The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  In the Bible, as she understands it, a man is obliged, not forbidden, to marry his Deceased Wife’s Sister.

  She recognises that her field of enquiry is limited and of meagre academic appeal, but it’s as good as The Times or The Guardian crossword. It’s an indulgence.

  At her age, she thinks she has earned a few indulgences. She agrees with the school of thought of American Professor of Ethics Michael Slote, who argues that in old age we are allowed to adjust our goals and watch daytime TV and play shuffleboard. (Actually, that’s not what he argues, but that’s how Josephine Drummond chooses to read him, and it’s not wholly a travesty of the direction of his more finely nuanced reasoning.)

  She’s not sure what shuffleboard is, but it conjures up memories of reading Jeremy Bentham on pushpin and poetry. She’d never really know what pushpin was, either.

  Occasionally it occurs to her that the nature of her study of DWS fiction retrospectively devalues the whole high literary enterprise, her life’s work in pursuit of truth and meaning.

  For what had her adult education classes been but a form of knitting for the lonely, an escape for the housebound, a time-filler for the bored? George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, V. S. Naipaul, Doris Lessing . . . the post-colonial novel, the feminist novel. They kill time. That’s what they are good for. And what did Samuel Beckett write about? Killing time. That was his tragic theme.

  She and Fran had both hated Beckett when young. They are now approaching him, in old age, warily. They have booked tickets to see a forthcoming production of Happy Days, with Maroussia Darling playing Winnie. But, as Fran said to her the other day, I’m bloody glad I got this far without having to know what he was on about. I’m glad I didn’t go for it when I was young.

  It’s a question of actuarial computation, as Slote might have said. Three years of fearing death and seventy years of hardly ever thinking about it is a better deal than Beckett had, who seems to have thought about it all the time.

  The timing is all. The readiness is all.

  Why did Beckett age so prematurely, why did he spend his writing life in the contemplation of death? There’s time for that later, plenty of time, as Josephine and Fran have found out. You really don’t need to do it when you’re in your twenties or thirties or forties, as he did.

  Something to do with his mother, Fran thinks. Jo thinks it was his low-grade persistent ill health and poor eyesight. He lacked animal spirits. Also, he had a hammer toe, a very inconvenient malformation. Jo has one of those too. It’s not much of a bond with the playwright, but it generates a little posthumous fellow feeling.

  The TV news comes to a dull dying fall about troubles on the M11 (Josephine does not share her friend’s interest in regional news) and she gathers her soft rose-pink and sage-green and old-gold tapestry wools together into her little wicker basket and sets off along the corridor and across the cold dark quad to Owen’s.

  Sometimes she does Modernist tapestries, but she is now trying to finish a wreath of roses that one of her grandchildren had given her for Christmas. She is doing it out of pious loyalty to twelve-year-old Sasha.

  Elizabeth Taylor had written a good novel called A Wreath of Roses. She will perhaps re-read it one day. That too had been about ageing, although Jo hadn’t recognised that when she read it in her thirties.

  Owen, this evening, is hoping to astonish her with a bottle of absinthe, and he succeeds.

  ‘Good God,’ she exclaims, eyeing the stylish dark-green bottle with admiration, ‘wherever did you get that?’

  Owen smiles, proudly and modestly, his charming lopsided wary judicious cunning little smile.

  ‘An old student brought it,’ he tells her, as he unscrews its top and sniffs at it. ‘It’s been made legal now, he tells me, but he assures me it’s still got a very high alcohol content.’

  He pours their generous, but well-judged doses into their twin tumblers, and adds water to the historic potion, drop by drop. Drops of Cambridge tap water fall from a cut-glass decanter. They watch the absinthe vein and cloud and pursue its own mysterious convection currents. The chalky green, the promising deadly foreign odour of aniseed and verveine. The water and the power.

  Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Degas and Ernest Hemingway walk into the room and join the hommage.

