The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  And she’ll be getting more than the minimum wage.

  Teresa does not often invoke the arms of Liam, or those of her subsequent lovers. But sometimes she thinks of them. She occasionally has a sexual dream, but she wakes to find that she is happier where she is now. Sex had been a hassle, no doubt about it.

  Teresa has sent for her son Luke. She has texted him, and emailed him, and requested his presence. She tells him she would like to see him very soon. He must know what that means. Surely he must. He has been following her accounts of her condition, and he will know how to interpret them.

  He is in Mozambique, working for Médecins Sans Frontières. He says he’s trying to book a flight.

  She’d like to see her grandson Xavier too, but she’s not sure she’s a fit sight for a healthy teenage boy. She knows that she looks wasted. Xavier is at the International School in Maputo, where he is doing well. He is bilingual. His mother works at the eye clinic. Teresa and Xavier have occasionally communicated by Skype, and Luke sends photos of him. Teresa doesn’t like Skype very much: it’s frustrating, it’s distorting, it’s a step too far.

  She doesn’t know what to do about Liam O’Connor, her ex in Canada, the father of Luke. He won’t want to be excluded. Perhaps, together with Luke, she should see him. They could appear together at her deathbed. She is still married to him in the eyes of God, or so Father Goodall would quite correctly tell her.

  Luke and Liam get on tolerably well, as she understands it, though they do not see much of one another, divided as they are by land and sea.

  Teresa had lost her hair, through chemo, but it has grown back again, with a richer and wirier texture than before. Now it curls bravely upwards in its crisp short white bob, in a sprightly halo. It has more strength in it than the rest of her wasting body. She suspects that it will go on growing in her coffin. She does not wish to be cremated. She has chosen her plot of land, at St Mary’s in Kensal Green Cemetery, near the canal. She has walked the towpath many times, in her good walking days, and heard the birdsong in the trees, and seen the foxes sauntering brazenly along, and studied the inscriptions on the tombstones.

  Liam, too, has as much hair as he ever had and shows no sign of an ageing manly baldness. He has so much hair that, as some men of his advanced age do, he has boastfully let it grow thick and long and magisterially grey, well down below his shoulders, like a dorsal penis, and he ties it back with a coloured ribbon. He dresses formally, in suits and ties, but he wears his hair long. She knows this because she can see him on the internet, if she bothers to look, and Luke and her grandson Xavier sometimes send her what she still calls ‘snaps’. She receives them in her ever-ready little mobile phone.

  She is told that Liam’s silver ponytail is an alternative modern academic look. She quite likes it.

  Liam lost his faith, long ago. She doesn’t know what Luke believes.

  Teresa does not believe very firmly in a personal afterlife, although she sometimes has to pretend that she does, because that makes it so much easier for everyone else. Father Goodall is certainly comforted by her profession of faith in arriving in a heavenly Jerusalem, and she does not want to upset or alienate Father Goodall in her hours of dependence and need. And who knows, there may well be a better place.

  Her friend Fran is not a believer. She sometimes says she is a pantheist, but she isn’t very consistent about that. On a good day, with good weather, she’s a pantheist. A fair-weather pantheist. She’s pointed out to Teresa that February isn’t a good month for pantheists. Fran, Teresa knows, is longing for the spring. The snowdrops in Teresa’s own garden and in her ugly North London churchyard are already displaying an ivory white and a streaked green, and the aconites will be a joyous buttery yellow around the gravestones, although Teresa cannot go to see them, and Fran would not even know where they are.

  Fran is somewhere in the sodden West Country, stranded with her fierce daughter Poppet. She’ll be back soon, they have fixed a date. Maybe she will have to introduce Fran to Birdie. She wonders how they will get on.

  Her son Luke and Birdie get on fine. They’ve known each other forever. They tease one another a lot. That won’t be a problem, when Luke comes.

