Cyril ripped the last bread roll savagely. “Fury is a tonic.”
“I’m simply saying . . . You’re so fully engaged now . . . So determined to personally help reverse this thing . . . Whose consequences you’re not even expecting to suffer . . .”
“Out with it, wench.”
“It’s just—you don’t seem like a man who’s anywhere near ready to let life go!”
“Well! I suppose I’m not, quite. As you said, we’ve a whole year left, God willing, and I intend to put it to good use. I aim for us to go to our maker after having helped safely restore this country to the good graces of the European Union—that alliance being one of the greatest historical achievements of the Western world. Speaking of which, I’ve assessed our finances, and we’ve undershot our spending goals a bit. So I made a sizable donation to the People’s Vote campaign. We’ll still have enough left over to cover basic expenses for the next twelve months.”
Finally the waitress arrived—with no bread—and sloshed the whole last half of their cabernet carelessly into their glasses, perhaps in the hopes that the doddering old dears would forgetfully drink up, and order another bottle.
Obligingly, Cyril picked up his glass and toasted. “Happy birthday, bab. Must say, it’s nice to be able to celebrate two cheerful events in one, the birth of your fine self and an extension of Article Fifty.”
“It has been peculiar hearing broadcasters make incessant reference to ‘March twenty-ninth.’ As if Radio Four has been planning my surprise party.”
“Mark my words, this is the beginning of the end for those Leaver louts.” Once again sounding far younger than eighty, Cyril was so lively tonight that maybe they would order that second bottle. Well. Or at least a port.
“Do you ever consider,” Kay inserted slyly, “moving our own Leave date? Perhaps just a smidgeon? By and large, our health seems to be holding, and neither of us has stashed the towels in the oven.”
“Now, that’s dangerous talk, bab. Apostasy!” He was joking, and not.
Cyril was right. It was indeed dangerous talk—just as he was also right that the purportedly hard-and-fast date for Brexit having been deferred at the last minute was prospectively fatal for the whole enterprise. As soon as you put off what is writ in stone, it is writ in water. During the whole post-referendum omnishambles, something about the prime minister’s hectoring insistence that “Brexit means Brexit,” an empty assertion echoed by the pressure group Leave Means Leave, had reminded Kay of her husband’s implicit and equally intransigent motto, Eighty means eighty. For over the last couple of years, Theresa May’s incessant repetition of her monotonous mantra had subtly backfired. Self-evident like all tautologies, the slogan had introduced an element of insecurity that, as last week’s EU deferral to the twelfth of April demonstrated, was well founded. Since Brexit meaning Brexit should have gone without saying, yet did not go without saying—could not go without saying all the time—perhaps Brexit didn’t mean Brexit after all. Thus today’s non-event introduced a ray of hope that Kay’s personal departure date could also be forestalled. Even one delay would throw the whole proposition up for renegotiation, because then Cyril’s uncompromising base-ten deadline (a piquant term in this case) would be breached. For what was bound to happen before April twelfth? Article 50 would be extended again. By inference, if Cyril’s arbitrary cut-off ever shifted by so much as a day or two, eighty could become eighty-one could become ninety-three and a half. That’s why the Leave camp was so crushed today, and why, irrespective of her political propinquities, Kay was rather uplifted. What can be postponed once can be postponed indefinitely.
Kay’s salmon was dry, and in compensation she ordered that port. In fact, she ordered two, and at eleven twenty-five p.m. the invisible old fogies in the corner banquette closed the joint. After all, Cyril had called her tentative proposal to stick around just a smidgeon longer “apostasy.” So assuming that she didn’t tragically stumble from being so tipsy on the walk home, this was the only remaining birthday that she was guaranteed to live all the way through.
* * *
To say that the following year went by quickly would be an understatement.
