Читать книгу The Dark Flood Rises - Margaret Drabble - Страница 8

She has often suspected that her last words to herself and in this world will prove to be ‘You bloody old fool’ or, perhaps, depending on the mood of the day or the time of the night, ‘you fucking idiot’. As the speeding car hits the tree, or the unserviced boiler explodes, or the smoke and flames fill the hallway, or the grip on the high guttering gives way, those will be her last words. She isn’t to know for sure that it will be so, but she suspects it. In her latter years, she’s become deeply interested in the phrase ‘Call no man happy until he is dead’. Or no woman, come to that. ‘Call no woman happy until she is dead.’ Fair enough, and the ancient world had known women as well as men who had met unfortunate ends: Clytemnestra, Dido, Hecuba, Antigone. Though of course Antigone, one must remember, had rejoiced to die young, and in a good (if to us pointless) cause, thereby avoiding all the inconveniences of old age.

Fran herself is already too old to die young, and too old to avoid bunions and arthritis, moles and blebs, weakening wrists, incipient but not yet treatable cataracts, and encroaching weariness. She can see that in time (and perhaps in not a very long time) all these annoyances will become so annoying that she will be willing to embark on one of those acts of reckless folly that will bring the whole thing to a rapid, perhaps a sensational ending. But would the rapid ending cancel out and negate the intermittent happiness of the earlier years, the long struggle towards some kind of maturity, the modest successes, the hard work? What would the balance sheet look like, at the last reckoning?

It was the obituaries of Stella Hartleap that set her thoughts in this actuarial direction, as she drove along the M1 towards Birmingham, at only three or four miles above the speed limit.

The print obituaries had been annoying, piously annoying, in a sexist, ageist, hypocritical, mealy-mouthed manner, reeking of Schadenfreude. And just now, yet another mention of Stella on the car radio, in that regular Radio 4 obituary slot, has revived her irritations. She hadn’t known Stella very well, having met her late in the day in Highgate through Hamish, but she’d known her long enough to recognise the claptrap and the bullshit. So, Stella had died of smoke inhalation, having set her bedclothes on fire while smoking in bed in her remote farmstead in the Black Mountains, and having just polished off a tumbler of Famous Grouse. So what? A better exit than dying in a hospital corridor in a wheelchair while waiting for another dose of poisonous chemotherapy, which had recently been her good friend Birgit’s dismal fate. At least Stella had nobody to blame but herself, and although the last minutes couldn’t have been pleasant, neither had Birgit’s. Not at all pleasant, by all accounts, and without any complementary frisson of autonomy.

Birgit wouldn’t have approved of Stella Hartleap’s end. She might even have been censorious about it. She had been a judgmental woman. But that was neither here nor there. We don’t have to agree with anyone, ever.

Her new-old friend Teresa, who is grievously ill, wouldn’t be censorious, as she is never censorious about anyone.

I am the captain of my fate, I am the master of my soul. A Roman, by a Roman, valiantly vanquished.

There is a truck, too close behind her, she can see its great dead smeared glass underwater eyes looming at her in her driving mirror. In the old days, Hamish used to slam on his brakes in situations like this, as a warning. She’d always thought that was dangerous, but he’d never come to any harm. He hadn’t died at the wheel. He’d died of something more insidious, less violent, more cruelly protracted.

She chooses the accelerator. It’s safer than the brake. Her first husband Claude had believed in the use of the accelerator, and she was with him on that.

Francesca Stubbs is on her way to a conference on sheltered housing for the elderly, a subject pertinent to her train of thought, but not in itself heroic. Fran is something of an expert in the field, and is employed by a charitable trust which devotes generous research funds to examining and improving the living arrangements of the ageing. She’s always been interested in all forms of social housing, and this new job suits her well. She’s intrigued by the way more and more people in England opt to live alone, in the early twenty-first century. Students don’t seem to mind cohabitation, even like it, and cohabitation is forced upon the ill and the elderly, but more and more of the able-bodied in their mid-life choose to live alone. This is making demands on the housing stock which successive governments are unable and possibly unwilling even to try to satisfy.

Fran is in favour of a land tax. That would shake things up a bit. But the English are extraordinarily tenacious of land. They hate to relinquish even a yard of it. The word ‘freehold’ has a powerful resonance.

No, there is nothing heroic about the housing stock and planning policy, subjects which currently occupy her working life, but old age itself is a theme for heroism. It calls upon courage.

Fran had from an unsuitably early age been attracted by the heroic death, the famous last words, the tragic farewell. Her parents had on their shelves a copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, a book which, as a teenager, she would morbidly browse for hours. One of her favourite sections was ‘Dying Sayings’, with its fine mix of the pious, the complacent, the apocryphal, the bathetic and the defiant. Artists had fared well: Beethoven was alleged to have said ‘I shall hear in heaven’; the erotic painter Etty had declared ‘Wonderful! Wonderful this death!’; and Keats had died bravely, generously comforting his poor friend Severn.

Those about to be executed had clearly had time to prepare a fine last thought, and of these she favoured the romantic Walter Raleigh’s, ‘It matters little how the head lies, so the heart be right’. Harriet Martineau, who had suffered much as a child from religion, as Fran had later discovered, had stoically remarked, ‘I see no reason why the existence of Harriet Martineau should be perpetuated’, an admirably composed sentiment which had caught the child Fran’s attention long before she knew who Harriet Martineau was. But most of all she had liked the parting words of Siward the Dane who had commanded his men: ‘Lift me up that I may die standing, not lying down like a cow’. She didn’t know why this appealed to her so strongly, as she was herself very unlikely to die on a battlefield. Maybe it meant she had Danish blood? Well, she probably had, of course, as many, perhaps most of us in England have. Or maybe she had liked the mention of the cow, which she heard as strangely affectionate, not as contemptuous.

She was much more likely to die on a motorway than on a battlefield.

The Vikings hadn’t approved of dying quietly and comfortably in bed. Unlike her first husband Claude, who was currently making himself as comfortable as he could.

She has pulled away from the truck, and is now overtaking a dirty maroon family saloon with an annoying sticker about its ‘Baby on Board’. There is an anonymous dirty white van just behind her now. It isn’t raining, but it’s dirty weather, and there’s grimy February splatter and spray on her windscreen. There’s worse weather on the way, the forecast warns, but it hasn’t reached her yet. It’s been a grim winter so far.

Why the hell is she driving, anyway? Why hadn’t she taken the train? Because, like all those people who insist on living alone when they don’t have to, she likes being on her own, in her own little space, not cooped up with invasively dressed strangers eating crisps and sandwiches and clutching polystyrene coffee and obesely overflowing their seat space and chattering on their mobiles. She is hurtling happily along to the car park of a Premier Inn on the outskirts of Birmingham, guided by her satnav, and looking forward to her evening meal. Some of the other delegates will be staying at the Premier Inn, and she is looking forward to seeing them. She’ll be able to get away from them if she wants to and take herself off to her anonymous bedroom to watch some regional TV.

Fran loves regional TV. You find out a lot of odd things, watching regional TV up and down the land. She’s glad she’s still got the energy and the will to drive around England, looking at housing developments and care homes. She’s a lucky woman, lucky in her work. Sometimes, in her more elevated moments, she thinks she is in love with England, with the length and breadth of England. England is now her last love. She wants to see it all before she dies. She won’t be able to do that, but she’ll do her best.

The charity that employs her doesn’t cover Scotland and Wales.

She wouldn’t mind dying on the road, driving around the country, though she wouldn’t want to take any innocent people with her.

The dirty white van is far too close. The bad name of white van drivers is well deserved, in Fran’s opinion.

There’d been another section in Brewer’s, called ‘Death from Strange Causes’. It wasn’t as good as ‘Dying Sayings’, but it had its charms. Memorable recorded deaths, most of them occurring in antiquity, had involved the swallowing of goat-hairs, grape stones, guineas and toothpicks. According to Pliny, Aeschylus had been killed by a falling tortoise. Many have been killed by pigs. Some choke to death with laughter. Nobody, as far as she knows, has yet thought to keep the white van tally, which must be high.

She is looking forward to seeing her colleague Paul Scobey again. As she checks in at the Premier Inn reception desk, having parked in the allotted space in the subterranean metal car cage, there he is, sitting on an orange and purple couch in the foyer, nursing half a pint and watching a super-coloured soccer match on a giant overhead TV. He waves when she spots him, and she goes over to say hello, begging him not to interrupt his viewing. Paul is her friend and ally. He is far too young to share her first-hand empathetic familiarity with some of the needs of the elderly, but he has a pleasantly sardonic manner, a detachment that she finds enabling. He doesn’t expect people to want what they ought to want. So many in the geriatric business can’t understand the perversity of human beings, their attachments to or impatience with irrational aspects of their old homes and neighbourhoods, their sudden detestations of members of their family with whom they had rubbed along without protest for years, their refusal to admit that they were old and would soon be incapable. Paul seems unusually accepting of the changing vagaries of human need. He’s in favour of community living and co-operative schemes, but he understands those who refuse to downsize and need at the end to die alone in a five-storey building, fixing the threat of a mansion tax with a cold eye. Carrots and sticks, says Paul. If you want to get them out, you have to tempt them out.

Fran doesn’t like that phrase, ‘carrots and sticks’. Old people aren’t donkeys. But he’s got the right ideas.

He has a mother living stubbornly alone in the house where he had been born, in the low-rise Hagwood 1950s estate on the western edge of Smethwick. He speaks of her sometimes, but not very often. He talks more about the merits and failings of corporation and council housing than he speaks of his mother, but Fran knows that thoughts of his mother inform his thinking. And he also has an elderly and long-demented aunt, his mother’s older sister Dorothy, living very near to where they are now. A visit to see her is on his two-day agenda, and Fran has agreed to accompany him, to see the small care home where she has lived for years. This was his neck of the woods, not Fran’s, although he himself now lives down south in Colchester.