  Teresa has enjoyed discussing the last things with Fran, who, although an expert in trivia, is more than willing to apply her mind to eschatology. Teresa lies on her day bed, under a cheerful tartan once-much-travelled car blanket, with a new book about the Etruscans open upon her knee, contemplating the new (to her) discovery that both pain and trivia can be a welcome distraction from the ultimately serious business of dying. Pain alters perceptions of time, and makes one wish to be elsewhere, to be speeding on one’s journey, whereas trivia comfortably and companionably block the forefront of the mind, occupying the space that might otherwise be devoted to prayer or thought or meditation or despair.

  Trivia: a comfortable blanket, a mug of soup, a text message or two, a radio quiz, a book upon one’s lap.

  Trivia: the meeting of the three ways, the lower arts.

  The book on the Etruscans had been sent to her by her brother David. It is a lavish but scholarly new work by his long-term partner, Massimo Vignoli, with whom he shares an apartment in Orvieto. As David had said, in the covering email heralding its arrival, the illustrations are wonderful. Teresa does not object to the implication that she may not be up to reading any heavy stuff about the Etruscans, because it’s almost but not quite true. She is happy to read a paragraph here and there, but happier to browse through the photographs of sarcophagi, of reclining matrons with their stout and gentle husbands, of details of delicately coloured tomb wall paintings of ducks and deer and vines and suntanned dancing men and pale women. The Etruscan deities have such strange names. Vanth, Fufluns, Uni, Turan, Turms. What kind of a language is that? Names from an arrière-pays. She particularly likes the ancient little Villanovan hut-houses of the dead. She had read, long ago, D. H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places, and is inclined to share his view that the Etruscans were a happy breed, happy in life as in death, a view not upheld by Massimo Vignoli, who dismisses Lawrence, not with contempt but with a scholarly compassion. Lawrence’s views are out of date, but he couldn’t, at that period, have known any better.

  Lawrence had been dying when he visited Tarquinia and Cerveteri and Volterra. He had died so young, and he had so much hated to be dying. He’d been bravely building his ship of death for the dark flood, and fitting it out with food and little cakes and wine and cooking pans, but he hadn’t wanted to die. She is too old to die young, and that’s a comfort. She often counts, on her fingers, her remaining comforts.

  The little terracotta red-brown cinerary huts of the dead are small and homely. Like doll’s houses. She thinks Fran would like to see them. They do not quite come into the Ashley Combe category of accommodation for the elderly, but they have a metaphysical connection with it. She must remember to show them to Fran.

  The book is heavy on her lap. She can hardly lift it to move it safely to one side of her day bed. Never again will she be able to climb up her library steps, to reach the art books on the top shelf. She had not thought to note the last time when she felt able to ascend. It hadn’t seemed a marker, a milestone, though it had been one. Even Fran, who is fit, strong and wiry, had found David’s Pontormo weighty and unwieldy and had complained, as she clambered carefully down, that her wrists were not what they were.

  Teresa gazes at her bookcases, at the collection of novels and poems from the 1960s and 70s, some still with their original dust jackets, at her more recent work-related medical case histories, at the top shelves with their dust-collecting, rarely visited volumes of Constable and Matisse, of Artemisia Gentileschi and El Greco, of Rembrandt and Rubens, of Hockney and Hogarth. She wonders at the thick catalogues of exhibitions visited over the years. How had she ever had the energy to go so often to the Tate and the National Gallery, to the Courtauld and the Ashmolean and Kenwood? When she was working, and working more than full-time? And how had she had the
strength to carry such doorstep tomes home with her on the Tube, on the bus? It amazes her now, to think of how much she has seen and done.

  And now, lifting a single book, even a book of average weight, exhausts her. It is sad, not to be able to lift up a book. Sometimes she feels terminally weary, and wishes, in a cowardly manner, that she might die in her sleep, without having to look her God or her faith or her oncologist in the eye.

  She sees Fran standing at the top of the library steps, Pontormo clutched to her thin but still shapely chest, arrested as she carefully tests her balance, preparing for the descent.

  When she had got safely down, Fran had told her about a friend of her friend Jo, who had been seized by a severe panic attack on top of a rolling ten-foot-high grasshopper-green library ladder in one of the lofty vaulted Reading Rooms in the Bodleian in Oxford. She had had to call for assistance, for a helping hand to steady her on her way down. Those ladders are like siege engines, Jo had told Fran. They are perilous. They are not safe for older folk. They have rolling-ball feet like Daleks.