Kay was well aware that despite the rejuvenating effects of Remainer indignation her husband was playing up his physical infirmities. His back gave him legitimate grief, but he was the one who’d refused the surgery. He often left his hearing aids out on purpose, because making his wife repeat, “Do you want another piece of toast?” four times made his company seem more geriatric. Believe it or not, he was still fairly spry. (How curious, that by convention an adjective meaning “agile” applies exclusively to old people. She’d looked it up once, and the strict dictionary definition had nothing whatsoever to do with the unfeasible leaping about of the decrepit.) Yet he deliberately slumped when he read, deliberately fell behind when they walked along the pavement, and deliberately vocalized moments of discomfort with groans and cries of dismay, although after stubbing his toe as a younger man he’d been stoic. He sometimes requested that one of the children give him a hand doing chores like stashing the outdoor furniture in the tool shed in the autumn that he was perfectly capable of dispatching by himself.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So stiff did Kay’s upper lip become that it was doubtful she could use a straw. In truth, her right shoulder had developed a fierce pain whenever she raised her arm higher than about forty-five degrees, but she merely popped discreet overdoses of ibuprofen when Cyril wasn’t looking. She was constantly tortured by nocturnal leg cramps, which she walked off in silence after slipping from the bedclothes without waking her husband. Her joints and spine made a cacophony of sinister noises, although the internal snap, crackle, and pop wasn’t that audible to other people, and she let the advert for Rice Krispies broadcast its continuous loop without remark. The arthritis in her toes, of all places, had become so agonizing that a Sunday walk along the South Bank had become more grim discipline than refreshing jaunt, and she’d taken to lingering over a coffee at her turnaround, the better not to admit to Cyril that she’d cut her former distance in half. She concealed her GP’s consternating verdict of high blood pressure from her husband, disguising the medication in a bottle that once held antacids. So whilst suffering the same insults to her physical person as anyone else on the cusp of eighty, to all appearances Kay Wilkinson was a model of functionality. (She was spry.) She refused to present herself to her murderous husband as a high-mileage, petrol-sucking jalopy in need of so many replacement parts that, rather than maintain the old girl, it was cheaper to throw the clunker on the scrap heap and buy a new car.
As the months flew by, she grew ever more dissociated. The split into two Kays now seemed perpetual, and she was wont to watch herself from a long way off, as if she were practising for being dead. It is commonplace to stare blankly into the refrigerator in mystification over whatever you’re looking for, but Kay didn’t stare blankly but fixedly, as she knew full well what she was looking for: the black soap-dish box in the back left-hand corner, which never accumulated the bits of food the other containers did, leading her to wonder if Cyril was reverently wiping it down when she was away at the shops. The rectangle seemed to peer back at her with a hint of smugness: such a small object, yet more powerful than its owners, whom it was poised to annihilate in . . . 184 days? No, the countdown was relentless: it was already 183.
The panic was now unabating. Was a documentary about loss of biodiversity in the Amazon really worth purchasing with the precious currency of her life, when she wasn’t going to be around to mourn the extinction of the white-cheeked spider monkey? Probably not. Although even at her advanced age Kay had still been taking on small interior design jobs, mostly for friends, she abruptly bowed out of doing over Glenda’s ground floor halfway through, at some cost to the friendship, owing to a sudden, frantic impatience amidst deciding on knobs-versus-rails for the drawers of the new kitchen island. Was determining whether the fixtures should be sl
eekly modern or hint at the Victorian really the way she wanted to spend her final year on this earth? No, no, no. Yet once any given activity was interrogated with sufficient rigour, no pursuit could pass the test. The answer to which activities were truly worth her time was absolutely none.
Meanwhile, Cyril threw himself into the campaign for a second referendum, leafleting and banging out diatribes on the social media he used to decry as background noise. He helped organize a petition by the British Medical Association protesting prospective restrictions or tariffs on drugs imported from Europe and the dangers this could pose for NHS patients. His further donations to the People’s Vote campaign pinched their budget even if they were only eking through next March, obliging Kay to economize during a period they ought sensibly to have been loading up on smoked salmon, quails’ eggs, and cognac. He conceived an outsize loathing for Boris Johnson, whom he’d always dismissed as a dishevelled, lightweight chancer and whom Cyril elevated, once the tousled pro-Leave Tory became prime minister, to a diabolical, double-dealing demagogue (alliteration itself being a signature Boris-ism). Cyril joined still another People’s Vote march to Parliament Square that October, dubiously vaunted as one million protesters strong.
