The Dark Flood Rises. Margaret Drabble

its way. It would have been worse for her had she been alone. But on paper his role could not look heroic.

      Fran knows that Christopher is shortly to return to the Canaries, to find out what has happened to the Western Saharan contingent, to tie up loose ends, to sort out questions of medical insurance, to see some of the ex-pats who, he said, had gone out of their way to help in the crisis. She gathers that there was one elderly couple who, in the emergency, had been more than kind. Theirs was the advice he should have followed and did not.

      Fran had not at first been able to follow the politics of Christopher’s confusing account of the Sahrawi woman’s airport protest, which she was holding against the allegedly brutal Moroccan domination of a largely unrecognised North African state which called itself the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. Fran had never heard of this state, and finds it hard to retain its name, but it does indeed exist. She has looked it up. It is a cause of little interest to the British or, initially, to Fran, but after Sara’s death, out of respect to Sara and Christopher, Fran has tried to get to grips with its unrecognised existence. It is a story of nationalism and political activism, and the heroine of it is a Sahrawi woman called Ghalia Namarome who is fighting for the independence of her homeland. Christopher’s film-maker partner Sara, who specialised in human rights documentaries for an independent company called Falling Water, had been taken by the manner in which Namarome had materialised at the airport before her very eyes.

      Fran’s son Christopher, when he is in work, is, more frivolously, a television arts presenter, known for his colourful clothing and his idiosyncratic manner, which had, of late, gone a bit too far.

      How Namarome had landed up in Lanzarote airport was a convoluted tale, involving the confiscation of her passport and her deportation from the airport of her home town of Laayoune. On arriving at Laayoune on her return from the US, where she had been presented with some kind of peace prize, she had refused to tick the citizenship box that said ‘Morocco’. She identified herself as Sahrawi and Western Saharan and would not acknowledge the Moroccan label. So she sat there in limbo, in the Spanish Canary Islands, in a modern holiday airport in no man’s land, this stylish protesting woman in her large dark glasses, with her shimmering headscarves and robes of turquoise and pink and gold, amidst the red-faced sunburnt British and German and Scandinavian tourists in khaki shorts and cotton dresses, queuing as they waited to check in for their flights home. She sat there, on a mosaic of patterned oriental carpets, of less than magic carpets, refusing to budge and accepting no sustenance but sweetened water.

      Namarome was the same age as Sara. Sara, although British-born, was of émigré Egyptian descent and spoke Arabic. Sara had been struck by the would-be martyr and her passive resistance. They had, Christopher told his mother, conversed, and Sara had managed to film a brief interview. They had spoken of the Oasis of Memory, the Wall of Shame. Apparently, Fran had learnt from Christopher, there is a great dividing wall of sand and berm and brick built across North Africa, rather like the barrier wall that separates Israel from the West Bank but much much longer. Few in the West know or care about it.

      It is ironic that Sara, who had seemed to be in such good health, was now dead of a rare tumour of the nervous system, whereas Namarome was courting a public death by hunger strike. No, ‘ironic’ is too light a word for the contrast.

      Fran is not at all sure how Christopher’s relationship with Sara had been faring before this abrupt end. He’d been with her, on and off, and a little tempestuously, for a couple of years: his first lengthy and publicly admitted affair since he and his long-term wife Ella had split up. But something in his most recent communications, both before and now after her death, had suggested they were already drifting apart.

      Christopher doesn’t talk to Fran all that much about his emotional life, but he drops hints, makes black jokes. She’d sensed he wasn’t very happy before Sara’s death, but he must surely be even more unhappy now.

      The melodrama of the present situation is unpleasing, distressing. Sudden death and a hunger strike. Fran is more at home with the real low-key daily world of sheltered housing, and yet she cannot deny that she had also been morbidly attracted by the aspect of public martyrdom attached to the Western Sahara case. Was Namarome preparing, had she perhaps already uttered her last words to the press? Would they rival those of Walter Raleigh, of Danton?

      She’s worried about Christopher, she’s upset about Christopher, but she’s not sure how deep her sorrow goes. She keeps forgetting about it. She can’t tell whether that’s good or bad, natural or unnatural.

      Some believe that our emotions thin out as we grow old, that we are pared back to the thin dry horn, the cuttlebone of selfishness. That is one well-recognised theory of ageing. Fran often wonders if this will happen to her, if it is already happening without her marking it. It seems to have happened to Christopher’s father Claude, Claude, her first husband, but that for him is excusable, in his present slowly deteriorating physical condition. Claude has retreated into comfort and laziness and selfishness. Into the search for comfort, which he cannot always find, though he does better than most of his age. He’s lucky not to be in pain. He knows he’s lucky.

      Claude does not seem to have fully grasped what has happened to Christopher, and he never really took in the colourful but distanced existence of Sara.

      Cuttlebone isn’t a good metaphor for Claude as he is now quite plump, but that’s partly the steroids.

      Occasionally Fran exercises herself by trying to recall the passionate and ridiculous emotions of her youth and her middle age, the expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Or in a waste of embarrassment, or of envy, or of anxiety, or of wounded vanity. The attempt to cheat in the sack race, the red bloodstain on the back of the skirt, the fart on the podium, the misunderstanding about the ten-pound note, the arriving too early at the airport, the mistake over the visa, the table where there was no place name for her, the overheard remark about the inappropriate cardigan, the unforgivable forgetting of a significant name. She doesn’t worry about some of the things she used to worry about (she doesn’t need to worry about bloodstains on the skirt, though she worries now about the soup stains on her cardigan, the egg yolk on the dressing-gown lapel), but she certainly hasn’t achieved anything resembling peace of mind. New torments beset her. Her relentless broodings on ageing, death and the last things are not at all peaceful. Lines of Macbeth, from Macbeth, repeat themselves to her monotonously, even though they are not particularly applicable to her lowly estate:

      And that which should accompany old age,

      As honour, love, obedience, troops of friends,

      I must not look to have.

      I must not look to have.

      What comfort would they be to her: honour, love, obedience and troops of friends: as night fell?

      La notte e vicina per me.

      Those were the words that an elderly Italian woman, an old crone who swept the stairs, had uttered to Fran when she was working as an au pair girl in Florence, a hundred years ago.

      La notte e vicina per me.

      But old age has its comforts, its recognitions.

      Fran’s Freedom Pass is a comfort, but they are threatening to take that away from her. She values it disproportionately. It is a validation of work, of worth, of survival, of taxes gladly paid over a lifetime. It is her Golden Bough, her passport from the world of work to the uselessness of old age.

      Venerable old age. Valued old age.

      My God, the bullshit and the claptrap.

      Honour, love, obedience, troops of friends.

      I must not look to have.

      La notte e vicina per me.

      The egg yolk on the dressing-gown lapel.

      The dining area of the Premier Inn is geared to dispel elderly apprehensions, not to reinforce them. It is noisy and colourful and full of large busy middle-era middle