Paul pats the couch by him, suggests she sit, and she sits. The leathery fireproof hollow-fill foam of the couch sinks deeply under her modest weight. She’ll have to struggle to get up.

Paul is a gingery fellow, sandy-haired and lashed, lightly freckled, strikingly pale-skinned, pleasantly featured in a snub-nosed boyish way, in his mid forties she supposes, a little younger than her son Christopher. Hazel eyes, not Viking blue. He had wanted to be an architect but the qualifications took too long, he’d needed to start earning, and he had settled for planning and housing. His views on aesthetics (not often requested) are surprising. He has a nostalgic private weakness for Modernism, but recognises that most old people in England detest Modernism (not that they get asked much about their preferences) and prefer a post-modern pseudo-cottage, bungalowesque, mini-Tesco mix. You can get all those features into a housing estate quite easily, as he knows from the avenues and crescents of Hagwood.

His expertise lies in adaptation. He really knows, or thinks he knows, how features of a dwelling space ought to be adapted to the ageing and disabled, to the increasingly ageing and increasingly disabled. He relies on Fran, who is well ahead of him on the road of ageing (though as yet far from disabled) to advise him and offer him her insights. He had been fascinated by her account of the woman who had died because she hadn’t been able to open the bathroom door. There was nothing much wrong with her, apart from her loss of grip. She’d been unable to turn the doorknob, couldn’t get out to the phone to dial 999 after a very minor stroke, and had passed away on her cold bathroom floor.

If she’d had a lever-type doorknob instead of an old-fashioned screw doorknob, she’d have been alive today. If she hadn’t shut the door after herself (and what on earth was the point in doing that, as she lived alone?), she’d have been alive today.

Killed by a doorknob.

For the lack of a nail the battle was lost.

You have to be careful, when you’re old.

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Fran declines a beer. I’ll see you down here at seven, she says. And up she goes to her room, to kick off her boots and lie on her bed and gaze at the rich daily life of the Black Country and the West Midlands. It’s on the chilly side in her bedroom, there must be a thermostat somewhere, but she can’t find it. Never mind, you can’t die of hypothermia in a Premier Inn.

She likes her bedroom. She likes the whiteness of the pillows, and the rich loud purple of the Inn’s informative boasts about its reliable facilities and its notable breakfasts. It’s very purple, the Premier Inn branding.

There are several items of soothingly mild interest on the regional news – a promotional chat by some staunchly upbeat florist’s about a Valentine’s Day event, an interview with a volunteer at a food bank, a report of a non-fatal knifing at a bus stop in Bilston, and, most unexpectedly, an item about a small earthquake which had hit Dudley and its neighbourhood at dawn that day. It had caused little consternation and most people had not even noticed it, although one or two said their breakfast crockery had rattled or a standard lamp had fallen over. Cats and dogs and budgerigars hadn’t liked it, and had wisely seen it coming, or so their owners said. This was routine stuff, but Fran’s attention is caught by a lively account by an unlikely young woman who claims that she had been rocked on her moored narrow boat by a not-so-small and inexplicable wave. ‘It wasn’t a tsunami,’ says this spirited red-cheeked person, posing picturesquely and entirely unselfconsciously in a purple woolly hat, a padded red jacket and cowboy boots on the wharf just along the canal from the Open Air Museum, ‘but it was definitely a wave, and I thought it was coming out of the limestone caverns, I thought the quarry sides had given way, or the mining tunnels had collapsed, or maybe a great river beast was making its way out of there, been there for millennia waiting just for me!’

Fran likes this person very much, she admires her relish and her imagination and her Wolverhampton accent, and she admires the interviewer and the cameraman for realising how eccentrically photogenic she is. ‘To tell you the truth,’ says this robust young person, ‘I’m always hoping something really really terrible is about to happen, like the end of the world, you know what I mean? And that I’ll be right there? You know what I mean?’ And she smiles, gaily, and then pronounces, ‘But it was only a very small earthquake, they say it was very low on the Richter scale, so it’s not the end of Dudley after all! I’m not saying I wanted a bigger one, but it would have been interesting. You know what I mean?’

Fran does know exactly what she means. She too has often thought it would be fun to be in at the end, and no blame attached. One wouldn’t want to be responsible for the end, but one might like to be there and know it was all over, the whole bang stupid pointless unnecessarily painful experiment. An asteroid could do it, or an earthquake, or any other impartial inhuman violent act of the earth or the universe. She can’t understand the human race’s desire to perpetuate itself, to go on living at all costs. She has never been able to understand it. Her incomprehension isn’t just a sour-grapes side effect of ageing. She is pleased to see that this healthy and happy young person shares some of her metaphysical defiance. It is an exoneration.

One wouldn’t mind dying of a cataclysm, but one doesn’t want to die young by mistake, or possibly by human error, as her son’s latest partner had recently done. Untimely death is intermittently on Fran’s mind, alongside housing for the refusing-to-die elderly and her more-or-less-bedridden ex-husband’s dinners. Christopher’s glamorous new love Sara had died aged thirty-eight of a rare medical event and Christopher believes that the doctors had done her in. Fran is not to know if this is true or not, as she has never heard of the rare condition that had killed Sara, but she feels that Christopher’s current mindset of blame is doing him no good. Maybe he needs it to get by. It is not much comfort to reflect that, like Antigone, Sara has escaped getting old by dying young, and she has not offered this palliative reflection to Christopher. It does not seem appropriate. She had not disliked Sara, but could not disguise from herself the knowledge that it is Christopher she grieves for, not Sara.

So it is, with degrees of kinship and of mourning. If her son Christopher, bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, had died, that would have been another matter.

She had not been confident that Christopher and Sara had a long future together, but had not expected it to be quite so brief. Their mutual past had also been brief. They hadn’t been together for long.

Fran doesn’t meddle with her children’s lives, but she’d liked what she’d seen of Sara. Though she suspects that in Christopher’s life Sara had embodied something of what we now call a mid-life crisis. Mid-life crises, in Fran’s ageing view, are a luxury compared with what she has seen of end-of-life crises. But Sara hadn’t even had time for a mid-life crisis.

Sara had been taken ill very suddenly in a very large bed in a large luxury hotel on the Costa Teguise on the island of Lanzarote. Christopher had been in bed with her and had witnessed the crisis and been landed with the consequences. She had been rushed to hospital in Arrecife, then flown back to a private hospital in South Kensington, where she had died twenty-four hours later, having been given, according to Christopher, the wrong medication. If she had stayed in Lanzarote, where he was told the medical services were first class, he believed she would not have died. The wrong decision had been made in repatriating her. He had not trusted the good advice offered by the islanders.

Sara and Christopher had not been on holiday in the Canaries, as most visitors to those tourist islands are. They had been working, but who would believe that? Well, all those who knew the serious-minded and ambitious Sara would have known it, but it was true that Christopher had been there on a semi-freebie, as a freeloading partner, while Sara was engaged with her team in research for a documentary film about illegal immigration from North Africa. And, more or less fortuitously and it had at the time seemed fortunately, she had hoped to record an interview about the political goals of a woman from the Western Sahara who happened to be on hunger strike on the polished tiles of the departure lounge of Arrecife airport when they arrived. She was a surprising sight, holding court in the departure lounge, and was a gift to a film-maker. Or so Christopher had told his mother.

Christopher had been keeping Sara company, being himself temporarily unemployed, and his presence in that bed that night during her attack had been for her a blessing, in 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 England middle-aged people talking loudly and 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 herself to be waited on. All around Fran, younger people 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 Bilston chip, the fluorescent nasturtium-coloured deep-fried potato chip. The 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 in which Americans are so much readier than the British to accept the concept of Twilight and Sunset Homes. They are far less attached to property and privacy than we are, she had asserted. They move house and home more readily, are much more realistic about their needs. They don’t stand on their rank and dignity, they go for what’s comfortable, for whatever works well.

I’m much more comfortable here than I was in that big house in Norwich, says Jo. I didn’t like Norwich, I didn’t like the university, I never had any real friends there. I know more people in Cambridge than I ever did in Norwich. I’ve always had friends in Cambridge, and I used to have family here. We used to have Christmas here. I’ve known Cambridge since I was a child. Anyway, I couldn’t afford to go on living there on my own, the house was too big. I downsized, and now I’m living as I like. I’ve got selfish in my old age. I live as I like.

Some retired dons in Cambridge still live in comfort and dignity in college properties, Fran knows. And she knows that Jo knows that Athene Grange is mimicking that comfort and dignity. But if it mimics them to her comfort and satisfaction, so what?

Fran is fond of her flat in Tarrant Towers, although it is a bad address, a bad postcode, and the lifts often break down. But the view is glorious, the great view over London. She likes to watch the cloudscapes assemble from afar, the great galleons of cumulus sailing her way on the approaching storm; she likes the red-streaked clouds of evening, the pierced and the torn caverns beyond the beyond of the everlasting blue, the rents and the gashes and the intimations. She endures the lowering blanketed greys of winter, the monotonous dull skies of February, and waits for the opening drama of the spring. Elevate, sublimate, transcend, that’s what the view tells Fran. And climbing up the concrete stairwell once or twice a week is good for the heart.

She likes Tarrant Towers. She likes its insalubrious garage space. She couldn’t do without a garage. She needs her car, she needs to keep moving.

Imagine Claude Stubbs. Imagine him released from Fran’s controlling vision of him, if we can. Yes, he is there, he is occupying his own space. Cyrus the stout tabby is settled on the end of Claude’s day bed, his softly rounded white-tipped front paws curved comfortably inwards towards one another in a slightly camp submissive gesture that Claude finds deeply endearing. The claws are sheathed and amply padded. Cyrus is not a young cat and he enjoys the circumstances of Claude’s confinement, he is pleased that Claude is not well. Claude hardly ever goes out now, except on forays to the hospital, so Claude is almost always there to be with Cyrus. Cyrus approves of this regime. The radio is playing, the television is on although the sound is mute, and Claude’s mind moves towards the next plated meal, which he thinks is potato, egg and anchovy bake, a dish he believes to have been invented by Fran, though in fact it is a debased version of a recipe she once read in a Jane Grigson book in the 1970s, in the far-off days when she used to hope that one day she would learn how to cook.

