The Dark Flood Rises. Margaret Drabble

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.