The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  It’s a fairly remote spot for a retirement home. Most of the Athene Group’s properties are in the suburbs of small towns or just off ring roads, in quiet seaside resorts or in new-build precincts, in cathedral cities or university towns. Valerie explains Westmore Marsh. It’s expensive. It has an experimental design, innovative features and an upmarket clientele, consisting of clients who would hitherto have been housed in converted country homes and historic decommissioned mental institutions with Grade Two listings. Fran understands the background? Yes, Fran does. Those who still have family have relatives with good access to transport, with cars or drivers or accounts with the local taxi company. And the amenities here really are very very pleasant. It looks better in better weather, of course, but it’s always pleasant.

  Yes, Fran would like a ham and cheese toastie.

  Poor Peugeot, perched alone on a sloping furrow.

  Most of them really like it here, continues Valerie.

  Of course, the boot is on the other foot. It is Valerie Heritage who has to prove herself to Fran, for Fran is in the position of the inspector, Valerie the inspected. Ashley Combe’s endorsement and investment are important to Westmore Marsh. Hence the towel and the toastie. Fran is so deeply incapable of seeing herself in a powerful position that, when she is involved in a tricky situation such as this, she is not good at discerning obsequious mannerisms or the gradations of subservience. She is always ready to put herself in the wrong, and in this instance has succeeded very thoroughly in so doing.

  Valerie is a competent woman. Her accent Fran had been unable to place, during their only phone conversation, but she now begins to understand that she is from Bristol, and that her speech aspires to merge with that of her superior county clientele. As does her outfit. Her shoes are classic expensive brown leather lace-up (Fran tries but fails to remember the footwear of Suzette in West Brom, which certainly wasn’t at all like this) and she is wearing a suit of a heathery tweed, enlivened and lightened by a lilac-pink silky polo neck. Quite a cunning combo.

  Fran had managed under stress to remember to extract her flower-patterned wellies from the car boot when the car came to rest in its field, along with her hessian bag, and now she puts them on. They feel scratchy and uncomfortable, on her bare feet, but her shoes and socks were soaked and are now drying out on a radiator. She is recovering enough to want to explore the eco-village, but the weather has not recovered. It is still raining. She can tell that Valerie is not at all eager to venture outdoors, into the wet. Fran will have to content herself with being shown around the Retirement Living part of the complex.

  Yet more unwelcome aspects of her predicament are beginning to make themselves apparent, but she pushes them to the back of her mind and sips her hot coffee, and distracts herself by volunteering the information that she has a friend who lives very comfortably in an Athene retirement home in Cambridge. Does Valerie know Athene Grange? Yes, she does, it was one of the company’s earliest ventures, and very successful and well established, always fully occupied and much in demand. They discuss, in a low-key mode, the changing vocabulary of care homes and accommodation for the elderly: Retirement Living, Later Living, Assisted Living . . . There is no full-time assistance available here at Westmore Marsh, and Valerie herself is present only from ten o’clock to four in the afternoon on weekdays. They discuss fees, rentals, maintenance and extras, and Fran makes notes and stuffs a lot of smiling brochures into her hessian bag.

  It’s expensive, getting old. This place makes Dorothy’s £390 a week seem like a bargain. And God knows what Persephone is costing Claude.

  Valerie walks her round, introducing her to one or two residents. The accommodation is good, well planned and thoughtful. The architect had not been forbiddingly ambitious, although he is, in ecological terms, avant-garde. The guest suite, not unlike the one she had stayed in at Cambridge for Jo’s birthday party, is very pleasant and, like the Cambridge suites, costs only twenty pounds a night to guests of residents. The show flat, also furnished by the Trust, is soothing, with its turquoise-and-ivory framed prints of birds and butterflies, its cool beige incident-free furniture, its deep-pile old rose rugs, its handy fitted modern kitchen where no appliances are plugged in on skirting boards at ground level. Fran has a sudden urge to give up the struggle and move in to Westmore Marsh at once and begin to lead a restful orderly stationary life.

  She makes notes on her notepad.

  She loves going round other people’s homes, imagining herself becoming another person, born again. She’d be quite different, surely, if she lived in a model apartment like this. Maybe it’s not too late to try?

