The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

  Fran, in her tower, succumbs at last to the temptation of looking up images of Maybrook Park and the street where they had lived. And there it is, little changed except for a few added conservatories and the house prices. The prices, some veering towards half a million, keep popping up in the sidebar however hard she tries to get rid of them. But there is the very building where she and Teresa had played. The cellars of both of the semi-detached residences have been turned into garages, facing frontwards onto the road, but otherwise everything looks much the same. Somebody has planted what is now a very tall conifer in the front garden of Number 26, surely a mistake, but otherwise a deep suburban stagnation appears to prevail. Fran is quite glad that she doesn’t live anywhere near there these days. Even Romley had been better, and Clapham and Highgate had been heaven. And Tarrant Towers – well, it is Tarrant Towers, defiant and rude, making its own abrasive statement.

  Luke will never have been to Broughborough. Nor have her own children, come to think of it. Whatever would take them there?

  Teresa hadn’t lived long enough to show Fran the book about Etruscan tombs and the little terracotta hut urns of the Villanovan dead. She will never see them now.

  Fran will have a conversation with David Quinn at the funeral, but it won’t be about the Etruscans, or about Jacopo da Pontormo, or about the afterlife. It will be about the old tram routes to the town centre, and what colour the trams had been. Neither of them will be able to remember. David thinks they were dark green, but Fran thinks they were a kind of dirty cream with blue trim. They can’t ask Teresa to adjudicate, as she’s already under the cold ground.

  And Christopher does come back to England, and like a good son he lets his mother know almost as soon as he’s back. He’d been informed by several texts of the bad news about Teresa, and although he knows it was in no way unexpected, he also knows his mother can’t choose but be downcast, so he arranges to take her out to dinner. He tries to think of somewhere cheering and fun, but it’s so hard to know what she’d like. She has this weird affection for Wetherspoons and Premier Inns, and he can’t face any of that. So he settles for the expensive fish restaurant off Piccadilly, where he’d had that lunch with Simon Aguilera: it’s still there, still smart, but traditional, not too outré, and it’s easy for both of them to get to. And she likes fish.

  He’d thought there wouldn’t be limpets on the menu, but there are. They must be the new thing. As they go in, they pass vast platters of fruits de mer, heaped high on a fishmonger’s marble slab – mountains of limpets, razor shells, clams, crabs, mussels, sea urchins, oysters, the lot, all draped with bladder-wrack and kelp, and tastefully bordered with a fringe of emerald-green samphire.

  Fran is looking good, he can see she’s made an effort. She’s wearing what he can tell is an expensive grey and beige and black striped jacket made of a heavy ribbed silk, but when he compliments her on it, she somewhat spoils the effect by telling him how cheaply she’d bought it in the Harvey Nichols sale. Still, it does look good, and she is pleased that he likes it.

  Over the bisque, he tells her about Lanzarote, and about Bennett Carpenter’s strange journey through xenophobia towards calm and peace and affability. Fran is gripped but not astonished by this tale. She’s professionally acquainted with many forms of geriatric aberration, and retaliates with the story of the woman in St Frideswide’s Hospice who kept crying out that she could see a black man’s face in her bathroom mirror, and could only be cured of this illusion when told that it wasn’t a black man’s face, it was a Jungian archetype. An Oxford academic by trade, she had been satisfied by this explanation.

  Christopher describes Ishmael, and Simon Aguilera, and the famine tower. You have been jaunting amongst the archetypes, says Fran, and instantly regrets the word ‘jaunting’, but he doesn’t seem to have taken it amiss.

  The Dover sole is very good. It’s a long time since either of them has had Dover sole. Fran is slightly surprised that it still exists. It’s a restaurant fish, they agree. Fran’s few attempts to cook it had been extravagantly and destructively disastrous. It needs to arrive, whole, on a plate, before the calmly seated diner, like a godly gift.

  A description of the lively incursion of the Geraldines leads to talk of Jo Drummond and Owen England and Jo’s new interest in the Studdert Meades and the Spanish Civil War. Jo is always finding herself new projects, says Fran, a little forlornly. But you’ve got a proper job, says her son. Yes, says Fran, but it’s sometimes a bit of a downer, my job. It’s a losing battle, you know, the fight against the ageing process. You see and hear some terrible things.

