As she ladles out her orange-red roast pepper soup, she is not very pleased to hear her name being called. She’d been looking forward to a quiet, anonymous lunch keeping up to date by reading a new American novel on her Kindle, and it is hard to adjust from this comfortable prospect to conviviality. It is her old friend Geraldine, calling at her from over by the salad bar where she is piling her little glass bowl high with leaves and lentils and other more new-fangled pulses. There is Geraldine, with her startling orange hair, her scarlet sweater, her spangled scarf. There is no way of avoiding her. You can’t miss Geraldine, or pretend you haven’t seen her. Jo adjusts her soup bowl on her tray, changes mode, smiles and decides to go for it: it’s always fun with Geraldine, if you surrender.
They find a table by the window, in the glass-covered extension, and exchange news as they tuck into their healthy soup and salad combo. Geraldine, as usual, is highly excited. ‘Darling,’ she exclaims from time to time, as she reports in her loud, highly inflected and resounding voice on the various activities and dramas that have occupied her since they last met (‘yonks ago’): more grandchildren, a lecture recently delivered at the Italian Institute, an invitation to a festival in Mantua in the spring, a foot operation (of which she displays, beneath the table, the aesthetically pleasing results), a few friends and relatives dismissed as dead or dying (Geraldine has no truck with illness, her own or anyone else’s), a flirtation with a Venetian art historian, a row with her publisher over e-books and royalties on reprints. Geraldine has always been volatile and combative, and Jo has learned that the enemy of today may well be the hero of tomorrow, so she listens and exclaims and sympathises and lets the flow wash over her. Unlike many big talkers, Geraldine is also insatiably interested in the lives of others (all fodder for future gossip of her own) and she plies Josephine with a series of questions: how is Cambridge, how is Athene Grange working out, is she still playing bridge, did she see the new Tosca at Covent Garden, what is she writing, how is the disruptive and demanding Sally Lyttelton, why is Jo in the British Library, how are Jo’s children, how is that friend of hers, what’s her name, Fran, who used to live next door to Stella Hartleap in Highgate? Poor Stella, what a ghastly death, and did Jo hear about what happened to Martin Stuart? Too terrible.
Jo fields all these questions expertly and doesn’t think she’s given away too many secrets. Geraldine shows a mild interest in Jo’s new preoccupation with Basque refugees, says she can speak a word or two of Basque, and that she is in the middle of reading a new Italian novel set in the Second World War with some stuff about Franco and Mussolini. Mussolini, she says, is popping up a lot in fiction these days, it’s his turn, but she doesn’t think she’s going to recommend this one to her publishers.
Geraldine is so well if sporadically connected that Jo is half expecting her to say that she knows the Studdert Meade family. She doesn’t, but she does declare, having finished her résumé of the past few months and leapt forward to the immediate future, that she is off with the other Geraldine to the Canary Isles in a couple of days, to Lanzarote, for a week or two of winter sunshine. Has Jo ever been to the Canaries?
It is very Geraldine to have a best friend called Geraldine. Jo thinks she knows all about her, as, no doubt, the other Geraldine will think she knows all about Josephine Drummond.
Jo says no, she has never been to the Canaries, and had been of the impression, rather snobbishly, that they are full of high-rise hotels and English pubs and hooligans. But, she cautiously volunteers, her Thursday evening fiancé (she has allowed Geraldine to label him thus) had been there for Christmas, staying with ex-pat friends, and had given a very good report of the climate and scenery of Lanzarote. Even as she is speaking, she slightly regrets this potential contribution to Geraldine’s store of tittle-tattle, and the more so when her friend seems keen to find out the identity of the ex-pats and, possibly, to call on them. Jo hesitates, wondering whether to pretend she’s forgotten their names and rapidly assessing the chances of Geraldine knowing Bennett Carpenter already. She does know a hell of a lot of people, and her field of scholarship (Italian twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction and cinematography) is not a million miles removed from Bennett Carpenter’s own. And Geraldine is no fool, although she tried very hard to look and sound like one.
