The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  Christopher Stubbs, sitting with his mother in the second row of the crematorium chapel, feels there have been too many funerals recently, and hopes this is the last of the run. Fran, thank God, is not frail or ailing, but she does suddenly look very small. He’d noticed how small she was when he’d met her at Cambridge station. She’d seemed dwarfed by the crowds of healthy young people pouring off the platforms and milling about the concourse and queuing up for cabs. And now she is sitting here beside him neatly, tidily, in a black winter coat that seems to swallow her up. She looks diminished.

  Sitting so far forward in the hall, he can’t inconspicuously make a check of who else is there, though he’s already spoken to Nat and Andrew, in the front row, and Poppet, who is sitting on the other side of Fran. But it’s a good turnout, the chapel is full. He sees Cambridge and Norwich friends and colleagues, students and family, most of them individually unrecognisable to Christopher, but generically easy to place, though there are one or two younger guests that he seems to know by sight but finds hard to identify. He thinks he may have glimpsed his acquaintance, art historian Esther Breuer. He admires her and he is hoping she is here.

  He doesn’t like to think that this is Auntie Josephine’s actual coffin, covered in floral tributes, and that she is about to go up in flames. His mind goes back to Romley days, and school, and playing with the Drummond boys on the marshes, and smoking and drinking in bus shelters, and freewheeling down the hill, and games of whist in the Crossroads Café.

  There are speeches, but not too many: a professor from Norwich, a Cambridge Quaker cousin, Nat himself. An aged woman poet with wire hair and a gravel voice reads a short poem called ‘The Wheel’ by Yeats, which makes Fran get out a wad of tissue and blow her nose several times, though Christopher can’t concentrate on the words and can’t work out what it’s about. He is thinking now of Ivor and Bennett, and of Bennett’s careful plans for his own send-off, which it seems Ivor won’t be needing to organise for some time. Bennett has settled well, he is on a peaceful plateau, he could go on for years. All is calm at La Suerte.

  But Josephine had been taken by surprise and hadn’t had time to plan anything.

  Bennett’s old friend Owen English must be here somewhere, but Christopher wouldn’t know him if he saw him. He’ll catch up with him later. And he hasn’t yet seen either of the Geraldines, who had erupted so strangely into his Lanzarote dream-life, though they surely must be here. They wouldn’t miss a party.

  His father Claude had expressed a desire to attend, for old times’ sake, but Christopher doesn’t think he can have been serious about this.

  And yet, when they get to The Willows, there is Claude in his wheelchair, the first of the guests, attended by Persephone St Just, with a glass of wine already in his hand. He’d skipped the service and the speeches and the sermons and come straight to the reception in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes, now parked in the hotel’s spacious car park. Christopher, Fran and Poppet don’t know whether to be pleased or annoyed to see him. He’s not quite as intrusive as Sally Lyttelton, in her charcoal suit, who is already not very successfully attempting to dominate a group of dowdy Cambridge dons, but he does fill up a lot of space.

  There is space. It’s a large reception room, with vast well-draped windows looking down over some well-kept greensward towards a willow-fringed brook, some tributary of the Cam or the Ouse or the Granta. The champagne flows. (Claude doesn’t like champagne.) Fran knocks back a glass or two. She doesn’t have to worry about drinking and driving as she’s staying the night in the guest suite at Athene Grange; she’s already dropped off her overnight bag there. In the morning she and the boys are going to have a sort through of Jo’s things.

  There are a lot of people here that she ought to talk to. Owen England introduces himself and reminds her politely that they’d met before at Jo’s birthday party. They speak about what a good friend Jo had been to both of them, and how much they will miss her. He’s a very small man, thinks Fran, he’s almost on her own eye level; he seems even smaller than when she saw him last. But that’s good, as it means she can hear him more easily as they chat about the Thursday evenings and the excursions to Samuel Beckett and Deceased Wife’s Sisters and Bennett Carpenter. She can’t hear very tall people any more when she’s in a crowd, but she can log in with Owen well, intimately, almost conspiratorially, on this lower plane.

  ‘I shall miss our Thursdays,’ repeats Owen sadly. ‘I’d planned a gimlet for next week.’