  In the communal lounge, two men and two women are grouped around a coffee table, the men reading newspapers, one of the women busy with a colourful iPad, the other woman doing a crossword in a puzzle book. They greet Valerie with what seems like a mixture of friendly respect and social condescension, register Fran’s visiting card with the name of Ashley Combe, comment in jocular manner to Fran that she’s chosen a bad day for sightseeing. Fran explains her wellies and the state of the rural approach road. Yes, she’d been brought here on a tractor, quite an adventure! They talk about the weather, about what a long winter it’s been, about climate change and dredging and the River Parrett, about the local flooding. Westmore Marsh has been standing up well, they tell her. They don’t seem deeply interested in its novel architecture.

  The crossword puzzler pays no attention to the weather talk, but chips in to read out one of her clues to Fran and Valerie: I’m really stuck on this one, she says, and this lot can’t help, they’re useless, what do you think? I’m hopeless too, says Fran, but miraculously she gets the answer in a trice. Big yellow bird is the clue, 4 and 7, ends with an A, first letter G. Gran Canaria, says Fran, without even thinking. Spot on! says the puzzler, joyfully, gratefully, humbly, and fills it in.

  And so the hours pass, and so the days pass, and so the years pass.

  Fran explains that although she’s not very good at crosswords, the Canaries are on her mind because her son is in Lanzarote, and that must be why the words had come to mind so quickly. (She doesn’t describe the circumstances of his visit: they will assume he is on holiday.) Three of the quartet have been to the Canaries, and proceed competitively to compare the attractions of Tenerife and Lanzarote. Grotty Lanzarote, says the Tenerife champion. Not at all, says the iPad woman, it’s Tenerife that’s grotty, all that high-rise; Lanzarote is very well cared for, it’s really manicured, or it was when I was there. Immaculate. Not a plastic bag in sight.

  Fran isn’t really listening. She wants to get out into the rain to see how the landscaped ponds and hollows are coping with the run-off. She doesn’t think this cosily marooned indoor quartet would be very interested in that. She had thought they might have been, but, now she sees them, looking at them, she can see they would not. They don’t go out much, she can tell.

  She is also worrying about how she is going to get back to London without causing too much trouble to herself or anyone else. Valerie Heritage says the minor B road towards the West and the A303 is still open, but that’s not much use to her, as her car is stuck in a field to the east. She’ll have to order a taxi from Taunton or Bridgwater, it will cost a fortune. She really doesn’t want to have to spend a night here, even though the guest suite is such good value and looks so temptingly comfortable. How on earth would she fill in the rest of the day? It’s only midday. She supposes the Trust would pay, for a taxi or for the suite, but she feels guilty, she should have heeded the weather warnings, she knows already that she’ll never be bold enough to put in a bill for her own folly.

  She would die of boredom if she had to spend much more time with the crossword and iPad quartet.

  On the other hand, there is something to be said for inspecting the rest of the development in these challenging conditions. Valerie gives her a site map, but, with a glance at her own well-polished shoes, sensibly declines to accompany her, so off Fran goes on her own, under he
r umbrella, to splash around exploring the layout of detention ponds and balancing ponds, admiring the green roofs of the new building units, looking out for the green swale. It’s a new word to her, ‘swale’, and she likes it. The terrain seems to be coping well with the groundwater, better than the country lane with its reeds and its teasels and its traffic jam. There is some standing water in the main car park, but nothing too serious. Westmore Marsh is a new village, of some affordable but mostly unaffordable housing, built on what was once a small and secret Second World War airfield. Who can be choosing to live in this flat out-of-the-way place? Is there some kind of Intelligence Unit nearby, providing discreet employment for the sons and daughters of those who once serviced the air field? A kind of offshoot of Porton Down or GCHQ?

  She’s visited care homes and sheltered housing built in some strange spots in her time. There was one in a little market town near Oxford called The Old Gaol. She hadn’t thought that a very suitable name for a care home. Better than the Old Abattoir, which had once been tactlessly proposed for a development in Sunderland. But not that good, as she had pointed out. At least Westmore Marsh is innocuously, if too appropriately, named.

