The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

Maybe something’s gone wrong with the magnetic pull of the earth, thinks Ivor.

  Surgically, the hip operation is said to be a success, and Bennett is recovering from it in his private ward. The care is good, and he won’t be getting bed sores while he is safe in here. Ivor seems to be the only person who can detect that he is not making much sense. He relays his anxieties to Christopher, and together the two of them go over possible courses of action: to wait and see what happens; to seek further medical and psychiatric advice; to fly somebody reassuring out from England (James Robbins might come, he’d dealt capably with some of Bennett’s earlier medical crises, and Bennett likes him); to fly back to England anyway and try to find a hospital bed there, as Christopher had done for Sara.

  Christopher now can’t remember how he’d wangled the bed, even though it all happened so recently: maybe it was the TV crew that had fixed it? That young man Jonathan had been a brilliant fixer. When he looks back at those days, which now seem months ago, it’s a blur of panic, the panic that Ivor must be feeling now.

  Most of Bennett’s friends on the island are as old and shaky as he is, and not likely to be much use, though good will messages from them come through as news of his misadventure gets about. Simon Aguilera rings and says Pilar is willing to come over and housekeep for a while at La Suerte, when Bennett is allowed to go home. This surprisingly practical offer cheers Ivor, momentarily, but it’s hardly a long-term solution.

  Christopher doesn’t like to ask about Bennett’s and Ivor’s finances, though he does grasp without being told that selling La Suerte wouldn’t be easy, if it should come to that, and that most of their capital will be tied up in the property. They had, as Ivor has said several times, well and truly burned their boats when they had sold the lease on their London flat. They’ll find it very hard to get off the island.

  It is Ivor who, on the third night of Bennett’s hospitalisation, raises the subject. After dinner, he suddenly gets to his feet, crosses the room and opens Bennett’s old roll-top desk. He extracts the will from its pigeonhole. It’s obvious, at a glance, that it is a will. Wills still preserve their archaic form: their long brown envelopes, their old-fashioned Gothic script.

  Ivor sits down and breathes rather heavily. He has a good idea what’s in there, but he can’t be sure.

  ‘The income hasn’t been too good, of late,’ he says, apologetically, as he slowly makes his way through the legal prose. ‘The royalties are right down. We never got to grips with the contracts for the e-books, I think the publishers took him for a ride. He never really understood about e-books. And because we moved around so much, he didn’t really build up a proper pension. He wasn’t very careful about money matters. And the health insurance has been costing us a fortune.’

  Christopher can tell that Ivor isn’t very clued up about money either. For all their worldly charm and suavity, these had been two innocents, washed up on their island in the sun. Almost as unable to sail or swim away as the original inhabitants had been, all those centuries ago.

  Ivor reads, frowning as he reads. He seems, as far as Christopher can tell, relieved rather than disturbed by what he finds, and he suddenly lets out a laugh and shakes his head, but more in amusement than in sorrow or in anger.

  ‘He’s left a choice of books from his library to Owen England, and £5,000 to maintain the goldfish pond at Haycombe House, more than he’s left to the Terrence Higgins Trust. And he wants Owen to have his Picasso dinner plates.’

  ‘But he’s left you all right?’ Christopher feels compelled to ask. He doesn’t really want to know about the goldfish. It’s too late to go back that far.

  He has a sudden image of his father, corpulent in his bed. He had been a top-rate earner. How much will go to his second wife’s family? In Christopher’s view, he owes the lot to Fran, to whom he is now doubly indebted. And he and Poppet haven’t wholly neglected him.

  Or have they? Perhaps they have.

  Fran is a proud woman and will probably say she doesn’t want or need anything. And that will be true.

  ‘Yes,’ says Ivor, ‘he’s left me the house, and his royalties, and his investments, and his PLR.’

  ‘Investments’ is a grand word, thinks Ivor, for those little deposits here and there in building societies and ISAs and National Savings Certificates and Premium Bonds. A grand and misleading word for Bennett’s shares in Eurotunnel, which had been bringing him in regularly about 18p a year. Bennett hadn’t been shrewd about stocks and shares, but he had liked the idea of a tunnel under the Channel. Their friend Jack Stringer, former Master of Gladwyn College and now Lord Stringer of Medmenham, had been smarter at finance than he had been at his subject of eighteenth-century history, and would die a rich man, without heirs. In his old age Jack was forever at his computer, buying and selling, trading online. He’d given Bennett a tip or two, but the only one he’d taken up had been a disaster, and he’d often wondered, aloud, if Jack had given it to him out of spite.

