The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  It gapes, not very dramatically. She gazes at slices of yellowish earth, at heaps of rubble, and at the exposed foundations and severed drains and sewers of the buildings that have been demolished to make way for the new wave of old residents. By the end of next year there will be apartments with Alzheimer’s-proof locks and pretty pale carpets and button-operated blinds and curtains and fitted kitchens. There will be modest landscaped gardens, featuring, if Fran’s suggestions are adopted, raised beds where residents can do a little planting and weeding. There will be show flats and a guest suite. And access by public transport, in due course, to the pubs and tattoo parlours. Pets will be permitted, so the pet clinics may come in handy. And it will have a new postcode, the last postcode of old age.

  Fran leans on a wall and stares into the raw earth. She sighs. Then she gets back into her car and resets her satnav for Blackpool. There may be a bit more life in Blackpool than here in the flatness of the Fylde.

  Fran walks along the front, but the wind is icy. The cowslips are out on the verges, and Easter and the anniversary of Hamish’s death are over, but it’s not warm yet. She’s left her car in a worryingly cheap vacant-plot parking lot near the unfashionable South Beach, but is determined to explore for an hour or two before she turns in to the comfort and safety of the Premier Inn. But it’s cold, cold, and the sea is the colour of cement. She can’t face much of this. There are a lot of care homes in the side streets, and some crumbling guest houses as well as a lot of chip shops on the front. There’s an ageing population here. The ageing Blackpool Tower ahead of her is encased in scaffolding. She’s tired; it’s been a long drive. She can’t walk much further, though she would like to get to the Tower, to be able to say she’d reached the Tower.

  See Blackpool and die.

  I’m a stubborn old fool, she tells herself.

  She notices that she’s walking along a tramline and spots an approaching tram, going north to Fleetwood: she hops on it, finds her London Freedom Pass isn’t valid, but is more than happy to pay £1.50 to the friendly conductor in order to get out of the wind. It’s her duty to investigate the ‘supreme ugliness’ of this famous town of illuminations, and she perseveres.

  There are sculptures, of sorts, and ghost trains, and restaurants shaped like skulls and pirate hulks, and street decorations featuring mermaids. A sad little skewbald pony trots beside the tram, pulling a tacky little pink Cinderella pumpkin coach with a transparent plastic dome, in which a parent and a small child huddle. Fran is sad. It’s not meant to be like this, it’s meant to be fun. Her eyes are watering, but she’s not weeping for Hamish’s death or for Teresa’s death or for Josephine’s death. Her eyes are watering because of the brutal English wind.

  She gets off at the Tower, gazes bleakly at its shrouded lower levels, and heads off inland, out of the blast, towards the pedestrianised town centre. She plods dutifully on, past posters advertising tours and pantomimes and concerts long gone and yet to come, and identifies one or two architectural features she’d told herself to look out for – the Opera House (closed), the Winter Gardens of white faience, some Deco office blocks, and the imposing post office of Portland stone, where two crouched and kneeling Atlas figures wearily support its heavy canopy.

  Surprisingly, the post office still seems to be functioning as a post office. It must be one of the few grand purpose-built post offices left in the land. She wonders how long it will survive.

  Outside the post office, an elderly couple asks her the way. They want to find W. H. Smith’s. I can’t help you, she says, I’m a stranger here myself. They nod and smile at one another, politely, all of them lost, all of them at sea.

  She doesn’t find the old Miners’ Convalescent Home, said by her guidebook to be the best building in town. It must be further along the North Beach. She’s not going to get that far.

  She’s had enough. She heads back towards the tram, hoping she’ll remember where to get off, hoping she’ll remember where she left her car. It’s nearly suppertime. She’s tired and hungry. She hadn’t really enjoyed the Kentucky Fried Chicken at the motorway service station, but there hadn’t been much of a choice. She’d lost a bit of one of her fillings on a wing bone, but even in her brief perambulation of Blackpool she’s had time to notice that being toothless is quite the fashion here.

  The Premier Inn is safe and familiar. The Inn of Happy Days. The plump ginger-haired young man at Reception welcomes her warmly, as an old friend, or at least as an old customer, and assures her that if all she wants for her cooked breakfast is a boiled egg, it’s fine if she just pays for a continental. So she trundles her wheelie bag through a security door and along the corridor and up a short flight of stairs. There is the familiar and unfailing space, the room with its dotted carpet and its spotted decor and its white pillows and its purple messaging. Can it be only a couple of months since she and Paul and Julia and Graham had been eating scampi and barbecued ribs and drinking Merlot in the Premier Inn in the Black Country? She checks out the bathroom, and congratulates herself on having remembered to bring some proper soap, a leftover from a Christmas present gift-box from Ellie. She’s not wholly keen on the hospital-style liquid stuff they supply here, though that’s her only criticism.

