Very very slippery, he had delighted to repeat, as he blamed his downfall on the highly laminated texture of the Renaissance Review, a very suspect publication.
His leg had taken a long time to mend. And he’d died within a year or two. He hadn’t really recovered.
Death by glossy magazine.
Christopher climbs into the back of the ambulance. It’s a steep hike up, only a very fit person could make it. Christopher is quite fit, and comparatively young, but it’s a heave.
The material world seems suddenly steeper, more intransigent.
He and Ivor and Bennett make their noisy way towards the hospital.
The great calm light fades towards the west.
As Sir Bennett Carpenter is being submitted to scans and examinations and as Ivor and Christopher are sitting together anxiously in a waiting room, Fran is sitting with her daughter Poppet in the little low dark house by the green-brown canal, nursing a glass of lightly watered peat-brown whisky. She has faced the fear/sorrow/anxiety that had occupied her at the thought of ringing Poppet, and here she is, uninvited, marooned. Jim had been to get her, and here she is, though her car is still some twenty miles away, in a field two miles up the sunken road from Westmore Marsh. She’ll deal with that in the morning, with Jim’s help. But she’ll spend the night upstairs in Poppet’s bed. Probably with Poppet’s cat, but she won’t mind that.
Poppet has volunteered to sleep downstairs on the cane couch, and her offer has been accepted.
Fran had been worried that Poppet would have neither food nor drink in the cottage, and Jim had made a request stop at the village mini-market for her to stock up with toothbrush, toothpaste, moisturiser, whisky, eggs, tomatoes, broccoli and one red chilli.
She hasn’t got her medication on her, but she’ll survive a night without it. She knows she ought to keep a supply in her handbag, she’s always advising other old people to do that. But she doesn’t.
She’s filled in her report on Westmore Marsh’s Retirement Living facilities, ticking boxes and adding brief descriptive paragraphs of amenities and decor. The Ashley Combe Trust, she explains to her daughter, appreciates her prose. Unlike the local authorities, it doesn’t just go by ticking the boxes. It welcomes a bit of personal evaluation.
Teresa Quinn had been impressed by the quality of Fran’s reflections when she’d read her housing review on the internet, the review that had reintroduced them to one another. She’d told Fran how much she’d enjoyed them. And Fran is proud of them. Fran is proud of her perceptions. She still enjoys perceiving. When she ceases to enjoy perceiving, she’ll know she is about to be dead.
Not many people enjoy reading housing reports. Fran knows she is lucky to have rediscovered Teresa.
Fran has developed, during the past decade, her own idiosyncratic views on architecture. As she sips her whisky and thinks of low-build low-carbon retirement homes, little flashes or illuminations of anger and indignation flicker through her consciousness, accompanied by images of the populist pomposity of the Pompidou, and the grandiosity of some of the new billionaire apartment blocks in central London, in Kensington and Mayfair, built for foreigners, bought by foreigners, let out by foreigners, but designed by British architects who voted for New Labour and who still call themselves socialists. A plague on their new luxury apartments, which, during their years of construction, had created traffic jams and diversions and paralysed bus routes, preventing ordinary Londoners from going about their daily lives. Her own block, the block where she now lives, is brutal. But it isn’t hypocritical.
Fran has made an omelette and a tomato and broccoli side salad, dressed with sesame oil and some dubiously aged sunflower seeds. She needn’t have done that bit of shopping with Jim, as Poppet is well provided with tinned goods and dried pulses and unusual condiments: one of her many useful professional deformities is a siege mentality, unusual in her age group, though common in her mother’s. But Fran is pleased to have contributed to a meal. It makes her feel less of an intruder, more of a provider.
Fran is feeling fairly relaxed and fairly companionable. The house is dark and intimate, and the water level doesn’t seem to be rising. It’s stopped raining at last. The wood and wicker decor is pleasing: it’s primitive, without being punitive. Poppet’s little home sits lightly on the earth. They will see the night through. Poppet needn’t have bothered to move her treasures upstairs. They talk about floods, and about Christopher and Sara, and about the tremor off El Hierro. Fran describes the TV news coverage of the small earthquake in Dudley, and the small wave that had poured through the limestone caverns.