  If Jack loses his wits, how long will he go on trading before anyone notices? He lives, deservedly, a very solitary life.

  Bennett had, against the odds, made a little money out of the £500 he’d put into the new swimming pool at the club, which had done all too well with the wrong kind of members: Bennett loved to swim, but he’d staidly disapproved of the new pool clientele, and had sold his shares for a surprisingly large profit. Ivor had quite liked the new members, although he was too old and set in his ways to take advantage of them. That was another reason why Bennett had taken against the pool.

  Bennett wants to be cremated, and he had asked, when this will was made and witnessed by an English lawyer in Arrecife and by non-beneficiary Simon Aguilera, that Ivor should scatter his ashes into the crater of Monte Corona. If Bennett doesn’t die soon, Ivor won’t be able to get up there to do it, and will have to delegate the duty. And maybe, now that Bennett is disenchanted by the island, he won’t want to be scattered into a Spanish-territory Canarian crater; he may wish to be dispersed in English woodland. How can one guess what he wants, in this rambling unbalanced frame of mind?

  Ivor reads out to Christopher the sentences about the cremation and the ashes, and the secular service which Bennett had envisaged being held in the euphorbia garden, with readings from W. H. Auden and Cecil Day-Lewis and Lorca. Lorca had given Bennett the title for his best-known book, taken from a poem the title of which, Ivor knows, means ‘Farewell’, and this is the poem he wishes to be read. The Day-Lewis is a heroic extract from ‘The Nabarra’, and the Auden poem was to be ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’:

  Territory, status,

  and love, sing all the birds, are what matter:

  what I dared not hope or fight for

  is, in my fifties, mine . . .

  Ivor doesn’t like ‘The Nabarra’, but he knows the Auden lines by heart, and they always bring tears to his eyes.

  Bennett had also, long ago, received a pledge from their friend Piers Carline, to sing Britten’s setting of ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’, but Piers had predeceased him, so he won’t be able to do that.

  Ivor describes the volcano of Monte Corona and the purple flowers that blossomed on its lower slopes in spring. In their first year here, he and Bennett had been fit enough to scramble up the slippery slopes of scree to reach the crater, and to gaze down into its mineral lichen-encrusted mouth. Ivor had liked the idea of the volcano ascent enough to overcome his tendency to vertigo, which afflicted him more in cityscapes with tall buildings than outdoors, and he’d enjoyed hearing Bennett ranting about Empedocles on the summit.

  Their spirits are rising, now that Ivor has braved his fate and discovered that he has not been disinherited. He doesn’t tell Christopher, but he has also found some affectionate phrasing, carefully inserted into the codicils and clauses, which has warmed his loyal heart. Territory, status and love . . .The panic of fear of the immediate future, of displacement and estate agents and furniture removals, is tempered by a sense that his life has, after all
, been worthwhile, and that Bennett has, however erratically and at times imperiously and selfishly, loved him. The end may be upon them, and it may in its details be horrifying, but the journey towards it has been worthwhile.

  When they talk about the immediate future, into the small hours, they both assume that Christopher will be staying on to see it through. He hasn’t got anything better to do, has he? A kind of gallows hilarity overcomes them as they discuss the macabre possibilities ahead. And as they talk, Christopher is in the process of realising more fully that his affair with Sara had been going nowhere: she had been beautiful, gifted, powerful, serious, too serious for him, on another plane of engagement with her career. Her subjects had been too big for him. Saharan politics, Ghalia Namarome, the Wall of Shame, Port-Étienne, the frontiers drawn in the sand, the rusting ships, the sinking pateras, the immigrantes wrapped in gold foil, the Red Cross in Puerto del Rosaria. She had been one too many for him, as Bennett had always been one too many for Ivor. He wasn’t up to her level. But unlike Ivor, he had not been able to espouse a role of submission. She had been an alpha female, and she had outclassed him. In time, he would have come to resent this. But time had not been given to them.