  It’s been a very long two months. She’d been a lot younger, two months ago. She’d been walking steadily on a plateau, for years, through her sixties into her seventies, but now she’s suddenly taken a step down. That’s what happens. She knows all about it. She’s been warned many times about this downwards step, this lower shelf. It’s not a cliff of fall, but it’s a descent to a new kind of plateau, to a lower level. You hope to stay there on the flat for a few more years, but you may not be so lucky.

  In your middle decades, you’re on a roller coaster. Up and down, sometimes without warning. That’s not really true when you’re in your seventies.

  She pours herself a whisky from her little travel bottle, tops it up with tap water, kicks off her shoes, climbs up onto her bed, puts her feet up, switches on her TV, and finds the regional news. These beds do seem higher than they used to be, but that’s because she is getting smaller.

  She is warming up nicely, after the chill of her sightseeing. And here, before her, on the screen, is ‘Life in the North-west’. It will keep her company in her terminal loneliness, in her sense of rapidly encroaching despair. She may be near the end of the road, but they are not – no, there they all are, as busy as ever, the poisoner care worker who contaminated the saline solution with insulin, the plane spotters arrested in the United Arab Emirates, the politician delivering his lines on the set of Coronation Street, the young man who ran away to Syria and was hauled back again, the parents petitioning to fill in the quarry where their child had drowned, the daughters fundraising for their mother with a rare cancer of the gall bladder, the football manager apologising for his team, the dog that didn’t die in the fire. There are the academics from Lancaster University, proudly showing off their new inventions, and the woman who keeps bees.

  There is no item quite as curious and cheering as that interview with the woman on the narrow boat who had survived the small earthquake and the tidal wave of Dudley, but it’s good stuff, just the same.

  She’s in despair, but she can’t help but be a little interested in what is going on out there, and the manner in which it’s being relayed to her. It’s part of her and she’s part of it. Her life has been full of failure and defeat and triviality and small concerns, and at times she fears it is ending sadly. Her courage is running out, her energy is running out. She has lived vicariously, in the small concerns of others. The larger themes are leaving her.

  She stares at the screen. Her eyes are dry.

  But they keep on, out there, the unknown people of the North-west.

  She’ll have her supper in the restaurant. There must be some meals on the menu without chips. The KFC chips had been like cold dry matchsticks, she’d eaten a few but wished she hadn’t. She can’t face another chip. The wings had bee
n fine, surprisingly nice, but they’d broken her tooth.

  It’s curry night at the Inn, curry night at the long buffet bar, so it’s easy to avoid chips. The large room is full, but not many of these diners are business people. It’s a different demographic from West Brom. There are a lot of family groups with children, a hangover from the Easter holidays. At the next table, there is a young middle-aged couple with a little fair-haired girl and a pale teenage boy in a table-adapted wheelchair, to whom the mother pays the most delicate attention. The boy is handsome, in a pallid, dark-haired, Byronic way, despite his hunched shoulder and his paralysed hand and his awkward slouched position. His mother bends towards him, helps him to spoon his rice and dhal, wipes his chin with her paper napkin, gazes intently and lovingly upon his every move. The father appears more detached: he is drinking his beer, joshing with his daughter, crinkling and cracking his poppadoms. But he is attuned to his boy and to his wife’s intense devotion. Nothing escapes him. And the little girl glances from time to time, approvingly, at her brother, and seems pleased that he is enjoying his supper.

  From time to time the boy lets out a strange high-pitched moan, but it seems to signify pleasure rather than distress.

  Fran does not stare at the family group, as she was brought up not to stare, but as she forks down her saag paneer and rice and chicken and sips her Merlot, she takes in and honours the energy and care and love that have gone into this holiday meal, into creating and maintaining the fragile balance of this quartet. Years and years have been poured into these moments. The family of four is self-contained, triumphant in its overcoming of difficulties, enjoying a night out.

  On the other side of her table, almost too close to her and impossible to ignore, indeed soliciting her attention, sits a duo at a table for two. At first she thinks it’s a mother with her little boy, but then she thinks no, this is granny and grandson. The women have their babies young around here, as they do in the Black Country, and they are still young, still in their forties, when they become grandmothers. The grandmother is as solicitous as the mother at the table for four, but much more vocal, as is the child. He is of mixed race, about four years old, with curly hair and a wide smile. He is as lively as a cricket. He finds it hard to sit still. He restlessly wriggles and bounces and rocks his chair and plays with his cutlery, and chatters and asks question after question. He is an enchanting infant, extrovert, showing off in the most endearing manner, utterly confident that he is adorable. He is immensely pleased with himself and everything around him. He is even pleased with Fran. His good will overflows and crosses the small gap between their separate tables. He catches her eye, plays to her as his audience, engages her attention. She cannot help but smile at him.

