The Dark Flood Rises. Margaret Drabble

fellow, sandy-haired and lashed, lightly freckled, strikingly pale-skinned, pleasantly featured in a snub-nosed boyish way, in his mid forties she supposes, a little younger than her son Christopher. Hazel eyes, not Viking blue. He had wanted to be an architect but the qualifications took too long, he’d needed to start earning, and he had settled for planning and housing. His views on aesthetics (not often requested) are surprising. He has a nostalgic private weakness for Modernism, but recognises that most old people in England detest Modernism (not that they get asked much about their preferences) and prefer a post-modern pseudo-cottage, bungalowesque, mini-Tesco mix. You can get all those features into a housing estate quite easily, as he knows from the avenues and crescents of Hagwood.

      His expertise lies in adaptation. He really knows, or thinks he knows, how features of a dwelling space ought to be adapted to the ageing and disabled, to the increasingly ageing and increasingly disabled. He relies on Fran, who is well ahead of him on the road of ageing (though as yet far from disabled) to advise him and offer him her insights. He had been fascinated by her account of the woman who had died because she hadn’t been able to open the bathroom door. There was nothing much wrong with her, apart from her loss of grip. She’d been unable to turn the doorknob, couldn’t get out to the phone to dial 999 after a very minor stroke, and had passed away on her cold bathroom floor.

      If she’d had a lever-type doorknob instead of an old-fashioned screw doorknob, she’d have been alive today. If she hadn’t shut the door after herself (and what on earth was the point in doing that, as she lived alone?), she’d have been alive today.

      Killed by a doorknob.

      For the lack of a nail the battle was lost.

      You have to be careful, when you’re old.

      And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

      Fran declines a beer. I’ll see you down here at seven, she says. And up she goes to her room, to kick off her boots and lie on her bed and gaze at the rich daily life of the Black Country and the West Midlands. It’s on the chilly side in her bedroom, there must be a thermostat somewhere, but she can’t find it. Never mind, you can’t die of hypothermia in a Premier Inn.

      She likes her bedroom. She likes the whiteness of the pillows, and the rich loud purple of the Inn’s informative boasts about its reliable facilities and its notable breakfasts. It’s very purple, the Premier Inn branding.

      There are several items of soothingly mild interest on the regional news – a promotional chat by some staunchly upbeat florist’s about a Valentine’s Day event, an interview with a volunteer at a food bank, a report of a non-fatal knifing at a bus stop in Bilston, and, most unexpectedly, an item about a small earthquake which had hit Dudley and its neighbourhood at dawn that day. It had caused little consternation and most people had not even noticed it, although one or two said their breakfast crockery had rattled or a standard lamp had fallen over. Cats and dogs and budgerigars hadn’t liked it, and had wisely seen it coming, or so their owners said. This was routine stuff, but Fran’s attention is caught by a lively account by an unlikely young woman who claims that she had been rocked on her moored narrow boat by a not-so-small and inexplicable wave. ‘It wasn’t a tsunami,’ says this spirited red-cheeked person, posing picturesquely and entirely unselfconsciously in a purple woolly hat, a padded red jacket and cowboy boots on the wharf just along the canal from the Open Air Museum, ‘but it was definitely a wave, and I thought it was coming out of the limestone caverns, I thought the quarry sides had given way, or the mining tunnels had collapsed, or maybe a great river beast was making its way out of there, been there for millennia waiting just for me!’

      Fran likes this person very much, she admires her relish and her imagination and her Wolverhampton accent, and she admires the interviewer and the cameraman for realising how eccentrically photogenic she is. ‘To tell you the truth,’ says this robust young person, ‘I’m always hoping something really really terrible is about to happen, like the end of the world, you know what I mean? And that I’ll be right there? You know what I mean?’ And she smiles, gaily, and then pronounces, ‘But it was only a very small earthquake, they say it was very low on the Richter scale, so it’s not the end of Dudley after all! I’m not saying I wanted a bigger one, but it would have been interesting. You know what I mean?’

      Fran does know exactly what she means. She too has often thought it would be fun to be in at the end, and no blame attached. One wouldn’t want to be responsible for the end, but one might like to be there and know it was all over, the whole bang stupid pointless unnecessarily painful experiment. An asteroid could do it, or an earthquake, or any other impartial inhuman violent act of the earth or the universe. She can’t understand the human race’s desire to perpetuate itself, to go on living at all costs. She has never been able to understand it. Her incomprehension isn’t just a sour-grapes side effect of ageing. She is pleased to see that this healthy and happy young person shares some of her metaphysical defiance. It is an exoneration.

      One wouldn’t mind dying of a cataclysm, but one doesn’t want to die young by mistake, or possibly by human error, as her son’s latest partner had recently done. Untimely death is intermittently on Fran’s mind, alongside housing for the refusing-to-die elderly and her more-or-less-bedridden ex-husband’s dinners. Christopher’s glamorous new love Sara had died aged thirty-eight of a rare medical event and Christopher believes that the doctors had done her in. Fran is not to know if this is true or not, as she has never heard of the rare condition that had killed Sara, but she feels that Christopher’s current mindset of blame is doing him no good. Maybe he needs it to get by. It is not much comfort to reflect that, like Antigone, Sara has escaped getting old by dying young, and she has not offered this palliative reflection to Christopher. It does not seem appropriate. She had not disliked Sara, but could not disguise from herself the knowledge that it is Christopher she grieves for, not Sara.

      So it is, with degrees of kinship and of mourning. If her son Christopher, bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, had died, that would have been another matter.

      She had not been confident that Christopher and Sara had a long future together, but had not expected it to be quite so brief. Their mutual past had also been brief. They hadn’t been together for long.

      Fran doesn’t meddle with her children’s lives, but she’d liked what she’d seen of Sara. Though she suspects that in Christopher’s life Sara had embodied something of what we now call a mid-life crisis. Mid-life crises, in Fran’s ageing view, are a luxury compared with what she has seen of end-of-life crises. But Sara hadn’t even had time for a mid-life crisis.

      Sara had been taken ill very suddenly in a very large bed in a large luxury hotel on the Costa Teguise on the island of Lanzarote. Christopher had been in bed with her and had witnessed the crisis and been landed with the consequences. She had been rushed to hospital in Arrecife, then flown back to a private hospital in South Kensington, where she had died twenty-four hours later, having been given, according to Christopher, the wrong medication. If she had stayed in Lanzarote, where he was told the medical services were first class, he believed she would not have died. The wrong decision had been made in repatriating her. He had not trusted the good advice offered by the islanders.

      Sara and Christopher had not been on holiday in the Canaries, as most visitors to those tourist islands are. They had been working, but who would believe that? Well, all those who knew the serious-minded and ambitious Sara would have known it, but it was true that Christopher had been there on a semi-freebie, as a freeloading partner, while Sara was engaged with her team in research for a documentary film about illegal immigration from North Africa. And, more or less fortuitously and it had at the time seemed fortunately, she had hoped to record an interview about the political goals of a woman from the Western Sahara who happened to be on hunger strike on the polished tiles of the departure lounge of Arrecife airport when they arrived. She was a surprising sight, holding court in the departure lounge, and was a gift to a film-maker. Or so Christopher had told his mother.

      Christopher had been keeping Sara company, being himself temporarily unemployed, and his presence in that bed