The Dark Flood Rises. Margaret Drabble

hadn’t attempted to defend Romley. Romley had been hard on her, he recognises that, though he wouldn’t admit it to her then or now. The Romley hospital had been a hard apprenticeship. It’s been demolished. It escaped the recent round of NHS scandals by getting itself pulled down and relocated further out in almost rural Essex.

      On telly, there is some kind of auction going on, a downmarket daytime version of the Antiques Roadshow. It is dumbly and silently failing to compete with Classic FM, a channel much loved by Claude. He discovered classical music as a teenager, and this daily programme is aimed at his level. He knows it can annoy seriously musical people but he is not seriously musical. Culturally, he has always enjoyed striking an unsettling pose between the philistine and the mandarin, and somehow Classic FM fails to annoy him at all. He used to enjoy it while driving, but now he likes to feel part of the stay-at-home family of the housebound, the housewives, the retired, the unemployed, the home-workers, the put-your-feet-up-you’ve-earned-a-rest brigade. The presenters speak to him pleasantly, with exactly the right degree of polite but friendly intimacy, cheerful and respectful but with a touch of irony, much less annoying than the feigned chumminess and barely disguised condescension and contempt of some of the Radio 3 clever chappies and well-spoken ladies, who don’t seem to be able to get it right these days. They’re culturally adrift on Radio 3, they don’t know who they are. The BBC as a whole has lost its way, that’s Claude’s view, and he thinks the licence fee should be abolished. It’s made some astounding mistakes, it’s dug its own grave.

      Claude even enjoys the Classic FM commercials, as they attempt to sell him car insurance and medical products and barbecues and tickets to concerts and homely holidays in dullish English counties. The travel news, with its accidents and lane closures and roadworks, is a comfort to him, for now he is no longer driving or being driven, he is safe in his day bed, not stuck in the stationary fast lane or stranded on the hard shoulder. All over Britain, people are having a bad time at the wheel. Classic FM makes him feel part of the human race, without having to pay a high price for his inclusion.

      He will never drive again. He’s got over feeling that that is such a bad thing. He will never operate again, and that is a relief.

      Claude isn’t nearly as bored as Fran thinks he must be. He’s bored, but he has his resources. And one of them is Classic FM. It is all so surprising, its ever-present availability. Brahms, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mahler, Chopin, Berlioz, Gounod, Bernstein. The presenters are full of genuine and well-informed enthusiasm for their products. He loves Alan Titchmarsh and John Suchet. He hears Barenboim, Menuhin, Nigel Kennedy, Maria Callas. Greatness pours through the air and floods his apartment.

      Claude Stubbs is an impassioned admirer of Maria Callas. He has had an intense fantasy relationship with her for many years.

      He has half an hour of Callas on CD most evenings. He usually times it to coincide with the Pill. He has to take a lot of routine medication to stay alive, but the semi-legal Magic Pill which he prescribes for himself is something else. Others might think of it as an anti-depressant, but to Claude it brings psilocybin euphoria. It elevates him, briefly but unfailingly, to a sublime state. It’s better than all the drugs he took when he was a young physician. It’s the business, it does the trick.

      The conference is over and Fran has spoken, competently but in her view rather boringly, reporting on the Ashley Combe Trust’s continuing support of research into models of integrated housing developments for the elderly. Raised flower beds, patent window catches, isolation valves for gas appliances, key lockers for visiting carers – a medley of suggestions and possibilities, some of which she has inspected and tested in practice, some of which exist as yet only in theory, but most of them far less futuristic than Ken’s dapper range of robots.

      She is staying one more night in the refuge of the inn, at her own expense, as she doesn’t want to drive all the way back to London in the dark and face the possibility of a non-functioning lift on arrival. She can face the stairwell in the mornings, but not so well in the evenings. (Once, exhausted, she had slept in the garage, in her car.) And Paul has asked her to accompany him on his visit to his aunt in Chestnut Court in Sandford Road. For moral support, he said. He’d like to know what she makes of Chestnut Court and his aunt. Two people visiting makes it easier than one, he said. A platitude, he said, but she well knows it to be true.

      Fran doesn’t mind platitudes. A few platitudes, every now and then, are restful. They draw one back from the brink of the flames.

      Fran was pleased to be asked by young Paul, flattered that he valued her opinion and her company. They have become good professional friends, despite the age gap. Yes, of course, she had said, she’d be happy to give him a lift.

      She thinks, briefly, as she negotiates with the satnav’s help the tricky one-way system of Sandwell, of Christopher and Sara and the volcanic craters, and of unexpected death. No platitudes there.

      A small earthquake had shaken Dudley.

      The Canaries had been formed and transformed by volcanic activity on a massive scale.

      Sandford Road turns out to be one of those long curving streets that lack all architectural cohesion. It was cut off from the old dying shopping parade by a 1970s stretch of dual carriageway, over which arched a steeply sloping narrow flimsy pedestrian walkway. Sandford Road had found itself on the wrong side of the tracks. It had wandered and struggled through many decades of build and rebuild, juxtaposing cheap modern maisonettes with little ‘carriage houses’ with stretches of turn-of-the-century terrace with once-desirable 1930s semi-detached dwellings. Nothing grand, but many variants on the theme of decent inexpensive housing for decent folk, with the older buildings now in slow decline. Some of the houses are set back behind small front gardens, others front the street. One or two mature and as yet leafless trees from an earlier epoch rear defiantly upwards to the light, from painfully carbuncled and root-buckled pavements.

      Fran finds a space to park outside a run of four late Edwardian three-storey red-brick terraced villas that had been done up in startling style, with bizarre ornamental stained-glass panels let in to some of the front windows and doors, and modern iron gates with ornate designs picked out in gilt and turquoise and scarlet. These houses must, she surmises, belong to an extended family group or to a cluster of an ethnic minority with pronounced and eccentric views on decor, or indeed, most probably, to a combination of the two. One of the front windows has an image of a not very English running deer surrounded by white blossoms engraved upon it or set into it. She can’t begin to think what it is doing there. She points it out to Paul, who doesn’t seem as surprised by it as she is. He’s seen it all before.

      Asian? Eastern European? Bizarre.

      She loves it. She loves how it all is.

      And there is Chestnut Court, the modest care home that says it specialises in schizophrenia. Unlike Josephine’s Athene Grange, it obviously isn’t purpose-built. It is a rather shabby spreading asymmetrical 1930s terrace house, on two floors with two wide bay front rooms, and above one of the front rooms a wide bay-windowed bedroom, the master bedroom, the room with a view. It doesn’t have a local authority look about it, even though it is largely funded by the local authority. It is quiet, it is calm, a backwater amidst the changing waves of demolition and renovation. And there Aunt Dorothy from Brasshouse Lane has lived becalmed for many years.

      Each room its own TV, home-cooked food with the menu changing weekly, access to local church and local shops, medical attendance, visiting chiropodist. All for £358–£420 a week. It is very reasonable. Compared with Claude’s outgoings, this is very reasonable.

      Dorothy is petite. She is small and perfect. She is very old but she is perfect. Her skin is clear, unblemished and almost without wrinkles, her eyes are a lucent blue, her lips are pink with a perfect shade of carefully applied pale girlish lipstick, her silver hair is thin but arranged to perfection in gentle but neatly controlled curls and waves around her perfect brow and her heart-shaped face. Once a fortnight she is taken in a taxi to the hairdresser for a shampoo and set. She had been a beauty. She is still a beauty. She is fragile. She is delicate, a porcelain figurine. She is beautifully