The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  Bennett is in a good place. He has passed beyond the panic longing for repatriation and the xenophobic spasms and hallucinations of morphine into timelessness. (Xenophobia is one of the under-recorded side effects of morphine.) Ishmael pushes him towards the brink of eternity, to the lip of the great crater. And Bennett sees, rising hugely, rising soundlessly, far out to sea, the great wave that will greet him soon and carry him to the eighth island. He is happy with this vision. He has always longed for this wave, be it of the sea or of the land. He has passed through a dark confined space, an uncomfortable, indoor, medical space, but now he surges forward, into the light, with Ishmael as his guide. He is happy. Ah, so be it. Ah, his heart rises. He smiles into the sun and the salt wind.

  Ishmael is on his mobile phone, speaking to his mother in Wolof. Bennett listens, benignly, to this animated chatter in an unknown tongue. These isles are full of marvels.

  Bennett is not quite sure where he is, or who Ishmael is. But it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. He knows that he likes it here. Ishmael is a pleasant change from Ivor. New blood. Ivor has been looking rather tired of late.

  Liam O’Neill kneels by Teresa’s bedside. He lays his grizzled head upon the slight blanketed hillock of her wasted knees. His thick grey plait reaches almost to his waist, a grey rope against the dark green of his corduroy jacket. His hands are clasped and he is muttering words to himself, so maybe he is praying. He is a penitential, old-fashioned, medieval figure, a figure from a dark painting of grief, of remorse or perhaps of reconciliation. He has placed a little bunch of snowdrops, gathered from her own garden, on her dark-blue pillowslip.

  His son Luke O’Neill, sitting very upright on a bentwood chair by the window, gazes in dulled amazement at this strange tableau. He cannot hear his father’s words, but he can hear their mumbled rhythm.

  Liam has come too late. Teresa died while he was still miles high over the mid-Atlantic, and he will maintain for years to come, to the end of his long life, that he heard a chord break, felt a twang, as she departed. It is easy enough, with hindsight, to fancy that one senses such moments of passing, but Liam will continue to insist that in mid-air, in his own flesh, he felt and heard her spirit leave her body.

  Teresa had never really recovered from her fall, though she had been released from hospital to die at home, as she would have wished. Both Birdie Bardwell and Luke had been with her at the end. Birdie had been more distressed than Luke at the time, for she felt she had failed in her duty, and had been greedily looking forward to having her beloved Teresa all to herself for at least a few evenings, for however long it would take, to make things good between them, to share their last secrets.

  Luke is relieved that his mother has died. Not pleased, but relieved. He’s not thinking of the airfare, though that consideration comes into it, and not wholly of her increasing pain and her dwindling tolerance of medication, though they come into it too. He is glad to have seen her out. He had recognised that she did not have long, and he is pleased he timed his visit wisely. She had sent the correct signals, and he had responded correctly. She had always had a great deal of common sense.

  So he doesn’t know why she had tried to clamber up the fragile little wooden spiral of the library stairs. He can’t think that she had intended to hasten her end, though she had in effect done so. He’d only been out for an hour, he’d popped out rather shamefully to buy some cigarettes and have a nose around the old neighbourhood, but Birdie had been in charge, so how can it have happened? He has tried to work out which book she was reaching for, and why. His Uncle David’s partner’s tome of Etruscan tombs had been (and still is) lying on her bedside table, along with her Bible, her leather-bound gilt-edged biblical concordance, her e-reader and, incongruously, a new and notoriously violent Scandinavian paperback thriller. She’d never have tried to get up to the top shelf of exhibition catalogues and the heavy volumes of Matisse and Constable: was she trying to reach for the lower shelves, for her novels of the 1960s and 70s, for Saul Bellow or Updike or Angus Wilson or Iris Murdoch? Or for Winnicott and Freud and Jung and R. D. Laing and her small collection of recent disability study theorists on the shelves above? Or for the comfort of Elizabeth Bennet or Dorothea Brooke? Nobody will ever know. She has taken this small secret with her, and will shortly take it to her grave in St Mary’s churchyard, Kensal Green.