Claude has little notion of Fran’s increasingly vexed relationship with food. He has never had to cook anything, ever, except toast and an egg. He likes the anchovy bake, so he won’t have it for lunch, he will save it up for supper. Something to look forward to. His minder, who is called Persephone, has already been in to see to him and has left him a plastic box containing chicken and avocado sandwiches on brown and an M&S tropical fruit salad. Claude is supposed to like mangoes, and most of the time he does, though perhaps not quite as often as they appear on his menu. Persephone is a tall good-looking black girl with expensively smooth dark gold hair. She says she’s from Zimbabwe, and she’s forty years younger than Fran. She makes him think about sex, but thinking about it is all that he can do. She told him this morning some rigmarole about the flowers that one of her beaux had sent her for Valentine’s Day. Orange lilies, and a huge golden metal heart sticking up out of them. A bit dangerous, a bit menacing, for flowers, said Persephone. More like a weapon than a love offering.

Persephone is no fool.

It’s bloody freezing out there, said Persephone, you’re better off here in bed.

People often say thoughtless things like that to Claude. He doesn’t mind as much as he used to. He’s got used to it. He wouldn’t like Persephone’s life, no, not at all.

Persephone likes Cyrus, or pretends to, and never complains about changing the cat litter. But she is well paid to do that kind of thing. At least she doesn’t have to change Claude’s litter or empty his bedpan. Not yet.

He’s mobile enough to get to the kitchen, with the aid of his Chelsea and Westminster NHS crutches. He’s not on the NHS, or not wholly on the NHS, just as when in practice he wasn’t wholly on the NHS nor wholly private. He’s always been an opportunist. He acquired the crutches as an outpatient in an earlier and less terminal state of affairs, and although he was supposed to have returned them long ago, he hasn’t. They’ve been standing in the cupboard in the spare room for years. They’ve come in handy now.

With the crutches, he can still get, very slowly, to the lav, as they used to call it in Romley. He doesn’t always get there in time, as he sometimes misjudges the urgency and the difficulties of the journey, but he gets there.

Imagine Claude, imagining his first wife Francesca. Fran is at a conference up north somewhere. She’s always buzzing around the country, despatched by that Quakerly quango on geriatric housing that employs her. Quango, charity, NGO, he’s never been quite sure what it is, but it’s something to do with the elderly, and it does pay her a salary. She’s a busybody, a typical social-worker middle-class busybody type. And however public-spirited she may think she is, she is as utterly selfish as anyone he has ever known. She’s just as selfish as all his colleagues rolled together – the surgeons, the oncologists, the anaesthetists, the consultants, the chief medical officers, the professors, the heads of all the royal colleges. Everybody is selfish, and Fran is as selfish as the rest of them. She doesn’t work for the public interest, but because she likes doing it, because it keeps her busy, because it makes her feel important and on top of the game.

What game? At her age? It’s tragic, it’s pathetic.

He visualises the potato, egg and anchovy bake. He likes salt, and maybe his salt intake has contributed to his present lamentable condition. There’s probably double cream in there too. Too late to start worrying about all of that now.

Maybe Fran is trying to kill him off. She had threatened to murder him several times, half a century ago, but there wouldn’t be much in it for her if he died now. She’d be let off the plated meals, but it’s Claude’s convenient view that, in her masochistic womanly way, she enjoys making them.

She doesn’t know what’s in his will, and would never ask. She doesn’t even ask what provision he’s made for their two children and his grandchildren. But she knows Persephone is pricey, and his life expectancy is actuarially uncertain. Who knows how long he and a succession of Persephones could survive before he ran out of money?

He knows, but she doesn’t.

He will have half a bottle, perhaps a bottle, of the very good Chablis with the bake. He has resolved to drink expensive wine until he dies. Neither of his wives could tell one bottle from another, let alone one year from another, although both of them could knock it back. He has decided to enjoy what he can, while he can.

Fran now lives alone in a high-rise council flat on a dismal North London estate, having recently moved from a much nicer ground-floor garden flat in Highgate where she lived with that man Hamish. He has never seen the council flat, but she has described it to him, briefly and provocatively. He has accused her of slumming, but she has denied this. She has used lofty words for her lofty eyrie. Atonement, absolution, amnesty. No, none of those words is quite right, his memory for words is going, but he’s sure one of those that she used to justify her choice of residence begins with an A. And she had mentioned the view, what she called the overview.

Odd how one can remember bits of words, but not always the words themselves. Maybe it’s a word that he applied to it, not her. Anyway, it began with an A. Proper nouns go first, then abstract nouns, then nouns, then verbs. So he’s been told.

It’s a damn sight nicer in Tarrant Towers than in Romley and Chingwell and Chingford, she had told him.

He 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 preserved and presented, in the overheated upholstered lounge of the very homely home. Grey skirt, a prettily embroidered cream blouse, a pale blue cardigan, silver earrings and a pearl necklace. Rings on her fingers, proper rings, not mail order trinkets, and a silver bracelet.

She has been beautifully presented to reassure her nephew Paul, Fran assumes, but she cannot detect any hint of hidden or underlying neglect. This is a very small outfit, a domestic operation, a ‘home from home’. There are only five other residents, two of whom are up in their rooms, while the other three are somewhat slumped and dozy in recliners at the other end of the lounge, watching a muted TV. Paul, Fran and Dorothy sit upright in the little bay window with their tea and shortbread biscuits, while Dorothy tells Fran the story of her life. Fran is a new audience, and she listens politely and attentively.

She cannot understand much of Dorothy’s tale. She is familiar with various forms of dementia and confusion, and knows people who cannot carry a conversation or remember a thought sequence for more than two or three minutes at a time. Dorothy is not like that at all.

Dorothy wanders from past to present seamlessly, in a stream of consciousness that loops and circles and turns in on itself. Albion Road, the war, the air raids, the gas light with a mantel, West Bromwich Albion, bread and dripping, my father, he was always so angry, Junior Mixed and Infants, the old Board School, her bouts of pneumonia, her TB, her colostomy (she pats the bag, affectionately, softly swelling under her grey skirt). The church, the vicar, that time she spoke at her friend’s funeral, her son who came to see her when he could, her husband, she married him when she was seventeen. Her father was angry. God was so good to her. Her plans for her funeral, her favourite hymns, the first time she’d been put in hospital, Suzette the manageress, Claire the stylist at the salon, the new shopping mall, the darkies have taken over everywhere. The day thou gavest Lord is ended. Darkies are everywhere. Look, this is the ring he gave me, my Charlie, it’s sapphires and diamonds. Hopscotch in the street and dancing to the gramophone. Her father was angry when she did handstands, he didn’t like her showing her knickers, he gave her the strap if she showed her knickers, he bought a coat for £2 at the pawn shop but he didn’t live to wear it, but her mother lived to be ninety-four.

I hope I don’t last that long but God disposes, they help me to change the bag, there’s always a helper on duty here.

He didn’t like me showing my knickers. I was always the pretty one, my little sister Emmie she was the clever one.

As she mentions her sister Emmie, she looks in a puzzled way at Emmie’s son Paul, as though wondering who he is and what his connection with this narrative.

The pumping station, it’s all bricked up now. My dad worked, he worked for the water board. Yes, God is very good, they wheel me to church every Sunday. Our church is one hundred years old. I like to read, I like stories, we get these magazines.

It’s a very vocal form of dementia, if dementia it is. The three residents at the other end of the room speak not at all. They must have heard Dorothy’s stories innumerable times. She is the talker, she speaks for them all, she is the muddled memory of their generation.

Fran tries to follow, picks out the recurrent motif of the angry father, wonders if he was the explanation of why his daughter is here, year after year, unageing, unchanging, living it out to the end.

Dead at forty-eight, he was, it was his lungs.

Paul’s grandfather, that would have been.

After an hour, manageress Suzette joins them to break it up, for they had dutifully done their stint. Dorothy recognises the nature of the intervention at once, and makes no attempt to detain her visitors. She is well-mannered, docile. She presents them each with a parting gift, a card from a children’s play pack, which she has coloured in with bright acrylics. One shows a butterfly, the other a country cottage. She has worked them carefully, not going over any of the edges, none of the colours overlapping one another.

She seems to have taken to Fran, and urges her to visit again when next she finds herself nearby. Just pop in, says Dorothy, you’ll always find me here.

‘She loves colouring in,’ says Suzette gaily as she ushers them out into the hallway. Dorothy remains sitting at the table, gazing not after her guests but out at the street, her frail mauve beringed hands neatly folded in her lap.

Suzette is a stoutly confident tawny-blonde sixty-year-old with a short sharp defiantly razored hairstyle, all points and tips and highlights. No shampoo and set and hot curlers under the hood of the dryer for her. She is dressed in a bold tight fuchsia and black geometric print stretchy fabric dress with a scooped neckline. She is brisk and breezy, supplying the movement and energy in the house that her charges lack. Her parting handshake is powerful. She is a strong woman.

Who owns the premises? Who is making money out of this? Who employs Suzette? Is anyone making money out of it? It looks more like a break-even one-off situation to Fran. Not a chain, not part of a lucrative exploitative string of Chestnut Care Homes, just this one homely house hanging on in Sandford Road. Too low-profile for a scandal. Just surviving, as best it could.

There had been a scandal recently, in another much larger Sandwell care home. Several residents had fallen ill with food poisoning and a twenty-three-year-old care worker had been arrested and detained in a secure mental health unit. She was suspected of having deliberately contaminated their food.

Leave the mad to feed the mad, let the dead bury the dead.

Fran drives Paul back to the Premier Inn, where he says he’ll ring for a cab to get to Birmingham New Street. He has to get back to Colchester. She doesn’t even offer to drive him to the station. She is far too tired.

And Paul is subdued.

‘She must have been a beauty,’ offers Fran.