  Fran can believe that he will miss her. He has all the outward characteristics of a lonely man. She says she’ll go and find Christopher to introduce to him, and leaves him standing to stare over the lawns with his glass of Laurent-Perrier. But she is intercepted on her way to look for her son by Eleanor Masters. Eleanor is a friend of Maroussia Darling, so they speak about her performance as Winnie in Happy Days, and of Maroussia’s long illness, and of Jo’s robust health. She forgets about Owen.

  Owen is left staring at the lawns. He has noticed in the mid-distance, in the gathering dusk, a delicate little muntjac deer, browsing daintily amidst the crocuses and the scillas and the grape hyacinths of spring. It is a charming little beige creature, a faunlike apparition. It would be tempting to think it were a spirit, a soul, a messenger from the other world, from the arrière-pays. Perhaps that innocuous well-tended lawn is the arrière-pays. Maybe there is no further to go. If that’s so, it’s a bit disappointing.

  Christopher finds Esther Breuer and they exchange notes about scandals in the auction rooms and the Turner Prize and the recent debate about Delacroix’s oil painting of an unmade bed, the painting which hangs in the little house museum in Paris. Esther expands her praise of Delacroix with disparaging remarks about Tracey Emin, but Christopher is too canny to be caught by that line. It’s all right for Esther, at her age and with her reputation, to be rude about fashionable art, but it would be dangerous for him to enter into the argument, especially when he’s temporarily unemployed. He wouldn’t trust Esther not to pass his remarks on to the wrong people. She has a sharp tongue and could do damage: he hasn’t forgotten that sorry business with feminists and Pauline Boty. He diverts her by asking what she thinks of the work of Canarian artist Manolo Millares, and is pleased when she says she’s never heard of him. But she does, he discovers, know Simon Aguilera, who turns out to be an old friend of her husband Robert Oxenholme, and she is very interested to hear about his sardine-factory gallery on Fuerteventura, and the stately sixteenth-century depiction of St Helena which had reminded Christopher of Josephine Drummond. She says she’d like to go and have a look at it, and Christopher tells her that he’s sure she would be welcome, as Simon is in fine form and seems pleased to have guests and visitors.

  Yes, agrees Esther, Josephine did have an imposing presence. Esther had known Jo since the 1980s, when she’d met her and her husband in Boston at a conference. They’d kept in touch and become friends. They’d all enjoyed a trip to a Crivelli exhibition at the gallery at Fort Worth together, in the Drummonds’ Midwest days. Esther had been giving the keynote address, and had invited Jo and Alec to a very grand reception, which had featured edible garlands and elaborate Crivelli swags made of real fruit and flowers and nuts and vegetables.

  She’s never heard of any painting featuring a Madonna del Nido. She tells Christopher she’ll look into it.

  Claude, meanwhile, has identified two of the more unlikely looking mourners as ex-test cricketers. One of them is brown and bearded, the other is clean-shaven and white. They are talking about matches that they have played and he has watched. They turn out to be old friends of Nat’s. They had hoped to engage the beautiful Persephone in conversation, but she has no interest in cricket whatsoever. Nor, she declares haughtily and provocatively, has anyone in Zimbabwe. They all laugh a lot.

  Unlike Claude, Persephone likes champagne and is enjoying herself.

  Claude is wearing a white rose in his buttonhole.

  The muntjac feeds amongst the hyacinths
.

  Eventually and inevitably, Fran finds herself with her back to the wall, deep in a semi-serious conversation with Sally Lyttelton: they speak of Thomas Hardy, of late Shakespeare, of the lamentable state of the funding of adult and continuing education, of the value of the humanities, and of Jo’s deft handling of her class. It’s quite hard work, but it’s a lot better than a conversation about tram routes in Broughborough. Sally reveals that Jo’s friend Geraldine, whom she also knows quite well, has failed the feast, as she’s better fish to fry: she is in Venice, carrying on with an American Professor Emeritus called Gerry in a grand apartment overlooking the Grand Canal.

  Fran supposes it’s a good thing that life goes on, and she supposes she admires this person called Geraldine for having the energy to carry on, at her age, and she supposes Jo wouldn’t have cared a tuppenny fuck about Geraldine’s presence or absence at her wake. But Sally is tiring, and so is Jo’s sister Susie, who now appears, elbows out Sally, and makes herself known. Fran feels she must have met Susie, over the years, but she has no meaningful recollection of her (she certainly hadn’t been present at Jo’s big birthday party) and she finds she can’t strike a good note with her. Susie is all elbows. She is like a parody of Jo. She is pedantic to a fault, whereas Jo had only been amused by and interested in unorthodox demotic or grammatical usages, and she is judgmental (as Jo had been), but surely now was not the moment to be caustic about the ageing poet who had read the Yeats poem with, in Fran’s view, proper feeling.