  When Teresa and Fran were young in Broughborough, they hadn’t spent all their time crouching conspiratorially in the cellar, aspiring to higher things. They had played giddy games, spun themselves around on the grass like whirling dervishes until they fell over with ecstatic dizziness, performed handstands and backwards somersaults, unsuccessfully attempted cartwheels, jumped over and off walls, climbed trees. The sap had risen in them each year in the spring, for those few years of mutual girlhood, and they had explored the semi-rural corners of suburbia, where an occasional pony stood patiently in a neglected field. They had sucked the sweet juice of the red flowers of the horse chestnut and eaten the delicate stripped white pithy stems of grasses, and once, daringly, laid the dry, black and deadly poisonous seeds of the laburnum pod and the glowing sticky translucent pink berries of the yew upon their tongues, to see if they would die.

  They hadn’t swallowed them, the black seeds and the lethal reddish pink globe berries, they had spat them out. Of course. And they hadn’t died. They hadn’t wanted to die. There had been moments since then when Teresa had wished to die, but not when she was a schoolgirl in Broughborough.

  She’s feeling low. She’s disappointed in herself. She’s tired of being ill. She doesn’t think that she’s afraid of dying, and she isn’t, for the moment, in much pain, restored by her latest chemical fix. She leans back on her high pillow, closes her eyes. It’s not clear to her what she’s supposed to do, on a spiritual level, with the rest of the time she has left. She’s never much liked the language of struggle and battle, and anyway, she knows the battle is already lost. She hasn’t thought of her relationship with her cancer in terms of fighting the good fight, as some do. But the lines from Timothy come back to her, nevertheless: Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called . . .

  Lay hold on eternal life. Fight the good fight of faith.

  She can’t do it.

  Whereunto thou art also called.

  She has known some who have lost their faith late in life, in their sixties, in their seventies, even in their eighties. Because the human story is so very disappointing, because the cruelty of it is so very great, and God’s care of his creation so hard to interpret.

  The saddest case she had ever known had been that of an old woman of the parish, a sinless friendly kind old woman, a neighbour, a practising but not particularly devout Catholic who had, in her last years, been plunged into a state of appalling panic and depression and guilt. It had seemed causeless, to Teresa and to the professionals. The old woman thought she had committed the Sin against the Holy Ghost, whatever that might be. Perhaps she simply meant that she had lost her faith. She had been hospitalised, and then transferred to an expensive psychiatric home in North London, her stay there funded, Teresa gathered, by the son who had done well in the City. Teresa had been to visit her once or twice and had been deeply affected by her condition. Mrs Taylor (they were not on first-name terms, and Teresa was always Mrs Quinn to Mrs Taylor) had been in a state of abject terror. Each day had been an insurmountable and seemingly unendurable ordeal. Her refuge was in playing games of Solitaire – always the same game of Patience, never venturing on any other – again and again, again and again, on a little digital games device. Teresa had not thought much of the staff at the home, who could not work up any interest in so old and so dull a patient.

  Once, exasperated, she had told Birdie that some of the staff couldn’t have run a Pets’ Parlour, let alone a psychiatric unit for the deeply disturbed.

  Mrs Taylor had one friend there, an inmate in her forties, herself in the throes of a clinical depression, who would listen and attempt to engage Mrs Taylor in games of Scrabble. Teresa could tell that this good-natured person would emerge before too long into the light of day.

  She had an interesting conversation with the good-natured person, on her way down a corridor. The good-natured person, who said her name was Ginnie, had said to Teresa, ‘You look just like my psychotherapist.’ Teresa could tell that this was a compliment. This was one of the reasons why she knew Ginnie would come through.

  The very name of Ginnie seemed to be cause for hope.

  But now, thinking of Mrs Taylor arouses a wave of panic, which rises helplessly up in her like an acid reflux. It rises up through her gorge and sours her throat. She needs to be rescued.

  It is a terrible thing, when God, who should comfort us, who should give us wings, becomes our jailer and our persecutor. It is terrible when His eye stares at us in anger.