‘I don’t think she’s unhappy,’ says Paul, unhappily.

He had volunteered, earlier in the day, that his mother hadn’t seen her sister in thirty years. They had quarrelled, terminally. Emily in Hagwood and Dorothy in Chestnut Court. Both their husbands were dead. Dorothy has a son, the son she had mentioned, he isn’t a fantasy son as Fran might have supposed. But he had emigrated to Australia, a fact which she doesn’t seem to have wholly grasped. He wasn’t much use, her son Ralph, on the home front.

Fran is thinking of the bouts of childhood pneumonia, of the TB, of the bowel operation, of that occasionally vocal colostomy bag, of all the skilled surgery and intensive care and nursing and expense that have gone into keeping this confused old woman alive and smiling and putting on her jewellery and being wheeled to church and colouring in and looking at fashion pictures in magazines and wandering softly in her wits. She realises she’s been thinking of Dorothy as belonging to the ultimate generation, to the phalanx of the truly old, but Dorothy’s wartime memories had marked her as being only a very few years older than Fran herself. Fran can just about remember the war. Dorothy is in her seventies, not even in her eighties. She could live another twenty years.

Sometimes Fran thinks she can understand the impulse that makes a twenty-three-year-old want to kill off a lot of useless old people.

We can all expect to live longer, but it’s recently been claimed that the majority of us can expect to spend the last six years of our prolonged lives suffering from a serious illness, in some form of pain and ill health.

Fran found this statistic, true or false, infuriating. Longevity has fucked up our pensions, our work–life balance, our health services, our housing, our happiness. It’s fucked up old age itself.

Fran can no longer wholly control her thought processes. As she lies on her guaranteed-good-night’s-sleep bed, watching the evening news and eating a packet of some novel kind of Gujarati mix (satisfyingly spicy but rather too many peanuts), washed down with a bottle of not-quite-cold-enough screw-top 13 per cent Spanish white purchased from the friendly bearded Muslim newsagent over the road, she finds herself planning Claude’s next week of meals. She doesn’t want to be doing this, but she can’t help it.

He’ll be running out of plates and plastic boxes, he’ll be expecting her to turn up soon with some more.

What about soup? She could make a thick vegetable soup, no, a vegetable soup with bits of bacon, no, a lentil soup with chicken pieces. Claude used to say he didn’t like soup, half a century ago, but he’s not in a position not to like it now, is he? He has to take what he’s given, now.

She could get a good chicken, make enough soup for both Claude and Teresa.

Lardons. That’s the word she’s looking for. Bits of bacon, ready chopped. Good in soup. Soup freezes well. There’s yet another word for lardon but she can’t quite get it.

He used to get back from the hospital after the night shift, and she’d have made the healthy thrifty chunky soup and all he had to do was warm it up. But that wasn’t good enough. He wanted HER to be there to WARM IT UP FOR HIM. And she in bed and worn out with the children sleeping or not sleeping or waking or not waking and the sense of unutterable inadequacy, the sense of rejection, the fear, the panic, the sexual rejection identified with food rejection, the sense of not being that women have, you’d think she’d have grown out of it by now, by her age, at seventy-plus, but no, it intensifies, it gets worse and worse.

So he’d say he didn’t like soup. Root vegetables, carrots, potatoes, no parsnips, he couldn’t tolerate parsnips, what other root vegetables are there? Onions. Celery.

Bacon bits. Pancetta. Got it, that’s the other word, pancetta. Lardons. Pancetta. Foreign words for bits of bacon.

The treadmill of the food mind, like a hamster in its cage. Sometimes she thinks she is going mad, really mad, she will end up in a home like Dorothy, mindlessly colouring in. She used to enjoy colouring in, she remembers a book of flowers and birds and butterflies she had when she was a child, a treat just after the war shortages, and how she’d cried when the water colours ran together into a muddy brown. The failures, the failures. The tough beef, the stew with frilled yellowy gristle, the bloody undercooked lamb, the disintegrating fish overcooked in the oven. He wouldn’t eat the fish, the guests wouldn’t eat it, they’d pretended they were allergic to fish rather than try to eat her fish, she hadn’t forgotten that, she hadn’t forgotten anything, and it had been good fish too, from the fish shop, in those days when there was a fish shop.

She’d better snap out of this, she’s going downhill fast, down to that place that it was so hard to clamber out of.

Lardons. They were the solution, the solution to everything. We didn’t used to call them that. God knows what we did call them. We didn’t call them that other word either, pancetta, we’d never heard of pancetta.

Bread and dripping, Dorothy had mentioned. You couldn’t offer that to man or boy now, not because they wouldn’t eat it, although they wouldn’t, but because meat doesn’t produce dripping any more. The meat isn’t real meat any more. Even when it looks like meat, it’s something else.

Fran takes another swig of the oaky Spanish, mutes the news, looks for her mobile, panics when she can’t find it. She’s just an old woman endlessly groping in the bottom of her bag, checking her keys and her mobile every ten minutes to see if they are still there, but there it is, in the wrong zip bit. Why can’t she remember always to put it in the same compartment? It doesn’t bode well, Christ, it doesn’t bode well.

Claude answers within three rings. Hello, Francesca, how’s it going?

Relief, hearing his voice so not unfriendly, so not at all hostile. He is pleased to hear from her.

Fine, says Fran, good day, just checking you are OK, everything OK?

Everything fine, says Claude, I’ve just finished the potato and anchovy bake, it was delicious. Persephone brought me a bit of green salad this morning so I’ve had my greens too.

Oh good, potato and anchovy isn’t really your five a day, is it?

To hell with five a day, it’s very nice. You do look after me, Fran, I don’t deserve it.

No, you don’t, but we all need more than we deserve, don’t we? Oh reason not the need.

How was your day, how was the conference?

Good. It was fine.

Good.

I’m going home in the morning, I’ll come over and see you in a couple of days when I’ve sorted myself out, bring you some more supplies.

Thanks, have you had your supper yet?

No, I was just wondering whether to go down to the restaurant or to pop out for a pizza. The food here’s not great but the breakfasts are good.

You were never a breakfast girl, were you?

No, but here they do you a perfect soft-boiled egg, it’s a treat.

How’s Cyrus?

Cyrus is fine, aren’t you, big puss?

Paranoia dissolves, retreats, thins out, but one day it won’t, will it? One day it will entrap her in its dark nets and fogs and she will sink under it. It would be a pity to die dismally, in that darkness.

She wants to die in the light. Enlightened, in the light. Let there be light, oh God let there be light.

Endgame. She and Josephine are planning to go to see Endgame, God knows why. Or is it Happy Days? She can’t remember which. Jo is in charge of booking the tickets, it’s Jo who has suddenly decided they ought to get to grips with Samuel Beckett.

Some fear the approach of dementia. Fran is acquainted with many people with dementia, she has very recently inspected blueprints for dementia-proof housing designed by a team at the University of Watermouth, she has read books about dementia, she has helped out (but only once, she can’t boast about it) at a social event for dementia patients and their carers. But Fran doesn’t think she is on the road to dementia. Her parents had never shown any sign of mental deterioration, they had been conscious (although not always peacefully and happily) to the end. Her brain functions well, her connections are quick, her memory is serviceable and subject only to a well-within-the-normal-range of lapses about names and products and titles of books and misplaced objects. No, what she fears is paranoia and subjection and rejection, and a return to that sense of worthlessness that had gripped her when she was newly married to Claude and spent so much time worrying about ruining the food. Maybe these sensations are returning to her because she has re-engaged with Claude, or maybe she has re-engaged with Claude because she needs to return to them. Maybe this is a necessary stage.

Food is a metaphor. But for what? She worries away at this. There is a deep entangled mystery. Sometimes she thinks she should go/have gone to an expert, to an analyst, to have this explained to her, but most of the time she thinks that she can work it out for herself in the end.

The end is nigh, but she’ll keep on trying.

It’s not too late.

And she would be too ashamed to talk about food to an analyst. It is too trivial, too obsessively trivial.

Food disorders are for the young. And this isn’t really a food disorder, it’s more like a cooking disorder.

Fran hates media chefs. They proliferate, they spread fear and panic.

She has somewhat half-heartedly developed her strategies for confronting and averting late-onset ailments. Walking, working, swimming. Climbing the tenement stairs, up and down, down and up, as though climbing up and down an Escher construction site. Networks, tasks, the occasional crossword puzzle. The discipline of plated meals for Claude, the new fortnightly vigils with Teresa. The renewals and transfusions of energy from Paul and Julia and Graham and other younger professional acquaintances up and down the land. The driving about, looking at projects, and the feeling of an occasional wave of oneness with the ordinary plight of the ordinary human race. The keeping-in-touch without-being-too-annoying with her son Christopher and her daughter Poppet and her ex-daughter-in-law Ella and her grandchildren.

The ‘wider interests’ that are meant to keep us from falling down the funnel.

Lying there on her wide white plump bed in the Premier Inn, she realises that she has knocked back too much of the Spanish wine and is feeling hungry, but is too drunk to go out for a meal. They don’t seem to do room service, and anyway room service sometimes takes hours and hours. She could go out and buy herself a slice of pizza. But she is too tired to go out to buy herself a slice of pizza. She has left it too late to go out to buy herself a slice of pizza.

She could go downstairs and order a plate. A hot plate. Scampi and chips with loud Muzak. A glass of red. She is sick of this Spanish white.

Valentine’s Day. Shrove Tuesday. Good Friday. Easter Sunday. We measure it out.

See the water and the blood from his riven side that flowed.

Poor Hamish. He had died at Easter, on Easter Saturday. A sombre day to die. A disproportionate number of people die in hospitals at weekends, for obvious reasons. He had been a statistic. But at least he had died on a serious day.

Claude had enjoyed cutting people up, and he’d been exceptionally good at it.

W. B. Yeats, her friend Jo’s favourite poet, was good on old age and our insatiable dissatisfaction, as Jo keeps telling her. She doesn’t really need telling, she read Yeats for herself, in the days when she read poetry. ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’, that had been one of the great songs of her youth. She used to play it to herself loud loud loud, it was the only song she really liked, though the Beatles she could tolerate.

