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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 could go downstairs and order a plate. A hot plate. Scampi and chips with loud Muzak. A glass of red. She is sick of this Spanish white.
Valentine’s Day. Shrove Tuesday. Good Friday. Easter Sunday. We measure it out.
See the water and the blood from his riven side that flowed.
Poor Hamish. He had died at Easter, on Easter Saturday. A sombre day to die. A disproportionate number of people die in hospitals at weekends, for obvious reasons. He had been a statistic. But at least he had died on a serious day.
Claude had enjoyed cutting people up, and he’d been exceptionally good at it.
W. B. Yeats, her friend Jo’s favourite poet, was good on old age and our insatiable dissatisfaction, as Jo keeps telling her. She doesn’t really need telling, she read Yeats for herself, in the days when she read poetry. ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’, that had been one of the great songs of her youth. She used to play it to herself loud loud loud, it was the only song she really liked, though the Beatles she could tolerate.
Sex, food, satisfaction.
I can’t get no satisfaction.
She’d meant to text Christopher a routine good will message, HOW R U LOVE FX, but why bother, her fingers are too stiff and clumsy at this time of night, and she is redundant both to Christopher’s life and to Sara’s death.
She heaves herself up and forces herself to go downstairs for a Red Meal. She thinks with longing of the potato and anchovy bake, and of the chicken and tarragon, with their paler shades and more subtle flavours. She does make them for herself, sometimes. But sometimes she just can’t be bothered. She often thinks she should always cook double quantities of everything, and freeze half for Claude, half for herself, but there is something wrong with that as a concept. She can’t work out what it is, but maybe one day she will. She’s cooked double occasionally, but she’s never made a habit of it. She thinks of Paul, Julia, Graham, Ken of the robots, and the strong-armed sixty-year-old Suzette, who could have tossed the frail little body of Aunt Dorothy, colostomy bag and all, over her shoulder and carried her up the stairs without missing a step. Suzette had seemed to be a kindly woman, but who knows what motivates her? Maybe one day she too will lose the plot and poison all her brood.
There just aren’t enough strong younger people around these days to infuse the energy into the elderly. The feeble, as never before in society, in history, are outweighing the hale. The balance is wrong. The shape of the bell curve is a disaster. It’s a dystopian science fiction scenario, a disaster movie.
The hunter gatherers wouldn’t have let themselves get into this kind of predicament. They abandoned the elderly, or drowned them, or clubbed them to death, or exposed them on snowy mountainsides. They kept on the move.
Fran is on the move too.
Nor know that what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb …
Ivor Walters sits on the little low balcony of the familiar bar overlooking the promenade that runs along the curving bay. He sips his warming beer. He is filling in time before meeting Christopher Stubbs at the airport. A pastel-pretty pink and beige and pale blue collared dove perches on the back of the little white bistro chair at the table on the next balcony, looking at him from time to time. It puts its head on one side, and looks at him. The sun, predictably, is setting. It is a very reliable sun. Sunset and sunrise do not vary much in these climes. He watches the slow march of the people on their daily pilgrimage. They are walking back from the beach to shop for their supper in one of the many small and almost identical supermarkets, or to eat fish or burgers or pizza in one of the many small and almost identical restaurants, or to spend an evening watching football in one of the many English pubs, where they will get drunk on beer or on Canarian or Spanish wine or (in the case of the ladies) on recklessly dispensed tumblers full of sweet holiday liqueurs.
You cannot really call their slow march a passeggiata, a camino, a paseo, for these pilgrims are too humble and lacking in style for such words. He observes them as they plod and trudge: the fit, the fat, the brown, the red, the weathered, the wizened. Cleavages, thighs, shorts, sandals, walking sticks. Wheelchairs, mobility scooters, buggies. Half term is over and most of the larger children have flown away and gone back to school, but the little ones in their pushchairs are always with us, accompanied by a few truant siblings. A sunset procession, a slow pedestrian parade. Occasionally a jogger varies the rhythm of the procession, but there are not many joggers. The pace is slow.
The surface of the path is hard and trim and newly laid and neatly bordered. He knows the island well and he has seen its improvements and its upgradings. Much public money has been spent on footpaths and roadways and viewpoints. He knew this path when it was rock and sand and mud and grit and spume, when it was raw and painful to the sandalled foot. He is slowly ageing with the island, he has watched it adapt itself to the ease and the pleasure-seeking of the perpetual procession. This is a good country for babies in buggies, and a good country for old men. Ivor is not yet old, as others are old, but he has lived here long enough. If Bennett dies soon, which he may, Ivor can go back to England. But if Bennett survives into his late eighties and nineties, which in this mild climate of mummified and everlasting life he equally well may, it will be too late for Ivor to go home. It is a common story.
Bennett is here for his health and Ivor is here because Bennett needs him to be here. Bennett is slowly drying out like a Guanche mummy of the caves and dunes. Ivor needs Bennett because Bennett holds the purse strings. It is too depressing, and yet not ignoble. They are bound together by the needs which succeed love, by the needs which succeed sex and affection. Ivor does not like thinking in these terms, but it is hard to avoid them. They sit by him, these considerations, looking at him from time to time, as does the pretty collared dove with its pale and pearly plumage.
Ivor tries to keep Bennett entertained, he is loyal to him. Ivor is a good man, at the very least he tries to be a good man. Most would call him a good man, but, by his own high standards, he might fail.
It is better not to look too closely at Ivor these days, in Ivor’s view. He is, or was, a strikingly handsome man, and he still attracts flirtatious attention from men and women alike. Blond, bronzed, with the bluest of forget-me-not blue eyes, and the most even of features. A pin-up boy, a collector’s item. Bennett had collected him long ago, when Ivor was only seventeen and knew no better. Ivor worries now about his wrinkles. He is proud that he still has a full head of hair, white now rather than golden, but you can tell that it once was golden for it has that light silvery radiance, the white-gold thistledown brightness of the birthright blond. He keeps it just very slightly on the long side. Dashingly, but not effeminately long.
Bennett and Ivor have engaged with the life of the island. They know some of the local celebrities and intellectuals, most of them also elderly, some of them ancient, many of them also here for reasons of health (and at least one of them in retreat from scandal). A few are indigenous, but a very few. Bennett is himself now something of a local celebrity, and he speaks good Spanish, so he can participate more fully in the cultural and social life of the island than Ivor. Ivor is not a linguist, although he is good at small talk, at seeing to drinks, at opening bottles, at pulling up chairs for older guests in his own and other people’s houses. He is an asset. People cheer up when they see Ivor is of the party.
Bennett knows a good deal about Spanish and Canarian history, for he has written about the Spanish Civil War and Lorca and Franco and Guernica and Picasso, and about the now-forgotten but once-celebrated