The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  Christopher Stubbs had almost decided that he couldn’t hang around lotus-eating any longer, and had made several abortive attempts to book a flight home when the Geraldines arrived on Ivor’s doorstep, unannounced, with a great clumsy sheaf of gawky parrot and dragon flowers encased in cellophane and prickly silver foil. They had been only slightly appalled to find that their host was in hospital. A little problem like that would not deter them from seeking society. Quickly they changed their demeanour from gregarious lightweight fun-loving party-goers to supportive handmaidens: it was done in a trice, done as they stood on the threshold of La Suerte, holding their awkward bouquet. They were invited in, put in the picture, given space to exclaim and sympathise, given time to identify themselves (Ivor dimly remembered Geraldine the First, from the days when even university press publishing parties aspired to glamour), and they were welcomed as accomplices into the unfolding situation. Geraldine the Second has been full of good advice about hip replacements, having had one herself a couple of years ago. Geraldine the First, in contrast, is very keen to talk to Bennett about Franco and Mussolini and Gabriele D’Annunzio. Ivor has explained that now may not be the moment, but Geraldine has not abandoned hope of a serious discussion with the maestro. They’ve got another three days on the island, plenty of time for him to pull himself together. She would love to hear his views on what really happened to the Italians at Guadalajara.

  And here come the floats, with their motley and colourful array of pirates and pirate queens and conquistadores and Norman invaders and Guanche princesses in goatskins. There is even what looks like a tribute to the immigrantes, in the form of a fishing boat perilously perched on a tractor, containing a few dark gesticulating figures wrapped in gold foil, bearing huge gilded boughs and palm fronds – is this a sign of acceptance, of integration, or a political protest? It’s hard to tell, but the gold stuff glitters, the dark eyes behind the huge masks flash, and the clumsy Ship of Death lurches on. The makeshift painted vehicles rumble and teeter along the streets, the young men drunkenly dance and hurl golden leaves and twigs into the crowd like confetti. It is just as well that the island has ceased to tremble, or they would all be falling over and falling off their floats.

  A gilded spray lands on the café table, right in front of Christopher Stubbs, aimed at Christopher Stubbs. He picks it up and sticks it in the third buttonhole of his striped shirt.

  None of them are to know that the story of the immigrantes is far from over; indeed, it is only at its beginning. Over the coming years, fewer will risk the Atlantic passage from North Africa, but more and more will be crowding onto ill-equipped vessels in the Eastern Mediterranean, as violence in the Middle East and Libya drives them to further desperation. They will aim for Greece and Malta and Sicily and Italy and thousands upon thousands will drown, as Europe fortifies itself, ceases to send rescue missions, leaves the boats to sink in sight of shore. The more people drown, hopes Europe, the more immigrants will be discouraged, and the fewer mouths to feed in Europe.

  But it won’t work out like that. The tidal wave will not be stopped.

  Some will still reach the Canaries, bringing with them scares of Ebola as they land on tourist beaches, but fewer and fewer will embark from the Western Sahara and Port-Étienne. The cemetery of Gran Tarajal will not be overcrowded. The tragedy shifts to the east. And Sara will not be there to follow it. No one knows how it will end. Sara’s unfinished project will haunt Christopher. He won’t be able to forget it. It will grow and swell in his mind.

  Ivor watches the parade. His mind is restless with torment. He doesn’t feel up to making any of the ineluctable big decisions that lie ahead. It’s not as though he hadn’t seen this coming, he’d been dreading it ever since they arrived on this beautiful and arid island. But he’d been in denial of his own future for years. He doesn’t even know what to do, right now, this day, tomorrow, with these two extremely silly women who have arrived unannounced in his territory. He and Bennett had always been vulnerable and exposed to random visitors, some of whom had been unwelcome, but this invasion seems like a parody of all previous visitations.

  The girls clearly consider they are providing a welcome distraction, and in a way they are. They have even made him laugh a couple of times, and Christopher seems to find them amusing. They are full of stories. Geraldine Two tells them that as an underemployed actress, she had once worked as a home help, and has many indiscretions to impart about old folk she had looked after, one of whom had actually died on her watch, died in his bed while she was in the kitchen getting the reheated ‘meal on wheels’ out of the oven. What a shock, what a surprise! Not a sound came out of him, she says, not a murmur. When she’d gone back into his bedsitting room with the shepherd’s pie, he’d gone. As easy as going to sleep: a comfort really, to know you can pass the barrier so easily. Painless, silent, peaceful. A very easy death.

