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The Dark Flood Rises. Margaret Drabble
Читать онлайн.Название The Dark Flood Rises
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781782118329
Автор произведения Margaret Drabble
Жанр Контркультура
Издательство Ingram
She has been beautifully presented to reassure her nephew Paul, Fran assumes, but she cannot detect any hint of hidden or underlying neglect. This is a very small outfit, a domestic operation, a ‘home from home’. There are only five other residents, two of whom are up in their rooms, while the other three are somewhat slumped and dozy in recliners at the other end of the lounge, watching a muted TV. Paul, Fran and Dorothy sit upright in the little bay window with their tea and shortbread biscuits, while Dorothy tells Fran the story of her life. Fran is a new audience, and she listens politely and attentively.
She cannot understand much of Dorothy’s tale. She is familiar with various forms of dementia and confusion, and knows people who cannot carry a conversation or remember a thought sequence for more than two or three minutes at a time. Dorothy is not like that at all.
Dorothy wanders from past to present seamlessly, in a stream of consciousness that loops and circles and turns in on itself. Albion Road, the war, the air raids, the gas light with a mantel, West Bromwich Albion, bread and dripping, my father, he was always so angry, Junior Mixed and Infants, the old Board School, her bouts of pneumonia, her TB, her colostomy (she pats the bag, affectionately, softly swelling under her grey skirt). The church, the vicar, that time she spoke at her friend’s funeral, her son who came to see her when he could, her husband, she married him when she was seventeen. Her father was angry. God was so good to her. Her plans for her funeral, her favourite hymns, the first time she’d been put in hospital, Suzette the manageress, Claire the stylist at the salon, the new shopping mall, the darkies have taken over everywhere. The day thou gavest Lord is ended. Darkies are everywhere. Look, this is the ring he gave me, my Charlie, it’s sapphires and diamonds. Hopscotch in the street and dancing to the gramophone. Her father was angry when she did handstands, he didn’t like her showing her knickers, he gave her the strap if she showed her knickers, he bought a coat for £2 at the pawn shop but he didn’t live to wear it, but her mother lived to be ninety-four.
I hope I don’t last that long but God disposes, they help me to change the bag, there’s always a helper on duty here.
He didn’t like me showing my knickers. I was always the pretty one, my little sister Emmie she was the clever one.
As she mentions her sister Emmie, she looks in a puzzled way at Emmie’s son Paul, as though wondering who he is and what his connection with this narrative.
The pumping station, it’s all bricked up now. My dad worked, he worked for the water board. Yes, God is very good, they wheel me to church every Sunday. Our church is one hundred years old. I like to read, I like stories, we get these magazines.
It’s a very vocal form of dementia, if dementia it is. The three residents at the other end of the room speak not at all. They must have heard Dorothy’s stories innumerable times. She is the talker, she speaks for them all, she is the muddled memory of their generation.
Fran tries to follow, picks out the recurrent motif of the angry father, wonders if he was the explanation of why his daughter is here, year after year, unageing, unchanging, living it out to the end.
Dead at forty-eight, he was, it was his lungs.
Paul’s grandfather, that would have been.
After an hour, manageress Suzette joins them to break it up, for they had dutifully done their stint. Dorothy recognises the nature of the intervention at once, and makes no attempt to detain her visitors. She is well-mannered, docile. She presents them each with a parting gift, a card from a children’s play pack, which she has coloured in with bright acrylics. One shows a butterfly, the other a country cottage. She has worked them carefully, not going over any of the edges, none of the colours overlapping one another.
She seems to have taken to Fran, and urges her to visit again when next she finds herself nearby. Just pop in, says Dorothy, you’ll always find me here.
‘She loves colouring in,’ says Suzette gaily as she ushers them out into the hallway. Dorothy remains sitting at the table, gazing not after her guests but out at the street, her frail mauve beringed hands neatly folded in her lap.
Suzette is a stoutly confident tawny-blonde sixty-year-old with a short sharp defiantly razored hairstyle, all points and tips and highlights. No shampoo and set and hot curlers under the hood of the dryer for her. She is dressed in a bold tight fuchsia and black geometric print stretchy fabric dress with a scooped neckline. She is brisk and breezy, supplying the movement and energy in the house that her charges lack. Her parting handshake is powerful. She is a strong woman.
Who owns the premises? Who is making money out of this? Who employs Suzette? Is anyone making money out of it? It looks more like a break-even one-off situation to Fran. Not a chain, not part of a lucrative exploitative string of Chestnut Care Homes, just this one homely house hanging on in Sandford Road. Too low-profile for a scandal. Just surviving, as best it could.
There had been a scandal recently, in another much larger Sandwell care home. Several residents had fallen ill with food poisoning and a twenty-three-year-old care worker had been arrested and detained in a secure mental health unit. She was suspected of having deliberately contaminated their food.
Leave the mad to feed the mad, let the dead bury the dead.
Fran drives Paul back to the Premier Inn, where he says he’ll ring for a cab to get to Birmingham New Street. He has to get back to Colchester. She doesn’t even offer to drive him to the station. She is far too tired.
And Paul is subdued.
‘She must have been a beauty,’ offers Fran.
‘I don’t think she’s unhappy,’ says Paul, unhappily.
He had volunteered, earlier in the day, that his mother hadn’t seen her sister in thirty years. They had quarrelled, terminally. Emily in Hagwood and Dorothy in Chestnut Court. Both their husbands were dead. Dorothy has a son, the son she had mentioned, he isn’t a fantasy son as Fran might have supposed. But he had emigrated to Australia, a fact which she doesn’t seem to have wholly grasped. He wasn’t much use, her son Ralph, on the home front.
Fran is thinking of the bouts of childhood pneumonia, of the TB, of the bowel operation, of that occasionally vocal colostomy bag, of all the skilled surgery and intensive care and nursing and expense that have gone into keeping this confused old woman alive and smiling and putting on her jewellery and being wheeled to church and colouring in and looking at fashion pictures in magazines and wandering softly in her wits. She realises she’s been thinking of Dorothy as belonging to the ultimate generation, to the phalanx of the truly old, but Dorothy’s wartime memories had marked her as being only a very few years older than Fran herself. Fran can just about remember the war. Dorothy is in her seventies, not even in her eighties. She could live another twenty years.
Sometimes Fran thinks she can understand the impulse that makes a twenty-three-year-old want to kill off a lot of useless old people.
We can all expect to live longer, but it’s recently been claimed that the majority of us can expect to spend the last six years of our prolonged lives suffering from a serious illness, in some form of pain and ill health.
Fran found this statistic, true or false, infuriating. Longevity has fucked up our pensions, our work–life balance, our health services, our housing, our happiness. It’s fucked up old age itself.
Fran can no longer wholly control her thought processes. As she lies on her guaranteed-good-night’s-sleep bed, watching the evening news and eating a packet of some novel kind of Gujarati mix (satisfyingly spicy but rather too many peanuts), washed down with a bottle of not-quite-cold-enough screw-top 13 per cent Spanish white purchased from the friendly bearded Muslim newsagent over the road, she finds herself planning Claude’s next week of meals. She doesn’t want to be doing this, but she can’t help it.
He’ll