  She finds what she thinks may be the swale. It’s a sort of ditch, between two muddy grassy banks, and its purpose seems to be to absorb and carry groundwater and rainwater away from the clusters of new buildings, towards the river, towards the estuary. Is it the same sort of thing as a rhyne? Is swale a fancy new name for a rhyne? A word fished out of the dictionary? She likes it, anyway. She likes this ditch.

  Rhynes and reans. According to Paul, who should know, one of the most notorious and impoverished Black Country estates is called Whitmore Reans. Whitmore Reans, formerly known as Hungry Leas. It is still hungry but it has food banks now.

  She thinks again of Suzette and Aunt Dorothy, the Sleeping Beauty. She is glad she met them. She should send Dorothy a card.

  She stands, under her Liquorice Allsorts striped umbrella, and gazes at the brown water. She knows what she ought to do, if she had any sense. She knows someone who would know all about rhynes and swales and culverts and run-off and the Michael Pitt Flood Review, and she also knows she’s only fifteen miles away.

  I’m a coward, says Fran to herself, glumly, in the dripping rain. I’m reluctant to go to impose myself upon my own daughter.

  Christopher and Ivor have reached the bar in the atrium of the ziggurat hotel and are sitting in an indoor grove amidst small palms and cacti, beneath a high dome of tropical lianas and vines and blossoming bougainvillea. Bloated languid pink and silver and golden fishes swim lazily in shallow water around their feet. They are sipping a glass of Prosecco. They are celebrating the finding of Christopher’s glasses. His glasses had lost themselves, and, with a little encouragement from Ivor, had found themselves. They had been sitting in a safe in the manager’s office, along with, the suave young gentleman confided, some pieces of quite serious jewellery that have been unclaimed for months. Not jewellery de voyage, but real stones. He had managed to look simultaneously disapproving of this negligence and proud of the careless richesses of his clientele. He had also informed them that there had been that afternoon another large tremor off El Hierro, and joked that maybe a new westerly isle would arise from the ocean bed. There have been many sightings over the centuries of the phantom isle of San Borondon, the eighth Canary, but maybe this time it will at last manifest itself! Bets are already being taken on how soon after it emerges the San Borondon airport will open.

  San Borondon, St Brendan’s Isle. Lucky Bennett isn’t here to tell them more about it than they need to know. Bennett is interested in the fact that Oscar Wilde’s surgeon father, visiting the Canaries as a young man in the 1830s, had claimed that the mummified Guanche remains he saw there had reminded him of Celtic heads found in Irish tumuli. ‘The sculls I was shown of those aborigines were decidedly of a well-formed Caucasian race; the forehead low, but not retreating like the negro.’ And no less an authority than Sabin Berthelot had suggested a Celtic connection on the basis of megalithic structures on El Hierro (also known as l’Isle de Fer, Ferro, the Iron Island). Berthelot came to believe that the Canarians had crossed the Atlantic and reached America. Oscar Wilde’s father speculated that the Guanches were of ‘a branch of the great Libyan or Atlantic stock’, whose history was, he conceded, ‘wrapped in obscurity’.

  Bennett finds all this speculation fascinating, and some of it has settled in Ivor’s memory, whether he wants it there or not. Owen English had been a better listener than Ivor, but then he hadn’t had to listen to so much of it. Owen had particularly liked the Celtic possibilities.

  Christopher and Ivor sit comfortably with one another, free of responsibility for Sir Bennett and his needs and his whims. Christopher is airing his problems with the television company which has recently dispensed with his services, and wondering, as Ivor had hoped that he might, if he could find a project that would bring him back to the Canaries. It’s so scenic, it’s so theatrical, it’s so painterly, it so asks to be painted and to be filmed, says Christopher, but all you get back home are tourist movies and bodies on beaches.

  With the exception, of course, of that footage of the immigrant sitting on the sand at Gran Tarajal which he and Sara had gazed at it in their bed. A different kind of body on a beach. He describes it to Ivor, who makes a gesture as though to cross himself.

  It’s obvious to Ivor that Christopher hasn’t got the wish or doesn’t feel he has the right to encroach on Sara’s human rights territory, but there are many other areas to explore. It is while they are discussing the case of Simon Aguilera and Ishmael and the ghastly murals in the tower that Ivor’s mobile starts to bleep at him, and he apologetically responds to it, in case it is Bennett.