  Bennett and Ivor have had a lifetime together. Nearly fifty years, says Ivor, as he recalls their first meeting. They’d met in a tea shop in Oxford, where Ivor had been waiting at table as a favour to his Auntie Rosie who was short of staff. He had just left school, just turned seventeen, and was about to take up a lowly job with Reading Council. Bennett had been sitting at a little table in the window with an important-looking Oxford type, gowned, deep in conversation, and they had ordered what Ivor had heard as buttered scones. But when he arrived back with the requested tray of Darjeeling and china cups and napkins and buttered scones, Bennett’s guest had vehemently and petulantly protested that he had asked not for scones, but for buttered toast. Bennett, faced with this petty explosion, had winked imperceptibly at Ivor and declared, ‘But my dear Frazier, I distinctly heard you ask for scones!’

  Ivor had soothingly scuttled away to replace the scones with toast, and had found himself, on their departure, in receipt of a handsome tip.

  Bennett, calling back for his tea on several subsequent occasions, had failed to find the temporary waiter in attendance, but, undeterred, had tracked him down by brazenly asking Auntie Rosie how to contact him. She had obliged, and Ivor’s informal lifelong education had begun.

  Auntie Rosie had taken a pride in her part in this story, and had thoroughly enjoyed Bennett’s famous New Year parties.

  Nearly fifty years, repeats Ivor.

  If Bennett is really out of his mind, he won’t know whether he’s back in England or not, will he?

  England is so uncomfortable, so damp, so cramped. Ivor can’t face it, ever again. He’s got accustomed to warmth, and space, and a wide clear sky. He likes the little white chapel where nobody knows him but God.

  Teresa Quinn is elated. She had hung on, as commanded by her son Luke, and here he is, at her bedside. He hasn’t managed to bring grandson Xavier, but Teresa doesn’t mind about that at all, in fact she’d rather Xavier didn’t see her in this state. Seeing Luke is enough. The newly installed Birdie has tactfully reintroduced herself, and tactfully disappeared, leaving them with tea and toast.

  ‘My handsome, handsome boy,’ says Teresa, admiringly.

  ‘My beautiful, beautiful mother,’ says Luke.

  And she is beautiful: wasted, but elevated, ethereal.

  He is robust, and very brown of skin. He brings with him the vigour of the open air, of the outdoors. His dark hair, like his father’s, shows no signs of thinning and, unlike his father’s, has not a streak of grey. He is in the prime of life. His bodily solidity is a comfort to her. It will carry her along.

  They hold hands and talk about Africa, and Ebola, and Luke’s work, and his wife Monica, and the clinic, and Xavier, and Xavier’s schooling. They talk about pain levels and medication. Luke is a professional, it is easy to talk to him about pain, the subject does not embarrass him. Pain is his familiar. He looks through her rattling plastic boxes and her partitioned containers of pills and her bottles of syrup, examines the labels, cross-questions her about what she takes when, decides she is being quite competent about the regime, and notes that there are so many different kinds of medications that she hasn’t really grasped which are analgesics, which are sedatives, and which are mood stabilisers. That’s probably just as well, provided she sticks to the timings and the dosage. He’ll have a word with Birdie about it later, and with the district nurse in the morning.

  The nurse’s name is Connie, and Birdie says she is OK and fairly reliable. Connie likes Teresa, which is fortunate.

  But who wouldn’t, says Birdie, who is in love with Teresa, and has been for years.

  ‘So you’re back for your birthday,’ says Teresa to Luke, brightly, into a small sad pause that falls between them. He smiles. He is pleased she has remembered, that she hasn’t sunk deep into her own condition, as some old people do.

  ‘You’re so grown up!’ says Teresa, as she tells him once more the old familiar story of his birth, of the snow storm, the four-foot-long icicles, the Canadian winter, his father’s well-controlled panic, the midwife and the pudding bowl for the afterbirth and the bony Irish stew. She remembers, as she tells it for the last time, a detail she’d almost forgotten – that little white satinberibboned light wool bed-jacket, given to her and knitted by Granny O’Connor as though it were an item of a trousseau. A lying-in jacket, would that have been what it was called? The shiny white ribbons had been threaded through the curving neckline of the wool so charmingly. Liam’s mother had been very fond of Teresa. It had been a hard parting, on both sides.

