Finally Cyril slapped his iPad shut. “Listen. You’ve been fretting about that service for weeks on end. I fear you may have forgotten one salient detail: we’re not going to be there.”
* * *
On the evening of December twelfth, the Wilkinsons ate on the early side and hurried the washing up. Switching on the telly, Cyril settled himself in his regular armchair with a ceremonial bottle of ale and a festive bowl of barbecue-flavoured peanuts. “Even if it’s a hung parliament after all,” he announced with relish, “Labour and the SNP will have more than enough MPs to form a government, and that, as for Brexit, is that.”
At ten p.m. on BBC One, the familiar chimes of Westminster tolled the hour. Sitting before an older picture of Big Ben without the scaffolding, the presenter gravely announced the results of the corporation’s widely trusted exit poll: the Tories would win an eighty-seat majority.
The blood drained from Cyril’s face. His posture collapsed and his limbs went slack. He looked his age and then some. The fact that his bottle was filled with bitter seemed horribly apt.
For the immediate future was a foregone conclusion. There would be no second referendum. Every Tory candidate had pledged to support Boris’s tweaked withdrawal bill, which would now sail through Parliament like one of the crumbling building’s many bats. The United Kingdom would depart the European Union at eleven p.m. on the thirty-first of January. There would be no further delays, and no appeal. The Remainers had lost. Kay was minded to take the eerie finality of the moment as an omen. There was such a thing as a deadline, a hard-and-fast deadline, a deadline that truly came due.
After that night, Cyril was lifeless. His dependency on the seemingly ceaseless political drama had bordered on chemical. Kay was reminded of the film Awakenings, in which comatose patients were given a drug that made them walk and talk like real people again, until the drug wore off. For Cyril, as of the worst result for Labour since 1935, the drug had worn off.
* * *
The UK left the European Union at the end of January with little fanfare. When the prime minister addressed the nation that evening, major broadcasters including the BBC refused to carry the speech in full. There was some boisterous flag-waving around Parliament Square, though the poor revellers weren’t even allowed to drink. Relieved to see the back of the whole business, Kay was already disconcerted why membership of a trading bloc had ever seemed worth fighting over. The whole country seemed to be sheepishly recovering from a feral childhood tantrum. On both sides, everyone acted slightly embarrassed to have got quite so purple-faced over who got to play with the stuffed bunny.
On the heels of the devastating general election, Kay had worried that Cyril would arrive at her red-letter birthday on March twenty-ninth irretrievably unravelled. But as the first two months of 2020 inexorably advanced, he progressed from dismal, to pensive, to elegiac. Maybe it was for the best that his crusading high had subsided. He had used the diversion of Brexit to avoid thinking about their own exit—Cyrexit, if you will; Kayexit—and to approach such a Gethsemane without pause for contemplation would have reflected poorly on his intellect.
Understandably distracted by the imminence of making good on a suicide pact, Kay was slower than most Britons to pick up on murmurs about some illness in China. She paid the business no mind at first; taking care not to blight her last winter on earth by lying febrile and abed, she’d had her flu shot in the autumn. As infections began to spread, to Seattle, to Lombardy, they seemed to have nothing to do with her, even when the WHO declared a pandemic. Surging and subsiding across the globe all her life, communicable disease constituted yet one more travail in the conduct of human affairs that she would soon gladly leave to others.
Up against a stark final reckoning, Kay had zero interest in going anywhere further away than Waitrose—making her wonder whether their previous beaverings to foreign destinations had been diversionary, and if so, a trip to Malta had been diversion from what? Yet her less introspective compatriots continued to rush hither and yon, so it was inevitable that this highly contagious pathogen would eventually pop up in the United Kingdom. Indeed, on the first of March, the Today programme cited that the number of confirmed cases in Britain was five. On the second of March, the same presenter announced there were thirty-six.
Three days thereafter, the first British fatality was declared. By the eighth of March, the fatalities had risen to three. While the Wilkinsons theoretically regretted anyone’s demise, the couple had more pressing matters to ponder. What had the sum total of their lives come to? Had they left anyone in their extended family or social circle feeling injured or neglected, and might amends be made before it was too late? And hold on a minute: was this pact of theirs flagrantly barking?
Yet if the spouses were unperturbed by three British fatalities and under three hundred cases, the rest of the world seemed to care a great deal. At the beginning of the second week of March, something unpleasant happened to the London stock market. Luckily for Kay and Cyril, the big advantage of having no more money was perfect imperviousness to its loss.
During the same week that the FTSE crashed, at the beginning of which the Wilkinsons had exactly twenty-one days to go before lights out, Kay received her first social cancellation. That Thursday, she and Glenda had planned to hit Borough Market to score some early wild garlic, meander to the Tate Modern, dander across the Millennium Bridge, pop into St Paul’s, and saunter along the Strand to end up at The Ivy in Covent Garden for a well-earned fish supper. It was an engaging route they’d traced before. But on that Wednesday, when the Bank of England lowered its baseline interest rate from almost nothing to as-good-as-nothing and total UK deaths from so-called COVID-19 had reached eleven, Glenda begged off. Kay burst into tears.