In tandem, Kay had grown so apathetic about the unending legislative impasse that she couldn’t be bothered to get her head round some nonsense about parliamentary “prorogation” that was or was not “judiciable” and was or was not “unlawful,” which for some reason wasn’t the same thing as “illegal”; for pity’s sake, in comparison deciding on kitchen fixtures was positively riveting. The spectacle of her husband throwing body and soul into a reversal of that stupid referendum bewildered her. For Kay and Cyril Wilkinson, whether the UK remained a member of the EU—or NATO, or the UN, or the Commonwealth—was perfectly on a par with whether the country entered the Eurovision Song Contest. In a handful of months, they were planning to commit suicide, at which point there would be no EU, NATO, UN, or Commonwealth, and no song contest. There would be no UK. There would also be no magpies, no skies blue or otherwise, no quails’ eggs, no paperclips, no best friends with their noses out of joint, no cyberspace, no wellingtons, no household dust mites, no £6 discount coupons from Tesco if you spend £40 by 7/11/19, no scalp eczema, no elusive concepts like “populism,” no such colour as “burnt orange,” no words like “louche” whose definition she’d never quite pinned down, no emotion called “ebullience”—and not just the word for it but the very feeling of explosive joyfulness would exist no more. There would be no “supranational institutions”—not the names of them, not the overpaid, supercilious salarymen who ran them, not the ideas of them, not their acronyms or their unaudited finances. There would be no democracies and no parliaments, prorogued or unprorogued. In sum, there would be no Kay and Cyril, and therefore all these scraps that combined to form their perceived universe would vanish. She had the impression that Cyril didn’t exactly get it.
To the best of her ability, Kay finally concluded that for her husband the country’s death struggle over Brexit, of all things, was a priceless distraction from his own struggle. He was like their most feckless grandson, who locked himself in his bedroom playing video games when he should have been writing his essay on Wuthering Heights. At once, Cyril clung to the political crisis as a stand-in for all that in a short time hence he had vowed to give up: the arbitrary, transitory, irrational passions of the human world. She’d been exasperated by his lack of historical perspective (England as a nation had lasted for a thousand years and had been an EU member for only forty-six of them), but it was obvious that the last thing Cyril wanted was a sense of perspective. Brexit was intoxicating for its very status as a mania of the moment. The imbroglio had become his anchor to the present, which he gripped blindly like a lamppost in a gale. To “let go,” as she put it on her seventy-ninth, of what currently so absorbed their neighbours was also to let go of everything else. He cared so much because the divisive issue of the day, which could very well appear negligible in fifty years’ time if not in two or three, had come to represent caring itself.
Pointedly at first, that autumn Kay started planning their joint memorial service. Because Cyril wasn’t the only one desperate for a source of attachment, the project soon became all-consuming. She combed through volumes of poetry, especially responding to the verses she’d been required to memorize at school—Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving? . . . It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for—though the extraneous name “Margaret” might confuse congregants, and the poem’s theme was a shade morose. She listened tirelessly to Spotify playlists from the late 1950s and early ’60s, when she and Cyril had come of age and married—Roy Orbison, Shirley Bassey, the Everly Brothers, Tommy Bruce and the Bruisers—and sometimes the silliest numbers like “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” could move her to nostalgic tears. She paged methodically through a C of E hymnal, as more traditional churchgoers might appreciate respectfully sombre selections. Perusing the vast collection of family photographs that Hayley had kindly digitized, she searched for a suitable pic to put on the cover of the programme, and perhaps also to enlarge and prop on an easel before the altar. She was torn over whether to use a shot that included the children or a more romantic one of just the two of them. There was also the question of whether to use a recent (meaning depressing) likeness or an earlier photograph that captured their comely youth. (On the day they closed on the house in Lambeth, Cyril looked so triumphant holding the title aloft on the front steps. With a pang, she recognized the stylish frock with an off-centre, check-shaped collar that she had barely got away with wearing when four months pregnant with Hayley. Whatever happened to that dress?) She listed the order of service on an Excel spreadsheet, noting where the next-to-youngest granddaughter might serenade the loss of her grandparents, yet also display her budding prowess on the viola.