Sex, food, satisfaction.

I can’t get no satisfaction.

She’d meant to text Christopher a routine good will message, HOW R U LOVE FX, but why bother, her fingers are too stiff and clumsy at this time of night, and she is redundant both to Christopher’s life and to Sara’s death.

She heaves herself up and forces herself to go downstairs for a Red Meal. She thinks with longing of the potato and anchovy bake, and of the chicken and tarragon, with their paler shades and more subtle flavours. She does make them for herself, sometimes. But sometimes she just can’t be bothered. She often thinks she should always cook double quantities of everything, and freeze half for Claude, half for herself, but there is something wrong with that as a concept. She can’t work out what it is, but maybe one day she will. She’s cooked double occasionally, but she’s never made a habit of it. She thinks of Paul, Julia, Graham, Ken of the robots, and the strong-armed sixty-year-old Suzette, who could have tossed the frail little body of Aunt Dorothy, colostomy bag and all, over her shoulder and carried her up the stairs without missing a step. Suzette had seemed to be a kindly woman, but who knows what motivates her? Maybe one day she too will lose the plot and poison all her brood.

There just aren’t enough strong younger people around these days to infuse the energy into the elderly. The feeble, as never before in society, in history, are outweighing the hale. The balance is wrong. The shape of the bell curve is a disaster. It’s a dystopian science fiction scenario, a disaster movie.

The hunter gatherers wouldn’t have let themselves get into this kind of predicament. They abandoned the elderly, or drowned them, or clubbed them to death, or exposed them on snowy mountainsides. They kept on the move.

Fran is on the move too.

Nor know that what disturbs our blood

Is but its longing for the tomb …

Ivor Walters sits on the little low balcony of the familiar bar overlooking the promenade that runs along the curving bay. He sips his warming beer. He is filling in time before meeting Christopher Stubbs at the airport. A pastel-pretty pink and beige and pale blue collared dove perches on the back of the little white bistro chair at the table on the next balcony, looking at him from time to time. It puts its head on one side, and looks at him. The sun, predictably, is setting. It is a very reliable sun. Sunset and sunrise do not vary much in these climes. He watches the slow march of the people on their daily pilgrimage. They are walking back from the beach to shop for their supper in one of the many small and almost identical supermarkets, or to eat fish or burgers or pizza in one of the many small and almost identical restaurants, or to spend an evening watching football in one of the many English pubs, where they will get drunk on beer or on Canarian or Spanish wine or (in the case of the ladies) on recklessly dispensed tumblers full of sweet holiday liqueurs.

You cannot really call their slow march a passeggiata, a camino, a paseo, for these pilgrims are too humble and lacking in style for such words. He observes them as they plod and trudge: the fit, the fat, the brown, the red, the weathered, the wizened. Cleavages, thighs, shorts, sandals, walking sticks. Wheelchairs, mobility scooters, buggies. Half term is over and most of the larger children have flown away and gone back to school, but the little ones in their pushchairs are always with us, accompanied by a few truant siblings. A sunset procession, a slow pedestrian parade. Occasionally a jogger varies the rhythm of the procession, but there are not many joggers. The pace is slow.

The surface of the path is hard and trim and newly laid and neatly bordered. He knows the island well and he has seen its improvements and its upgradings. Much public money has been spent on footpaths and roadways and viewpoints. He knew this path when it was rock and sand and mud and grit and spume, when it was raw and painful to the sandalled foot. He is slowly ageing with the island, he has watched it adapt itself to the ease and the pleasure-seeking of the perpetual procession. This is a good country for babies in buggies, and a good country for old men. Ivor is not yet old, as others are old, but he has lived here long enough. If Bennett dies soon, which he may, Ivor can go back to England. But if Bennett survives into his late eighties and nineties, which in this mild climate of mummified and everlasting life he equally well may, it will be too late for Ivor to go home. It is a common story.

Bennett is here for his health and Ivor is here because Bennett needs him to be here. Bennett is slowly drying out like a Guanche mummy of the caves and dunes. Ivor needs Bennett because Bennett holds the purse strings. It is too depressing, and yet not ignoble. They are bound together by the needs which succeed love, by the needs which succeed sex and affection. Ivor does not like thinking in these terms, but it is hard to avoid them. They sit by him, these considerations, looking at him from time to time, as does the pretty collared dove with its pale and pearly plumage.

Ivor tries to keep Bennett entertained, he is loyal to him. Ivor is a good man, at the very least he tries to be a good man. Most would call him a good man, but, by his own high standards, he might fail.

It is better not to look too closely at Ivor these days, in Ivor’s view. He is, or was, a strikingly handsome man, and he still attracts flirtatious attention from men and women alike. Blond, bronzed, with the bluest of forget-me-not blue eyes, and the most even of features. A pin-up boy, a collector’s item. Bennett had collected him long ago, when Ivor was only seventeen and knew no better. Ivor worries now about his wrinkles. He is proud that he still has a full head of hair, white now rather than golden, but you can tell that it once was golden for it has that light silvery radiance, the white-gold thistledown brightness of the birthright blond. He keeps it just very slightly on the long side. Dashingly, but not effeminately long.

Bennett and Ivor have engaged with the life of the island. They know some of the local celebrities and intellectuals, most of them also elderly, some of them ancient, many of them also here for reasons of health (and at least one of them in retreat from scandal). A few are indigenous, but a very few. Bennett is himself now something of a local celebrity, and he speaks good Spanish, so he can participate more fully in the cultural and social life of the island than Ivor. Ivor is not a linguist, although he is good at small talk, at seeing to drinks, at opening bottles, at pulling up chairs for older guests in his own and other people’s houses. He is an asset. People cheer up when they see Ivor is of the party.

Bennett knows a good deal about Spanish and Canarian history, for he has written about the Spanish Civil War and Lorca and Franco and Guernica and Picasso, and about the now-forgotten but once-celebrated philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, whose ambivalent political affiliations have for many years intrigued him. He has written a famous essay about Unamuno’s brief Canarian exile to Fuerteventura, under the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. That distinguished Spanish academic had unwisely made a public protest about the preferential treatment of one of the dictator’s courtesans, La Caoba, ‘the Mahogany Girl’, and Unamuno had ended up on a boat from the mainland to what was then the dullest and scruffiest and least visited of the islands. Ivor and Bennett have been several times to pay homage to him in his humble dusty museum-house in Puerto del Rosario, a port formerly known as Goat Harbour, and they have seen his carved wooden desk and his carved wooden bed with its white lace coverlet.

Unamuno’s white, massive and strangely Fascist statue rises up on the lower slopes of the great and stately Montaña Quemada. That too they have seen, from the vertiginous road, many times.

Unamuno’s sojourn had been brief, to merit such memorials. A matter of months. But Fuerteventura had lacked celebrities, and it makes the most of him.

Ivor has never been able to follow the ups and downs of Unamuno’s posthumous reputation. He remains an ambiguous figure. He knows that Unamuno symbolised for Bennett something about the caprice of fortune, the humiliation of academics, the dangers of political vacillation, the neglect of posterity, but Ivor has never known precisely what, or why.

Ivor knows less than Bennett about the Canaries, but he is learning, perforce. And he knows some aspects of the Canaries that Bennett does not know.

He has learned a lot over the years by typing up Bennett’s mid-life works, published in the 1970s and 1980s. When Bennett was writing them, manual and then electric typewriters were still the favoured means of home-based reproduction. But Ivor has learned a lot more about technology since then. He is fairly good, very good for his age, on the email and the internet. They are his lifeline. Bennett has tried to learn email, but he is not fond of it and tends to leave it (and everything) to Ivor.

Bennett Carpenter and Ivor Walters have made this island their home. They have invested in it. It would be hard for them to go ‘home’ to England now. The Spanish property market has crashed, and the island properties, even pleasant and remarkable properties like Bennett’s, are currently unsaleable. The English property market, in contrast, has soared, and even unpleasant properties in undesirable neighbourhoods are un-affordable. They’ll have to stick it out here. They’ve made their bed and they’ll have to lie on it, though, thank God, they’ve got room for plenty of beds and don’t have to lie together on the same kingsize mattress any more.

They have burned their boats.

Bennett’s house is, in fact, almost unnaturally beautiful, and most of the time Ivor loves it. It had been a find. He reminds himself of this, when he gets, as he does, restless. When he gets restless, he gets into his little car and drives off, as he has done now, to find a bar or a café or a beach where he can sit alone or exchange banalities with local characters or, decreasingly frequently, to solicit other kinds of contact. The last of these possibilities interests him less and less.

Ivor sometimes looks back to the happier days when he and Bennett were house-hunting on the island. Bennett’s health was already impaired, but it was extraordinary how he perked up in a hot dry climate, and Ivor had driven him around gaily, as they fantasised about their new life in the sun. They had inspected the most bizarre and improbable dwellings: modern terraced apartments banked up high on hillsides above noisy Thomson Holidays resorts, old nineteenth-century white and green and blue street houses in desolate silent spacious inland towns, fishing cottages on pebbled beaches where the pure turquoise and white breaking waves of the Atlantic washed upon the whitened doorsteps and at stormy high tides surged through into the kitchens. A ruined medieval tower of rubble filled with sheep, a bright yellow Gaudi-esque house built perilously on the shifting sands, a farmstead on a volcanic slope overlooking a vineyard and a sea of lava. They had been entertained by estate agents of various nationalities and of engaging chutzpah (it was boom-time then) and they had met householders and tenants of mysterious ethnic and social origins. They had explored building plots of windswept scrubby grey-green plastic-bag-littered goat pasture, and rocky shores, and malpaís of many descriptions.

