The Dark Flood Rises. Margaret Drabble

in their thirties and forties and fifties tuck into fried eggs and bacon and beans and hash browns and mushrooms and fried tomatoes and fried bread, all wielding their cutlery with an air of gusto. Condiments flow, the red and the brown and the mustard-coloured, and loud piped music resounds. Both Claude and Hamish would have hated the piped music, but Fran doesn’t mind it at all.

      Her egg, when it arrives, is perfection. The yolk is soft, the white is firm. How is it, how is your egg, my angel, tenderly asks the kindly not-so-young woman.

      Perfect, says Fran, with emphasis. Perfect, she repeats.

      Yes, perfection. She reads the headlines and the lead story, moves to the continuation of the story on page two. She feels a powerful surge of happiness, a sense that all is well with the world, that she is in the right place at the right time, for this moment in time. She has had a good night, comfortable, pain-free, in a big white wide premier bed. And now she is at one with these munching people, she enjoys their enjoyment, as she spoons her chaste and perfect egg. And she is at one, through her almost-reliable friend of a newspaper, with the miscellaneous events of the turning world.

      The conference is not quite as jolly as the Premier Inn, but it has its highlights. The paper on the long-continuing fallout from the Thatcher ‘Right to Buy’ in the 1980s and the affordability of social housing and the chequered history of Housing Choice and the motivation of registered social landlords is routine, and routinely depressing, but the paper on the new technologies is fun, and is meant to be fun. It is light relief, the comic slot. It ignores finance, decay, demolition and death, and goes for the future. The lecturer is young and sparky and fast-talking and mid-Atlantic of accent, although his CV claimed he’d been born in Walsall. He’d studied in the States and in South Korea, and he is an enthusiast for the robot. Robots would save the elderly from the woes of the ageing flesh. He runs through some of the more familiar low-tech gadgets with which the elderly can already defend themselves from starving amid plenty or perishing on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor. Screw tops and tins and jam jars, bath taps and door knobs, socks lost under the bed, telephones and remote controls could all be attacked by humble devices available to all. But, Ken says, the Brave New World offers electronic and digital wonders that could achieve much, much more.

      On Ken Walker’s screen, darling little green articulated, not-quite-anthropoid monkey climbers with agile prehensile sensitive fingers mount walls and retrieve objects from high shelves, or bustle beneath chairs, beds and sofas to recover possessions dropped or mislaid (mobile phones, medication, peppermints, e-readers? Cigarettes, death lozenges of Nembutal from Brazil, marked for Veterinary Use only? Half bottles of whisky?). The delegates are shown an old-fashioned pack of playing cards being eased and pincered out from beneath a bookcase, a scenario that gives out a perplexing cultural message: surely nobody plays with a canvas deck these days? A discreet little scarlet ground-level scooting saucer, a flying saucer of the floor, launches itself from a dock under a comfy automated reclining armchair and bustles around the skirting boards and fitted carpet, ingesting crumbs and fluff. A more sophisticated bright lime-green highly laminated robot cleaner with a smiley face is seen vacuuming dust from every orifice of a superbly high-tech upmarket elderly person’s apartment, as the elderly person lies serenely in bed doing a jigsaw of Windsor Castle on a tray. Is there an allusion here to the extraordinary longevity of the royal family? And we do know that our poor Queen likes doing jigsaws.

      There is a robot to feed your cat or groom your dog. We are all aware, says young Ken, that having a pet adds years to your life. They are studying the neuroscience on this even as I speak, says keen Ken.

      Fran, at this point in the presentation, has a very clear picture of her ex, Claude Stubbs, settled plumply on his day bed, with his handsome tabby cat Cyrus upon his knee. Cyrus is good for Claude, but Fran has taken on some responsibility for both man and cat, and they are a worry to her. Fran likes Cyrus, indeed she often says to Claude that she prefers Cyrus to Claude, and she would have liked to have a loyal cat of her own, but on balance she prefers driving restlessly around England, from conference to conference, from housing estate to housing estate, from sheltered home to sheltered home, from gadget to gadget, from Premier Inn to Premier Inn, from soft-boiled egg to soft-boiled egg. She is not ready to settle yet, with a cat upon her knee.

      She’s not very good at concentrating on one subject at a time. She never has been. Her mind wanders, in an endless stream of consciousness. Perhaps everybody’s does, but she suspects not. Some people have an ability to concentrate, to focus. She lacks this. Her mind wanders now, back to Claude, back to her early married life, and onwards to a never-ending succession of plated meals.

      Her mind never or hardly ever wanders now to sex, as it once did, though the fact that she is able to make this inner observation means that she has not forgotten about sex altogether. The menstrual dream had been a reminder, a link to the past of sex and the tampon.

      She has read in newspapers, indeed in an article in her favoured upmarket newspaper, that ‘surveys’ show that some men, many men, think about sex every three or four minutes of their waking lives, whatever they may be doing. At work, at play, in transit, writing reports, giving public lectures, studying in libraries, waiting at tables, unblocking drains, mowing lawns, shouting in the stock exchange, fitting new tyres to old cars, changing in the locker room, climbing mountains, at the checkout in the supermarket, they think about sex. Not about love, or a loved one, but about sex, sex in the abstract, sex as an act, sex as sensation.

      She doesn’t think that even at her most libidinous she had thought about sex per se that often. Women are different from men, although we must not say so.

      She now finds herself thinking far too often about food. She blames Claude for this, perhaps unjustly.

      Fran frequently finds herself newly and repeatedly astonished to have become, so late in the day, Claude’s minder and carer. She can hardly believe that she has slipped into this stereotypical womanly role. She had been married to Claude so briefly and for most of their marriage so acrimoniously, and they had both lived so many other variant lives since their four embattled procreative years together. And yet she finds herself imprinted, enslaved, imprisoned, and in more ways than one. The habits of her body and mind had been marked forever by those four short early years.

      No, she says to herself sharply, as she doodles snowdrops and daffodils in the border of Ken’s robot notes, imprisoned she is not, no, far from it, but this restless wandering, this inexplicable wandering she surely owes something of that to those four years. Imprinted yes, imprisoned no.

      Claude has no rights in her at all, no claim on her at all.

      It’s the cooking and catering that have done her in. Claude, who is indeed physically somewhat imprisoned, thinks about food most of the time, although he wouldn’t admit it openly. And as a consequence Fran thinks about it too. She has been infected by his greedy dependence. She is thinking about food even now, even while watching Ken’s robots and listening to statistics about mobility problems in the over-nineties. She is infuriated by the way food, shopping for food, and cooking the stuff she’s bought have re-infiltrated and taken over her consciousness. It’s not that she doesn’t enjoy eating, she’d quite enjoyed her scampi and had been in love with her soft-boiled egg, it’s just that she doesn’t want food to be on her mind so much. How has this happened to her? Is it guilt, greed, reparation, preparation for her own death, an attempt to salvage the past?

      Prepare your ship of death for you will need it. Prepare it, O prepare it. Stock it up with viands and with wines.

      Chicken soup, if she has time, and a smoked salmon sandwich for Teresa.

      Here in the Black Country they call good food ‘bostin’ fittle’. Fittle means vittles. Good vittles, bostin’ fittle. They have their own language here. It hasn’t been knocked out of them yet.

      The orange