  She does not notice Ivor crossing himself as she tells this story. But Christopher notices.

  Christopher admires Ivor. He has found somewhere to be, thinks Christopher.

  It had been a shock to her, all the same, Geraldine Two said, and it had driven her into accepting a part in a panto in Sheffield, at the Lyceum. In Cinderella, if you want to know, she says, and laughs heartily, quakingly. I was a little maid waiting on the Ugly Sisters, I danced in the chorus and I flew in the flying ballet! Our star was Jax Conan, do you remember Jax? He was our Buttons. Bit of a groper, our Jax, but he was very funny. We didn’t mind a bit of groping in those days. In fact we quite liked it, but you aren’t allowed to say so now.

  Dead now, of course. Poor old Jax.

  Too much talk of death, thinks Christopher. He doesn’t mention that his father had successfully operated on Jax’s oesophagus, but seizes on the theatrical diversion and initiates a more high-flown discussion of the ancient traditions of cross-dressing and drag, of pantomime and carnival, and of Danny La Rue, whom he’d once seen on stage in all his feathers at the Golders Green Hippodrome. But he notices that Ivor doesn’t seem very happy with this line of talk either.

  Ivor is looking distracted, abstracted.

  He is back in his parents’ bedroom in Oxford Road in Staines, in their terraced house two doors up from the newsagent’s, trying on his mother’s shimmering peacock-blue cocktail dress. She hardly ever went out, hardly ever wore it. It hung there in the wardrobe, on its padded hanger, year after year. Such a pretty dress, he had thought it. She had been so pretty, his mother, but she hadn’t had much of a life.

  Whereas he and Bennett had seen the world.

  Fran is worried about almost everybody and almost everything. She’s worried about Poppet and Jim and the flood waters and Baby Jesus, she’s worried about Christopher dawdling out there in the Canaries, she’s worried about climate change and the lateness of the spring, she’s worried about Paul Scobey, she’s worried about Teresa.

  She’s had a text from Paul telling her that his Auntie Dorothy has died, which shouldn’t be upsetting to her as she’d only met the woman once, and she had been ill in a care home for years, burdened by some form of dementia and a colostomy bag, but nevertheless it is a disconcerting message. She’s glad he bothered to tell her, and she’s also glad to learn that Dorothy had received her card thanking her for her coloured-in pictures. She nearly hadn’t bothered to send it, wondering if Dorothy would remember who she was, but now she’s very pleased she did. But the apparent meaningless of Dorothy’s later life is worryingly incomprehensible to Fran, and the force of it revisits her. It begs some big metaphysical questions that she cannot even formulate, let alone answer. Dorothy had been so outgoing, so engaging, so beautifully turned out, and yet so disconnected.

  She’d have liked to have discussed these aspects of Dorothy’s life and death with Teresa, who had taken a keen interest in the story of Fran’s encounter with Dorothy and the energetic and vibrantly coloured Suzette, but Teresa has abruptly and in few words cancelled or postponed their next meeting. That’s not very surpris
ing, but it’s not good, and it makes Fran feel rejected. Teresa hasn’t even suggested looking for another date. Fran knows that Teresa’s son Luke was about to come to England, so that’s probably the cause. Unreasonably, she feels excluded, and is ashamed of feeling excluded.

  She’s worried about Bennett Carpenter and Ivor Walters, although she’s never met them.

  She’s worried about her car’s brakes. She should get them checked, after all that standing in water, after the car’s damp night in a ploughed field, but she hasn’t got round to it and she knows she’s probably not going to bother. The deep inertia of not-bothering has settled into her mindset.

  She hadn’t seen the cranes. It would have been cheering to see the cranes.

  She’s worried about her eyesight, which is scratchy. Her cataract must be nearly operable by now and she’s not looking forward to that at all. She’s worried about the free-range chicken which has been defrosting overnight on the breadboard. She’s worried about poisoning her ex-husband Claude with campylobacter. She’s decided to make lemon chicken for her next visit, but she hasn’t got any lemons. She knows she should change her planned menu, in view of this deficiency, but she can’t think of anything else to cook. The notion of lemon chicken has occupied all the space in her plated-meal brain. She’ll have to go out soon to get some lemons.