Once, on their travels, lost on a cinder track as they circled through the swirling peaks of the black tormented tufa around the pale-brown wrinkled elephant foot of a volcano, they had seen the strangest of sights: a small, low stone cottage, all alone, planted in the midst of the waves of dark and frozen ash. It was surrounded by a low garden wall, a dry stone wall such as we know well in England, but the garden blazed with red and orange tropical blossom and sprouted with spikes of aloe and cactus and giant euphorbia. A stocky old man, naked, his broad back and shoulders towards them, was trundling a wheelbarrow full of weeds towards a small smoking bonfire. His back was the burned red brown of red clay, he was Adam, he was the first and last man in Paradise. The red sun was setting, tingeing his solid elderly ruddy flesh with its radiance. He was a sight not to be forgotten.

A fortifying sight, an augury.

Ivor had looked in vain, year after year, in a desultory fashion, for that cottage and that solitary gardener of the sinking sun, but he had never found them. They had been a mirage, a trick of the light. But the vision of the old man had encouraged him to agree to settle here. And the house, when they found it, was special. It was exceptional, it was beautiful.

A man could die even here.

The house was inland and a little upland, but with a view down towards the sea. On the small island, nowhere is far from the sea. It stood on the outskirts of an undistinguished village, near a roundabout marked by one of the playful moving sculptures created by the island’s dead gay magus, the artist César Manrique, and it was built on one storey, spreading over a series of volcanic bubbles and caverns. The irregularity of the black pitted lava and the whitewashed walls enchanted Bennett. The shapes of the house were organic, fanciful, natural, devised by the natural surrealism of the eighteenth-century volcanic eruptions. It was the perfect house for a man who struggled for breath climbing stairs. It had been designed and built to a high standard in the good years, and was complete with pool, sun terrace, palm trees, a well-planted euphorbia garden of many colours, a fish pool, a tennis court. It had a gaiety and a lightness of spirit, and it seduced them both. Water from the desalination plant on the east coast of the island poured ceaselessly, merrily, from fountains and taps and shower heads. The sea was before them, and behind them the volcanoes, and their gardens were full of the music of running water. At night the sky was bright with the stars that had guided Columbus from La Gomera towards the unknown west.

A man could die even here.

Bennett had said this line when he first saw the house and he was fond of repeating it. Ivor knew it must be a quote, but had never worked out where it came from. He kept forgetting to try to find out. He didn’t really want to know.

The house was called La Suerte, Good Fortune, and they kept the name.

Bennett liked to say that you couldn’t say the house and its grounds were in bad taste, or vulgar. Anywhere else on earth they would have been monstrously so, but here they weren’t even camp. They were part of the fantasy of the landscape. They were ahistoric. They weren’t in any kind of taste at all. They were elemental.

Bennett and Ivor were happy there, or for some years they were happy. Bennett was finishing what he said would be his last big book, a merging of cultural history and his later and enjoyably acquired scholarship of art history, and he was well enough to fly back once or twice to see his editor and his publishers and to check references and illustrations and copyright and to give diplomatic and convivial lunches to a colleague or two. The airport was hell, but the flight itself was not too taxing, and the island was in the same time zone as London, so there was no problem with jet lag. And there was Ivor, to make the bookings, to see to the bags, to cajole the women at check-in and to chat up the air stewards about extra leg room for Sir Bennett.

The island, away from the ceaselessly busy airport and the false golden sand of the tourist beaches, had a curious emptiness that was in itself soothing. The silence of noon in the unfrequented colonnaded piazzas of the small inland towns was profound. The green and blue shutters of the houses were perpetually closed, the expensive and extensive new sports grounds eerily deserted, the avenues of palms in stasis. No children played in the immaculate playgrounds. Where had all the children gone? Unnaturally long and hard shadows fell towards the evening, as in a painting by de Chirico.

After Bennett’s first slight stroke, travel was not so easy, and Ivor began to feel more apprehensive about the future. But by then they had made friends on the island, Spanish friends as well as ex-pats, and Ivor had a few younger drinking companions whom he would meet in the bars in town. Bennett did not enquire about these relationships. He was well past his jealous years. The shouting matches of the past were over.

They gave parties at the house, good parties. A Nobel Prize-winner, a distinguished and outrageous elderly actor, a few historians and other assorted academics, a notorious bridge player who had once partnered Omar Sharif, a man of the theatre who owned a de Chirico, a handful of Sunday painters – it was a very painterly landscape, though not many had done it justice – and a chorus of locals who specialised in being amusing. Convivial friends, most of them ageing but nevertheless convivial, and a few younger spirits who stuck by Ivor and looked out for him.

People liked Ivor.

When the book was published, to respectful if somewhat subdued acclaim, Ivor began to wonder how Bennett would keep himself busy for the remainder of his life. Ivor was busy looking after Bennett, but Bennett needed occupation. He was accustomed to hard work. He started to talk about possible projects in a way that made Ivor slightly uneasy. For years he had talked about writing a life of General Lyautey. He’d had the idea long ago on their first holiday visit to Morocco, but Ivor had never taken it very seriously, he’d thought of it as an after-dinner jeu d’esprit. A provocative notion: a gay biography of a right-wing gay orientalising French general written by a gay left-of-centre English Hispanist historian-turned-art-historian – surely not? But now Bennett had returned to the concept and started to talk about it again. He’d talked about it for a year or two and asked Ivor to order him up some books, but it wasn’t easy to get hold of the source material in the Canaries, and Ivor watched his old friend becoming gradually disheartened by his own incompetence, by his lack of grasp and intellectual vigour and attack. It wasn’t that his mind was going, but he’d lost his perseverance. (‘I’ve lost my alacrity’, he would sometimes say, mournfully, when down in the dumps.)

He would never get to grips with the gay general. The subject was beyond him, too big for him, and too distant. He would never be able to give a proper account of his own attraction-revulsion relationship with the swashbuckling sabre-rattling French and Spanish in Morocco, and their aesthetic cults of violence and beheadings. The Foreign Legion and Beau Geste were beyond his narrative reach. (Bennett had loved Beau Geste when he was a schoolboy, but Ivor had never read it.) He’d never be well enough to go to Morocco again. Morocco wasn’t very far away, just a short hop over the ocean, as the Berbers and the Mauritanians had found it, but it was a short hop too far for Bennett. They could go by boat, perhaps, Ivor wondered? There were passenger ferries, there were cruises. That’s what old people do these days, they go on cruises. Ivor tried to work out the possibilities, but he wasn’t happy about the Lyautey dream. Neither, he could tell, was Bennett.

Lyautey was famous, or infamous, for his passions for the handsome young soldiers under his command. Had Bennett wanted to whitewash him, to justify him? Ivor didn’t even know, as the project hadn’t got that far.

They’d been to look at his tomb in the Invalides in Paris: a pompous manly erection, where his ashes had been reinterred in 1961. De Gaulle had given a speech on the occasion. Bennett was interested in military and military-style monuments. Unamuno, Lyautey, the tomb of Franco in the extraordinary Valle de los Caídos.

They don’t erect statues to historians. Or not very often.

Ivor didn’t like to watch Bennett becoming a disappointed old man, fearing oblivion. He deserved better than that, and Ivor deserved better than that.

Bennett, Ivor knew, had felt professionally discomfited by developments in Spanish historiography, by archaeological revelations on the Spanish mainland. The recent laws on Historical Memory, on the right to excavate the mass graves and the cemeteries and the battlefields of the past, had provided an excess of new material which he would never be able to assimilate. He had gallantly welcomed the new openness, but it had made him feel lamentably out of date. A whole new generation of historians, writing both in Spanish and English, had taken over the much-disputed and still embittered field. His work wasn’t rejected or derided, it was still cited, but it was being steadily supplanted.

Somebody was even writing a book about why, allegedly, the Spanish Civil War had attracted the attention and indeed participation of so many English homosexuals. An exploration of the A. E. Housman syndrome, of the beauty of doomed youth. Bennett had refused to be interviewed for it, and Stephen Spender had (just) pre-empted an interrogation by death. He’d lived to a good age, had Stephen. (Bennett could do some wicked parodies of Housman; his party piece was Hugh Kingsmill’s ‘What, still alive at twenty-two, A clean, upstanding chap like you?’)

The next project Bennett dreamed up, after the waning of the Lyautey dream, was more manageable, more within his reach, and Ivor encouraged it, with a sense that it would fill the time pleasantly, even though the book would never be written. It would give their excursions an illusion of purpose, and Bennett loved to have a purpose.

Bennett had decided to write a short, scholarly but popular history of the Canaries. There was surprisingly little in English or even in Spanish about this volcanic group of small islands sitting in the Atlantic, not far off the North African shore: a mirror image of the Galapagos, which they had visited in the days before it was considered an ecological crime to go there. The Canaries, the Isles of the Blessed. The history of the islands was short and at the same time mysterious. Bennett believed, or pretended to believe, that the millions (yes, literally millions) of English-speaking visitors who poured in and out each year would welcome some reading matter more stimulating than the tedious selection of magazines and mass-market English and German paperbacks available in the mini-markets. There were some guidebooks on sale, but they were very basic. There were one or two little books on Canarian food and on Canarian flora and on the history of the indigenous and intriguing Guanches of Tenerife, but they consisted more of captioned pictures than of text. The best guides written in English were by an intrepid British walker, who advised on climbing volcanoes, crossing dunes and barrancos and lava pans, finding casitas and goat tracks and avoiding dogs, but even he didn’t offer much historical information. Bennett thought he could fill a gap.

The Canaries were now a peaceful backwater. Their peoples weren’t obsessed, as so many on the mainland still were, by tales of revenge and violent death, by family vendettas, by the executions and defenestrations of yesteryear. They weren’t even very interested in independence, although you could occasionally spot graffiti demanding ‘Españoles Fuera’ or ‘Viva Canarias Libre’ or ‘Canarias no es España’. There had been betrayals and dispossessions, but they had been small in scale. The Canaries did not swim with spilt blood. Their dried mummies were very ancient and very dry.

