The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  Christopher acknowledges Ivor’s ethical dilemma. They agree that the real problem is that they don’t know how urgent the operation really is. Maybe it would be fine to wait until the morning for a signature, or the next day, by which time Bennett might have emerged from his delirium and gathered his wits together and be in a position to take responsibility for his own surgery.

  Or maybe that would be very unwise. They don’t know the risks, either way. And what would Bennett know about it, anyway?

  In a moment of vodka-driven inspiration, Christopher decides to ring his father. He’s the expert. He doesn’t ring Claude very often, but he knows he’ll be there at this time, he’s almost always there, listening to music, watching TV, having a glass or two. If he has friends round for a drink, they’ve gone by eight, but it’s still not too late, by Claude’s standards. Unlike his mother, Claude always picks up. His mother, in the evenings, goes to bed early and takes refuge in the silent peace of text-land and refuses to answer her phone, but Claude always picks up.

  Claude doesn’t seem put out by an unexpected call from his son. He listens, gets to grips with the situation almost instantly, and says, ‘Better get on with it. Get him to sign, or tell your friend to forge his signature, but get on with it. Don’t hang about. They’re right, the sooner it’s done the better. At his age, you have to get on with it.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Claude, authoritatively, irresponsibly, from far away. ‘But remember to ask them what they’re using. Be sure to get the name of the alloy. Titanium’s better than cobalt chromium, if they’ve got it.’

  He speaks a little longer about metals and plastics and ceramics, their merits and demerits, but Christopher knows he isn’t up to retaining and relaying any of the technical information. He’s got the message: Go for it. He thanks his father, and rings off.

  ‘He says go for it,’ he tells Ivor.

  So they go for it. Ivor doesn’t have to forge Bennett’s signature: Bennett scribbles his own name willingly if illegibly at the bottom of the bilingual form, by the pencilled cross. Ivor has already filled in his dates and his medical history and the details of their insurance company, which he knows all too well. And Bennett seems unperturbed, as he is wheeled off to a private ward to be made comfortable for the night. Indeed, he starts singing to himself, one of his old favourites, Fats Waller’s ‘My Very Good Friend the Milkman’, which he had chosen, decades ago, as one of his Desert Island Discs. He disappears, on his trolley, towards his bed. They will operate in the morning. The surgeon’s name is Manolo Zerolo Herrara.

  Ivor and Christopher are free. Bennett is in safe hands. Ivor will be back first thing in the morning, to see that Bennett is behaving himself and hasn’t revoked his consent. Meanwhile, the night is still young, and the young men need something to eat.

  Claude, in Kensington, curious, looks up the Canarian hospital at Arrecife on his iPad. It looks satisfactory. The healthcare in resorts like that is usually good. Then he looks up Bennett Carpenter. He’d managed to retain the name from Christopher’s call, as he knows he’s heard it before. He thinks he might even have met him. At a party? At a degree ceremony? At the Royal College of Surgeons? In the Inner Temple? At Buckingham Palace? He flicks around, with interest, for an hour. He finds a host of citations and cross references, including Bennett’s choices for Desert Island Discs, which had included Fats Waller, de Falla’s ‘Nights in the Gardens of Spain’, and Maria Callas singing Medea. Cross-checking on the website, he finds it very odd that only three other castaways seem to have chosen Callas. Compared with Brahms and the Beatles, Callas hardly scores at all. He can’t quite believe it. Had he been asked, he would have chosen nothing but Callas. The website must be defective, the data inadequately cross-referenced.

  This idle research prompts him to see how many surgeons and medical men have been invited to participate in this enviable exercise, but he finds very few, and those that are categorised and listed were, in his view, oddly selected. There aren’t many historians either, come to that. But Bennett Carpenter had always been known to be an entertaining speaker and a fluent broadcaster. He’d have been an obvious choice.

  He purchases and downloads Carpenter’s seminal work on the Spanish Civil War, The Reaper and the Wheat. The epigraph is a short poem in Spanish, by Lorca, entitled Despedida. ‘Si muero, dejad el balcón abierto’.

  When I die, leave the balcony window open . . .