  Teresa lies calmly now, very slight under her blanket, her eyes closed, her hair a silver halo, teased out by Birdie upon her blue pillow. She had told him that her hair had grown back luxuriantly, but he had not expected this curled abundance.

  The undertakers will come for her in the morning. The young chap will be back for the NHS day bed and the struts and spanners as soon as is decent, and possibly sooner.

  Luke has seen a lot of dead people, but few as composed as his mother. He doesn’t believe in heaven, or in an afterlife, nor does he know if she does or did, but such considerations seem of no moment. More pressing are the funeral arrangements, the notices, the network, the getting through the next few days. Now he will leave the room, and leave his mother and his father alone together for a while. Later, he and his father will go out for a meal at his father’s Charlotte Street hotel, and Liam will get very drunk and maudlin and apologise endlessly for having forgotten his son’s birthday, for having forgotten it year after year after year. He will start to tell Luke about the other women in his life, and Luke will not know whether to try to stop him or not.

  In the end he lets him ramble and lets him order another bottle. What is there to lose, at this stage in the game? He explains to his father about mesothelioma, and how it had nothing to do with smoking. He listens, as his father describes the snowy night of his son’s birth. That at least he has not forgotten, and his account tallies with Teresa’s. The midwife, the pudding bowl, the afterbirth thrown out for the dogs, the Irish stew. Teresa has told him this story many times, a ritual narration, but he thinks it’s the first time he’s heard it from Liam, and Teresa hadn’t been as brutal about the fate of the afterbirth.

  Neither Liam nor Teresa had other children. He is their sole heir, Xavier their only grandson. The burden is on him.

  Luke doesn’t smoke very heavily, but as the meal and the confidences drag on, he finds himself longing for a cigarette. He has the packet in his pocket, the packet he was buying when Teresa fell. He’s only smoked twelve of the twenty and he is longing for the thirteenth. He has vowed to make them last until the day of the funeral. He fingers the packet, for comfort.

  Birdie has already started going through Teresa’s old address book, trying to work out who must be asked to St Helen’s, her parish church, to St Mary’s at Kensal Green, to the reception in Teresa’s home, but she and Liam both know that address books are more or less obsolete, that all her more recent contacts will be in her email account and her mobile phone. Liam and Luke begin to make a list, over their second double espresso. Her brothers, David and Peter Quinn, and David’s partner Massimo Vignoli. Peter’s wife and children and grandchildren. Cousins on the Quinn side. Liam’s sister, who had remained in touch with Teresa, should be invited, but probably won’t come over. Who else from Canada and the US? Liam will get to work on this. North London colleagues, parents, surviving alumni from Teresa’s school, neighbourhood friends – there’s someone called Ginnie that she mentioned, says Luke, can’t remember where she comes in but if I trawl back I may find her. I know Teresa liked her a lot. And there was a Mrs Taylor? And then there’s Fran Stubbs, who knew Mum way back in Broughborough days. Mum saw a lot of Fran in the last few months.

  Fine, fine, says Liam, who is staring soddenly but not painfully at the lively mural on the wall of the Charlotte Street hotel restaurant.

  The mural is the reason why he booked into this hotel. Liam knows somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who painted it. And it’s just as good as he’d been told. He’s glad he’s staying here. England, London, Fitzrovia: something is still happening here.

  He says to Luke,
impulsively, why don’t you stay here for the night? I’ve got a vast double bed. Super king-size. The pillows are heaven. You don’t want to spend the night in that morgue, do you?

  Luke doesn’t know whether to be touched or not. He has no intention of spending the night in bed with his father, but he honours the invitation. It’s original and in its way it’s inspired. He admires it.

  No, Dad, he says: thanks, though. Good to see you. I’ll be OK in the morgue. She’s not very morgue-like, Mum, is she? I’m in my old bedroom. I’m fine there. I think I need to be there.

  This pretentious phrasing is incontrovertible.