  The long drive back from the West Country had taken it out of her, and now, two days later, she’s still not feeling back up to strength. She lies an extra hour in bed, feeling guilty and exhausted. Going downhill. Losing her grip. She reads her daily newspaper online, she’s too tired to go down and buy one from the grilled and barricaded newsagent on the street corner.

  The twenty-four-year-old care home worker who had purposely poisoned her patients with bleach products has been convicted and remanded in custody, awaiting sentencing. Planning permission has been granted for a controversial greenfield site in Warwickshire. A poet much admired by Jo Drummond has died. The Middle East is murderous. There is a fine double-spread photograph of a leafless tree in Yorkshire, with some brave and defiant words by the ageless David Hockney about the beauty of trees in winter.

  But Fran needs the leaves.

  She wishes she were back in the Premier Inn, in easy reach of the comfort of a perfect soft-boiled egg.

  The egg yolk on the dressing-gown lapel.

  Jo has got it all sorted. She is comfortable in her Grange, with its sundial and its little clipped box hedges. She can even get her paper delivered to the quasi porter’s lodge.

  In the Romley days, Christopher Stubbs and Nat Drummond had shared a paper round. The streets in Romley had been safe then, even though it wasn’t a very good neighbourhood. No knives, no guns, not many drugs.

  Nat writes about cricket and talks about it on the radio. Fran isn’t very interested in cricket, but she’s always pleased to hear his voice, for old times’ sake.

  As she lies there, with her mug of coffee and her online newspaper, conscientiously flexing her ankles and exercising her finger joints with a special gadget she’d bought online, her mobile buzzes. It’s an incoming text. Superstitiously, she doesn’t want to look at it. There’s so much bad news around.

  But of course she does.

  It’s a message from an unknown number, and it’s from Birdie Bardwell, the woman who has moved in to help look after Teresa. It’s bad, but not as bad as she had feared. It reads: TERESA HAD A FALL, ASKING AFTER YOU, CAN YOU GIVE ME A RING? BEST, BIRDIE.

  It’s bad, but Fran momentarily, selfishly, cheers up a little. She has been asked for.

  She envisages Teresa falling or tripping as she tries to struggle out of her day bed, or to make her painful way along the corridor. But that’s not the way it was.

  Birdie sounds distressed and flustered. We don’t know how it happened, says Birdie. She must have tried to get up the library steps, God knows what for. And you know how she is, she’s so frail. We can’t think what possessed her. She had a fall. I was in the kitchen, I’d have heard her if she’d called.

  Fran hears that Birdie feels guilty, responsible.

  Anyway, says Birdie, she’s all right, she’s still in hospital under observation and having her wrist fixed. But she can’t text, and she was worried that she’d sent you an incomplete message. She’d meant to explain about Luke’s visit, but the palliative care nurse had just turned up and she’d pressed SEND without quite intending to. But she’s all right, repeats Birdie, she’s all right, and Luke’s still here.

  Teresa doesn’t sound very all right to Fran, who hasn’t listened very carefully to this muddled and self-exculpatory explanation. Fran understands that she is being told that she’s not to visit the hospital. She doesn’t mind that, she’s not keen on hospital-visiting, but it’s too sad.

  Clambering up the library steps? Whatever for?

  A dying fall.

  I summon to the winding ancient stair . . .

  I’d better get up, says Fran to herself, aloud. But she does not move. She can feel that the bit of the brain that instructs her body to move is not yet functioning properly. It’s trying to get her up, but it can’t. It jerks towards action, then it stalls, then tries again and stalls again. She’s not as stuck as Winnie in her pile of sand, but she’s getting on that way. You have to hand it to Beckett, it’s a bloody good image, a bloody good metaphor, that pile of sand. She ought to have been more appreciative when thanking Jo for the hard-to-get tickets; she’d probably sounded a bit grumpy and reluctant about the outing. She’s had some more thoughts about Beckett since that evening, she must try to remember them for the next time she sees Jo.