  Claude reads some of the Introduction to the revised edition and tries to look at the photographs and illustrations, but they haven’t come out very well on his e-reader. He nods off.

  In Poppet’s tiny bedroom, robed in Poppet’s surprisingly pleasing pale-blue jersey nightdress and wrapped against the damp in a small tartan blanket, Fran finds, arrayed on the deep wooden ledge under the low window, her daughter’s treasures. She is not to know that they are not always there, that they have been brought out, unusually, and as yet unnecessarily, for salvation from the flood, as Poppet had had no cause to mention this.

  They go back a long time, these little objects, and the pathos of them catches at Fran’s old heart. Tears come to her eyes. She’s very tired, that’s why. Her heart is tired. The heart’s only a muscle, she’s been told. Who said that? Samuel Beckett? She thinks not. But it was a playwright. It was definitely a playwright. She’ll remember, if she tries not to think about it too much. It will come back to her.

  She looks sadly at the brown envelopes full of old photographs, which she does not open, and at the solid silver napkin ring, an anachronism even when it had been engraved and presented as a non-christening present to baby Poppy. Her poor mother, Granny May Robinson, so long dead. She wonders if Poppet has kept it from sentiment, or from inertia. She opens the little monogrammed mahogany box of miniature minerals from the Canaries and gazes at their powdery bright and spangled colours, their rugged tiny mountain shapes. And there is Baby Jesus, from the days of Rowbridge School. So Poppet had kept Baby Jesus. She had realised what a miracle he was.

  Fran feels a great tearfulness rising up in her, a grief for all things, a grief for her daughter and thence, from that grief, a grief for all things. She had feared that she would outlive such grief, that her heart would grow thin and cold, that grief would ebb from her as sexual hope and desire and much (though not yet all) of her social optimism had ebbed from her. She had thought, when Hamish died, that she would dry and harden, as she kept herself busy, as she prepared plated meals, as she climbed the winding stair, as she drove restlessly around the land. She had thought that ageing would bring calm and indifference and impersonality. She knew it was unlikely to bring her peace of mind, as perhaps it had brought Teresa Quinn, who was practised in an expectation of peace, but it might have brought her, at least, a dull amnesia. But no, she is, it would seem, condemned to grief, to an ever-replenishing well of grief, rising up from the centre of the earth of her body.

  It’s good to be able to weep, she tells herself, as she leans on the low sill and gazes out of the window. That’s what she’s always said to others, when called on to comfort them. To Christopher, when he broke his arm, aged eight. To Poppet, aged ten. To Poppet, aged twenty-two.

  Her body has dried up, but not yet her tears. She lets them flow.

  It has stopped raining, it is a clear night.

  She thinks fondly of Christopher, keeping guard by an old man in a hospital. On death-watch again, in the Canaries. He’s a good boy, although he doesn’t look like a good boy.

  Christopher had admired Poppet’s Baby Jesus, he will be pleased to hear (if she dare tell him) that it has been preserved. Christopher has always had a good eye, but he couldn’t paint, although he’d tried. He wasn’t a maker.

  Neither is Poppet, now.

  She has a random, friendly thought of Christopher, prompted by the speculative image of the morning’s crossword-and-newspaper quartet playing evening whist in Westmore Marsh. She remembers him, suddenly, as a fifteen-year-old, as a diso
rderly scruffy experimental schoolboy at the hard-boiled London comprehensive where he had learned to put on the style. He and his three mates had gone through a year-long phase of playing cards, seriously, obsessively, for small stakes. They played whist and poker, they took on rival groups, they sweated at it. They fancied themselves as hard players. Fran had found this amusing, she was glad he had such friends, she didn’t think for a moment that he’d grow up into a gambler. And she had been right. He doesn’t play now. His friend Brodie still plays, but Christopher doesn’t. He’d been put off by a group of old ladies who held a weekly whist drive down the road in the Crossroads Café. The boys had impudently, jokily, teasingly, challenged them on their own turf, and the old ladies had taken them on and cleaned them out.

  Christopher, to his credit, had told his mother this story, and he’d told it well. They were a lot of old grannies, he said, they looked so harmless, they tricked us into putting our money down and then they wiped us out, and then they laughed and laughed.