  Her right hand cradles her mobile phone. She waits for it to bleep or buzz or flash or ring. If only somebody would ring or text, someone, anyone, someone from out there, from the world of the living. Even that false and endlessly repeating recorded message purporting to be from her bank would do. She wills her little gadget to speak to her. It remains silent.

  Any sound would rescue her.

  Her hands are withered and wrinkled, as well as enfeebled, and their backs have for some years now been manifesting the pale-brown liver spots of age. She stares at them, attempting to distract herself. She doesn’t dislike these spots. They have a certain charm, even an elegance. She’ll miss them when she’s dead. If she remembers rightly, the Catholic novelist Graham Greene was teased for the high incidence of liver spots in his later novels.

  He didn’t like being called a Catholic novelist. He said he was a novelist who happened to be a Catholic. Teresa thinks that was casuistry.

  When she was young, the ball of the palm of her right hand had been distinguished by an attractive fairly large golden brown birthmark, shaped a little like a heart. She had been very fond of this distinctive stigma, and had gazed at it for hours when nothing much else was going on – in class, in church, at tram stops, in bed, while listening to the news with her family on the radio. It would bring her, as she thought, good luck. As her life got busier, she forgot to stare at it so attentively, and, neglected it had begun to fade, and (she inspects its site) it has now vanished altogether. Now she has time to look at it again, it’s gone. As in the fable about the ass’s skin. If she’d stared at it harder, she might have lived longer.

  She clutches her mobile, beseeches it. And it obliges. She hears and feels its friendly burr.

  It is better than a message from the bank. It is a text from her son Luke. He has booked his flight. He’ll be with her in a couple of days. Hang on there, Mum, he adjures her. See you soon.

  He’ll be with her for his birthday. He doesn’t say this in his message, but he is probably as aware of it as she is. It seems like some kind of good luck.

  Yes, that’s all she has to do. Hang on.

  Her spirits soar. She can wait two days, for she will see him soon. She has been rescued from the deep and from spiritual disgrace, and she can hang on.

  He was born in a February blizzard, snowed in, in Canada.

  Her fretfulness and self-pity fade, and she feels herself rising up
, into a higher and better place. She closes her eyes again, and is borne upwards, as she begins to doze and dream and sleep. She is released upwards into dreaming, as the nagging little thorns of memory and anxiety and fear and rationality unhook themselves from the old heavy matted stuff of her consciousness, and allow her to rise from her body. She is released into the presence of a dream landscape: she is observing (but is not quite inhabiting) a scene with a foreground of a grassy hollow with olive trees and great tawny slabs of broken, antique stone. In the centre of the scene, the huge deep-rooted trunk of an ancient tree bears upwards in its forked branches a slab of stone like a sarcophagus. Far away, in the background, upon the distant hillside, far beyond and behind, in a higher country, stands a little white chapel. The place is known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar.

  When she wakes, she will recognise in this dream landscape an allusion to the Etruscan tombs, and to the saving of the virtuous heathen from antiquity, and to a hand-coloured print given to her one year for Christmas by grateful parents. The print had shown just such a scene, but without the Christian chapel. The parents had purchased it, as they said, ‘for a song’, in Athens, in a stall in a street overlooking the Agora. They had thought she would like it, and she did. She had had it framed, and it hangs on her bedroom wall.

  A heavy stone coffin, a flesh-eating sarcophagus, borne upwards in the living growing branches of a tree.

  Her dream had married Jerusalem and Athens. She is pleased with the inventiveness of her dream life.

  Christopher and Ivor have been keeping vigil in the Bar Volcan. They have been back to La Suerte and have retrieved Bennett’s dental plate, which they discovered sitting agape in its tooth mug on the kitchen table. This had been a small but significant relief. He won’t be needing it yet, but it’s good to know where it is. And it has now been safely deposited with the very soothing, very-dark-skinned, dark-green-coated, deeply indigenous orderly who tells them that his name is Bencomo, and that they can rely on him. If the Señor wakes up and wants his teeth, if he seems distressed that he has lost them, Bencomo will reassure him that he can have them back soon. Everything had seemed in hand. Bennett, sedated, was snoring comfortably.