The Dark Flood Rises. Margaret Drabble

some more.

      What about soup? She could make a thick vegetable soup, no, a vegetable soup with bits of bacon, no, a lentil soup with chicken pieces. Claude used to say he didn’t like soup, half a century ago, but he’s not in a position not to like it now, is he? He has to take what he’s given, now.

      She could get a good chicken, make enough soup for both Claude and Teresa.

      Lardons. That’s the word she’s looking for. Bits of bacon, ready chopped. Good in soup. Soup freezes well. There’s yet another word for lardon but she can’t quite get it.

      He used to get back from the hospital after the night shift, and she’d have made the healthy thrifty chunky soup and all he had to do was warm it up. But that wasn’t good enough. He wanted HER to be there to WARM IT UP FOR HIM. And she in bed and worn out with the children sleeping or not sleeping or waking or not waking and the sense of unutterable inadequacy, the sense of rejection, the fear, the panic, the sexual rejection identified with food rejection, the sense of not being that women have, you’d think she’d have grown out of it by now, by her age, at seventy-plus, but no, it intensifies, it gets worse and worse.

      So he’d say he didn’t like soup. Root vegetables, carrots, potatoes, no parsnips, he couldn’t tolerate parsnips, what other root vegetables are there? Onions. Celery.

      Bacon bits. Pancetta. Got it, that’s the other word, pancetta. Lardons. Pancetta. Foreign words for bits of bacon.

      The treadmill of the food mind, like a hamster in its cage. Sometimes she thinks she is going mad, really mad, she will end up in a home like Dorothy, mindlessly colouring in. She used to enjoy colouring in, she remembers a book of flowers and birds and butterflies she had when she was a child, a treat just after the war shortages, and how she’d cried when the water colours ran together into a muddy brown. The failures, the failures. The tough beef, the stew with frilled yellowy gristle, the bloody undercooked lamb, the disintegrating fish overcooked in the oven. He wouldn’t eat the fish, the guests wouldn’t eat it, they’d pretended they were allergic to fish rather than try to eat her fish, she hadn’t forgotten that, she hadn’t forgotten anything, and it had been good fish too, from the fish shop, in those days when there was a fish shop.

      She’d better snap out of this, she’s going downhill fast, down to that place that it was so hard to clamber out of.

      Lardons. They were the solution, the solution to everything. We didn’t used to call them that. God knows what we did call them. We didn’t call them that other word either, pancetta, we’d never heard of pancetta.

      Bread and dripping, Dorothy had mentioned. You couldn’t offer that to man or boy now, not because they wouldn’t eat it, although they wouldn’t, but because meat doesn’t produce dripping any more. The meat isn’t real meat any more. Even when it looks like meat, it’s something else.

      Fran takes another swig of the oaky Spanish, mutes the news, looks for her mobile, panics when she can’t find it. She’s just an old woman endlessly groping in the bottom of her bag, checking her keys and her mobile every ten minutes to see if they are still there, but there it is, in the wrong zip bit. Why can’t she remember always to put it in the same compartment? It doesn’t bode well, Christ, it doesn’t bode well.

      Claude answers within three rings. Hello, Francesca, how’s it going?

      Relief, hearing his voice so not unfriendly, so not at all hostile. He is pleased to hear from her.

      Fine, says Fran, good day, just checking you are OK, everything OK?

      Everything fine, says Claude, I’ve just finished the potato and anchovy bake, it was delicious. Persephone brought me a bit of green salad this morning so I’ve had my greens too.

      Oh good, potato and anchovy isn’t really your five a day, is it?

      To hell with five a day, it’s very nice. You do look after me, Fran, I don’t deserve it.

      No, you don’t, but we all need more than we deserve, don’t we? Oh reason not the need.

      How was your day, how was the conference?

      Good. It was fine.

      Good.

      I’m going home in the morning, I’ll come over and see you in a couple of days when I’ve sorted myself out, bring you some more supplies.

      Thanks, have you had your supper yet?

      No, I was just wondering whether to go down to the restaurant or to pop out for a pizza. The food here’s not great but the breakfasts are good.

      You were never a breakfast girl, were you?

      No, but here they do you a perfect soft-boiled egg, it’s a treat.

      How’s Cyrus?

      Cyrus is fine, aren’t you, big puss?

      Paranoia dissolves, retreats, thins out, but one day it won’t, will it? One day it will entrap her in its dark nets and fogs and she will sink under it. It would be a pity to die dismally, in that darkness.

      She wants to die in the light. Enlightened, in the light. Let there be light, oh God let there be light.

      Endgame. She and Josephine are planning to go to see Endgame, God knows why. Or is it Happy Days? She can’t remember which. Jo is in charge of booking the tickets, it’s Jo who has suddenly decided they ought to get to grips with Samuel Beckett.

      Some fear the approach of dementia. Fran is acquainted with many people with dementia, she has very recently inspected blueprints for dementia-proof housing designed by a team at the University of Watermouth, she has read books about dementia, she has helped out (but only once, she can’t boast about it) at a social event for dementia patients and their carers. But Fran doesn’t think she is on the road to dementia. Her parents had never shown any sign of mental deterioration, they had been conscious (although not always peacefully and happily) to the end. Her brain functions well, her connections are quick, her memory is serviceable and subject only to a well-within-the-normal-range of lapses about names and products and titles of books and misplaced objects. No, what she fears is paranoia and subjection and rejection, and a return to that sense of worthlessness that had gripped her when she was newly married to Claude and spent so much time worrying about ruining the food. Maybe these sensations are returning to her because she has re-engaged with Claude, or maybe she has re-engaged with Claude because she needs to return to them. Maybe this is a necessary stage.

      Food is a metaphor. But for what? She worries away at this. There is a deep entangled mystery. Sometimes she thinks she should go/have gone to an expert, to an analyst, to have this explained to her, but most of the time she thinks that she can work it out for herself in the end.

      The end is nigh, but she’ll keep on trying.

      It’s not too late.

      And she would be too ashamed to talk about food to an analyst. It is too trivial, too obsessively trivial.

      Food disorders are for the young. And this isn’t really a food disorder, it’s more like a cooking disorder.

      Fran hates media chefs. They proliferate, they spread fear and panic.

      She has somewhat half-heartedly developed her strategies for confronting and averting late-onset ailments. Walking, working, swimming. Climbing the tenement stairs, up and down, down and up, as though climbing up and down an Escher construction site. Networks, tasks, the occasional crossword puzzle. The discipline of plated meals for Claude, the new fortnightly vigils with Teresa. The renewals and transfusions of energy from Paul and Julia and Graham and other younger professional acquaintances up and down the land. The driving about, looking at projects, and the feeling of an occasional wave of oneness with the ordinary plight of the ordinary human race. The keeping-in-touch without-being-too-annoying with her son Christopher and her daughter Poppet and her ex-daughter-in-law Ella and her grandchildren.

      The ‘wider interests’ that are meant to keep us from falling down the funnel.