The Dark Flood Rises. Margaret Drabble

a cherubic little boy standing and pissing into a chamber pot decorated with dolphins, the handsome back and bare bum of a woman with her skirts hoisted over a floral bucket. She’d photographed the signs, discreetly, on her mobile.

      Christopher, after a bottle of wine, had talked a little (but not too much) about his own career. He had made a name for himself as a presenter and co-producer of an arts programme, but had fallen out with his company and his employers and was looking for another niche. He said he was in the process of setting up his own production company. Ivor claimed to have seen him on screen, but Christopher thought Ivor was being polite.

      Ivor wasn’t sure whether he was being polite or not. Christopher did look and sound familiar, with his boldly balding bronzed head, his heavily framed tinted glasses (which he kept on throughout the darkened meal), his expensively coarse-fibred red-and-yellow striped-and-blocked shirt, his confident yes-it’s-me manner and his cultivated East London (or possibly Essex?) proletarian accent. He looked like somebody one might well recognise. But so did so many people.

      Bennett took to Christopher, regardless of whether Christopher would be of any use to them or not. He found him amusing. He egged him on to talk about television rivalries and programmes about Francis Bacon and David Hockney and William Tillyer and Joe Tilson (it seemed Christopher as a programmer and presenter had favoured the visual arts), and volunteered, though without any attempt to expand vaingloriously on the detail, that he had known some of these people. ‘Your shirt’s a bit Joe Tilson’, he interjected at one point, a remark which delighted Christopher. Christopher in turn was more than willing to cede to Sir Bennett’s authority and seniority, to demonstrate that he knew his work and had even read some of it. He made gracious enquiring allusions to Goya and Lorca and Unamuno and Picasso and Tàpies, while confessing a little disingenuously that Spain was not his thing.

      Ivor was pleased by these interchanges. It always pleased him when Bennett received fitting and ego-calming recognition. And he was relieved that Bennett seemed to be responding ‘appropriately’ (that odd word again, so often these days in his thoughts) to Christopher’s anecdotes.

      Old age veers towards the inappropriate.

      Bennett, on form as he was that night, was very amusing. He was a good mimic (his Hockney was excellent, though Hockney was a soft target) and he made them all laugh.

      And to Sara, Bennett also responded well. He liked her style, Ivor could see. He was on the ball and gallant and eager to be helpful. He suggested locations, he spoke (but not too much) about his little project for an islands history. He recommended the monumental Museo del Emigrante, which told the other side of the emigration-immigration story, and he found she already knew about that, though she hadn’t yet had time to go there. She should try to get to Tenerife and La Laguna, she should see the mysterious pyramids praised by Thor Heyerdahl, and she must certainly go across to Fuerteventura – less than half an hour on the ferry, amazing to think that the indigenous peoples over so many centuries had never built a boat. She ought to see the cemetery at Gran Tarajal on Fuerteventura, described by its mayor as the graveyard of Africa. Not on the tourist route, obviously, but well worth a visit from your point of view, said Bennett.

      A memorable location, and on television its silent dead would speak.

      Ivor was sometimes surprised by what Bennett remembered. He was sure he would have forgotten their visit to the dull and quiet little town of Gran Tarajal, with its walled cemetery on the hillside and the plain marble plaques recording the nameless dead. It was some years ago now, and Bennett still remembers.

      DEP Immigrante 12.12.2001

      DEP Immigrante 11.7.2002

      DEP Immigrante 6.7.2002

      Ivor wonders how many more deaths will by now have been recorded and added to the roll call that they saw.

      Descanse en Paz.

      Rest in Peace

      Ivor found that phrase deeply touching. Sometimes he longed to rest in peace, and reflected, not without bitterness, that he wouldn’t have merited much more than these nameless ones by way of an inscription of his exploits.

      He saw all the nameless dead as handsome young Senegalese and Mauritanians.

      Who, he wondered, would deck Ivor’s monument with little vases of weatherproof, unnatural artificial dark orange and purple roses? Who would push Uncle Ivor’s wheelchair when the time came? Who would write his obituary?

      Christopher and Ivor and Bennett had discovered, as they gossiped in Las Caletas, that they had an acquaintance in common, a friend less bland and more surprising than the man in the Foreign Office who had originally suggested Bennett as a contact. The name of Simon Aguilera had once been notorious and was still newsworthy, although he had long ago taken refuge in peaceful unadventurous Fuerteventura, in flight from the publicity and hostility that had pursued him ever since the scandal that had undone him, and in search, like Bennett, of a calm dry climate.

      In search of redemption and eternal peace.

      Son of a once-admired Spanish Republican émigré intellectual, the precocious and many-gifted Aguilera had made his name very young in the avant-garde theatre in Paris in the 1960s, an enfant terrible, and had seemed set for every kind of success. But he had been undermined by the creeping revisionism that had slowly destroyed his father’s reputation (what exactly had happened, and to whom, and at whose prompting, in 1936 in Alicante?) and then had undone himself utterly by killing his wife. It had been an international cause célèbre. He’d got off lightly because the French are soft on crimes passionnels, or so the British press had been pleased to comment.

      But he had killed her, for all that. With an axe.

      Knowing a murderer was a bond, more of a bond than being acquainted with a middle-ranking diplomat from a minor public school.

      Christopher had met Simon Aguilera in London at a show of Contemporary Italian Art at Christie’s, where they had fallen into conversation before a de Chirico that Simon was intending to buy. Simon had recognised Christopher from his TV show (always flattering) and they had adjourned to a nearby fish restaurant for one of those lunches that prolong themselves, over the second bottle, into the afternoon. They had told each other much, and forgotten most of what they had told. Only the flavour of the conversation remained, along with the flavour of the oysters and the turbot poached in Pernod. This had been before the days of Sara, and they had not kept closely in touch since then, although they had exchanged an occasional message about auction prices and false attributions in sales rooms.

      Christopher had not mentioned him to Sara before this visit. He had felt uneasy about the murdered wife.

      But the three of them had spoken well of Simon Aguilera and his exploits, at Las Caletas, over the bite-resistant rubbery garlic-reinforced limpets. (‘Quite like snails,’ Sara had commented, ‘but not as nice.’) Sara had listened with interest, without an air of judgment. Simon had recently adopted a Senegalese immigrant, Sara should go and speak to him, he’s very photogenic, said Bennett with his louche old-world chuckle.

      But Sara hadn’t had time to go across the narrow strait to Fuerteventura. She’d intended to go there, she’d had a contact in the Red Cross at Puerto del Rosario, who was eager to speak to her about the protection of immigrant minors. She’d done her research. It’s a pity it will all have been wasted.

      Ivor Walters sits on the balcony in the evening sun, waiting for Christopher, who is flying back from London to Arrecife even now. He will be here in an hour or so. The chartered planes are in a perpetual peaceful descending and ascending convoy, bringing hither and taking hence. In one of these Christopher would soon be listening to the landing instructions. In five minutes, Ivor will rejoin his car and drive to the airport to meet him, to collect him and take him back to La Suerte and Bennett and an evening meal.

      Distances are small and manageable on the island. It’s easy to time journeys to the airport.

      When