  Through winter-time we call on spring,

  And through the spring on summer call . . .

  Fran can’t cope with Susie’s aggression. She is feeling faint. She has quickly come to the view that Susie hadn’t been at Jo’s birthday because she hadn’t, for good reason, been invited. She is not an uplifting or engaging person.

  You can fail to invite people to your birthday party, but you can’t ban family members from funerals. Funerals are public events, and people just turn up at them. They just turn up, though they may not always know their way to the champagne.

  These are mean thoughts.

  Fran excuses herself, says she needs to go to the powder room, and plunges off into the hotel hinterland, with its disconcertingly flexible spatial arrangements and temporary demarcations and screens and antechambers. In an antechamber off a corridor, she is surprised to glimpse Poppet and Andrew Drummond, sitting with their arms around one another on a pale green banquette. Poppet’s face is buried in Andrew’s shoulder, and she seems to be sobbing. What can be going on there? Some terrible Romley memory, some primal Romley scene is being re-enacted. Fran hurries past, having no wish to interrupt or to be seen to observe, and takes refuge in the glittering black and white marbled hall of the Ladies room.

  Emerging from the super-modern stall, having made sure her underwear is all correctly aligned, she advances towards the row of gleaming white wash-basins, but is there defeated by the turning on of the water to wash her hands. It’s a simple-looking stream-lined but incomprehensible mechanism she’s never seen before: does one twist something, depress something, or wave one’s hands at a certain distance beneath the orifice? There’s nothing as obvious as a tap, and she is about to give up hope when another older woman arrives by her side to share, momentarily, her bewilderment, and then to solve the problem by a deft turn of a discreet lower spigot. Fran smiles, gratefully, and successfully copies the action, and their eyes meet in the mirror.

  ‘Thanks,’ says Fran, to the mirror image.

  It is a strange and intense moment, a strange angle of oblique communion. They smile at one another, two old women triumphing over the mystery of the flowing of the water of life, flowing towards them from some invisible aqueduct, from some snowy mountain. The other woman says, tentatively, as she combs her white hair, ‘I think we met at Jo’s birthday? You won’t remember me, I’m Betty Figueroa.’

  Of course, says Fran, you’re Betty. Jo used to speak of you: and I’m Fran Stubbs.

  Together they slowly make their way back to the throng.

  There is something extraordinarily gallant and moving about Betty, the survivor, the noble atheist of the left. She is nearing ninety, and yet she shines with an undiminished, with an increasing radiance. Like Teresa, but having travelled further onwards along the way than Teresa, with no hope or expectation of a resurrection, she shines. She and Fran find a couple of chairs by the window and sit together for a while, talking quietly of little things that they remember. Fran could not have said, will not be able to say, what it is that speaks to her through Betty Figueroa, who has travelled the oceans of the wide world and come home to Cambridge to rest. It is a light from another world, from another shore, from a distant mountain. A great and sad calmness descends on Fran. It will not last, she knows she will soon be reclaimed by grief and anger and restlessness, but for a while, sitting amidst the chatter and the crumbs and the growing debris with Betty, in the same haven, she is almost at peace.

  By the time Fran drives north to the reconvened meeting, the cowslips are out on the motorway verges, and the hedges are in bloom. Her calm has turned into a kind of low-grade settled desperation, a more normal condition for Fran. She is trying not to exceed the speed limit.

  She is driving towards the site of the new housing project, on the edge of a small country town in the Fylde. Its postcode has not yet been allocated. Her destination has no postcode. Her destination does not as yet exist.

  But on the way towards it, the sloping verges are burgeoning with cowslips, and even from the M6 at seventy-two miles an hour, one can see the scattered clumps of pale yellow flowers with their tender nodding heads. And, in the central reservation between the carriageways, there is a carpet of white and grey-green, a low growing mat of tiny dense white flowers, maritime salt-loving flowers which have in recent years taken over the motorways of Britain. They thrive on the salted grit of winter and blossom bravely in the spring. They come from the east, and have settled here.

