The Dark Flood Rises. Margaret Drabble

cheerfully and eating highly coloured meals, most of them from the hot red end of the spectrum. The flagship paperwork of the Inn is purple, but its food, at least on this month’s menu, is red. Red-orange battered fish, scarlet spaghetti, tomato-red pizza, prawns and peppers and paprika, chilli and chorizo and cajun. Pale Paul, after some joshing with waitress Leila, has ordered a brave black bottle of dark red Merlot, which Leila pours with a generous flourish into vast globular glasses for the four of them assembled at the table. They will be needing another bottle in no time. Fran settles into her chair and inspects the menu with anticipation. She’ll go with the flow. She orders scampi and chips and a propitiatory side salad, which, when it arrives, features jolly surgical sections of not-quite-deseeded red pepper.

      Sipping her Merlot, Fran feels a transfusion as of the redness of young blood begin to course through her hardening veins and arteries, pumping life and youth back into her, flushing her cheeks and warming her stiff fingers and her cold, gnarled and bunioned feet. A transfusion of ketchup and wine, of colour and vigour. It is good to be with the younger people, and in a dining area full of mid-life folk tucking unashamedly into large plates of fodder. Paul himself, although full of a restless energy and powered by a sharp brain, is in person rather a pallid, bloodless, colourless man, a celery and endive man, but Graham and Julia give out a warmer physical glow. Graham, a heavyweight fifty-something avant-garde architect from Sheffield, is almost gross, in a handsome kind of way – his hair is swept back in dark untidy old-fashioned waves, his thick neck bulges within his open-necked red shirt (he is more than a bit of a leftie, an heir to the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire) and a purple spotted handkerchief pokes its familiar and suggestive way out of his jacket pocket. Barbecued ribs had been his main order. Forty-year-old Julia is red of lip, with cheeks heightened by blusher as well as by wine: her thick glossy bell of dark hair has a henna sheen to it and her dimples are engaging. She is in the process of trying to wipe some startlingly orange curry sauce from her shiny white silk blouse, where it has spattered her bulky but shapely left breast. This mishap has hardly interrupted her animated gesticulatory discourse on the estate she’d visited the week before, an ageing high rise which boasted (as do so many) the highest proportion of trapped and isolated old folk in Europe – the usual story, non-functioning lifts, unlit stairwells, disabilities, gangrene, graffiti: children, grandchildren and great grandchildren all in jail: gangs in the shopping precinct, carers who didn’t care and didn’t show or wouldn’t stay more than five minutes.

      Asking for demolition, asking for a blow-down, the Heights, some of the old folk had said, but others had been loyal to them, didn’t want to budge, were fond of the view over the new shopping centre and the graveyard of the foundry where their men had worked. In the good old days when men had work. Most of those left stranded up there are women, the men died off early.

      Women live too long, says Fran, spearing a scampi tail and dabbing it into the tartare sauce. We need a plan to get rid of us. A magic lozenge.

      Fran, somewhat perversely, lives in a high rise herself these days. She knows about high rise.

      We all live too long, says Paul politely, diplomatically, nibbling at his buffalo wings.

      A magic lozenge, a suicide booth, a one-way ticket to Switzerland, agrees Julia lightly, to whom old age and death are as yet unimaginable, although she knows so much theory about geriatric care.

      But care is for other people, it would never be for her.

      What do you think they put in it to make it this colour, Julia asks, staring in admiration at the napkin-resistant splatter on her chest. Agent Orange, Sunset Yellow, Allura Red, Carmoisine?

      Are those real words, asks Fran, and Julia says yes, they are, they are the names of food colourings, apart from Agent Orange, of course, and had any of them ever sampled the Bilston Chip? There’s a fish and chip shop in Bilston with the most brightly coloured orange chips you’ve ever seen. Lurid. Technicolor. Delicious. Best fish and chips in the Black Country. We ought to give them a whirl.

      Do you think preservatives make you live longer, or do they kill you off, asks Fran. She has often wondered about this. The environmentally correct answer is that they are really really bad for you, but maybe, in their own way, they are contributing to our disastrous longevity. E-agent manufacturers must be doing research on this, but they haven’t yet dared to start boasting about their findings.

      She tries to avoid cooking with preservatives, and takes care to provide wholesome meals for Claude.

      Fran, well turned seventy, has to her own surprise become a carer of sorts and a provider of sorts for her husband Claude, whom she had divorced in a fit of self-righteous rage nearly half a century ago. She spends a lot of time running across London to his flat with plated meals. Now, as she tucks into her scampi and chips, he will be enjoying a deliciously pure portion of fish pie on a bed of wilted organic spinach, topped with parsley sauce. He’ll probably be listening to Maria Callas, because that’s what he does.

      That night, in the comfortable Premier Inn bed that rashly guarantees a sound night’s sleep to all sojourners, Fran has a curious and interesting dream about Tampax. It is decades since she’s had to remember to supply herself with tampons, and these days she never gives them a conscious thought, but in her dream she was struggling to arrest with an inadequate bung a constant thin pale and surprisingly watery flow of menstrual blood: the blood flowed through the tampon and through her fingers and onto her bare legs. This sensation, this dream experience, was strangely undistressing in its mood and flavour and texture, indeed pleasant rather than unpleasant, and when she wakes and tries to question it, she wonders whether it has sprung from the redness of the meal of the night before, or from her motorway thoughts about Macbeth, or from some new and about-to-be-apprehended aspect of time and the ageing experience.

      For ageing is, says Fran to herself gamely as she presses the lift button to go down for her breakfast, a fascinating journey into the unknown. Or that’s one rather good way of looking at it. The thin flow was the blood of life, not of death, reminding her that she is still the same woman, she who had once been the bleeding girl.

      Over breakfast, her good mood continues, indeed intensifies. She has had to dodge the rain and pop out over the road to buy her newspaper, as the hotel doesn’t seem to cater for that kind of extra, but she likes the Asian mini-store and the bearded young chap behind the counter and his fine display of fizzy drinks and spicy snacks and sweeties. His friendly greeting is in itself a little adventure. And when she gets back and settles at her table by the window, she finds herself to be almost entirely happy. Fresh newsprint, good coffee, assorted texts, some messages on her BlackBerry, what more could the modern world offer? She has selfishly forgotten, for the moment, Christopher’s distress. As we age, yes it is true, it is true, we become more and more selfish. We live for our appetites. Or that’s one way of looking at ageing. Old people are very selfish, very greedy.

      One of the personal messages is from her old and onetime friend Teresa, who has re-entered her life after decades of separation and forgetfulness, and with whom she is enjoying a curious last fling of intimacy. Teresa is dying, but she is dying with such style and commitment that Fran is deeply impressed and encouraged by this last passage. The message is to confirm a meeting in a week’s time. Fran looks forward to it, and replies to say so. Yes, she is on for lunch as agreed, and will bring sandwiches.

      Teresa is uplifting. She isn’t greedy, like Claude, she is too ill to be greedy, but she does still enjoy a smoked salmon sandwich, and, if Fran gets round to it, she would take well to a little home-made chicken soup.

      There is something robust and cheering about the sight of the Premier Inn Full English Breakfast and those who are devouring it. It is even better than the bright red dinner. Fran doesn’t go for the Full English herself, but requests a soft-boiled egg with toast. She would quite like to go over to the side table to make her own toast, but the not-so-young young woman labelled Cynthia, Cynthia with her chalk-white face and her raven-black hair, is so helpful and eager to please that Fran surrenders and allows