Maybe Bennett would be delighted to welcome the Geraldines? He seems to be a sociable and hospitable chap: she’s heard all about his kindness to the wayward Christopher Stubbs. She tries to create a diversion by asking Geraldine whether she’d like a coffee or a tea (interesting but well-recognised use of the indefinite article), but Geraldine isn’t going to let go. So Jo, who is not very good at subterfuge, finds herself offering up the name of Bennett Carpenter, the author of The Reaper and the Wheat and, latterly, The Shadows in the Square. She makes it plain that she herself has never met him, and doesn’t know his address, so is hardly in the position of effecting an introduction, but she need not have worried about that particular delicacy, for, as soon as his name is released, Geraldine lets out a cry of delight and recognition.
‘Bennett Carpenter!’ she shouts, causing several more heads to turn in their direction. ‘I know Bennett! So that’s where he’s got to! Does he live there now? I used to go to their parties when they lived in South Ken! I haven’t seen them for yonks!’
She rambles playfully on, over a double espresso. It is clear that she will get in touch with him and Ivor as soon as she arrives, if not before. Jo, by now thoroughly distracted from her pursuit of Alice, wonders if she’ll have to confess all this to Owen over cloudscapes and Bourbon tomorrow evening.
It’s well known that Bennett Carpenter lives in Lanzarote. It’s in the public domain. It’s not a secret. He’s not in hiding, or a recluse. None of this is Jo’s fault.
Geraldine is even more animated than usual, and as they part, she to Humanities One where she is doing a bit of background reading on the Italian debacle at Guadalajara under General Roatta, and Jo to her handwritten letters in Manuscripts, she throws her arms around Jo and cries, ‘Why don’t you come too! There’s plenty of room in our apartment! And a lovely swimming pool! Think what fun we could have! You could bring your fiancé!’
‘I think not,’ says Jo, with reproving gravitas. Though a lovely swimming pool does sound attractive.
Despite all, she does rather love Geraldine. And she can see that her style of academic camp could go down very well at La Suerte. Perhaps it’s all for the best.
Fran is looking out for the cranes, as she had said she would, but she is also concentrating harder than usual on her driving, as she doesn’t want any more adventures. Killed while craning her neck to look at a crane, not a good epitaph. The car seems none the worse for its night out and Jim had managed to rescue it without much difficulty. He had also given her helpful instructions about where best to get back onto the A303, and warned her to avoid the service station just beyond Stonehenge, where, he claims, the concrete forecourt is always awash with water in this kind of weather. Built below the flood plain – big mistake, according to Jim.
Jim is a puzzle to Fran, and this recent encounter has done nothing to clarify him or his role in her daughter’s life. He’s a farmer, but he seems to have a preoccupying and contradictory sideline in antiques and second-hand books. Unlike Poppet, he’s deeply local. He knows the vicinity, it’s in his bones, born and bred. He’s married, with a wife and grown children, one of them in catering, one a long-distance trucker, but his attitude to Poppet is not simply that of a helpful neighbour. They seem to have some kind of collaborative relationship, but Fran has no idea what it is. It doesn’t feel sexual, though they are physically at ease with one another, almost intimate. Brotherly? No, not quite. Something else, something other.
Poppet’s brother Christopher has never met Jim. But Christopher remains brotherly towards Poppet.
She wonders how poor old Bennett Carpenter is getting on.
Jim, though short of stature, is a heavy, powerful man, wi
th a blunt nose and a fine head of tightly curled reddish-grey hair, like a bull. He’d heaved her poor car’s nose up and attached it to his tow rope with no trouble at all.
Fran doesn’t see much of her two brothers, but she’s not on bad terms with them, it’s just a cool English-style fraternal relationship, with joshing and reminiscing and meetings once or twice a year. Her older brother’s very deaf now, and lame too. He has a bad hip which he refuses to have fixed, so he doesn’t get out much and therefore hasn’t got much to say. He and his loyal wife have closed in upon themselves, as ageing couples sometimes do, and do not seem as unhappy as Fran would be if she were they. Her younger brother is sprightlier and more outgoing, although (she doesn’t like to admit this, even to herself) rather dull. He talks a lot, but he talks about cars and golf and keeping fit. Fran likes trivia, but she’s more interested in female trivia than male.