Poppet, somewhat to her mother’s surprise, has accepted a beaker of Scotch, and has made good progress with it. Will there be confidences to come? Is now the time?
It’s only nine, but Fran is dozy. It’s been a long and stressful, though in its way triumphant day, and she was up very early. But she can’t go to bed yet.
She’s noticed that one of the subjects that old people love to discuss, when gathered freshly together, is the time that they go to bed. The topic is at once indescribably boring and not without some interest.
Poppet isn’t ready for bed. She wants to switch on her Climate Crisis programme and demonstrate its capacities. Up it comes, with its multiple options, on her clever screen. They note a meteorite in Managua, forest fires in Sumatra, a tornado in Texas. They browse the Levels and Westmore Marsh (it’s no worse than it was there, yet, though the Thames Valley isn’t doing well, and Abingdon is now cut off from Oxford). ‘Put in El Hierro,’ suggests Fran, getting into the spirit of the thing. So Poppet punches in El Hierro, and is confronted by interesting headlines in English and in Spanish. An earthquake swarm of dozens of small eruptions indicates a new magmatic intrusion, according to the tracking agencies Involcan and Pelvolca. There has been much activity during the day. A 5.1 magnitude quake has been recorded. The level of alert has been raised to orange. That’s high, says Poppet, impressed.
Poppet searches on her screen for graphs, sketches and photographs of the rocky iron island and its boiling watery skirts. There are images of a great seething mass of white and turquoise bubbles, like a gigantic jellyfish, rising monstrously up through the azure ocean. It is very dramatic. Fran waits for Poppet to apportion blame, but she doesn’t. It is just happening, from the ocean bed, from deep deep within the core of the planet. It happens.
It is beautiful, the gravity-defying watery monster.
‘Do you think Christopher knows about this?’ asks Fran. ‘Will he be able to feel the tremors, in Lanzarote?’
(Christopher, even as she speaks, is wondering whether some almost imperceptible quiver of the earth had tripped the unsteady Bennett on the threshold of the terrace and laid him low. It’s beginning to look as though he’s fractured his hip, and they may have to operate. If they need to, will Bennett be in a position to give consent? Christopher’s dubious legal status with regard to Sara’s treatment and evacuation had added to the trauma of her last days, and Ivor’s status with regard to Bennett is equally uncertain. They’d talked of Lasting Power of Attorney and a Living Will, but, like most people, they’d never got round to it.) ‘I imagine it’s big news, in the islands,’ says Poppet. ‘But Lanzarote’s a long way from El Hierro.’
‘I think I’ll text him,’ says Fran. She texts Christopher: STRANDED AT POPPETS CAN U FEEL QUAKE WE BOTH SEND LOVE FX.
‘He’ll be surprised I’m here,’ says Fran.
‘I’m surprised you are here,’ says Poppet, after a short pause. ‘You should have planned to stay the night anyway, it’s so near.’
‘I don’t like to be a nuisance,’ says Fran.
There is a silence, as each of them ponders the reasons why it wouldn’t have been easy for Fran to invite herself for the night. Their interchange, brief though it was, is portentous.
Fran, heavily, sadly, finds herself saying, ‘I do worry about you sometimes, darling.’
‘And I worry about you too,’ retaliates Poppet
, quickly. ‘Since Hamish died, I’ve worried about you a lot.’
‘Oh, I’m all right,’ says Fran. ‘Really, darling, I’m fine. I keep going fine.’
The light is very low, the shadows are profound. The two women can hardly see each other. Poppet has lighted a little brass-based Kelly oil lamp on the mantelpiece and it glows steadily with the smallest of yellowy blue flames. Poppet likes it because it is alive. It keeps her company.
Sometimes Poppet thinks she will die of loneliness. She knows that loneliness can kill.
The silence continues. Fran reaches for the whisky, tops up her glass, offers the bottle to Poppet, who shakes her head.
Fran is just about to dare to ask about Jim (who is Jim?) who is coming to collect her in the morning, when her phone buzzes.
It is Christopher, with a not very reassuring message: IN HOSPITAL ARRECIFE BENNETT HAD FALL MIGHT NEED SURGERY HELP CX.