  Owen is a small man, a slight small thoughtful active man. A very private person, he prefers talking about books to talking about people. All his relationships seem to have been mediated through literature, which is not uncommon in a university town. The solitary cloistered life of Athene Grange suits him well. His bachelor career – Cambridge, Australia, Canada, Keele, Kent – had been too itinerant to earn him a college sinecure, and such sinecures are more and more rare in the modern world. Those days are over, the days when Lewis Carroll or E. M. Forster or Dadie Rylands or Anne Barton could live in comfort in rooms in their well-endowed colleges, attended by all that should accompany old age: as honour, love, obedience, troops of friends. As wines from the cellar and servants to clean the grate and lay the fire and change the sheets. Athene Grange is a serviceable, affordable, not undignified substitute. And Owen appreciates his well-defined and regulated friendship with this handsome widow, Josephine Drummond, who is no fool, no, not at all a fool.

  He watches her, as she revolves the absinthe in her glass, then sips.

  ‘Delicious,’ she acknowledges. ‘Delicious.’

  The strong bittersweet and powerfully adult, yet at the same time childishly liquorice liquor slips rapidly down the gullet, kicks quickly up into the brain. She lets it fire and settle and fire again, like smouldering flame encroaching on paper, a flame that is wondering when to ignite and burst into its flaring colours.

  ‘And how fares Alice Studdert Meade?’ he enquires, when enough respect has been paid to the novelty and the hit of the absinthe. ‘How are the uncut pages?’

  Alice Studdert Meade is her new discovery, a late, possibly the last example of the DWS genre, and she has already shared with Owen her pleasure in reading a volume that nobody has ever leafed through before. He knows about the sensual satisfaction and permitted desecration of tugging the old blunt-edged silver-plated knife through the old thick rough-edged pages, and now she can divulge to him a little more of the plot – not much more, because listening to the recital of the plots of books that other people are reading, as to the stories of films that they have seen, is well known to be very boring. And, when old, one must take care not to bore.

  (‘An old woman should not give offence’ was an aphorism Fran had discovered, she can’t remember where, and had quoted to Josephine over the phone. Josephine rather wished she hadn’t. Fran thinks it was from the Italian, but she can’t track it back to its source.)

  But a sentence or two about Alice Studdert Meade’s The Fatal Kinship could entertain Owen, and does.

  ‘Vesey has discovered that Olive may be illegitimate. It all hangs on that. One way, disgrace and disinheritance, but the possibility of marriage, if she is illegitimate. The other way, honour and sacrifice and separation – and lots of money for Olive. I can’t tell which way it’s going to go. I really can’t tell whether it’s a tragedy or a romance. She’s created a real genre confusion. It’s clever.’

  ‘One can usually tell which it will turn out to be. Particularly with commercial fiction.’

  ‘Yes, one can. It’s an interesting balance. Maybe something extreme will happen. I can’t envisage the denouement.’

  ‘So she’s clever? She keeps you guessing?’

  ‘Yes, she’s clever.’

  ‘And you still haven’t found out much more about her?’

  ‘No, she’s a virgin field. She must have been born in the 1870s or 1880s. But there aren’t any biographical notes, or not in any of the obvious places. Not even in the feminist bibliographies.’

  ‘Wonderful that such a virgin field could still be.’

  Owen dwells in and wanders through better trodden fields, but discove
rs in them clues, scents, fresh spoor, an occasional view downwards through the roots of a hedge bottom or upwards through a spinney.

  ‘Yes, wonderful,’ agrees Josephine.

  They both fall silent, and sip.

  ‘They do love one another, Olive and Vesey,’ adds Josephine, and then, quickly, realising she is overstepping her special-interest time limit, she continues, ‘And the cloudscape, how goes the cloudscape?’

  Owen is studying cloudscapes in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Hardy and John Cowper Powys. He is writing a paper entitled ‘A cloud that’s dragonish’. He is in love with this phrase from Antony and Cleopatra. And why not, thinks Josephine. He has been waiting to use it all his life. Its time has come.

  (And so, perhaps, has Alice Studdert Meade’s.)

  Owen is Welsh, which is why the word ‘dragonish’ appeals to him so much, Josephine had once suggested. He hadn’t thought of that but concedes it could be so.

  Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish;

  A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,

  A towered citadel, or a pendant rock . . .