“Sweetheart, why ever are you taking such a minor disappointment so hard?” Glenda puzzled. “It’s just, this coronavirus does seem to have it in for us oldies, and Boris is discouraging us from socializing. I’m not a nervous Nellie, but staying put does seem sensible. We can reconvene when the excitement subsides and enjoy our outing twice as much for the wait. The weather will have improved as well.”
“But how long do you think it will take for the ‘excitement to subside’?” Kay whimpered.
“Oh, heaven knows. A few weeks? Goodness, a fortnight or two of Amazon Prime Video? You’ll hardly die.”
At that point, Kay grew inconsolable.
Within a day or two (as the FTSE plunged again in its giddiest drop since 1987—what a joy to have liquidated all those shares), every appointment Kay had meticulously scheduled for their final month, including benedictory evenings with all three children, was also cancelled. Friends and family alike backed off for the couple’s own good, because anyone over seventy needed to be “shielded” from a disease whose fatalities had an average age of over eighty—leading Cyril to remark, “I have to say, that virus has good demographic taste.”
“Maybe we needn’t touch that black box in the fridge after all,” Kay said, the direct mention so rare that it felt risqué. “We can simply run out in the road on my birthday and inhale.”
“Now, given our circumstances,” Cyril said from behind her at the kitchen sink, “why in heaven’s name do you keep manically washing your hands?”
“Oh.” Kay had already begun a mental rendition of the happy birthday song, which Boris had urged all Britons to sing to themselves twice before concluding this vital hygienic prophylaxis. But Cyril was right. Avoiding fatal infection in order to commit suicide was inconsistent to say the least.
“I suppose it’s all those adverts on the telly,” Kay said with a wan smile, drying her hands. “Propaganda works.”
Cyril had been laconic and inward for months. The coronavirus didn’t altogether alter that demeanour. But he spent all day online on his iPad, and the energy that emanated from his hunched figure had changed frequency. It hummed in a higher register. However poorly timed any spanking new enthusiasm, the contagion was right up his street.
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br /> The following week, Boris gently discouraged his countrymen from dining in restaurants and going to the theatre. The pound dropped to its lowest level against the dollar since 1985. It was announced that all schools would shut by that Friday. The Bank of England lowered its baseline rate once more, this time from as-good-as-nothing to no-longer-pretending-to-be-anything-but-nothing. To widespread popular horror, the BBC stopped filming EastEnders.
The whole experience was dizzying. Over the course of a mere ten days, the entire political and cultural landscape transformed, as if someone had pressed fast-forward on the country’s remote. News presenters ceased utterly to mention the word “Brexit,” which overnight was no more likely to arise in everyday conversation than “suit of armour” or “mead.” In a final gesture of dividing the old era from the new, as if loudly lowering a rattling metal shutter between the gritty present and all the fluff and whimsy of the past, Boris U-turned on the cajoling and brought down the hammer. Pubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, and restaurants would close—indeed, all “inessential” businesses. Addressing the nation, the prime minister announced that every Briton was ordered to stay home, unless they were fulfilling four specific purposes and only these purposes. The wholesale lockdown entailed the most extravagant curtailment of British civil liberties since the Second World War, during which, if Kay and Cyril weren’t mistaken, it had still been legal to walk out your own front door.
“So I’m to spend the last six days of my life under house arrest,” Kay said, after turning off the PM’s address. “I have to confess I feel resentful. It isn’t merely having all those dinners cancelled, our last opportunities to say goodbye, even to our own children. I feel sidelined. Diminished. As if the climactic conclusion of our lives has been summarily overshadowed and trivialized. With all those numbers on the news every night, who’s going to notice if two more elderly Britons snuff it?”
Not having roused from his regular armchair, Cyril was scowling into his hands and didn’t respond.
“And it’s irrational, but I feel oddly left out,” she continued. “Such a snowballing cataclysm, or so it would seem, reminds me, a bit painfully I’m afraid, of the extraordinary degree to which the world will carry on without us . . . Are you going to say anything? We don’t have much time left to say anything at all to each other.”
Cyril announced cryptically, “It’s disproportionate.”
“What is?”
“This shut-down. I’ve studied the data. That weedy, doom-mongering computer modeller at Imperial College London who predicted five hundred and ten thousand British deaths without draconian intervention—he has his head up his backside. The ponce may have Boris in his thrall, but Neil Ferguson has overestimated the lethality of this virus by at least an order of magnitude. And there has to be a reason we’ve never before responded to contagion by closing down the entire country: because it’s not a good idea.”
* * *
At least their final week would be tranquil. Traffic was sparse. Birdsong dominated the garden. Aeroplanes seldom scarred the sky.
When Kay discussed the details of their Last Supper, Cyril was kind enough to take an interest in the menu. “I love your bangers and mash,” he said, with the tinge of sorrow that had coloured his discourse for days. “Let’s have that.”