  Luke is being very polite, and at least half-sincere.

  Kiss her goodnight for me, says Liam.

  A profound banality, a banal profundity unites them, as they awkwardly embrace to say goodbye on the pavement of Charlotte Street.

  Liam staggers up to bed and, jet-lagged, passes out in the super king-size bed.

  Luke stands in the cold garden of his mother’s home at midnight, amidst the cold closed snowdrops, smoking his thirteenth cigarette. The air is damp and chill and smells intensely, sweetly, of honey, a thin but strong wintery scent reaching him in wafts from some unseen early-flowering shrub. The hellebores are full of dark purple bud. The garden looks neat and cherished, so somebody must have been looking after it.

  There is a view, eastwards, over the city. Its myriad lights glitter below him.

  He has decided not to send for Monica and Xavier. The cross-currents would be too disturbing, too uncontrollable. Liam is enough of a handful. He wouldn’t want Monica to have to come to terms with Liam. His mother, of course, had been ‘wonderful’ with Monica, but Liam had never met her. It wouldn’t be good to meet for the first and last time in a cemetery.

  He can’t get the image of the kneeling Liam out of his head.

  Birdie is already planning the funeral baked meats. She’s good at that kind of thing. She’d probably been thinking about it for weeks, if not for months. She will get some pleasure out of doing it all well.

  He has yet to meet Father Goodall, who will want to know about Mozambique and the church and the missions and Luke’s views on the Pope.

  He is thinking back over the many texts and emails he’s had from his mother in the past few months and of his conversation with her new-old friend Fran, with whom he had spoken briefly that morning. Fran’s voice had sounded eerily like his mother’s, and he wonders if she had some lingering overlaid trace of a Broughborough accent, or perhaps the two women had caught one another’s inflections in these last few intense months of rapprochement. Or maybe it was an age thing: their voices had aged together, in parallel, and had converged into the same tone, the same register.

  They had talked about Teresa, and about the timing of the funeral: yes, Fran can make Saturday, and of course she would be there. I look forward to meeting you, Fran had said, encouragingly, cheerfully, tearfully.

  ‘She spoke so much about you.’

  ‘I hope not too much,’ Luke had said.

  No, no, said Fran. I could never hear enough of whatever it was she wanted to talk about. You know what I think when I think of your mother? That she never said a dull word! Never! In all the years I’ve known her, and I’ve known her all my life! There’s an epitaph! Never a dull word!

  Luke inhales the honey, the tobacco, the chill air. The piercingly tender sweetness of a well-tended London garden assails him. Maybe he should come home soon, while he is in his prime. He believes he will inherit this house, though of course she may have left it to one of her good causes. And so be it if she has.

  He’d better get on to the solicitors tomorrow.

  He should stake his claim in this shifting monstrous beautiful city, the swelling hub of everything that is about to be. Each time he comes back from Africa, he finds it has transformed itself once more, into more glass and shard and glitter, into more terror and glory. Africa still breathes warmly, expansively, with its smell of vegetation, with its red roads, its red earth, its huge horizons, its blue distances. Here, the horizons are precipitous and sheer and near. They are the cliffs of fall.

  Claude and Fran are sharing the campylobacter-free lemon chicken. Fran doesn’t often eat with him, but she has decided that the meal smells so delicious and there is so much of it that she’ll stay and have a comfortable supper and a glass of good wine with the old beastie, instead of trudging back on the Tube to a killer drink and a cold meal in the Tower. She is in need of comfort. The chicken had, when defrosted, turned out to be an excellent fowl – plump, its flesh a healthy succulent pale yellow, its skin now crisp and honeyed and lemon-encrusted. It would have been a shame to freeze it, argues Fran.

  Claude discloses that he is pleased with himself because he has won a prize in a Classic FM quiz, consisting of a three-day trip to Verona. He won’t be able to go on it, of course, he’ll have to turn it in and send it back to the kitty, but he’s pleased with himself just the same. He’s never bothered to phone in before, often they ask you to text and he doesn’t do texts, but this time they’d given a phone number as well, and as he knew all the answers, he thought, why not. He’s not sure if the prize is transferable. Would Fran like to go to Verona? No, he thought not.

