just wants to make some kind of contact.

  She texts Josephine Drummond, Teresa Quinn, Paul Scobey, Peter Boddicote of Ashley Combe, her daughter Poppet, and her ex-daughter-in-law Ella, with whom she tried to maintain a friendship, for the sake of the grandchildren.

  She doesn’t text Claude, he doesn’t do texts.

  NOT WAVING MAYBE DROWNING, she idly texts Christopher, then notices that her battery has lost one of its little segment things, and switches her mobile off. She’d better conserve what’s left of it. It doesn’t occur to her that her message might be enigmatic.

  Christopher, in the warm dry south but in the same time zone as his mother, receives this message as he sits on Bennett’s terrace with a mid-morning high-caffeine solo coffee in an eloquently foreign little glass cup, a vessel which reminds him of youth, of other lives, of paths not taken. What is his stupid mother up to now? It’s not like her not to sign off properly. She invariably signs herself off as Fx.

  He texts her back. WHERE R U? CX

  He is beginning to worry, at times, about Fran. There is something slightly manic about her restlessness. She buzzes about too much. What is she after? She’s not ill, like Claude: if anything, she’s a bit too well. She should slow down.

  He knows he ought to be moving on from this warm plateau, getting back to London to organise some work, to confront the next problematically open phase of his career, but La Suerte is seductive. The weather in England has been dreadful, dark and unprecedentedly wet and gloomy, global-warming-gloomy, drown-in-a ditch gloomy, and he knows he would have to get to grips with the meaning of the absence of Sara were he to go home to their empty London flat in expensive but joyless Queen’s Park. He enjoys the undemanding and appreciative company of Ivor and Bennett. There is something restful about their intercourse, with its practised repartee, its occasional flashes of mild outgoing malice or of comic inward mutual reproach. They have weathered it out together, these two: their non-marriage has in years outlasted most of the marriages he has known, and without legal or any other discernible compulsion. It is good being with a couple so calm, so un-needy. They don’t need him, but they like him to be there. He feels liberated into an unusually comfortable sense of inertia.

  The
temperature is benign. Blood, air, water, and a light and favourable breeze.

  The Simon Aguilera outing had added colour and drama to the sense of a prevailing washed-up peace. The story of Ishmael is too strange. How could one ever know what was going on, in that handsome head of his? Sara would have been able to make contact with him, on a more serious political level, on an ethnic and linguistic level, but Christopher knows he cannot. He is too English. However cosmopolitan a life he leads, however international the so-called ‘arts scene’ which brings him his livelihood, he is English. It’s out-of-date, being English, in the modern world. His quasi-professional alliance with Sara (for they were of the media, had met through the media) had seemed to lead him onwards, but it has been killed off in its infancy. He has no idea where to go next. Sara’s death had been so sudden, so utterly unexpected and unprogrammed. So meaningless. Cut off in the prime of life.

  He thinks, suddenly, of the painter Pauline Boty, the beautiful blonde, the Wimbledon Bardot, who had died even younger than Sara. She’d died in the mid-1960s, if he remembers rightly, at the age of twenty-eight, of malignant thymoma, a rare kind of cancer, as rare as the pheochromocytoma that had killed Sara. Some ten years ago he’d made a programme about Boty’s work as a pop artist, when there’d been a revival of interest in her, marked by a scattering of exhibitions, at home and abroad. He’d interviewed some of those who had known her in the 1960s, and had got into a memorable spat with a feminist about Boty’s agenda on sexism. The feminist had insisted on portraying Boty as embattled and ill-treated, the victim of discrimination. Christopher hadn’t been able to read her in that way at all. To him, she had seemed powerful, free-spirited, experimental, erotic and happy in her body. Of course, he’d never met her, but neither had the feminist. They’d both been infants when she died.

  The feminist person had made much of the fact that Boty had told the novelist Nell Dunn, in an interview the year before she died, that she thought she had ‘an ugly cunt’, because she’d played with it as a child, trying to make herself look more like her brothers. Trying, presumably, to grow a penis. The feminist person had interpreted this as an illustration of Boty’s subjection to a male stereotype, but to Christopher it had seemed to be something quite different – an example of extraordinary self-confidence and outspokenness, a certainty of her own strength. A woman who could say to an interviewer, ‘I used to think I had an ugly cunt’, and be prepared to look at the words in print, was afraid of nothing. The feminist person, thought Christopher, had imposed her own reading on Boty’s life, had retrospectively attempted to deny her beauty, her womanhood, her lifeblood.

  He’d been very rude to that woman, but she had been provocative. It had made good TV, but it had handed ammunition to the enemy. Christopher, for a while, had been reviled in the press as a sexist swine, or hailed as an Iron Man. He hadn’t liked either role.

  Sara is newly dead, Pauline Boty is long dead, Simon Aguilera’s wife is long dead, and Ishmael is improbably very much alive.

  He ought to be heading home, away from the Fortunate Isles, but he can’t make himself get round to booking a flight, and he knows Ivor doesn’t want him to leave just yet. He feels for Ivor. Ivor has been almost uncannily helpful about Sara’s Transaerovac insurance invoices, and tactful with it. He’d instantly got on good terms with the lawyers for Sara’s production company, Falling Water, back home, and with the insurance company’s representatives on the island. What could have been a prolonged and expensive legal tussle has been smoothed out for him. Ivor is good at managing. He’s negotiated the hotel bills, some of them left unpaid during the outgoing flurry. (The bar bills would have been, potentially, revealing.) He has decades of expertise, from managing the erratic and temperamental Bennett and his many medical mini-crises around the globe.