An easy request to fulfil, you would think. Yet Kay returned from her first trip to Sainsbury’s empty-handed. “It was like Venezuela, or the Soviet Union,” she told her husband in bewilderment. “All the shelves bare, fresh food and non-perishables alike. Everyone’s gone mental. As if it’s the end of days. I wanted to scream, You don’t understand! My husband and I really are facing the end of our days—this very weekend!” Fortunately, by that Friday, special shopping hours for the elderly were installed between seven and nine a.m.—during which the supermarket was jam-packed. As a crowning testimony to the gentrification of what was once a dodgy, down-at-the-heel neighbourhood, by seven-twenty a.m. the shop was already stripped clean of penne and pesto. But Kay was at least able to get her mitts on a packet of sausages.
Weaving in and out of sleep that final Sunday morning was so delectable that they didn’t arise until noon, and then with reluctance. Being eighty years old was nothing like she had imagined many years ago. Various bits hurt, but otherwise she did not feel appreciably different now than when she was ten. As of the week before, it was officially spring, and for once the weather was cooperating with the conceit. Parting the bedroom drapes to let in the sun, she noted that the middle edges of the maroon velvet were light-bleached. So entrenched was the custom of planning for the future that she reflexively vowed to replace the drapes with more modern blinds—in canary yellow, she determined. Budding camellias in the back garden glistened; wings of butterflies flashed. Kay felt almost mocked.
“Happy birthday,” Cyril said, nuzzling her neck with only his shirt on.
“Will it be?” she wondered aloud.
“At least we haven’t to worry about the kids clamouring to help celebrate your eightieth,” Cyril said. “If they did throw you a birthday bash, they could be arrested.”
“You know, the clocks changed to summertime last night. We’ve lost an hour.” Horribly, it was not noon, but already one p.m. “That doesn’t seem fair, does it? Of all the days to be cheated.”
“You never really ‘lose’ an hour, any more than you ‘gain’ one in the autumn. Time is constant. It can’t be borrowed or gifted.”
“Pedant,” Kay said affectionately.
Cooking that afternoon achieved an ecclesiastical aspect. It was not a chore. Kay was sorry when all the potatoes were peeled. The tubers seemed harder and rounder and more resonant under a blade than ever before; the Bramley apples for their crumble also seemed crisper, tarter, and somehow more forcefully in the world, insistent on taking up their rightful space on the cutting board, pushing back against her knife. The smell of butter and cinnamon from the topping was heavenly. The menu was deliberately “ordinary,” for it transpired that all along they’d not dined on Cumberland sausages and hearted cabbage for the sake of their budget, but because that was what they’d both grown up eating and that was what they liked. Truth be told, she’d never really fancied smoked salmon.
Hayley and Simon rang to wish her a “safe” birthday—safety having been mysteriously elevated of late to the highest of virtues. She hadn’t the heart to tell them that, despite the government’s good intentions, remaining “shielded” behind closed doors with her own husband was the most dangerous thing she could have done today. Both children seemed consternated when she kept them too long on the phone. Later they’d understand and be grateful, but in the moment their mother would have seemed clingy. Roy didn’t ring, and perhaps in due course that would cost him. Or not.
Taking a break late afternoon, she sat on one of the patio chairs that Cyril had brought from the tool shed and wrapped herself in her favourite grey woolly jumper, for the air was still sharp. The sun had held and the light had goldened. She did not read The Week. How rarely she registered that sitting, looking, and thinking were activities in and of themselves, and rewarding activities at that. Cyril came out also and cupped her shoulders from behind, as they both beheld the azaleas, just coming into leaf.
They hailed from a generation still given wedding china. Laying out the elegant plates, with plain cream centres, solid emerald borders, and a glint of silver on the rims, Kay was pleased that she’d had the good taste in her youth to choose a simple pattern of which they would never tire. They should have used the good china more often, if not every day. They owned a service for twelve, and she had a sudden urge to smash one of the surplus plates like a heedless Greek, purely because she could. She didn’t, but the notion was bracing.
“What is it?” she asked casually, pressing fresh candles into the holders, though the old ones still had five inches left to burn. “What’s in the black box, exactly?”
“Quinalbarbitone,” he said just as casually. “Aka Seconal. You remember,
it was that insomnia medication taken off the market because of the dangers of overdosing.”
“Is it painful?”
“Certainly not. Fatigue, a spot of dizziness or blurred vision. It’s very quiet.”
In the sitting room, Kay put on one of the 1960s playlists she’d located whilst planning their memorial service, turned down to a level low enough for them to talk. They partook of pre-prandial sherry, again dry Amontillado with a twist of lime, along with two strong cheeses and savoury biscuits so thin that they didn’t crack but shatter. They could gorge themselves silly tonight without fear of getting fatter, but Kay inclined instead towards nibbling the tiniest smears of Ardrahan on the corner of a biscuit, then popping a single pea-sized Niçoise olive and sucking the pit.
“Oh, I love this song,” she said when Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” came on, and she sang along. Cyril joined in; he should never have quit that choir, with such fine pitch. The simple melodic line was so infectious that she hopped up to play the song a second time. They danced on the reprise. Ridiculously, on her eightieth birthday, she felt like a girl. Her swaying floor-length dress was a virginal white: the variety of garb in which women were both married and laid out. She’d done a good job on the sitting room, she concluded as the trailing-orchid wallpaper swirled about her. Those not-quite-matching end tables were just right.
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