  Jo calls old age ‘La Vieillesse’, adds Fran, and explains why.

  I always admired Auntie Josephine, says Christopher, sentimentally.

  And now Fran, emboldened by half a bottle of Sauvignon, says what she’s several times over the past weeks prevented herself from saying: There are worse things than dying young and beautiful and beloved and in the middle of a great project.

  Christopher is touched.

  I know, Maman, I know, he says, and pats the back of her pale wintery sun-starved blue-veined hand.

  But you’re looking fine, he continues. You keep going wonderfully.

  And so, against the odds, does your father, comes back Fran: and over coffee and white chocolate truffles they gossip about Claude and Persephone and Maria Callas. They remind themselves of the Jax Conan medical drama and the gift hamper, and Christopher tells Fran about Jax playing Buttons in panto in Cinderella with the other Geraldine. They move on, treacherously, collusively, to the subject of Claude’s second marriage, and say indiscreetly bad things about the unacceptably Sloaney Jean, with her cashmere and her shiny boots and her strange whining nasal upper-crust accent. They laugh a lot, and both feel better. Fran perks up as she recalls and describes her forthcoming Ashley Combe assignment, which involves visiting a sheltered housing development now under construction near Blackpool, and attending meetings with social workers, GPs and trustees. It will be fun, says Fran. I don’t know that part of the world, it will be an adventure.

  ‘Will you drive?’ asks Christopher. ‘It’s a long way; you do a hell of a lot of driving.’

  ‘I like driving,’ says Fran, but even as she asserts this, she remembers that she still hasn’t checked her brakes. She really ought to get the car serviced before she sets off on the 200- or 300-mile journey. She promises herself that she will, as Christopher ushers her out and hails a taxi for his mother and gives the driver her unfashionable postcode.

  She’s fine, thinks Christopher, as he returns on the rattling Bakerloo line to his empty and stupidly expensive flat in Queen’s Park.

  He’s fine, thinks Fran, as she presses the button for the lift and, happily, finds her call grudgingly, noisily accepted. She’d have taken the stairs in her stride tonight, thanks to Christopher and the Dover sole, but she’s glad she doesn’t need to.

  Slowly comes the late spring. It has never been so late, people in England say to one another, as the bare black twigs of the hedges at last begin to bud, as the waters sink in the levels, exposing mud and scrubby couch grass, as dangling catkins and plush pussy willows take on their yellowy silvery March plumage and celandines open their shining petals. The Met Office says the lateness is nothing exceptional; the Daily Express says it’s unprecedented. Some say the weather pattern confirms global warming; others claim it’s evidence of a new ice age. The English have always talked about the weather, but now they talk about it more obsessively, divisively, aggressively than ever. Although it’s a hot topic, paradoxically, it simultaneously lacks urgency. People can’t get their minds around the time spans involved.

  Further south, above the deep Atlantic Mountains, the surges of time’s troubled fountains have abated, and the Canary Islands have been restored to their seemingly ageless dormancy. Atlantis slumbers, and Bennett Carpenter sits in the afternoon sun in his wheelchair, dozing and dreaming from time to time of large freshwater fish. He can take a few steps now
, with an arm to lean upon. The little yellow canary birds in their cages no longer prophesy disaster in their anxious songs and twitterings. The bottles in El Volcan no longer rattle, and the TV set in the bar has not fallen off its perch. Impacto continues its run, adding to its violent repertoire more sensational and inexplicable air disasters, but on Lanzarote, at the spreading foothills of the volcanoes, and in the seas off El Hierro, all is calm.

  Ivor offers up his cautious thanks in the unfrequented little chapel on the hill.