Kay spent hours on end composing her farewell from beyond the grave, mindful not to leave anyone out, and therefore writing a personalized passage addressed not only to all three children and their partners, but to each of the five grandchildren, her surviving cousins, her brother Percy and his husband, Percy’s estranged children and his ex-wife, and Kay’s four closest friends—then, worried that Charlotte might take offence, making that the five closest.
Then she set about drafting an explanation for why she and Cyril had chosen to take their own lives whilst still of sound mind and body, trying to do justice to her husband’s reasoning that in order to exercise agency over one’s own old age one had to sacrifice a small bit that “wasn’t rubbish.” She submitted that Western society seemed to promote longevity at any cost, whereas a shorter life vibrant to its very end was surely more desirable than blighting a fine and fruitful existence with protracted decay. She wrote about her father, and how painful it had been for his memory to be overwritten by a violent, paranoid lunatic, and she reminisced about her mother’s gentler deterioration that had still turned a sensitive, intelligent woman into a vacuous, killingly polite guest at an eternal tea party. She went on at length about the NHS, researching the statistics online and laying out for their friends and family what a terrible burden the escalating number of frail, elderly patients was placing on a health service to which she and Cyril had devoted most of their working lives.
Alas, as enriching as the composition of these texts proved for her personally, by the time she finished the valedictory it ran to thirty-one pages, which took (she timed it) ninety-two minutes to deliver, and that was before a single musical interlude or vaulting prayer. The exegesis of their motives for the bulletin also grew as extensive as a small book, and the printing costs alone would be exorbitant; she was reluctant to saddle the kids with stiff expenses, especially after they discovered that the better part of their parents’ “estate” had already been liquidated and that, beyond those token trusts for the grandchildren, there would be no inheritance. Worse, on rereading the treatise, she realized that her
message could be misconstrued as a castigation of anyone who chose to endure beyond eighty as short-sighted and selfish. The essay seemed intent on making the “old-old” feel literally guilty for living. She sounded hectoring, unfeeling, and fanatical. Only in a few wistful asides did her tone strike notes of sincerity.
At least one advantage to an early exit was that they could probably fill out a reputable number of pews in St Mark’s. Their friends weren’t all dead. They had loads of extended family. Many grateful patients would remember their long-serving GP. Kay still received Christmas cards from osteoporosis sufferers and patients with thyroid imbalances whose medication she’d managed at St Thomas’. Then there were all the satisfied customers whose lives she had brightened with sprightly new window treatments. She could ask the members of Cyril’s old men’s choir and the chatty fellow homeowners at their local residency association. For that matter, Cyril had made any number of new contacts through the People’s Vote campaign. All told, compiling the invitation list—which would save the children such a headache, especially since she was helpfully including postal and email addresses—was gratifying. The couple had led full, useful lives.
Kay might have found the project engrossing, but getting Cyril to participate in the design of their memorial service was like pulling teeth—especially once Parliament finally acceded to a general election on the twelfth of December, and anything that didn’t concern defeating Boris and his imbecilic Leaver henchmen couldn’t hold her husband’s interest for two minutes. “Just tell me,” she prodded him. “Do you like Lonnie Donegan’s ‘I Wanna Go Home’ for a processional, or would you prefer ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’ by the Drifters?” Cyril continued to bang away feverishly on Twitter, under whose soothing influence he’d grown convinced that not only was Boris headed for an ignominious loss of seats, but that Labour had a serious chance of attaining a proper majority. “And I was wondering whether it’s too much of a stretch to invite our old dentist,” she added. “I don’t have his home address, but I imagine his former practice would forward a memorial announcement.” Still no response. “Also, I’m sorry to nag, but it simply won’t do for me to say goodbye to the whole family, and then for you not to leave behind so much as a fare-thee-well. You know the children would be hurt. So when do you think you can get around to drafting something? It needn’t be exceedingly long, but it does need to be personal—”
Should We Stay or Should We Go Page 5