Bennett has accumulated a pile of cuttings and jottings, but he hasn’t yet got much further than typing out a beautiful epigraph from his fellow historian Gibbon, who had never visited the islands, though he had written feelingly about them in an essay entitled ‘On the Position of the Meridional Line’:

A remote and hospitable land has often been praised above its merits by the gratitude of storm-beaten mariners. But the real scene of the Canaries affords, like the rest of the world, a mixture of good and evil, nay even of indigenous ills and foreign improvements. Yet, in sober truth, the small islands of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans may be esteemed as some of the most agreeable spots on the globe. The sky is serene, the air is pure and salubrious: the meridian heat of the sun is tempered by the sea-breeze: the groves and vallies, at least in the Canaries, are enlivened by the melody of their native birds, and a new climate may be found, at every step, from the shore to the summit, of a mountainous ascent.

Gibbon made the islands sound very agreeable, as indeed they are, but Ivor suspected that very few tourists would be at all interested in purchasing a history of them. They were not great readers, the visitors. They preferred sunbathing and football on pub TV. They would not care about Plato and Plutarch and Atlantis and King Juba II and Juba’s physician Euphorbius, after whom the ubiquitous and various Canarian plant was named. (King Juba had married, according to Bennett, the daughter of Antony and Cleopatra, which to Ivor seemed surprising and unlikely: what kind of woman could she have been, this Roman-Egyptian queen, which parent did she favour, what kind of colour was she?) The surfboarders from Norway and Uruguay would not wish to learn about the Roman general Sertorius, ally of Marius and Cinna and adversary of the bloody Sulla, who had attempted to set up a Utopian colony on Tenerife. They would be even less interested in William Wordsworth, who had once planned to write an epic poem about Sertorius and the small, peaceful, dwindling band of his followers who had hung on in the islands until the Norman invasion. They would not want to read about the disputed ethnic origins of the doomed (but genetically surviving) Guanches, or to speculate about how they had got there in the first place. They would not share Bennett’s curious fixation with the fact that by the Middle Ages the inhabitants of the seven islands had lost the art of navigation.

They must have had ships once, or they couldn’t have got there, could they?

(Unless, suggested Ivor, they had been dumped: and it turned out that this was indeed one more than plausible historical hypothesis. Ivor wasn’t very well educated but he was good at lateral thinking.)

Ivor could see that it was rather odd that when the Portuguese and the Normans and the Genoese rediscovered the Canaries in the fourteenth century, they encountered separate populations on each of the seven islands, all speaking different languages, and with no means of getting from one island to another, even though some of them could see their neighbours and wave to them, if they felt like it, over the water. As in the Galapagos, evolution had taken its own course.

The seven islands: El Hierro, La Gomera, Gran Canaria, La Palma, Tenerife, Lanzarote, Fuerteventura – separated both by water and by language.

Bennett seemed gripped by what Ivor considered a childish or perhaps senile fascination with this aspect of island history. It was his King Charles’s Head. It had replaced the gay Lyautey as an obsession. It was, Ivor thought, connected with his pleasurable memories of swimming. Bennett had, until very recently, been a keen swimmer, ever eager to leap into any tempting stretch of water. Ivor, who was not so keen on the indignities and discomforts of getting wet, had watched his friend practising his slow and stately breaststroke in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean and the Pacific, in the Red Sea and the Black Sea and the North Sea, in the Danube and the Rhine and the Rhône, in the Thames and the Barle and the Windrush. He had seen him ploughing up and down the homoerotic blue lengths of hotel swimming pools in Los Angeles and Toronto and Melbourne and Rio de Janeiro. He had seen him jump into green and murky shallow ponds in the English counties and into unlikely and deeply anti-erotic algae-covered waterholes in the Midwest. Bennett still enjoyed their well-maintained turquoise pool at La Suerte, although he was less eager these days to attempt even the milder island bays of the Atlantic. He’d lost his footing and been knocked down by a wave on the curving beach at the little fishing port of Arrieta late one morning and that had put him off swimming in the sea.

But Bennett remained fascinated by the fact that the indigenous Canarians, in the Middle Ages, didn’t build boats and didn’t swim and didn’t trade from island to island and didn’t speak a common language. In Ivor’s view, he was excessively fascinated by this. Ivor didn’t think of himself as an intellectual, but he did wonder in a Freudian kind of way why Bennett found this so interesting.

It was interesting, of course, and the handsome lads from Senegal who propositioned tourist ladies to buy handbags these days, were, physically, very attractive.

God knows how they got here, but they did.

The survival of the fittest.

These days, would-be immigrants from the mainland of Africa were frequently wrecked off the eastern shores of the islands. Young men, young women, children. The chancers. Some drowned; some made it to the detention centres; some survived to sell excellent fake handbags, until they were moved on or deported. One of them, one fortunate one plucked from the thousands, had been taken under the wing of a friend of theirs, the friend with the de Chirico, the friend with a chequered past and an eye for art, and he lived with him in comparative splendour in his rocky sardine fortress on the neighbouring island of Fuerteventura.

Most of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century immigrants could not swim. They trusted themselves to the leaking vessels, but had never learned to swim. Bennett was unduly fascinated by this.

Ivor was finding it hard to work out whether or not Bennett was, to put it bluntly, losing his wits.

Bennett’s reaction to the news of Sara Sidiqi’s sudden and at first inexplicable death had been very odd. He hadn’t seemed to take it in at all, or not in any way that we would now call ‘appropriate’. He didn’t want to know about it. The subject of her death was not at first admitted as part of his conversational range. Yet, earlier, he’d appeared to follow in detail the whole complicated story about the Western Saharan protest at the airport, had spoken to the press about it, had signed the letter to El País, had seemed quite chuffed to be summoned to appear on one of the local TV stations with their Nobel Prize friend to talk about the hunger strike and Sahrawi nationalism. He’d been more than happy to give his views on Namarome to Sara, and to invoke the name of his late acquaintance, the novelist and useful public intellectual José Saramago. Saramago would certainly have stood up for independence of the Western Sahara.

And Bennett had really taken to Christopher Stubbs.

Ivor had been taken with Christopher too. He had seen some kind of gleam of hope, of escape, of unexpected support, or at least of temporary relief, in Christopher Stubbs, and that was why he was sitting on the balcony of the bar waiting, on his way to drive to greet him on his return.

They’d met, the four of them, only once or twice, in Sara and Christopher’s short and dramatically curtailed stay on the island: Christopher had been given Bennett’s name as a useful contact by a college friend he knew in the Foreign Office, and when Christopher rang La Suerte, it was of course Ivor who picked up the phone. (Bennett wasn’t deaf, but he liked to pretend he was, and, although garrulous in person, he hated the phone.) Hospitable drinks at the magical black-and-white volcanic house had followed, and some briefing of Sara on local politics by Bennett, on local facilities and personalities by Ivor. They had all got on well: Ivor and Bennett were pleased with the influx of new young blood. They were cheered by the apparition of two handsome and healthy young people still in mid-career, still working, not yet tottering on the verge of retirement. They were impressed by Sara’s even younger research team and her Libyan cameraman. They were all staying in comfort at the big César Manrique-styled hotel in Costa Teguise.

The foursome had spent Sara’s last evening together, the evening before she was taken ill. They’d had dinner, at Bennett’s recommendation, in the last old-fashioned fish restaurant right down by the almost abandoned rusting old port, a far cry from the developed strand and promenade of the new resort. Las Caletas still preserved an unfashionable dark Spanish wooden gloom, with plastic-sealed wooden-framed salt-stained casement windows jutting out and overlooking the waves. It had a history. It had seen the boats sail out.

It served, amongst other marine delicacies, limpets. They were plucked, living, straight from the public rocks of the cove below. Sara had never eaten limpets. They were horrible, warned Ivor, tough and leathery like whelks, worse than whelks, but she had wanted to order them, for fun: they looked so like little volcanoes, she pointed out, little ridged volcanoes, they echoed the strange conical shapes of the landscape, she had to try them. She’d never seen them on a menu before, she’d never have another chance.

Ivor was to wish that he hadn’t remembered that she had said that.

Sara was a confident quick-witted young woman, in the prime of life, full of vitality, with a handsomely curved strong fleshly nose and a wide clear brown brow and well-defined, well-arched eyebrows and long lashes and richly springing black hair tied back with a yellow scarf. She wore a décolleté heart-scooped white T-shirt.

She had been much amused by the louchely infantile hand-painted ceramic gender signs on the wooden slatted doors of the restaurant’s primitive Servicios: a cherubic little boy standing and pissing into a chamber pot decorated with dolphins, the handsome back and bare bum of a woman with her skirts hoisted over a floral bucket. She’d photographed the signs, discreetly, on her mobile.

Christopher, after a bottle of wine, had talked a little (but not too much) about his own career. He had made a name for himself as a presenter and co-producer of an arts programme, but had fallen out with his company and his employers and was looking for another niche. He said he was in the process of setting up his own production company. Ivor claimed to have seen him on screen, but Christopher thought Ivor was being polite.

Ivor wasn’t sure whether he was being polite or not. Christopher did look and sound familiar, with his boldly balding bronzed head, his heavily framed tinted glasses (which he kept on throughout the darkened meal), his expensively coarse-fibred red-and-yellow striped-and-blocked shirt, his confident yes-it’s-me manner and his cultivated East London (or possibly Essex?) proletarian accent. He looked like somebody one might well recognise. But so did so many people.

Bennett took to Christopher, regardless of whether Christopher would be of any use to them or not. He found him amusing. He egged him on to talk about television rivalries and programmes about Francis Bacon and David Hockney and William Tillyer and Joe Tilson (it seemed Christopher as a programmer and presenter had favoured the visual arts), and volunteered, though without any attempt to expand vaingloriously on the detail, that he had known some of these people. ‘Your shirt’s a bit Joe Tilson’, he interjected at one point, a remark which delighted Christopher. Christopher in turn was more than willing to cede to Sir Bennett’s authority and seniority, to demonstrate that he knew his work and had even read some of it. He made gracious enquiring allusions to Goya and Lorca and Unamuno and Picasso and Tàpies, while confessing a little disingenuously that Spain was not his thing.