Teresa’s brothers, the boys next door, aren’t very close to Teresa either, though she frequently mentions David and his partner in Orvieto, as though they are often on her mind. David, of the six Broughborough neighbours, the two cellar girls and the four bicycling boys, has had the most distinguished career. He’s made a name for himself in art history. It’s a small world, but he’s made a name in it.
She hasn’t yet got round to asking Christopher if he knows anything of David Quinn. She keeps meaning to, but then she keeps forgetting. It’s of no importance. It’s idle curiosity.
The weather has changed; the large sky is now blue, bright and cloudless, a thin high clear wintery azure. A copse of pink and silver trees and copper bracken by the roadside gives way to a rising open field of a tender washed green, to a field of a ploughed and rusty red. Springtime is lying down there in the earth, in Wiltshire, waiting. The birds will be building their nests.
Teresa would have liked to have seen the snowdrops of her last winter. Fran had wondered whether to pick her a few from St Helen’s churchyard, and she’d even located the church, down the hill from Teresa’s, and around the corner. But she hadn’t got round to it. No, it wasn’t that she hadn’t got round to it, she had thought better of it. It would have been too pointed, too poignant an act. And anyway, it would have been theft. Father Goodall might have caught her at it, and that would have been very embarrassing.
The traffic slows to a halt for a while as the road narrows near Stonehenge.
The standstill gives her time to admire the ancient Wiltshire landscape and, when she’s done enough of that, to check her mobile. There are messages: from Christopher, from Teresa, from Jo, from Paul Scobey, and from various companies she wishes she had never patronised. Omega Hotel Rooms, who needs them? They will not let her go, and all because she once had to book herself in somewhere at the last moment in Berwickupon-Tweed. And there are more messages from various theatre companies promoting shows that she would pay not to see. That Beckett play had nearly finished her off.
She’s not sure if she wants to see what Teresa and Christopher have to say. Their lives are tinged by death. An aura of death and of deadly misfortune glows cold and luminous from their virtual and unopened envelopes. There might be bad news in either of those packages, a convergence of ill messaging.
She decides to try Jo, as more likely to be on good form, though she will have to get to grips with Christopher soon, in the next traffic jam.
After all, his last word to her had been ‘HELP’.
Jo is relaying the latest news of Bennett Carpenter to her friend Owen. She has heard it from Fran Stubbs, who has brought her up to date with Bennett’s condition and Christopher’s extended sojourn. Bennett has undergone hip surgery, a major event for a man of his age and in his state of health, and is now, unaccountably, saying that he wants to come back to England. So Christopher has reported. He and Ivor don’t know what to do.
They really don’t know what to do.
Jo and Owen sip their Bourbon, meditatively, and count their blessings. They are alive, and not in pain, and not, as far as they can tell, deranged. Nor are they homeless. They are far from homeless. They are embedded.
Jo is much more interested in Bennett Carpenter than she had been in previous discussions of him, because now she has read his book. His fate is a concern for her. His name is now surrounded by a thick cluster of thoughts and associations, crowding around him, from the Studdert Meades to her Aunt Marian, to the battle of Jarama and the Basque refugees and Winston Churchill’s plan to invade the Canary Islands. Hovering around him are also the contemporary figures of the two Geraldines, who won’t find it so easy to invite themselves for cocktails now the old man is in hospital, badly surviving a hip operation.
‘He says he wants to come back, but you say he hasn’t anywhere to come back to,’ says Jo.
‘That’s right,’ says Owen.
They are both selfishly thinking how lucky they are, safe here in Athene Grange. The price of these units has gone up steadily, since they bought their way in. So has the cost of the maintenance, but they can keep pace with it. They are sitting pretty.
‘And I know they’d told Christopher how good the healthcare is on Lanzarote,’ says Jo.
‘Maybe he had a stroke, when he fell,’ says Owen. ‘Maybe his mind isn’t quite clear. He seemed well enough at Christmas, but he may have had a stroke.’