Fran shows it to Poppet. They agree he doesn’t really mean he wants help or thinks they could offer any; it’s an exclamation, a plea for sympathy and solidarity.
‘Old age,’ says Fran, ‘it’s a fucking disaster. And Christopher thought those two old boys had got it all sorted.’
She is, at least temporarily, downcast.
‘I don’t think Ivor is all that old,’ says Poppet.
Poppet seems to know more about the inhabitants of La Suerte than Fran does. Fran is jealous.
‘What shall I reply?’ she asks.
‘God knows,’ says Poppet.
Fran, inadequately, tried out the words VERY SORRY. They don’t seem appropriate. She alters them to a noncommittal LOVE FROM US BOTH SPEAK SOON FX and sends.
It’s so easy to Send.
She suddenly feels overwhelmingly tired and old and helpless. She needs to go to bed. She needs to ask Poppet if she can borrow a pair of clean pants and socks for the morning. She knows Poppet’s pants. They are over-washed and over-worn and skimpily cut, with frayed gussets and perishing elastic. Poppet is skinny. Fran isn’t fat, but her bum is bigger than Poppet’s.
But she can’t bear to think of putting her own once-worn underwear back on in the morning. She really doesn’t like to do that. She’d say she was almost phobic about it. She can wear the same bra for a fortnight, but bras are different.
When she was a child, she’d worn her knickers for days on end without changing them. People did in those days. The avant-garde post-war housewives of Broughborough had heavy early-model top-loading washing machines with huge heavy aluminium paddles, gun-metal wartime grey paddles like the propellers of aircraft, but they were used sparingly.
She could have a washing-machine wash-day conversation with Teresa, on her next visit. The Quinns and the Robinsons had held strong and differing views on the subject of wash day. The Robinsons thought the Quinns washed too often, and the Quinns noted that the Robinsons did not always wipe their plastic-coated washing line free of smuts when they hung out their garments and their sheets. These wash days preceded the Clean Air Act, and clean clothes were often retrieved from the line flecked and peg-pinched with soot. Both Teresa and Fran had been too defensive to discuss these differences openly in their cellar, but each was aware of the positions taken. Now, in their seventies, they could come out on the topic, and laugh.
’Twas on a Monday morning when I beheld my darling . . .
Ah, how we love to differentiate ourselves from our neighbours. Religion, washing machines, washing lines, vegetables, the potato man, the bold Breton onion-seller, religion.
Who would have thought that Jacopo da Pontormo could have attracted the attention of David Quinn?
Fran is beginning to pass out, although her brain is still quite active, as she tries to knit it all together.
‘I’ll find you a nightie, Mum,’ says Poppet, who has noticed her mother’s yawns and her flagging spirits.
It’s only nine thirty. It feels like midnight.
Fran wonders if those nice well-presented old folk at Westmore Marsh are tucked up properly in their beds by now. Or maybe they are playing Scrabble, or bridge, or whist. Not, she thinks, chess.
Jo plays bridge. Fran hasn’t got time to learn how to play bridge. It’s too late.
She had been unsettled by the two faces of Valerie Heritage.
She thinks, fleetingly, admiringly, of the vigorous Suzette of West Bromwich.
In a care home in Sandford, a young woman carer has just been taken into custody for allegedly attempting to poison some of the residents.
Fran could have been anonymously, comfortably, installed in the £20-a-night guest suite, with bedtime TV and shampoo sachets. Just like the Premier Inn.
She’s taken a risk, coming to stay with Poppet. She’s such a coward. But, on balance, she’s glad to be here.
In the hospital at Lanzarote, Ivor has been told that the ilustrísimo Señor Bennett has, as suspected, fractured his hip, and that it should be operated on as soon as possible, probably first thing in the morning. He will have to sign a consent form, but as, calmed by morphine, he has now emerged from his wordless groaning and is looking very alert, this won’t be a problem. He is chattering away volubly to all around him, so there should be no difficulty with a signature, say the hospital staff to Ivor. Only Ivor, by the bedside, can tell Bennett is talking nonsense. Many of the members of staff speak English, but they aren’t up to this baroque monologue. Bennett is free-associating in an impressively high-grade range of gibberish, thinking he is back in England and about to give a lecture on Unamuno and the Falange in Oxford: ‘I’ve got my notes ready, they’re all ready, but I won’t be needing my notes, I speak much better without notes,’ he says happily, even euphorically.