  This is a better time of year for pantheists, as she had told Teresa, in expectation, months ago. But Teresa had not waited to see the better weather. She had not waited for Easter and the springtime.

  Neither had Josephine. She hadn’t even had time to say goodbye. Fran has tried to get her mind around the abruptness of Jo’s leaving, but it’s hard. She tells herself that Jo had died the perfect death, but that puts the burden of living squarely back on her. She’s got to keep going. There’s nothing else to do. You keep going until you can’t go any further. And you can’t count on the perfect death, at the end of the run.

  She’d been taken aback by Maroussia Darling’s dramatic suicide. The papers had been full of it, and the columnists had gone to town on the ethics of celebrity self-slaughter. Mind your own fucking business, you fucking vultures, Fran had yelled at them, as she saw the headlines, and turned the pages. It was even worse than all that crap about Stella Hartleap. She’d have liked to have discussed it with Jo, but of course she can’t do that. She even thinks of writing a note of condolence to Maroussia’s friend Eleanor Masters, but of course she won’t. She doesn’t know her well enough. She won’t interfere. It’s none of her business either.

  Although each death, each survival, seems to be her business.

  She has taken on Jo’s unfinished needlework. It’s in her overnight bag now. It’s a conventional pink and gold and green floral piece, probably given to Jo for Christmas by a grandchild. Tapestry is easy, any fool can do gross point and petit point and bargello.

  And, at Nat’s urging, she’d also taken a couple of the finished cushions home to her tower. A very early one, worn a little thin, from Romley days, and a later, plumper one, from Illinois.

  She’d spent an hour at Athene Grange with Owen, talking about Christopher and Bennett and Ivor and Lanzarote. Ivor certainly isn’t in a position to finish Jo’s monograph on Deceased Wife’s Sisters. Nobody will ever know now which way her mind was wandering, to what small revelations her enquiries were leadin
g her. It’s of no importance whatsoever, as Jo would have been the first to say, but it’s sad. Owen has said he will take up the possibility and desirability of publishing Valentine’s letters and diaries with Bennett, though he doubts if Bennett will be up to making any serious moves on this front. But perhaps Ivor will put in a word to Bennett’s agent. And Owen will have done his duty to Jo by mentioning it.

  Owen doesn’t tell Fran that he is losing his interest in clouds. They have begun to seem a pointless preoccupation. His smoking count has gone up, and he’s wondering whether to explore the world of e-cigarettes. He is as indistinct as water is in water. He keeps thinking about that little muntjac feeding at the water’s edge.

  Fran is to spend the night in the Premier Inn in Blackpool, before clocking on in the morning at the meeting with the social services and the NHS representatives and another Ashley Combe trustee in the allegedly ‘charming’ small country town where the new housing is to be built. She is hoping that Paul Scobey might get there, but he hasn’t confirmed. The town lies in the Fylde, a plain not unlike Poppet’s West Country Levels, and in some of its web images it looks charming enough, though she suspects it may not be. They are meeting in the offices of a surveyor who had been involved in the land purchase. She’ll look at the site this afternoon, though at this stage there won’t be much to see. Some demolition, a hole in the ground.

  Poppet says the Fylde is a flood plain. They are yet again, despite all they know, planning to build in a flood plain. Fran should ask them about this, at the meeting.

  She’ll have a look down the hole. She’ll see if she can smell the rising water. Then she’ll head for the Premier Inn.

  When she leaves the motorways, her satnav route takes her past a kitsch and over-restored but presumably historic windmill, along some narrow lanes, and slowly through flat terrain that is partly agricultural, partly post-industrial, partly wasteland. It’s no man’s land. She is guided onto a one-way system right through the centre of the charming country town, and notes that it is the usual mess of tattoo parlours, pet clinics, nail bars, charity shops, curry takeaways, fish and chips, Thai restaurants, shabby old pubs and chemists. The site is on the other side of town, and she drives through some standardised 1920s and 1930s suburban housing that could be anywhere in England, and comes to a halt by a crater next to a tennis court, marked by some diggers and skips and cement-mixers and bales of orange mesh netting. There doesn’t seem to be much point in parking to look at a hole in the ground surrounded by wire fencing, but she does.