The Dark Flood Rises. Margaret Drabble

stasis. No children played in the immaculate playgrounds. Where had all the children gone? Unnaturally long and hard shadows fell towards the evening, as in a painting by de Chirico.

      After Bennett’s first slight stroke, travel was not so easy, and Ivor began to feel more apprehensive about the future. But by then they had made friends on the island, Spanish friends as well as ex-pats, and Ivor had a few younger drinking companions whom he would meet in the bars in town. Bennett did not enquire about these relationships. He was well past his jealous years. The shouting matches of the past were over.

      They gave parties at the house, good parties. A Nobel Prize-winner, a distinguished and outrageous elderly actor, a few historians and other assorted academics, a notorious bridge player who had once partnered Omar Sharif, a man of the theatre who owned a de Chirico, a handful of Sunday painters – it was a very painterly landscape, though not many had done it justice – and a chorus of locals who specialised in being amusing. Convivial friends, most of them ageing but nevertheless convivial, and a few younger spirits who stuck by Ivor and looked out for him.

      People liked Ivor.

      When the book was published, to respectful if somewhat subdued acclaim, Ivor began to wonder how Bennett would keep himself busy for the remainder of his life. Ivor was busy looking after Bennett, but Bennett needed occupation. He was accustomed to hard work. He started to talk about possible projects in a way that made Ivor slightly uneasy. For years he had talked about writing a life of General Lyautey. He’d had the idea long ago on their first holiday visit to Morocco, but Ivor had never taken it very seriously, he’d thought of it as an after-dinner jeu d’esprit. A provocative notion: a gay biography of a right-wing gay orientalising French general written by a gay left-of-centre English Hispanist historian-turned-art-historian – surely not? But now Bennett had returned to the concept and started to talk about it again. He’d talked about it for a year or two and asked Ivor to order him up some books, but it wasn’t easy to get hold of the source material in the Canaries, and Ivor watched his old friend becoming gradually disheartened by his own incompetence, by his lack of grasp and intellectual vigour and attack. It wasn’t that his mind was going, but he’d lost his perseverance. (‘I’ve lost my alacrity’, he would sometimes say, mournfully, when down in the dumps.)

      He would never get to grips with the gay general. The subject was beyond him, too big for him, and too distant. He would never be able to give a proper account of his own attraction-revulsion relationship with the swashbuckling sabre-rattling French and Spanish in Morocco, and their aesthetic cults of violence and beheadings. The Foreign Legion and Beau Geste were beyond his narrative reach. (Bennett had loved Beau Geste when he was a schoolboy, but Ivor had never read it.) He’d never be well enough to go to Morocco again. Morocco wasn’t very far away, just a short hop over the ocean, as the Berbers and the Mauritanians had found it, but it was a short hop too far for Bennett. They could go by boat, perhaps, Ivor wondered? There were passenger ferries, there were cruises. That’s what old people do these days, they go on cruises. Ivor tried to work out the possibilities, but he wasn’t happy about the Lyautey dream. Neither, he could tell, was Bennett.

      Lyautey was famous, or infamous, for his passions for the handsome young soldiers under his command. Had Bennett wanted to whitewash him, to justify him? Ivor didn’t even know, as the project hadn’t got that far.

      They’d been to look at his tomb in the Invalides in Paris: a pompous manly erection, where his ashes had been reinterred in 1961. De Gaulle had given a speech on the occasion. Bennett was interested in military and military-style monuments. Unamuno, Lyautey, the tomb of Franco in the extraordinary Valle de los Caídos.

      They don’t erect statues to historians. Or not very often.

      Ivor didn’t like to watch Bennett becoming a disappointed old man, fearing oblivion. He deserved better than that, and Ivor deserved better than that.

      Bennett, Ivor knew, had felt professionally discomfited by developments in Spanish historiography, by archaeological revelations on the Spanish mainland. The recent laws on Historical Memory, on the right to excavate the mass graves and the cemeteries and the battlefields of the past, had provided an excess of new material which he would never be able to assimilate. He had gallantly welcomed the new openness, but it had made him feel lamentably out of date. A whole new generation of historians, writing both in Spanish and English, had taken over the much-disputed and still embittered field. His work wasn’t rejected or derided, it was still cited, but it was being steadily supplanted.

      Somebody was even writing a book about why, allegedly, the Spanish Civil War had attracted the attention and indeed participation of so many English homosexuals. An exploration of the A. E. Housman syndrome, of the beauty of doomed youth. Bennett had refused to be interviewed for it, and Stephen Spender had (just) pre-empted an interrogation by death. He’d lived to a good age, had Stephen. (Bennett could do some wicked parodies of Housman; his party piece was Hugh Kingsmill’s ‘What, still alive at twenty-two, A clean, upstanding chap like you?’)

      The next project Bennett dreamed up, after the waning of the Lyautey dream, was more manageable, more within his reach, and Ivor encouraged it, with a sense that it would fill the time pleasantly, even though the book would never be written. It would give their excursions an illusion of purpose, and Bennett loved to have a purpose.

      Bennett had decided to write a short, scholarly but popular history of the Canaries. There was surprisingly little in English or even in Spanish about this volcanic group of small islands sitting in the Atlantic, not far off the North African shore: a mirror image of the Galapagos, which they had visited in the days before it was considered an ecological crime to go there. The Canaries, the Isles of the Blessed. The history of the islands was short and at the same time mysterious. Bennett believed, or pretended to believe, that the millions (yes, literally millions) of English-speaking visitors who poured in and out each year would welcome some reading matter more stimulating than the tedious selection of magazines and mass-market English and German paperbacks available in the mini-markets. There were some guidebooks on sale, but they were very basic. There were one or two little books on Canarian food and on Canarian flora and on the history of the indigenous and intriguing Guanches of Tenerife, but they consisted more of captioned pictures than of text. The best guides written in English were by an intrepid British walker, who advised on climbing volcanoes, crossing dunes and barrancos and lava pans, finding casitas and goat tracks and avoiding dogs, but even he didn’t offer much historical information. Bennett thought he could fill a gap.

      The Canaries were now a peaceful backwater. Their peoples weren’t obsessed, as so many on the mainland still were, by tales of revenge and violent death, by family vendettas, by the executions and defenestrations of yesteryear. They weren’t even very interested in independence, although you could occasionally spot graffiti demanding ‘Españoles Fuera’ or ‘Viva Canarias Libre’ or ‘Canarias no es España’. There had been betrayals and dispossessions, but they had been small in scale. The Canaries did not swim with spilt blood. Their dried mummies were very ancient and very dry.

      Bennett has accumulated a pile of cuttings and jottings, but he hasn’t yet got much further than typing out a beautiful epigraph from his fellow historian Gibbon, who had never visited the islands, though he had written feelingly about them in an essay entitled ‘On the Position of the Meridional Line’:

      A remote and hospitable land has often been praised above its merits by the gratitude of storm-beaten mariners. But the real scene of the Canaries affords, like the rest of the world, a mixture of good and evil, nay even of indigenous ills and foreign improvements. Yet, in sober truth, the small islands of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans may be esteemed as some of the most agreeable spots on the globe. The sky is serene, the air is pure and salubrious: the meridian heat of the sun is tempered by the sea-breeze: the groves and vallies, at least in the Canaries, are enlivened by the melody of their native birds, and a new climate may be found, at every step, from the shore to the summit, of a mountainous ascent.

      Gibbon made the islands sound very agreeable, as indeed they are, but Ivor suspected that very few tourists would be at all interested in purchasing a history of them. They were not great readers, the visitors. They preferred sunbathing