  Owen’s reflections are all on a higher plane than the fictions of Alice Studdert Meade.

  But the Alice Studdert Meade is a teaser, just the same, and Josephine is as eager to find out what happens next as were the readers of 1907. And that’s a tribute to an old text.

  Owen doesn’t seem very interested in watching clouds in real life, but he pursues them diligently in literature. The February skies of Cambridgeshire are not, perhaps, inspiring. They are low and grey and weigh down on the flat horizon. Josephine’s friend Fran sometimes speaks of the large skies she sees from her London tower. She sees dragons, citadels and pendant rocks. She sees apocalyptic sunsets and fiery cities in the sky.

  ‘Ah,’ says Owen, in answer to her prompt about his cloud project, ‘I found yesterday the most intriguing phrase in Yves Bonnefoy.’

  Josephine is not over-familiar with the name of Yves Bonnefoy. He comes after the period she knows and loves best. She hasn’t kept up. She knows he is a French poet and essayist, possibly still alive, but that’s about all she knows of him. And that’s a lot more than most people know.

  This doesn’t matter, for Owen will tell her, but not at excessive length. He describes to her the book by Bonnefoy that he is now reading, it’s called The Arrière-pays, it’s about horizons and hinterlands and ruins and lost languages. About the never-captured, the half-glimpsed. The view of valleys and mountains from the train through the Alps, the view of the sands from the desert caravan, the view of the mysterious island from the boat’s deck. The Isles of the Blessed, surfacing briefly from the waves, and like Atlantis vanishing. The floating island of San Borondon.

  ‘Bonnefoy translated several Shakespeare plays, you know,’ says Owen.

  The absinthe has pleasantly coloured their communion. Their minds jump and meet on a more intimate level. Owen can see his clouds clearly, and communicates his vision, wordlessly, to Josephine.

  At what might seem to be another tangent, but is not, Owen says, ‘When I went to see Bennett and Ivor in Lanzarote in December, they took me to see the ruins of a castle, the ruins of the castle of Zonzamas. We don’t know who or what Zonzamas was. An old Guanche chieftain, perhaps? There wasn’t much to see, just great blocks of stone. Without lime or mortar. Just blocks. It was very suggestive. It could have been medieval, or it could have been a megalithic Stone Age settlement. ‘Grands blocs de pierres brutes’ – that’s how Berthelot described them. There’s a beautiful sketch of them. With goats and a goatherd.’

  Sabin Berthelot, Owen very briefly explains, was a French naturalist and amateur ethnographer, resident for many years on the Canaries. Bennett Carpenter had become very interested in his works.

  Owen is a library romantic, a dried-up little locust stick of a romantic, but he sometimes ventures out of doors, and his old friend Bennett had lured him all the way to the Canaries to see the ruins and the goats and the sun. Josephine doesn’t know Bennett and Ivor, though her husband had been acquainted with Bennett, but she’s heard quite a lot (but of course not too much) about them. Sir Bennett Carpenter is one of Owen’s more distinguished acquaintances. They had been at the same college, when Owen was an undergraduate and learning to be a Leavisite, and Bennett was a junior lecturer in Modern History, embarking on his ground-breaking studies of the Spanish Civil War. They had been good friends in their Cambridge days, and subsequently their paths had crossed in other parts of the world, in far-flung universities. They had kept in touch. They had a history together, and a continuation.

  Josephine has been intending to read Bennett’s first and most famous book, The Reaper and the Wheat, having been encouraged to borrow a copy from Owen, and hopes Owen won’t this evening ask her how she’s getting on with it, because she has hardly even opened it. Owen hadn’t thrust the copy upon her, but he had talked about Bennett and Ivor a lot in an unusually excited way on his return from the Canaries, and she had listened with interest, intrigued by his descriptions of the couple’s ex-pat warm-climate way of solving old age and the care-home problem. She had even got round to worrying by proxy about what the young but not-so-young Ivor’s eventual fate would be when Bennett died. She had conjured up a vivid picture of their dramatic black tufa and whitewash volcanic home of caves and bubbles, of the scarlet and pink and olive grey and lime green and acid yellow spears of their euphorbia garden. Owen isn’t of the generation that photographs everything it sees, but he had given her a good verbal description of La Suerte.

