Fran’s First Thoughts

Imagine: you are a woman “well-turned seventy,” white, British, living alone and independently in London. You are divorced and widowed, in that order. A mother of two. You are in good health, solidly middle-class, and employed by a charitable trust that supports research on housing for the elderly. Your name is Francesca Stubbs (such a glamorous name, but you’re actually known as Fran) and you are the primary fictional character in Margaret Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises, a novel about ageing set in England after the turn of the millennium and published in 2016. The novel opens with your point of view, offering us your frame of mind – your thoughts and feelings, your restlessness, your apprehensiveness about ageing, all delivered in a kind of stream of consciousness steadied by the author’s unobtrusive omniscience.

Here you are, driving by yourself (you do many things by yourself, and you like to drive). Off to a conference outside of London. To what do your thoughts turn? The first two paragraphs of The Dark Flood Rises are devoted to your musing – perhaps fixating would be a more accurate word – on the different forms your death might take. There are three.

One: you imagine you’re driving too fast and crash head-on into a tree. Or that the furnace in your flat, not having been properly maintained, has sparked a lethal fire in which you are engulfed. This kind of death is both brutally accidental and satisfyingly expeditious. We accord special meaning to a person’s final words by virtue of their being last. What are Fran’s last words? “You bloody old fool,” Fran thinks, addressing herself. Or stronger, “you fucking idiot,” bluntly indicting herself as the cause of her imprudent death, internalizing responsibility for what is an accident (1).