  They could play, said fifteen-year-old Christopher, admiringly. You should have seen them, Mum. They were brillo.

  She smiles to herself, pleased with this flashback to the triumphant crones of Romley. He had been a sweet-natured boy, even while he was trying so hard to be hip. He’d gone in for a vainglorious career, but he is still in his own way tender-hearted.

  Old grannies. Old crones. She is one of them now, she has joined their haggard company, those Grimm words are her indicators.

  But Christopher is a sweet boy, and kind to his old mother.

  She gazes out, at the wide flood waters. A drunken, sloping, three-quarters moon, a waning gibbous moon is shining upon them. The higher branches of the half-submerged willows are a trembling ghostly silver in the moonlight. And floating in the drowned fields is a swan, a white heraldic swan, proud in its effortless, meaningless, soulless beauty. Its neck curves, its head turns slowly from side to side, it floats arrogantly, disdainfully, emblematically, surveying the glittering realm of night.

  Owen England is not gazing at the staggering moon, though he has, earlier in the evening, looked briefly upwards and noted its cloud-streaked rising over the Backs as he returned from a prosy collegiate dinner. He is now reading Wordsworth and simultaneously watching a news programme about the Lebanon on TV. Like many older people of all sexes, he is good at multitasks and multi-diversions. He’s not so good these days at productive concentration, but he can still take in several messages at once.

  He hasn’t yet had his second cigarette of the day. He’s still got something to look forward to.

  He is somewhat shocked by the clouds-as-heavenly-city Wordsworth passages he has so recently discovered. An ex-colleague at Jesus had tipped him off to look them up, and there they are, in all their tumultuous glory. Line after line, mounting, accumulating, overwhelming, like a Sibelius symphony of ever-rising mountains, horizon beyond horizon. An enormous, panoramic crescendo. He should have taken them into consideration long ago. They appear in the Second Book of The Excursion, the book entitled ‘The Solitary’. Nobody ever reads The Excursion now, apart from a few specialists. He doesn’t think he can use these lines, but he would feel foolish if anyone discovered that he didn’t even know they were there.

  Fabric it seemed of diamond and of gold,

  With alabaster domes, and silver spires,

  And blazing terrace upon terrace, high

  Uplifted; here, serene pavilions bright,

  In avenues disposed; there, towers begirt

  With battlements that on their restless fronts

  Bore stars – illumination of all gems!

  . . .

  Clouds of all tincture, rocks and sapphire sky,

  Confused, commingled, mutually inflamed,

  Molten together, and composing thus,

  Each lost in each, that marvellous array

  Of temple, palace, citadel, and huge

  Fantastic pomp of structure without name . . .

  He reads on, dutifully, transported, with an admiration so painful that he can’t work out what it signifies. What can it mean, to experience such awe? There is even a small element of irritation in his awe, an irritation that such genius could exist so freely, so effortlessly, and sustain itself upon such heights. What does it mean, this awe, this love, this irritation? Can he ask Josephine Drummond about it? She, too, relies on poetry. He suspects that she once tried to write poetry, although she has never said this to him.

  Goethe once said that the only response to greater genius is love. Or something along those lines.

  He wonders, not for the first time, what on earth literature is for, and why he has devoted his life to teaching it and thinking about it. None of the conventional answers to these questions are in any degree satisfactory. One might as well ask, what is one’s life, why was one born, what is the meaning of a life.

  He had seen Dr Leavis, small and dry and brown as an autumn leaf, speaking well of Wordsworth in the old brown wooden lecture room in Mill Lane. Leavis had been confident that he knew the uses of literature and literacy.

  Owen had been young and green then, and so had Bennett Carpenter.

  Jo hasn’t returned Carpenter’s first edition of The Reaper and the Wheat to him yet. He wonders if she has even opened it.

  He thinks of Ivor, loyal Ivor, who has done such a good job with Bennett.

  Nobody has done a good job for him, and he has not done a good job for anybody.

  The Solitary.

  But Wordsworth, as age came on, had surrounded himself with acolytes, with sycophants.