  Shall she move now? She had heard on the radio recently a discussion about how all our actions, however trivial, are preordained, and you can read them on a scan of the about-to-be and of readiness-potential well before they occur. The lifting of a hand, the opening of an eye, the getting out of bed. Neuroscientists argue that this does away with the notion of free will, but that’s rubbish. It simply means that we can learn to read the pre-sequences of action more clearly. She’s quite good at tracing the locations in her brain that impel decision and action, though she doesn’t know the names for them. As she gets older, she can feel the processes of tracking and stalling and failing and re-engaging very clearly. As though the lobes and zones were separating off, one from another, as though the pathways were connecting less rapidly.

  Interesting.

  She’s still lying there, gazing out of her high window at her lowering cityscape and wondering whether she ought to try to read a long article on wind farms, when her landline calls her. This does get her out of her bed, as she can’t reach it from her bedside.

  Not many people ring on her landline. Tarrant Towers’ reception is excellent, it is one of the building’s few virtues, on a par with and in accord with its view, and she relies on her mobile.

  It’s Claude. She can tell he’s just rung up for a chat. He sounds absolutely fine. She’s relieved to hear him. They have an animated conversation about Poppet, the possibility of lemon chicken, Bennett Carpenter’s new hip, and Bennett’s choice of Desert Island Discs. Claude says he’d have chosen Callas singing ‘Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore’, if anybody had ever asked him, which they hadn’t, though he can’t think why not. He says that as a joke, so he’s in a good mood, something has pleased him. Fran makes a date and a time to go round with the as-yet-uncooked chicken. She’s cheered up.

  She gets moving.

  If she’d been asked to do Desert Island Discs, would they have let her choose ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’? It’s not as elevated as Tosca, it’s not on the plane of living for art and living for love, but it’s pretty damn satisfactory, all the same.

  Jo says that her friend Eleanor says that Maroussia Darling, when a rising star in the old Roy Plomley days of Desert Island Discs, wasn’t allowed to choose Billie Holiday singing ‘Gloomy Sunday’, because it was on the BBC’s suicide watch list. She wonders if that can possibly be true.
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  She’s feeling a lot better.

  The zones have reconnected; her sense of purpose is restored.

  Down she goes to buy the arbitrary lemons.

  The Geraldines have flown home on their package tourist flight, having had an unexpectedly entertaining break, full of drama; and Christopher Stubbs has at last booked his flight to Gatwick. Bennett Carpenter continues, physically at least, to make a reasonable recovery, and it looks as though Ivor isn’t going to have to up sticks and pack their bags and their furniture and find a new home, or not just yet. He’s been worrying inordinately about that incongruous mahogany roll-top desk, by which Bennett sets such store. But a reprieve has been granted, on this mild island of remission. Where better to convalesce than at La Suerte?

  While Ivor is driving Christopher to the airport, Ishmael is pushing Bennett’s wheelchair along the modest pier at the little fishing port of Arrieta. He wheels him along, towards Africa House with its low white walls and its pretty finials and its small stone lions. The beacon of its cupola gazes east, towards Morocco and Mauritania and the unacknowledged territory of the Western Sahara, where Ghalia Namarome maintains her defiant political stance. She’s recovered from her hunger strike, but she hasn’t given up the cause, although we no longer read about it in the Western press.

  The beacon lures seafarers to their death or to their deliverance.

  The giant bones of Antaeus are buried somewhere over there, over the waters. According to Pliny, or was it Plutarch, the noble Roman general Sertorius had seen them with his own eyes. Giant bones, elephant bones, whale bones.

  Bencomo, Acaymo, Pelicar, Tegueste, Pelinor, mutters Bennett.

  Bennett loves this stretch of seafront, even though its rolling surf had once assaulted him and knocked him over. Bennett and Ishmael make a striking couple, the one so old-world and so distinguished and so rubicund, with his mane of white hair and his bushy eyebrows and his old panama hat and his pale blue shirt; the other so handsome and dark and elegant in his designer jeans and his matelot jersey. Bennett has a friendly old navy-blue rug with a border of comforting red blanket stitching tucked over his knees. A hot dry Saharan wind is blowing from Africa, from Port-Étienne, from Ishmael’s homeland, and both men wear dark glasses against the grit and the sand. Bennett’s teeth are safely back in place, and he smiles with a kind of rapture as he is bowled along.