  The earth hath bubbles, as the water has . . .

  Words, words, she lives in words. And so does Owen.

  She wonders now if Owen is going to feel prompted to mention Bennett’s book (an enigmatically inscribed first edition, ‘For Owen England from Bennett Carpenter, with higher hopes’), but he doesn’t. It’s a long time since Owen looked at Bennett’s masterwork and he has largely forgotten what was in it. His mind is now wandering around the incomprehensible ruins in the company of Bennett and Ivor and Sabine Berthelot and the ageing French poet. Yes, pursues Owen, ‘Yves Bonnefoy would have liked those stones. He’d like that phrase. Grands blocs de pierres brutes. He’s very fond of old guidebooks. And old photographs. And old postcards. And landscape phrases from the past. He’s still alive, but he must be in his nineties now. He’s a great man.’

  ‘La malinconica distesa delle colline crestace,’ Owen intones, as it were to himself. ‘The melancholic stretch of chalky hills . . .’

  Owen gets to his feet, for the hour of their separation is approaching, and he wants to show her his copy of Bonnefoy’s Arrière-pays, whether she wants to see it or not. It is a strange, small, squat, surprisingly heavy little book, expensively produced by a small specialist publisher. She weighs it thoughtfully in her hand.

  Owen wishes to point out to her one of the illustrations, of Mondrian’s The Red Cloud. It is a painting Josephine had never seen before, and it is from a period of Mondrian’s work with which she is unfamiliar. She knows his late and most well-known style, and long ago in faraway Missouri had stitched a tapestry (sketched for her onto the canvas by the younger of her sons) reproducing one of his red, black and yellow rectangles. But this strange free floating patch of unearthly yet earthy red, hanging over Van Gogh furrows, is, as Owen says, striking.

  ‘Fauve?’ murmurs Jo, tentatively. ‘Did he go through a Fauve phase?’

  Owen is not listening. He has taken the book back into his slightly arthritic lean yellow-knuckled brown-spotted hands and is turning the pages, gazing at the smudged but profoundly suggestive images of Italian paintings, churches, angels, huts, deserts and mountain slopes. He is searching, searching. A lost landscape, a haven, a mirage, an air that kills, yet flutters back to life again. A coal, smouldering.

  When Jo has gone, he will have his first cigarette. He smokes two a day, always in solitude.

  ‘Time to go,’ says Josephine, rearranging her wools in her work
basket. She had done a couple of moss green stitches since her arrival. It’s slow work, but there is no hurry to complete.

  Work box. Work basket. Needlework. Women’s work. Work. Work ethic.

  Both Josephine and Owen, being heavy readers, are very much attached to their early model Kindles, but it occurs to Josephine, as she rises smoothly to her feet, that Owen’s quaint picture-book and the dark-blue-bound gilt-lettered 1907 copy of Alice Studdert Meade through which she is slowly knifing and slicing her way offer satisfactions not to be gained from an e-reader or a tablet. She thinks of articulating this aperçu, but can’t find the words. She’ll think about it, and perhaps return to it on their next week’s agenda, when Owen comes to her side of the quad for a glass of Laphroaig – yes, she thinks it should be Laphroaig.

  The libraries mean as much to Josephine as explorations of England mean to her restless friend Fran. They confirm status, confer identity. When Josephine Drummond goes into the libraries that she uses most frequently, she is received with some degree of recognition. Sometimes her books are handed over without her having to request them by name. This doesn’t happen in the British Library in London, though even there she occasionally gets a friendly nod, but in Cambridge she is a familiar. Unlike some old women, she is easily recognisable, even memorable. Tall and pronounced of features, she will never dwindle into a little old lady, with all the conveniences and inconveniences which that status brings. Josephine may think she looks low-key, but she cannot help but look noticeable. She doesn’t look eccentric (or this is her friend Fran’s considered view) but she doesn’t look negligible. Her career hasn’t been distinguished, but it has been a career, of a sort, and it’s not quite over yet.