  At Athene Grange, the ragged damp purple and yellow of the crocus brighten the borders and straggle untidily from the grass beneath the willow trees. Jo Drummond bicycles to the University Library to read more of Valentine’s diaries, and wonders whether she should suggest editing them to one of her contacts in the academic publishing world. Who would own the copyright? Or will it have expired? She reads a Hardy poem with her class, the one that begins ‘I look into my glass, /And view my wasted skin’, and is impressed when Mr Pennington is willing to interpret Hardy’s phrase about ‘throbbings of noontide’ as evidence of the ageing Hardy’s pre-Viagran potency. Some of the women look embarrassed, but most of them are amused. It’s a good class, she’s proud of them, and she’s already planning next autumn’s course: it would be good to do prose or drama next time, would any of them be up for Samuel Beckett? Or she could suggest that they do prose and poetry of the Spanish Civil War – Orwell, Hemingway, Lorca, Auden and Day-Lewis?

  Men, men, too many men. She must try to think of some women whose work she wants to teach. Caryl Churchill? Margaret Atwood? Toni Morrison? Doris Lessing? She’s done Lessing, but not for years, and not with any of this group.

  She’s sometimes thought of proposing a course of French poetry with bilingual texts – Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, les poètes symbolistes. But they probably wouldn’t let her do that, it would be transgressive. And she’s not really qualified. And they are all men too.

  Owen, on Thursday, suggests she could construct a course themed around Beowulf, Sir Gawaine, John Cowper Powys and Kazuo Ishiguro. When she points out that this too is an all-male cast list, he suggests adding Angela Carter. She says she’ll think about it. She can’t quite see the links, but knowing Owen, there are bound to be some.

  She enjoys planning courses. She’s pleased that the Institute gives her a free hand. It values her. She always gets a full class.

  Poppet Stubbs goes to an auction in Tiverton with Jim and buys a strange ceramic colander for fifty pence. It has an interesting muddy green and cream-coloured glaze. He thinks it could be Saintonge ware, and at that price, it’s a bargain whatever it is. He can’t think how it can have got to Devon. It may or may not be functional, Poppet will test it when she gets it home.

  Jim buys a pair of Sheffield plate candlesticks and an escritoire and an almost complete run of Horizon. He’s got barns full of junk, full of treasures.

  They both enjoy these outings, as you never know what will turn up. Stuff from clearance sales, from ploughed fields, from pre-history.

  Fran is writing up her report on the Westmore Marsh project, and planning her next trip to the North-west. Ashley Combe doesn’t mind when she goes, within the next two or three months, provided she gives them a week or two to set up a meeting, and something in her tells her that she ought to wait for better weather, for spring, for Easter time. But she does like to get on with things. There’s a gap in her life, now that Teresa has gone. She hadn’t seen her very often, but she’d been a part of the fabric, part of the pattern, part of the routine. It’s such a dull and empty time of year. She might as well put her foot down and hit the M40 and the M6 sooner rather than later. She thinks she might spend a night in Blackpool. She’s never been to Blackpool. It has the lure of the truly desperate and dreadful. The black pool. It has a bad name, but it may be very nice when you get there.

  Yes, she thinks she might pop in on Blackpool. That’s what she tells herself, as she falls asleep. The prospect is alluring. Yes, that’s what she’ll do.

  Fran wakes in good spirits and rises easily and this morning painlessly, skipping the tedious dialogue with the neurones of the decision-making processes, and goes comfortably back to bed with her mug of coffee and her guidebook to Lancashire. Blackpool, it tells her, has no architectural merits whatsoever. She looks forward to what her snobbish book describes as its ‘supreme ugliness’.

  The sky is still dark, but each day it is and will be lightening. The year has turned, and at last we can begin to feel its turning. She is warm in her bed with her book.

  She wonders if she’s getting into the habit of getting up later and, if so, whether this would be a bad thing or whether it wouldn’t be of any significance at all.

  She is a little surprised when the mobile phone on her bedside table disturbs her browsing. Nobody rings her so early, it isn’t yet nine. She reaches for it, amidst the clutter of medications and pencils and notepads and Post-it notes and paperclips and rings and bracelets, and accepts the call. It’s probably a scam, she thinks, though she hardly ever gets scams these days. She’s managed to screen them out, with the help of one of the young Ashley Combe techno-wizards.

  But it isn’t a scam. It’s Nat Drummond.

  He doesn’t need to say anything. As soon as she hears his voice saying ‘Fran?’ she knows. What she feels is the thud of knowledge. That’s not a very nice word, thud, but it is what it is. A thud.