Bennett has been worrying about Unamuno and the Falange for decades. He’ll be worrying about it on his deathbed. Maybe this is his deathbed, and that’s why he’s worrying.
‘Is the car on its way, Ivor? We must not be late,’ he repeats from time to time, rather formally and emphatically, and then starts quoting, in Spanish, some words which Ivor assumes come from that incomprehensible work, the Tragic Sense of Life. They could have alerted his white-coated entourage to his state of mind, but they don’t.
‘Si muero,’ declaims Bennett, ‘dejad el balcón abierto . . . dejad el balcón abierto . . .’
Ivor is in a dilemma. Bennett would probably sign any bit of paper with which he was presented. Ivor could tell him it was a BBC release form or a contract for £500 from the University of Oxford or another appeal for support from the Terrence Higgins Trust, and he wouldn’t query it, he would sign. He always leaves that kind of stuff to Ivor. But Ivor is a man of scruples, and exceptionally law-abiding. Because his earlier years of sexual activity had been ineluctably illegal, he has been careful in other matters not to cross any lines. He parks their little car with scrupulous care, pays Bennett’s bills instantly, counts small change in shops and hands back any over-payment, observes dress codes respectfully. He doesn’t like to ask a delirious Bennett to sign what might well, at his age (Ivor does not fool himself), prove to be his own death warrant.
Ivor has by now calmed down enough to notice that the ilustrísimo Señor isn’t wearing part of his dental plate. The upper left is missing. He wonders where it’s got to. Had he taken it out himself, for an hour or two of solitary comfort, while reading and snoozing over his novel? Had it fallen out when he fell, is it still lying on the terrace, or is it safe in its little ceramic tooth mug in the bedroom?
Bennett sometimes takes the pink and white dental plate out and puts it on his blue and white majolica side plate during a meal. He’s only done this once or twice when guests were at table, but Ivor fears he may soon start to do it more frequently. Ivor doesn’t know whether he will mind this or not.
He does mind it when their old friend Gustavo hikes up his trouser leg and displays a twining catheter, which he then empties, at table, in company, into a plastic bottle. Ivor wishes Gustavo wouldn’t do that.
Ivor fortunately fails to r
ecapture the vanishing just-beyond-reach shade of a memory of a horror story of an acquaintance who, during the snoring of the night, had inhaled a detached crown. He had known it was coming loose, but had neglected to get it stuck back on properly, as with good reason he dreaded visiting his dentist. Swallowing crowns or bridgework is OK, they pass through the body and must be retrieved from the lavatory bowl, as they are so expensive. Inhaling is not OK. Rescuing an inhaled crown involves hacking into the left bronchiole, through the back, or into the larynx, from the front, or something like that. Or that’s what Ivor has understood. But he’s forgotten it. It doesn’t bear thinking about. So Ivor doesn’t think about it. He denies the memory.
Ivor decides to go back to the waiting room for Christopher’s company, to consult Christopher. Christopher had spent transit time in this very hospital, with Sara, and had then, back in England, endured a worse hospitalisation than this, with the worst of all outcomes, but he may nevertheless or therefore have words of comfort or advice.
The two men sit together on the yellow plastic bench. Christopher has prepared himself for the long wait with a slug of vodka from the small bottle he always carries with him in his inner jacket pocket, just in case. This had seemed to be the case. A sociable glass of Prosecco wouldn’t see him through. Nor will Saramago’s Stone Raft, with which he is finding it hard to engage. It’s a heavy book and its sentences are far, far too long. He is wishing he had brought his iPad. He hadn’t taken it to the Grand Hotel, he hadn’t thought he’d need it over an early evening drink, and he hadn’t thought, in the flurry, to pick it up at La Suerte. If he’d had it with him, he could be trying to look up hip fractures right now.
Ivor hasn’t yet reached the ever-changing ever-self-updating sophistication of the iPad.
The Dark Flood Rises Page 22