Ivor was pleased by these interchanges. It always pleased him when Bennett received fitting and ego-calming recognition. And he was relieved that Bennett seemed to be responding ‘appropriately’ (that odd word again, so often these days in his thoughts) to Christopher’s anecdotes.

Old age veers towards the inappropriate.

Bennett, on form as he was that night, was very amusing. He was a good mimic (his Hockney was excellent, though Hockney was a soft target) and he made them all laugh.

And to Sara, Bennett also responded well. He liked her style, Ivor could see. He was on the ball and gallant and eager to be helpful. He suggested locations, he spoke (but not too much) about his little project for an islands history. He recommended the monumental Museo del Emigrante, which told the other side of the emigration-immigration story, and he found she already knew about that, though she hadn’t yet had time to go there. She should try to get to Tenerife and La Laguna, she should see the mysterious pyramids praised by Thor Heyerdahl, and she must certainly go across to Fuerteventura – less than half an hour on the ferry, amazing to think that the indigenous peoples over so many centuries had never built a boat. She ought to see the cemetery at Gran Tarajal on Fuerteventura, described by its mayor as the graveyard of Africa. Not on the tourist route, obviously, but well worth a visit from your point of view, said Bennett.

A memorable location, and on television its silent dead would speak.

Ivor was sometimes surprised by what Bennett remembered. He was sure he would have forgotten their visit to the dull and quiet little town of Gran Tarajal, with its walled cemetery on the hillside and the plain marble plaques recording the nameless dead. It was some years ago now, and Bennett still remembers.

DEP Immigrante 12.12.2001

DEP Immigrante 11.7.2002

DEP Immigrante 6.7.2002

Ivor wonders how many more deaths will by now have been recorded and added to the roll call that they saw.

Descanse en Paz.

Rest in Peace

Ivor found that phrase deeply touching. Sometimes he longed to rest in peace, and reflected, not without bitterness, that he wouldn’t have merited much more than these nameless ones by way of an inscription of his exploits.

He saw all the nameless dead as handsome young Senegalese and Mauritanians.

Who, he wondered, would deck Ivor’s monument with little vases of weatherproof, unnatural artificial dark orange and purple roses? Who would push Uncle Ivor’s wheelchair when the time came? Who would write his obituary?

Christopher and Ivor and Bennett had discovered, as they gossiped in Las Caletas, that they had an acquaintance in common, a friend less bland and more surprising than the man in the Foreign Office who had originally suggested Bennett as a contact. The name of Simon Aguilera had once been notorious and was still newsworthy, although he had long ago taken refuge in peaceful unadventurous Fuerteventura, in flight from the publicity and hostility that had pursued him ever since the scandal that had undone him, and in search, like Bennett, of a calm dry climate.

In search of redemption and eternal peace.

Son of a once-admired Spanish Republican émigré intellectual, the precocious and many-gifted Aguilera had made his name very young in the avant-garde theatre in Paris in the 1960s, an enfant terrible, and had seemed set for every kind of success. But he had been undermined by the creeping revisionism that had slowly destroyed his father’s reputation (what exactly had happened, and to whom, and at whose prompting, in 1936 in Alicante?) and then had undone himself utterly by killing his wife. It had been an international cause célèbre. He’d got off lightly because the French are soft on crimes passionnels, or so the British press had been pleased to comment.

But he had killed her, for all that. With an axe.

Knowing a murderer was a bond, more of a bond than being acquainted with a middle-ranking diplomat from a minor public school.

Christopher had met Simon Aguilera in London at a show of Contemporary Italian Art at Christie’s, where they had fallen into conversation before a de Chirico that Simon was intending to buy. Simon had recognised Christopher from his TV show (always flattering) and they had adjourned to a nearby fish restaurant for one of those lunches that prolong themselves, over the second bottle, into the afternoon. They had told each other much, and forgotten most of what they had told. Only the flavour of the conversation remained, along with the flavour of the oysters and the turbot poached in Pernod. This had been before the days of Sara, and they had not kept closely in touch since then, although they had exchanged an occasional message about auction prices and false attributions in sales rooms.

Christopher had not mentioned him to Sara before this visit. He had felt uneasy about the murdered wife.

But the three of them had spoken well of Simon Aguilera and his exploits, at Las Caletas, over the bite-resistant rubbery garlic-reinforced limpets. (‘Quite like snails,’ Sara had commented, ‘but not as nice.’) Sara had listened with interest, without an air of judgment. Simon had recently adopted a Senegalese immigrant, Sara should go and speak to him, he’s very photogenic, said Bennett with his louche old-world chuckle.

But Sara hadn’t had time to go across the narrow strait to Fuerteventura. She’d intended to go there, she’d had a contact in the Red Cross at Puerto del Rosario, who was eager to speak to her about the protection of immigrant minors. She’d done her research. It’s a pity it will all have been wasted.

Ivor Walters sits on the balcony in the evening sun, waiting for Christopher, who is flying back from London to Arrecife even now. He will be here in an hour or so. The chartered planes are in a perpetual peaceful descending and ascending convoy, bringing hither and taking hence. In one of these Christopher would soon be listening to the landing instructions. In five minutes, Ivor will rejoin his car and drive to the airport to meet him, to collect him and take him back to La Suerte and Bennett and an evening meal.

Distances are small and manageable on the island. It’s easy to time journeys to the airport.

When Christopher disembarks, he will no longer see the woman from the Western Sahara sitting on her carpet in the departure lounge, for she has been transferred to a hospital on the Spanish mainland, and is recuperating, to fight again another day. Her vigil, at least for now, is over. They will be pumping liquids into her, reviving her.

Ivor wonders what will happen to Sara’s prestige project. It will probably never be made. It will die with Sara. The Libyan cameraman had managed to record Sara briefly interviewing Namarome, but would that sequence ever reach mainstream television? Now Sara was gone, nobody in the English-speaking world apart from a few Arabists and human rights professionals would be interested in it or try to push it through. There was one Labour MP in an outer London constituency who bangs on about it, but nobody takes him very seriously. It will be stored, as everything these days is stored, in case history changes its mind, but it won’t reach out. Even if Namarome dies, it won’t reach out. It would take more than one death in the Western Sahara to interest the Western media, when so much of the rest of North Africa, further to the east, is brewing up a different and worse kind of turmoil. The Western Sahara is a dull and empty quarter, when you compare it with Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran or Egypt, which are in the process of fomenting greater and greater cataclysms and atrocities and migrations on a scale that will make the Canarian voyages seem tame and domestic. These new waves of migration will obsess the media and ruin and rescue lives for years, perhaps decades, perhaps a century to come. Images of flight and desperation comparable to and perhaps in time exceeding those of the Second World War will fill our screens, but Sara is dead and will never see them, although perhaps Ivor and Christopher sense the dark flood that approaches.

Immigrants arriving by boat to the Canaries from Africa will remain a story, with a tourist perspective, but the British are very wary of it. They will be more concerned with the siege of Calais, with the Syrians at the gate, with babies drowned on the shores of the isles of Greece.

But for now, in the present, Ivor is looking forward, perhaps too much and unwisely, to seeing Christopher Stubbs again and to renewing their acquaintance. Christopher is going to stay with them at La Suerte, while he sorts out the health insurance difficulties and winds up one or two other matters to do with car rentals and local suppliers left unresolved on their sudden departure. Ivor and Bennett have offered hospitality and succour and Christopher had been surprisingly keen to accept them. Ivor had wondered if the island would hold too bad a memory for him, but he seemed to have had a very different reaction to the prospect of his return. He wanted to revisit, to expunge or exorcise.

Maybe Christopher’s relationship with Sara had not been all that it seemed. Ivor had caught a glance or two, even in the surreptitiously smoky murk of Las Caletas. Maybe Sara had been a bit too much of a challenge.

Christopher has an ex-wife somewhere, and children. His relationship with Sara had not been unencumbered.

It is true, as Ivor had encouragingly and truthfully pointed out to Christopher in various friendly emails, that life on Lanzarote was, in most ways, astonishingly stress-free. Good weather, good roads, reasonable food, as yet reasonably stable euros, great calm. No politics, no beggars, nothing of extremity. Nothing much going on at all, really. It was a good place to recuperate from emotional shock.

A man could die even here.

Sara had nearly died here, but she had gone home to die.

Ivor wonders whether he also will go home to die. Who will push Uncle Ivor’s wheelchair?

Christopher, Ivor fancied or fantasised, had responded to Ivor’s friendliness in a friendly way.

Ivor can tell that Bennett too is pleased at the prospect of having someone new and so much younger to talk to for a few days. He had been speaking with some excitement about the things he was going to show Christopher, the people he’d like him to meet, as though unaware that their guest might not be in sightseeing or party mood.

Bennett is bored with Ivor’s unfailingly reliable, dutiful and high-minded devotion, and with the geriatric round of occasionally peevish neighbours that composes most of their social life. Sometimes he breaks out in an ominous burst of anger against Ivor, shouting that he hadn’t meant to spend his whole life stuck with him, that he didn’t want to die at the mercy of someone who’d been battening on him for fifty years.

Feeble, volcanic old man’s eruptions, followed by the great cool spent peace of the wide evening sky.

Ivor sometimes thinks he feels the spirit of the Lord watching over him on this island. It’s probably a trick of the light, or of the landscape. He has started, secretly, to visit the plain silent unfrequented little white chapel on the hillside, where he kneels down and prays. His prayers don’t have any words. No one is ever there, but the chapel is never locked.

Bennett, the old-style rationalist-atheist-humanist intellectual, wouldn’t approve of that at all. Ivor doesn’t really know why he’s doing it, but it is a solace. It takes him into another dimension of living and dying, it uplifts him. It may be a false solace, but there’s more truth in it than in the endless discussions about doctors, diets, symptoms and medications, about dwindling royalties and bad reviews by old enemies, about the menace of e-books and the demise of booksellers and the new historiography.