  He knows they won’t allow you to ring in on phone lines for much longer.

  Fran offers to buy him a cheap mobile and to teach him how to text, but he doesn’t seem at all keen on the idea. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, he says. He looks very pleased with himself as he says this.

  They talk about Poppet, and the cranes, and Fran promises to have her brakes checked. Claude had no interest in the cranes, but he had enjoyed the tale of the car in the ploughed field.

  She tells him about Teresa’s death and they talk about mesothelioma and the drawing pin and the horseshoe nail. Fran complains that she had still had so many questions to ask Teresa, some of the greatest profundity (life after death, coma and the deep sleep) and some of the greatest triviality (washing machines of the 1950s).

  Fran is simultaneously slightly embarrassed and slightly proud that she has remembered to bring, secreted in her handbag, some beeswax-reinforced furniture oil to anoint the javelin box. Why should she care about dead wood? But she does. She’ll try to leave the bottle in the kitchen, where she can find it next time, and have a rub of the pale dried oak while Claude isn’t looking. She thinks he might be cross with her for trying to nourish his neglected javelin box.

  Why the fuck should she care whether Claude is cross with her or not?

  When she was pregnant with Christopher, her first-born, she had rubbed her swelling belly with industrial lanolin, from a large brown glass jar. A recipe to prevent scarring, and also something of a prophylactic. They hadn’t been able to afford fancy body lotions in those days, or maybe they hadn’t yet been invented. The lanolin had smelled disgusting, of sheep and meat, and it was a horrible dark fatty yellow. She can smell it now. Was it Jo who’d recommended it to her? They’d been pregnant at the same time, with Nat and Christopher.

  The beeswax polish, in contrast, smells delightful.

  In Teresa’s garden, in Kensal Green cemetery, in the trim little parterres of Athene Grange, the bees scent the spring.

  Fran had said, politely, that she was looking forward to meeting Luke from Mozambique, but on reflection she’s not really all that sure that she is. He’s a grown man, a broad-shouldered suntanned tennis-playing full-bodied male adult, in the prime of his important life, and he’s an expert at putting people under and out. She’s seen photos of him, looking powerful. She recognises that maybe she’s becoming more at home these days with the incapacitated and the enfeebled, which is a shaming, maybe humiliating, notion. She’s had a pleasant telephone conversation with Luke, but she will never get to know him, and it will be an effort to smile and say the right things when they meet.

  The energising effect of the transfusion from Paul, Julia and Graham is beginning to wear off, although she had it onl
y a couple of weeks ago. Maybe she needs another trip to the Premier Inn, another glass of black Merlot and some bright Agent Orange scampi.

  She hopes her Christopher will come home soon. He’s an adult male, but she can cope with him, he’s her flesh and blood. She’d like to see him, to hear him teasing her, calling her by his silly pet names for her – Maman, Frankie, Frangipani, Granny Franny.

  She knows she is obliged, for Teresa’s sake, to go to Teresa’s funeral, but there won’t be many people there that she knows, and she will probably feel awkward and unwelcome. She’s never met Birdie, who has taken over on the domestic front, or Father Goodall, who will officiate at the funeral mass before the cortège leaves for the cemetery. She’s never set foot in St Helen’s, Teresa’s parish church, and she’s never been to any kind of Roman Catholic service. She won’t know where to sit or what to wear or what to do. She rightly suspects that Birdie is bossily possessive about Teresa and will see herself as custodian of the flame as well as carer and caterer. Fran has only a slight curiosity about meeting David Quinn and Massimo Vignoli, and an even slighter curiosity about Teresa’s younger brother, of whom she has hardly any recollection. Sixty years is a very long time, and their acquaintance had been tenuous in the first place. The very thought of those next-door boys of the 1940s makes her sad, as does the thought of her own brothers, with their deafness and their bad hips and their golf and their BMWs.