  Ivor has revealed to Christopher that he has learned the phrase ‘The professor has lost his glasses’ in several different languages, including Japanese. He’s not a linguist, but, like Bennett, he’s a mimic, and can sound misleadingly convincing in foreign tongues. Der Professor hat seine Brille verloren. Le Professeur a perdu ses lunettes. Il Professore ha perso gli occhiali. El Profesor ha perdido sus gafas. He has even learned the difference between glasses mislaid in Spanish territories (gafas) and glasses mislaid in Mexico (lentes), and the polite non-judgmental way of saying that the professor’s glasses have gone and lost themselves. ‘I have lost my glasses’ becomes ‘Se me olvido mis anteojos’.

  The title of Professor goes down well, around the globe. It’s multilingual, and it commands just the right degree of respect. Respect without sycophancy.

  Ivor has promised to display his linguistic expertise on the topic of mislaid glasses this very afternoon, on a post-siesta visit with Christopher to the Grand Hotel to see if by any chance Christopher’s expensive tinted varifocals have turned up. They are highly desirable, but not much use to anyone else, as Christopher has one long eye, one short eye, and his prescription is highly personalised. (Christopher is ashamed of how much he’d paid for these specs, but he is a public person and he needs to look good. They are – or were? – by way of being his trademark.) The management has promised to keep looking for them, and there is no harm in going round there to nudge them.

  Bennett has declined the outing, he says he’s tired, he’ll stay at La Suerte and re-read Saramago’s Stone Raft. He’s now remembered the name of the apocalyptic book that had eluded him over the sea bass in the restaurant at Nazaret. Renewed reports this morning of yet more tremors off westerly El Hierro have combined to summon up the title of this entertaining novel, in which his late friend Saramago imagines that the whole of the Iberian peninsula has broken free from the continental land mass along the ridge of the Pyrenees and drifted out into the Atlantic. Excellent. He enjoys alternative, what-if histories, though some of them can be rather silly. What if the Germans had won the First World War, what if Hitler had been assassinated, what if Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated. There’s quite a vogue for them these days, he gathers. Although of course Saramago is in a class of his own.

  Winston Churchill had planned to invade the Canaries, if the Germans had seized Gibraltar. He had 24,000 men on standby, in Operation Pilgrim, but he had never had to do it.

  There are far more than 24,000 Brits in the Canaries now.

  Simon Aguilera had been the victim of revisionism, on his father’s behalf. Inevitable, really. We do so like to unpick heroism. Revisionists have gone over George Orwell’s record in the Spanish Civil War with what we used to call a toothcomb, whatever a toothcomb may be. Orwell revisionists have revised Orwell revisionists. POUM, the NKVD, Harry Pollitt, Arthur Koestler, Victor Gollancz. We petty men do find ourselves dishonourable graves . . . Of course Carlos Aguilera couldn’t have escaped that posthumous process. Too much ideology, too many careers invested in the arguments.

  Owen England had liked Simon’s Augustus John drawing of Valentine Studdert Meade, commissioned by Valentine’s Cambridge-based parents in support of Artists International. Simon’s uncles, martyrs of the Civil War, had known Valentine. Valentine had died young. Valentine had been a beautiful young man. Owen had been beautiful once, in his Downing days. Hard for Bennett to remember that now. Unlike Ivor, he hasn’t kept even a shadow of his youthful beauty. He’s just a fidgety dried-up rather yellow old man. But at least he’s still alive.

  Of course, he’s a lot older than Ivor.

  Studdert Meade’s father Hubert had translated most of Aeschylus and Euripides. Bad Edwardian verse translations, not even useful as a crib.

  Bennett thinks he’ll settle in the shade, and browse through Saramago’s whimsical Quixotic apocalypse. He’s got a bit of a headache, and fancies he can feel a slight pulmonary flutter in his upper left chest. He’s been a little unsteady on his feet today. He doesn’t need a trip to the Grand Hotel in Costa Teguise. And the young men will enjoy an outing on their own, without the old boy holding forth and holding them up. He’d be happy for Ivor to strike up
a friendship with Christopher. It would be good for both of them.

  He’s amused by the thought of himself ‘holding forth’. Ivor’s been very good at keeping him under control.

  But he knows he holds Ivor up. He can’t walk very fast these days. And he’d nearly slipped on the stairs down to the car deck on the ferry back to Playa Blanca. He apprehends caducity. Best to take it easy, at his age.

  Fran has been extricated from the impasse and the mud and the ditch. It hadn’t been easy, and it hadn’t been very dignified, though all the drivers had been, as it were, in the same boat, and none of them was able to blame the others. There had been no opportunity for abuse of women drivers. She had been sandwiched in the middle, and they were all bloody fools. The operation had involved the police, a tractor and some tricky reversing, and the ginger sideburns in the Toyota behind had been quite helpful. (Well, he had to be, didn’t he?) Fran’s car is now safely but inaccessibly parked in a sloping field, up on some higher ground, and Fran, insisting on progress rather than retreat, has been delivered to Westmore Marsh by tractor and is now drying her feet in Valerie Heritage’s office. Valerie has given her a very nice small red and yellow checked fluffy hand towel for this purpose. Fran’s old bare feet create an intimacy between them. Fran hasn’t got a hammer toe, though she has got bunions. But Valerie Heritage is familiar with bunions, and worse.

  It is an adventure. That’s the best way of looking at it.

  Valerie is not censorious. She doesn’t suggest that Fran’s stubbornness is highly inconvenient, and that stranded Fran is a bloody nuisance. Instead, she offers a towel and a cup of coffee, and says she’ll see about sandwiches. Fran had been careful, in her emails, to say that she wouldn’t be needing lunch, but in the circumstances, she might as well accept. Now that she’s getting less cross and less anxious, she is beginning to feel hungry.