The Dark Flood Rises. Margaret Drabble

pure and perfect egg.

      She wonders briefly about Namarome’s hunger strike, and what is happening to her now. Had Namarome thought with longing about food, as she sat there defiantly on the polished tiles of Lanzarote airport, watching the queues of holiday-makers from northern Europe, many of them very large, some of them obese, with their plastic bags full of crisps and snacks and duty-free? Had visions of deliciously spiced North African meals, of couscous and lamb, of chermoula and harissa, of coriander and cumin and pickled lemon, floated deliriously past her as she sat there starving, or had her mind been on higher things?

      Fran sometimes thinks of trying some Moroccan cookery, but she’s not sure if Claude would like it.

      She thinks Namarome has by now been deported to the Spanish mainland. Christopher had tried to explain that Namarome had no quarrel with Spain. Her quarrel and her country’s quarrel were with Morocco, not Spain or the Canary Islands.

      Fran’s thoughts flit very quickly and briefly to the last meals of those on Death Row, a subject too recent and perhaps too indecent to be catalogued by Brewer, though she supposes it may feature in the Guinness Book of Records. As far as she can recall, cheeseburgers and pizzas feature high on the list. You really wouldn’t want your last meal on earth to be a cheeseburger, surely?

      Last time Fran had visited Claude, she’d left him six plated cling-filmed meals in the freezer, to be eaten in the correct order, marked with big red numbers on white freezer labels. 1 Chicken Tarragon, 2 Potato Anchovy Bake, 3 Kedgeree, 4 Lamb Casserole, 5 She Forgets, 6 Chick Peas with Bacon. She’s not always so organised. Claude can’t quite rely on her good will and her bounty, and it’s better that way.

      Call no man happy until he is dead. Claude can’t be very happy these days, cooped up as he is, although she has at times suspected that something in him gets a bit of a kick from being able to bully his ex-wife. But that had been an ignoble thought, and when she had aired it to her friend Josephine, one of the few survivors to have known her in the early days, Josephine had ticked her off, telling her that, on the contrary, she, Fran, was getting a kick out of being able to bully the old boy in bed, from playing Lady Bountiful to a chap who could hardly move for steroids and other medications. And maybe this was true.

      Josephine’s role as long-standing friend has involved some putting-down of Fran, and Fran, most of the time, has for many years appreciated and accepted this.

      Teresa is both older and newer in Fran’s life. But Josephine has been more consistent.

      Josephine had known Fran and Claude when Claude had been a junior house doctor and had been working the strange long late hours that had been so trying to Fran’s sleep patterns, career plans, social life, sex life and digestion. Fran had resented the demands of his profession with what now seems to her to be disproportionate rage, as the hours had not been of his choosing and had laid the foundations for a distinguished and lucrative career, but she can still remember that she had been driven nearly out of her mind with solitude, claustrophobia and baby-minding, stuck in the flat in Romley with two babies and no friendly human being in reach except Josephine, who was similarly isolated with her own two little ones. Romley was the back of beyond and neither of them had regular access to a car. Fran loved her babies, as most (but not all) mothers do, but although they were hard work they didn’t fill the time, and the evenings were very long and very lonely. You weren’t allowed to say so, but they were. The intensity of those years had scarred her for life, and seeing more of Claude in these his latter days brings it back to her, the anger, the sense of splitting, the giddy loss of identity, the waves of terror and inadequacy, the clinging to little splinters of her past more youthful more hopeful self. It hadn’t been post-natal depression, no, nothing as medical or nameable as that, it had been a kind of existential anguish, a terror in the face of adult life. Now, in the very different panics of old age, she comforts herself occasionally by reminding herself that she was even unhappier, more intensely unhappy, when she was young.

      It’s cold comfort, but it is a comfort. She wouldn’t want to go back there, into those swirling storms, that cosmic turbulence. She must be further on than that, in the long journey of existence. She must have moved on from there. She has moved on from there.

      The Tibetan Book of the Dead. There’s a thought. A strong thought. The Way of the Bardo. The journey after death. She has a DVD somewhere, with commentary by Leonard Cohen, which she’s been meaning to watch for a long time, but she’s a bit apprehensive about it.

      She cannot help but see a lifespan as a journey, indeed as a pilgrimage. This isn’t fashionable these days, but it’s her way of seeing. A life has a destination, an ending, a last saying. She is perplexed and exercised by the way that now, in the twenty-first century, we seem to be inventing innumerable ways of postponing the sense of arrival, the sense of arriving at a proper ending. Her inspections of evolving models of residential care and care homes for the elderly have made her aware of the infinitely clever and complex and inhumane delays and devices we create to avoid and deny death, to avoid fulfilling our destiny and arriving at our destination. And the result, in so many cases, has been that we arrive there not in good spirits, as we say our last farewells and greet the afterlife, but senseless, incontinent, demented, medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity. Old fools, who didn’t have the courage to have that last whisky and set their bedding on fire with a last cigarette.

      Julia and Paul and Graham, in their middle age, are they happy, confident? They look it. She hopes they are. Paul is a bit of a worrier about small things – train times, punctuality, vouchers, that kind of thing – but he knows what he’s doing.

      Ken with his robots? Ken is a bit manic, she considers.

      Perhaps you need to be manic, to imagine his kind of future.

      Claude is walled up in the red-brick Kensington flat he’s lived in for some years, first with his second wife and now, ultimately, alone with Cyrus. Well heeled, well padded, well attended, well pensioned and retired from stress: bored, with the unalleviated boredom of inert old age, but comfortable. Or that’s how she sees him, she, forever on the move. A self-made man, a re-made man. If you met Claude these days, if you’d met him a few years ago in his prime, you’d never have guessed the lower-middle-class world that he’d come from. He’d been a striver, he’d made himself into a successful West Londoner, and as a Kensingtonian he would die. In red-brick Kensington, in a second-floor mansion block apartment with polished floors and brass fittings, where the lifts always worked. There would be hell to pay if they didn’t. With maintenance fees like those that Claude paid, of course the lifts worked. There was a concierge to see to that kind of thing.

      Fran’s only Romley friend Josephine, bizarrely but perhaps boldly, has recently moved to what Fran considers an extraordinarily quaint development in Cambridge, where, she says defiantly, she is very happy and very busy. It is a pretentious and expensive retirement home, built to give its residents the illusion that they are living in a Cambridge college. Its architecture is inauthentically but allusively Gothic, with pointed leaded windows and arches. The brick is a sober yellowish grey, the paintwork a crisp and holy white, and a church-like tower rises up over a recreation complex which houses exercise machines and an indoor swimming pool. The gardens are landscaped as though they were college courts or quads, with tidy lawns and weeping willows and little box hedges edging not very imaginatively planted parterres, and in the centre of the main quadrangle there is a stone-imitation plaster fountain with a boy holding a dolphin which spouts water. It looks as though it ought to be a copy of a Renaissance original, but it isn’t, Josephine says, it’s modern.

      Jo’s attitude to her new residence is an interesting mixture of haughty deprecation and proud affection. Fran believes and trusts that Jo may well be happy there, in a way that she herself could never be. She has visited Athene Grange a few times, from her hideout in Tarrant Towers in Cantor Hill, and been introduced to some of the more congenial neighbours, with whom Jo occasionally takes a morning coffee or an evening drink (though never, Jo says emphatically, a meal), and she has seen the games room where Jo not very often plays bridge.

      Josephine and her late husband had spent ten of their middle years in Middle America, in academe in Missouri, and Jo claims to have been impressed by the manner