  He thinks of the Castle of Zonzamas, so suggestivo, so implacable, so enduringly unknowable. So massive, so forgotten, so humbled.

  The Castle of Zonzamas is the arrière-pays, the timeless hinterland that beckons us.

  Teresa knows she is taking a turn for the worse. She feels worse. The pain is bad. One would not want to live with this degree of pain for very long. Pain may drive her into what she sometimes thinks of as the arms of God, although her faith does not allow her to make haste. She finds that phrase, ‘the arms of God’, a comfort. Phrases and biblical texts come to her aid, along with her childhood prayers.

  She is good at reading her interchanges with her GP and her oncologist and the district nurse and the palliative care nurse and the merrily morose young bald black chap who had come a couple of days ago to adjust her NHS-provided day bed.

  It’s not going well. There had been a muddle about the adjustments to the day bed technology which had resulted in Teresa saying to the young man, tartly, ‘Don’t worry, you can take it back and collect all those spare spanners and struts and things when I’m dead. Just shove them under the bed for now, don’t worry about itemising them, they won’t go anywhere.’

  The chap hadn’t seemed to take note of these unkind remarks, but he had been very young.

  Teresa had regretted her sharpness. But was relieved to think he hadn’t noticed.

  Father Goodall had been more attentive.

  Fran had been wrong about Teresa’s attitude to Father Goodall and his clumsy dripping black umbrella. Teresa finds Father Goodall’s ineptitudes endearing, they do not annoy her at all. She is used to priests. He is not, it is true, a very clever man, in an academic sense; he is not very quick-witted, but he is a man of conventional wisdoms, and his fidelity to her and to their God is a comfort to her. He too knows about the welcoming arms of God. Now death is coming upon her, he will not prevaricate. He will do his job. He will know what to do. He may even enjoy doing it. And she has always been pleased to give joy to others.

  She has taught herself to aspire to a humble and a contrite heart.

  Those words of the psalmist also comfort her.

  A humble and a contrite heart.

  Her old friend and colleague Birdie Bardwell is to move into the spare room. She and Birdie go back a long way. Birdie had been a member of her staff for twenty odd years, her second in command. Birdie is a professional. Teresa is comfor
table with Birdie, although she knows that not all her friends will be. Teresa would prefer to be on her own, with her accustomed privacy, for she likes her own company, but she needs somebody in the house, and Birdie could do with the small addition to her income and will make no bones about accepting it. Birdie is large and loud-mouthed and outgoing, and some find her overwhelming, but Teresa had always been grateful to her for her brutal buoyancy. She is the sort of woman that people call a tower of strength. A pig farmer’s daughter from Suffolk, once broad and blonde, she is now a solid matriarchal white-haired figure, although her only child is long dead, of the terminal spinal condition that had first introduced Birdie to Teresa Quinn’s establishment. She is a good cook and very fond of her food; indeed, much of her conversation is about food, and as Teresa is now ethereally thin and picks at her meals like a small but polite and willing bird, this might seem inappropriate. But Teresa, who has always considered herself inadequate in the kitchen, enjoys listening to Birdie’s riffs about celebrity chefs, about fast food and slow food, about tripe and pigs’ trotters. And she is grateful for the cauliflower cheese, for the oxtail soup, for the chicken and ham pie, for the clove-flavoured ham knuckle, for the delicious apple strudel with crème fraîche, for the astonishingly light and perfectly shaped profiteroles.

  Birdie is good at pastry, and although Teresa can’t eat much pastry now, she applauds and enjoys Birdie’s expertise.

  She looks forward (almost, in a way, perhaps?) to watching TV food programmes with Birdie. There are so many of them, and she would never dream of watching them by herself, but Birdie loves them, although they annoy her. This will be Birdie’s evening treat, and Teresa will go along with her yelps of contempt, her occasional plaudits, her reaching for the Rioja and the charcoal biscuits and the thin slices of Emmental. (Birdie believes that charcoal is good for Teresa’s condition, and who is to contradict her?) And then Birdie will help her to her bed, and listen for her in the night watch, and come to her if she calls out in pain or in need. Her mottled matronly arms will willingly enfold her, more present and more fleshly than the arms of God.