The Dark Flood Rises. Margaret Drabble

Atlantis and King Juba II and Juba’s physician Euphorbius, after whom the ubiquitous and various Canarian plant was named. (King Juba had married, according to Bennett, the daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, which to Ivor seemed surprising and unlikely: what kind of woman could she have been, this Roman-Egyptian queen, which parent did she favour, what kind of colour was she?) The surfboarders from Norway and Uruguay would not wish to learn about the Roman general Sertorius, ally of Marius and Cinna and adversary of the bloody Sulla, who had attempted to set up a Utopian colony on Tenerife. They would be even less interested in William Wordsworth, who had once planned to write an epic poem about Sertorius and the small, peaceful, dwindling band of his followers who had hung on in the islands until the Norman invasion. They would not want to read about the disputed ethnic origins of the doomed (but genetically surviving) Guanches, or to speculate about how they had got there in the first place. They would not share Bennett’s curious fixation with the fact that by the Middle Ages the inhabitants of the seven islands had lost the art of navigation.

      They must have had ships once, or they couldn’t have got there, could they?

      (Unless, suggested Ivor, they had been dumped: and it turned out that this was indeed one more than plausible historical hypothesis. Ivor wasn’t very well educated but he was good at lateral thinking.)

      Ivor could see that it was rather odd that when the Portuguese and the Normans and the Genoese rediscovered the Canaries in the fourteenth century, they encountered separate populations on each of the seven islands, all speaking different languages, and with no means of getting from one island to another, even though some of them could see their neighbours and wave to them, if they felt like it, over the water. As in the Galapagos, evolution had taken its own course.

      The seven islands: El Hierro, La Gomera, Gran Canaria, La Palma, Tenerife, Lanzarote, Fuerteventura – separated both by water and by language.

      Bennett seemed gripped by what Ivor considered a childish or perhaps senile fascination with this aspect of island history. It was his King Charles’s Head. It had replaced the gay Lyautey as an obsession. It was, Ivor thought, connected with his pleasurable memories of swimming. Bennett had, until very recently, been a keen swimmer, ever eager to leap into any tempting stretch of water. Ivor, who was not so keen on the indignities and discomforts of getting wet, had watched his friend practising his slow and stately breaststroke in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean and the Pacific, in the Red Sea and the Black Sea and the North Sea, in the Danube and the Rhine and the Rhône, in the Thames and the Barle and the Windrush. He had seen him ploughing up and down the homoerotic blue lengths of hotel swimming pools in Los Angeles and Toronto and Melbourne and Rio de Janeiro. He had seen him jump into green and murky shallow ponds in the English counties and into unlikely and deeply anti-erotic algae-covered waterholes in the Midwest. Bennett still enjoyed their well-maintained turquoise pool at La Suerte, although he was less eager these days to attempt even the milder island bays of the Atlantic. He’d lost his footing and been knocked down by a wave on the curving beach at the little fishing port of Arrieta late one morning and that had put him off swimming in the sea.

      But Bennett remained fascinated by the fact that the indigenous Canarians, in the Middle Ages, didn’t build boats and didn’t swim and didn’t trade from island to island and didn’t speak a common language. In Ivor’s view, he was excessively fascinated by this. Ivor didn’t think of himself as an intellectual, but he did wonder in a Freudian kind of way why Bennett found this so interesting.

      It was interesting, of course, and the handsome lads from Senegal who propositioned tourist ladies to buy handbags these days, were, physically, very attractive.

      God knows how they got here, but they did.

      The survival of the fittest.

      These days, would-be immigrants from the mainland of Africa were frequently wrecked off the eastern shores of the islands. Young men, young women, children. The chancers. Some drowned; some made it to the detention centres; some survived to sell excellent fake handbags, until they were moved on or deported. One of them, one fortunate one plucked from the thousands, had been taken under the wing of a friend of theirs, the friend with the de Chirico, the friend with a chequered past and an eye for art, and he lived with him in comparative splendour in his rocky sardine fortress on the neighbouring island of Fuerteventura.

      Most of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century immigrants could not swim. They trusted themselves to the leaking vessels, but had never learned to swim. Bennett was unduly fascinated by this.

      Ivor was finding it hard to work out whether or not Bennett was, to put it bluntly, losing his wits.

      Bennett’s reaction to the news of Sara Sidiqi’s sudden and at first inexplicable death had been very odd. He hadn’t seemed to take it in at all, or not in any way that we would now call ‘appropriate’. He didn’t want to know about it. The subject of her death was not at first admitted as part of his conversational range. Yet, earlier, he’d appeared to follow in detail the whole complicated story about the Western Saharan protest at the airport, had spoken to the press about it, had signed the letter to El País, had seemed quite chuffed to be summoned to appear on one of the local TV stations with their Nobel Prize friend to talk about the hunger strike and Sahrawi nationalism. He’d been more than happy to give his views on Namarome to Sara, and to invoke the name of his late acquaintance, the novelist and useful public intellectual José Saramago. Saramago would certainly have stood up for independence of the Western Sahara.

      And Bennett had really taken to Christopher Stubbs.

      Ivor had been taken with Christopher too. He had seen some kind of gleam of hope, of escape, of unexpected support, or at least of temporary relief, in Christopher Stubbs, and that was why he was sitting on the balcony of the bar waiting, on his way to drive to greet him on his return.

      They’d met, the four of them, only once or twice, in Sara and Christopher’s short and dramatically curtailed stay on the island: Christopher had been given Bennett’s name as a useful contact by a college friend he knew in the Foreign Office, and when Christopher rang La Suerte, it was of course Ivor who picked up the phone. (Bennett wasn’t deaf, but he liked to pretend he was, and, although garrulous in person, he hated the phone.) Hospitable drinks at the magical black-and-white volcanic house had followed, and some briefing of Sara on local politics by Bennett, on local facilities and personalities by Ivor. They had all got on well: Ivor and Bennett were pleased with the influx of new young blood. They were cheered by the apparition of two handsome and healthy young people still in mid-career, still working, not yet tottering on the verge of retirement. They were impressed by Sara’s even younger research team and her Libyan cameraman. They were all staying in comfort at the big César Manrique-styled hotel in Costa Teguise.

      The foursome had spent Sara’s last evening together, the evening before she was taken ill. They’d had dinner, at Bennett’s recommendation, in the last old-fashioned fish restaurant right down by the almost abandoned rusting old port, a far cry from the developed strand and promenade of the new resort. Las Caletas still preserved an unfashionable dark Spanish wooden gloom, with plastic-sealed wooden-framed salt-stained casement windows jutting out and overlooking the waves. It had a history. It had seen the boats sail out.

      It served, amongst other marine delicacies, limpets. They were plucked, living, straight from the public rocks of the cove below. Sara had never eaten limpets. They were horrible, warned Ivor, tough and leathery like whelks, worse than whelks, but she had wanted to order them, for fun: they looked so like little volcanoes, she pointed out, little ridged volcanoes, they echoed the strange conical shapes of the landscape, she had to try them. She’d never seen them on a menu before, she’d never have another chance.

      Ivor was to wish that he hadn’t remembered that she had said that.

      Sara was a confident quick-witted young woman, in the prime of life, full of vitality, with a handsomely curved strong fleshly nose and a wide clear brown brow and well-defined, well-arched eyebrows and long lashes and richly springing black hair tied back with a yellow scarf. She wore a décolleté heart-scooped white T-shirt.

      She had been much amused by the louchely infantile hand-painted ceramic gender signs