  Women don’t wear bed-jackets these days. Young people wouldn’t even know what they were. Mothers don’t lie-in, they get straight out of bed with their newborn babies and go shopping the next day in Sainsbury’s, like kangaroos, and quite right too.

  She isn’t quite sure how old Luke is, though she knows his birth date, it is fixed in her memory, because she uses it as part of her login banking security. He was born in 1962. How old does that make him now? In his fifties, surely. Sometimes she forgets how old she is herself.

  Old enough. She has outlived her span of three score years and ten.

  Enough.

  They hold hands. You’re allowed to do that when you are dying.

  Maroussia Darling, in the North London house which she has owned for nearly fifty years and lived in for many of them, looks at herself in her bathroom mirror. She is yet and always has been a beautiful woman. She has borne this burden well.

  She is thinking that at the end of the run, which is imminent, she will give her last performance as Winnie, hear one more round of applause, and then she will come back to her home and take her dose of Nembutal. That’s what she defiantly tells herself that she will do. She will send an email or two, with delayed transmission, and then she will take her exit. She smiles as she thinks of the headlines which she will never read. It will serve Beckett right. She has served him well and loyally, and she deserves a grand finale, at his expense. He has set it up for her.

  Poor old Winnie. Oh Happy Days.

  It’s getting very near the end, but we are not yet at the end. Ivor, Christopher, Geraldine and Geraldine are sitting at a café table on the corner in the little inland palm-tree oasis of Haría. They wait with the crowds of locals, and with a few discerning tourists, for the carnival procession to pass. These days, the towns and the islands stagger the celebrations over weeks, getting the best of a prolonged period of Mardi Gras. The street is decked with bunting, the café is gay with paper flowers and lanterns, and false canaries sing in winking cages. The quartet of spectators is well placed to view the pageantry. The theme this year is ‘Pirates of the Pacific’, which Ivor predicts will be a bizarre mixture of Johnny Depp, Christopher Columbus and local legend. Sir Lancelot, who some think gave his name to Lanzarote, may r
ide forth in knitted chain-mail and cardboard armour, and so may the medieval mistress of Zonzamas in spectacular drag. Ivor describes the parades of recent years and the unfortunate laughter at the tragic moment when the young man fell off the platform at the festivities at Las Palmas in Gran Canaria. Bennett had hoped his mother wasn’t watching, he tells them.

  Ivor has risen to the sense of occasion by adding a little sapphire-blue frosted glitter to his gold-white hair, and a heart-shaped jet-black patch to his brow, which covers the slightly ominous blot that nature has recently bestowed upon him. Geraldine the First does not need to advance far beyond her usual flamboyance, although she has done her best to add extra gaiety with a twinkling and flashing tiara of electric violet stars. The other Geraldine, who is a few years younger and much larger than her friend, is comfortably clothed in a vast black tent, and Christopher is wearing his best pink-and-yellow striped Jermyn Street shirt.

  There has been much talk this evening of Christopher’s Auntie Josephine and the chance encounter in the British Library that has indirectly introduced the Geraldines to Ivor Walters. Bennett, of course, they have not met, though he has rallied and is in better shape, or Ivor would not be sitting here at the street corner pretending to enjoy himself. Bennett is still in hospital and he is still confused, but his hip is mending well and the fever of his desire to get back to England appears to have abated. It may return, Ivor fears, but for the time being, he seems happy to contemplate being restored shortly to the comforts of La Suerte. He has shed his truculence and become his more customary well-mannered self. He has been characteristically grateful and gracious to the helpful Bencomo, and has even taken in Bencomo’s name and asked him if he was named after a Guanche chieftain.

  He was.

  Bennett and Bencomo now address each other by their first names. Bennett doesn’t seem to mind this at all.

  Bencomo, Acaymo, Pelicar, Tegueste, Pelinor, mutters Bennett mysteriously to himself, from time to time, like a mantra. He may have lost some of his wits, but he hasn’t (alas, thinks Ivor) forgotten his Canarian history.