  She’ll never be able to think of a better word.

  Fran, he says, this man she’s known since before he was born, Fran, I have to tell you, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I can’t believe it.

  He tells her that Josephine Drummond had died in the night.

  There was nothing wrong with her, he says, more than once.

  Where are you, asks Fran, when she thinks of something to say.

  He is at King’s Cross. That accounts for the background noise. He is on his way to Cambridge.

  I had to tell you, he says.

  Of course, she says. Shall I come, she asks.

  He says he’ll ring her when he gets to Athene Grange.

  I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, he repeats. They think it was a cardiac arrest. She died in her bed, they think in the late evening.

  I could come, she repeats.

  I needed to tell you, he repeats.

  Keep in touch, Nat, she says, and anything I can do . . .

  Her voice trails away. What is there to do? That’s the end. This is the end. It wasn’t what she’d expected, as an ending.

  Thanks, Fran, he says. You could let Chris know. And Poppet.

  I will, she says.

  He rings off. They have put his platform number up. He needs to hurry along to board his train. They don’t give you long these days.

  During the day, Fran comes to terms with what seems to have happened at Athene Grange. Cardiac arrhythmia, reports Nat. He rings her from Jo’s own landline, at some point during the long drag of the afternoon. But she cannot come to terms with its meaning – for her, for Jo’s children, for her worldview, for the yet more lonely future. Of course, we can all expect to die at any moment, as she and Jo had many times comfortably told one another. But it’s different when it happens, without warning.

  Claude gives her his views on cardiac arrests. Inevitably he says it was a good way to go, as everyone will say. Yes, Fran agrees, meekly. It doesn’t feel very good, yet.

  He has the grace to sound shaken. She was quite a woman, says Claude.

  He had fancied Josephine Drummond. She’d been handsome, in her youth, and into her old age. He doesn’t mention this to Fran, but she appreciates his appreciative tone.

  Ô toi que j’eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais . . .

  A perfect example of the pluperfect subjunctive, as Josephine Drummond would have said.

  They’d found her because her lights were on and her radio was playing music all night and on into the darkness of the morning. A neighbour from across the courtyard, alerted by this
unusual pattern and leaving to catch an early train, had knocked as she passed, received no answer, cautiously entered (Jo never locked her door at night) and discovered Josephine Drummond dead in her bed. You wouldn’t lie long unnoticed in Athene Grange, as you could in some London housing estates. As you could in Tarrant Towers.

  Fran doesn’t seem to be able to cry. She cries easily, with mini-rage, when she is tired and late and has just missed a bus, when she can’t find her keys and is in a hurry, when she gets a speeding ticket and more fixed points on her licence. She can cry when she reads a sad poem or hears an everyday human tragedy rehearsed on the radio. She had wept, deeply, sadly, happily, over Poppet’s relics, as the moon shone on the waters. But now her eyes are dry. She hadn’t been able to weep much for Hamish either, until long after his death, and then she had wept through the selfishness of loneliness. This, like Hamish’s illness and death, is too serious for tears.

  She awaits instructions about the funeral. Her consolation is that Nat, and now Andrew, seem to wish to keep in constant touch with her. At Jo’s funeral, she will not be an extra, an outsider; she will not have to talk about tram routes in the 1950s. They need her to be there.

  She postpones her trip to Blackpool and rearranges her dates.

  She refuses to deliver an eulogium. She refuses to read a poem. But she tells the boys that somebody should read some Yeats. Jo had been very fond of Yeats.

  Sally Lyttelton had offered to host what would have been a grand reception at Charteris Hall after the cremation, but this hadn’t seemed a good idea to anybody except Sally. She’d have taken over, bossed people about, set too high a standard, made Jo’s other old students feel uncomfortable. Athene Grange had facilities for events of this nature, but it was agreed that this would have been too institutional, too gloomy. So Nat and Andrew had settled for neutral ground and booked an expensive, efficient, modern, anonymous, slightly out-of-town hotel. There they would gather, and eat canapés and drink themselves stupid, if they wanted to, and as some of them will.