‘Poor Ivor,’ says Jo, feelingly. She is concerned for this man whom she has never met.
‘And poor Christopher,’ says Owen, who has never met Christopher, although he has seen him (though he would not readily admit this) on TV. ‘He’s had what I think we call a double whammy.’
The phrase sounds so quaint coming from Owen’s pale nicotine-dry lips that Jo gives a short laugh, although there is nothing much to laugh about.
‘I wonder whether Bennett’s health insurance would cover repatriation,’ speculates Owen.
Jo takes another sip, and looks around her comfortably standardised but pleasantly personalised living room with a complacent sorrow. She is surrounded by the best of the remnants salvaged from several moves over her long life, and this is her last home. Her charming rust-red velvet Edwardian Bergère chair and ottoman, inherited from her parents-in-law, many times reupholstered and heaped high with the tapestry cushions she has worked over the years; Aunt Marian’s small eighteenth-century marquetry table, with its beautiful fan inlay; her oval gilt-framed chipped and never-restored French mirror, purchased for a song in Romley market; her elegant ruby-red Bristol glass vase, given to her by Alec for their ruby wedding, and holding some dried grasses and a peacock feather; her library of books, the early poetry first editions still in their dust jackets, and probably worth a pretty penny now; her mantelpiece full of photographs and knick-knacks and objects given to her over the years by children and grandchildren and grateful students. Her little William Nicholson still life, her Picasso print, her delicate hand-coloured Edward Lear landscapes of Petra and Smyrna and Nicopolis, her pencilled Jack Yeats horse and foal standing in a quiet field by a dry stone wall, her Marian Heber sheep on Stanage Edge. These things have made their home here, and she intends to die with them around her.
‘Maybe he just wants to die in England,’ she ventures.
‘Maybe,’ says Owen, glumly.
They decide to break protocol and have another snifter.
‘But it was such a convenient house to die in,’ says Owen, after a long pause. ‘I was quite envious. Athene Grange is all very well, it’s very good here, but La Suerte was amazing. It might have been made for them. And Bennett’s Spanish was excellent.’
‘Who did design it?’ asks Jo, at a tangent.
Owen doesn’t know.
‘Poor Ivor,’ repeats Jo.
‘Yes, poor Ivor,’ says Owen. ‘He really wouldn’t like it here at all. In England. Not his scene, at all. I think he’d got a scene, out there. I hope he had. Poor Ivor.’
In bed, meditating on Bennett Carpenter’s homing instincts as she tries to fall asleep, Jo remembers a story told to her by a friend who
had recently visited the Living Museum in Dudley, in the Black Country, where streets and shops and houses from the time of the Industrial Revolution to the 1930s had been painstakingly recreated, brick by brick. So realistic were the replications that one confused old woman, visiting in her wheelchair on an outing with fellow inmates from her care home in West Bromwich, had thought that she was home again at last. She wanted to stay, to settle back in. When she was told the little artisan’s house was only a show, despite its kitchen range and its dresser and its peg rug and its carefully selected period branded products, she had cried, and refused to accept this information. She had not wanted to leave. She had not wanted to go back on the coach to her care home.
Or so the woman got up in fancy dress had told Jo’s friend, who had told Jo.
This was a distressing story.
Jo wonders what Bennett wants to come home for.
Ivor is nearer to panic than he has been for years. Decades of calm solicitude, carefully banked up in him against such emergencies, begin to collapse, and he doesn’t know what he should do for the best, or where to find his footing. Bennett has clearly lost his wits, possibly temporarily, possibly permanently, and his insistence that he wants to return to England is vehement and irrational. He seems to have turned against the Spanish-speaking hospital staff; he has even turned against the impeccably polite, patient and helpful Bencomo. And he has been making slightly racist remarks, which make Ivor feel hot and cold all over. He has mentioned Franco, as though he were still alive. What on earth has happened to him? The tremor that rattled the bottles in the volcano bar has dislodged some particle in Bennett’s brain.
The Dark Flood Rises Page 26