The Dark Flood Rises. Margaret Drabble

      

      Also by Margaret Drabble

      FICTION

       A Summer Bird-Cage

       The Garrick Year

       The Millstone

       Jerusalem the Golden

       The Waterfall

       The Needle’s Eye

      London Consequences (group novel)

       The Realms of Gold

       The Ice Age

       The Middle Ground

       The Radiant Way

       A Natural Curiosity

       The Gates of Ivory

       The Witch of Exmoor

       The Peppered Moth

       The Seven Sisters

       The Red Queen

       The Sea Lady

       The Pure Gold Baby

      SHORT STORIES

       A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: The Collected Stories

      NON-FICTION

      Wordsworth (Literature in Perspective series)

       Arnold Bennett: A Biography

       For Queen and Country

       A Writer’s Britain

      The Oxford Companion to English Literature (editor)

       Angus Wilson: A Biography

       The Pattern in the Carpet

      The Dark Flood Rises

       Margaret Drabble

      Published in Great Britain in 2016 by Canongate Books Ltd,

      14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

       canongate.co.uk

      This digital edition first published in 2016 by Canongate Books

      Copyright © Margaret Drabble, 2016

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission

      for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or

      omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that

      should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

      ‘Going On’ from An Almost Dancer, Poems 2005–2011, by Robert Nye, published by Greenwich Exchange, London 2012

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 78211 830 5

      Export ISBN 978 1 78211 831 2

      eISBN 978 1 78211 832 9

      Typeset in Sabon MT by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

      Falkirk, Stirlingshire

      To Bernardine

      1939–2013

      Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul

      has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.

      D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Ship of Death’

      THROUGH winter-time we call on spring,

      And through the spring on summer call,

      And when abounding hedges ring

      Declare that winter’s best of all;

      And after that there’s nothing good

      Because the spring-time has not come –

      Nor know that what disturbs our blood

      Is but its longing for the tomb.

      W. B. Yeats, ‘The Wheel’

      Contents

       Chapters

       Envoi

       Acknowledgements

      She has often suspected that her last words to herself and in this world will prove to be ‘You bloody old fool’ or, perhaps, depending on the mood of the day or the time of the night, ‘you fucking idiot’. As the speeding car hits the tree, or the unserviced boiler explodes, or the smoke and flames fill the hallway, or the grip on the high guttering gives way, those will be her last words. She isn’t to know for sure that it will be so, but she suspects it. In her latter years, she’s become deeply interested in the phrase ‘Call no man happy until he is dead’. Or no woman, come to that. ‘Call no woman happy until she is dead.’ Fair enough, and the ancient world had known women as well as men who had met unfortunate ends: Clytemnestra, Dido, Hecuba, Antigone. Though of course Antigone, one must remember, had rejoiced to die young, and in a good (if to us pointless) cause, thereby avoiding all the inconveniences of old age.

      Fran herself is already too old to die young, and too old to avoid bunions and arthritis, moles and blebs, weakening wrists, incipient but not yet treatable cataracts, and encroaching weariness. She can see that in time (and perhaps in not a very long time) all these annoyances will become so annoying that she will be willing to embark on one of those acts of reckless folly that will bring the whole thing to a rapid, perhaps a sensational ending. But would the rapid ending cancel out and negate the intermittent happiness of the earlier years, the long struggle towards some kind of maturity, the modest successes, the hard work? What would the balance sheet look like, at the last reckoning?

      It was the obituaries of Stella Hartleap that set her thoughts in this actuarial direction, as she drove along the M1 towards Birmingham, at only three or four miles above the speed limit.

      The print obituaries had been annoying, piously annoying, in a sexist, ageist, hypocritical, mealy-mouthed manner, reeking of Schadenfreude. And just now, yet another mention of Stella on the car radio, in that regular Radio 4 obituary slot, has revived her irritations. She hadn’t known Stella very well, having met her late in the day in Highgate through Hamish, but she’d known her long enough to recognise the claptrap and the bullshit. So, Stella had died of smoke inhalation, having set her bedclothes on fire while smoking in bed in her remote farmstead in the Black Mountains, and having just polished off a tumbler of Famous Grouse. So what? A better exit than dying in a hospital corridor in a wheelchair while waiting for another dose of poisonous chemotherapy, which had recently been her good friend Birgit’s dismal fate. At least Stella had nobody to blame but herself, and although the last minutes couldn’t have been pleasant, neither had Birgit’s. Not at all pleasant, by all accounts, and without any complementary frisson of autonomy.

      Birgit wouldn’t have approved of Stella Hartleap’s end. She might even have been censorious about it. She had been a judgmental woman. But that was neither here nor there. We don’t have to agree with anyone, ever.

      Her new-old friend Teresa, who is grievously ill,