  It’s impossible not to overhear their conversation, as he questions his nan about the rides they can go on tomorrow, the games they can play, the chips they can eat, and the Blackpool Rock they can buy for his mum. He longs to see the sharks and stingrays in the aquarium, and he knows the names of the dolphins. He is mad keen on the aquarium, and it is clear that his grandmother has primed him with curiosity and enthusiasm. And he is passionately eager to get his nan to commit to letting him go on the Big Dipper. She demurs, she doesn’t know if they let little tiddlers like him on it, it’s really enormous, she’d be scared to go on it herself, it reaches right up into the sky, it goes up into the clouds, it goes at fifty miles an hour! Oh come on, Nan, we’ve got to do it, he urges. You said we could. You promised.

  Fran can tell he will get his way.

  He’s seen it on telly, on that popular roller-coaster advert for Specsavers, an ad about old folk with a plot so complicated that Fran’s never been able to follow it. But he has.

  Brum brum, he says, racing his little plastic car noisily along the table and up the side of the laminated menu, and over his side plate, and over the silver dishes of chutneys, and over the remains of a chapatti, and off the edge of the table, where it crash-lands under Fran’s chair. There is a lot of proud apologetic smiling as Fran retrieves it and restores it. Fran feels she should express her appreciation of this small child’s fine qualities, but can’t think of anything to say except, ‘You’re the best!’ as she hands him back his yellow vehicle. He laughs, because he knows he is, but he manages to look a little bashful at the same time.

  ‘He’s the king!’ says his grandmother.

  It’s a small moment, but it will see her more cheerfully on her way, in the morning, to the unknown destination. Seeing it through, that’s the best she can do.

  ENVOI

  Fran finished Jo’s tapestry in a matter of weeks, much more quickly than Jo would have done. She enjoyed working on it, in a melancholy way, and even wondered whether to buy herself a needlework pack of her own. She didn’t, but she sometimes thought about it.

  Owen English never wrote his paper on dragon clouds, but he did strike up a friendship with another inmate of Athene Grange, who was pleased to share his Thursday evenings and to talk about poetry. He was entrusted by Nat Drummond with Jo’s computer, and located her work on The Fatal Kinship and the Studdert Meades, but decided that nothing could be made of it. He printed it out and put it in a drawer, and forgot about it. He flew out once more to the Canaries, where Ivor seemed happy to see him, and Bennett seemed to recognise him, but he knew that would be the last time.

  Ivor Walter’s future seemed a little bleak, to Owen.

  When Bennett died, Ivor sold up, at a considerable loss, and came back to England, where he is now living peacefully and uneventfully in a monastic care home in the shadow of a West Country cathedral. The home was found for him by a friendly Spanish priest in Las Palmas. Uncle Ivor’s wheelchair is being pushed around the close and the green by a succession of lay brothers. What he thinks of this we do not know. But things could be much worse, for Ivor.

  Owen England outlived Bennett Carpenter and Fran Stubbs and Claude Stubbs and Simon Aguilera. They are all dead now. We won’t stand upon the order or the manner of their going. Owen was to be puzzled by the way in which he had quietly outlived so many.

  Poppet Stubbs is still alive and well. She does not change much. When Fran died, Poppet took her addled and abandoned egg from its flowerpot on her windowsill, and released it, one summer evening, very gently, into the canal. She slid it into the green water, wondering if it would sink or float. It floated, a little lopsidedly, and then, very slowly, drifted away with the current and out of sight.

  Christopher Stubbs and Ishmael Diatta, still in the prime of life, have sailed on. They lashed themselves to the mast, and crossed the narrow Atlantic straits from Africa House, and they have arrived here, in the dry and blistering sun, at Nouadhibou, formerly Port-Étienne. It is a scene as astonishing, as terminal, as apocalyptic as Sara had imagined. Here they are at the last stockade, with a crew that is setting up its cameras in the last redoubt. Before them lie the rusting graveyard and the ships of death. Behind them lie the many miles of desert sands.

  These ignoble comrades will tell this story or die in the attempt. They will finish Sara’s project, and they will finish Bennett Carpenter’s project. They already have an update of Ghalia Namarome in the can. They will tell the history of the last journeys, of the gold foil and the golden bough, of the brands that were saved from the burning and the sailors who were saved from the sea.

  They will tell the last chapter of the history of the Isles of the Blessed, before they are engulfed beneath the rising waves.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Robert Nye for permission to cite his poem, ‘Going On’. I also thank Sowon Park for introducing me to a domestic robot, and to Leonard Cohen’s DVD about The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

  I owe a considerable debt to Helen Small’s The Long Life (2007), which gave me much food for thought, and provided me with a useful reading list. Her book is a fitting successor to Simone de Beauvoir’s classic work on the subject of age, La Vieillesse.

  My thanks also to all at Canongate, and to
my agent, James Gill.