  It is Bennett. He has had a fall, he’s not well, he sounds confused and faint, his voice is breaking up and soon vanishes completely. Shit, says Ivor, snapping his phone off and then on again.

  Shit, repeats Ivor.

  So it’s happened.

  He tries to ring back, updates Christopher on what he’s heard, and they decide, before hitting the road to La Suerte, that Ivor should ring for an ambulance to meet them there. While he’s ringing, Christopher throws a large pile of euros on the table (the last thing he wants is another pursuant bar bill from Las Salinas) and off they go.

  They get to La Suerte before the ambulance, to find Bennett on the terrace, lying awkwardly with a crumpled leg, and semi-propped-up against an unsupportive frail cane table. He seems conscious, but he is groaning. He must have managed to trip on one of the only steps on the premises, a shallow step leading from the open glass doors from the living room down onto the stone terrace. Or perhaps he has had a stroke, a heart attack? He is beyond cogent speech. Ivor kneels by him, Christopher goes to the kitchen to find a glass of water, in case a glass of water might be of use. (He later learns that it would have been not useful but dangerous, but how was he to have known that?)

  ‘What happened, what happened?’ Ivor is repeating, uselessly, when they hear the welcome sound of the approaching ambulance, on its way from not-very-distant Arrecife. Christopher has a strong sense of déjà vu as the paramedics check Bennett’s pulse, heart rate, or whatever it is that they are checking. They seem to think he has broken his leg, or his hip. Is it safe to move him? He’s not as heavy as some old men Christopher knows, not nearly as heavy as Claude, who is still corpulent, sustained by his ex-wife’s plated meals and by Persephone and by inertia. But he’s no lightweight either, and not very pliable. Christopher can hardly bear to watch as they ease him onto a stretcher and into the back of the startlingly yellow vehicle.

  Ivor clambers in with the recumbent Bennett. He gestures to Christopher to come too. Christopher is not sure what his role should be.

  But he thinks he’d better stick with Ivor.

  He doesn’t want to be left alone at La Suerte.

  Maybe he can make himself useful at the hospital.

  He recues the b
ook that had been wedged under Bennett’s knee by his fall. Stone Raft. He puts it into his shoulder bag. Maybe Bennett will come round shortly and want to pick up Saramago’s novel where he left off. One always needs a good book to read, in the tedium of a hospital.

  When Sara was dying, he’d been kept company somewhat inappropriately by a colourful new book about a 1990s forgery/ attribution scandal, involving impeccably trustworthy art historian Esther Breuer, who is a friend of his equally impeccable Auntie Jo, and some of his more foolish, gullibly greedy and unlikeable colleagues in the world of media and the visual arts. He’d also summoned up for company a cloud of titles – thrillers, books about the 2008 financial crash, biographies, misery memoirs – purchased somewhat randomly on his e-reader.

  He’s not a very persistent reader; he reads very fast and very badly.

  Stone Raft is the first edition of an English translation from the Portuguese (Bennett can’t easily read Portuguese) and it is a signed copy, dedicated to ‘My good friend Bennett, Comrade in Arms, La Suerte, August 2004’. But Christopher doesn’t know that yet. When he does discover it, in the small hours, at a time when he has nothing better to do, he still won’t know that Saramago remained a Communist until his dying day. He’ll have more than enough time to puzzle inconclusively about whether ‘comrade in arms’ has anything to do with Bennett’s political history, or whether it’s simply a jocular reference to their joint membership of the literary profession.

  But he does now remember, disconcertingly, as the ambulance speeds along, a prissy and entertaining old-style gallery owner, an old queen with a proud white crest of hair, who had broken his femur. He’d broken that big bone badly. He’d broken it in St John’s Wood, in his home – home, that most dangerous of places – by slipping as he trod on a pretentious glossy arts magazine that he’d left at the top of his stairs. (He’d left it there deliberately, he later explained at pedantic length, because at night he always left things he wanted to take down in the morning at the top of the stairs, so he could retrieve them from the fourth step down without bending down too far as he went down to his breakfast. He’d got it all worked out, but his cunning had undone him.)