They dined. The cheese had quickened her palate, and despite the nature of this occasion, which might have cast rather a pall over matters, Kay was hungry. The whipped potatoes were better with that extra double cream. The sausages had a nice crust without having burnt, and the hearted cabbage with butter and shards of sea salt was still bright with a slight crunch. In fact, all the colours were heightened—in candlelight, Cyril’s face framed by the bookcase looked like a Rembrandt—as if she had taken tablets of a very different sort than the kind in the fridge.
So this was life without consequences. She’d have expected to have to gird herself, to make promises inside her head (Come on, spit it out, this is your last chance to come clean!), to at least need to take a breath, but the confession came out effortlessly over a second sausage. “I’ve meant to tell you something for a while now, my dear,” Kay said, sawing off a crispy end piece. “I voted Leave.”
Cyril’s cutlery froze. “Is this a joke?”
Kay laughed. “In a way. What’s not a joke now? Darling, I’m positively wounded if you can’t finally find it funny. And amidst the chloroforming of the entire UK during a global pandemic, I am astonished—perhaps even impressed—that you still care. Goodness, all your dire warnings about how Brexit was ‘committing economic suicide.’ Now the UK is committing real economic suicide by putting a ‘Gone Fishing’ sign on the whole flipping country. Continuing to hyperventilate over whether a few goats can scamper unimpeded across the Northern Irish border seems incongruous to say the least.”
“But the referendum seemed to matter monumentally in 2016. What in God’s name got into you?”
“Something impish. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing at the polling station. I simply marked the X in a different box. The whole experience was terribly refreshing, like a tall drink of water on a hot day.”
“You threw your country’s future in the toilet on a whim?”
“My dear, we don’t want to get into a row tonight of all nights. It wasn’t a whim precisely. I did it because I knew I wasn’t supposed to. Sometimes I wonder how well you know me after all. I don’t like being told what to do. Including by you. Maybe especially by you.” But she made these assertions lightly.
“Our countless conversations . . .” His expression gave human form to the “recalibrating!” declaration of their GPS when you took a turn in defiance of its officious instructions. “I always assumed you were testing our arguments the better to strengthen them. Playing devil’s advocate.”
“Honestly, I’ve long found those haughty, patronizing bureaucrats in Brussels hard to take. They’re the same authoritarian sort who’ve imposed all these bossy stay-at-home orders.”
“So all along this household has had a fifth column.” He looked gutted.
“Yes, and all those insults you pitched at the ‘ignorant bigots’ and ‘pathetic Little Englanders’ you were hurling at me!” she said gleefully. “But I’m truly fascinated that right up to the brink you’re still holding onto your umbrage over Brexit.”
“First I discover that more than half my compatriots are self-destructive, small-minded louts. Next I discover that they’re also sheep—‘freeborn Englishmen’ who will accept indefinite house arrest without a bleat of protest. Who blindly embrace as gospel the wild, unfounded forecasts of one maverick, historically alarmist epidemiologist at our alma mater, because after all this time they apparently still don’t know how to use the internet on their own. Maybe it’s easier to leave behind a country I no longer recognize.”
“And a wife you no longer recognize?”
He reached to clasp her hand across the half-eaten mash; she’d made too much. “Nothing makes that easy, bab,” he said, and his eyes filmed.
All day, Kay had been lifted by a peculiar floating sensation, as if she were drifting two or three inches above the floor, the way a hovercraft glides across the waves without touching water. This giddiness and detachment and lack of seriousness were dreadfully inappropriate considering, as if the guiding principle for all their major decisions for decades were merely a fanciful leg-pull. As she sipped the last of the champagne, this feeling of fizzy levitation intermingled with the refreshing spritz of bubbles on her nose, but the buzz wasn’t from the wine; she felt as if she were the champagne, rising into the air, pip, pip, pip. This whole evening, she should have been consumed with dread and anxiety, and instead she couldn’t remember a night in recent memory when she and her husband had had a better time.
“You know, after all the threats of disaster from the IMF, the CBI, and the Bank of England?” she mused, rising to open a pricey bottle of cabernet that she was damned if she’d leave for Roy. “I’m a bit disappointed that now I’ll never learn whether leaving the EU turns out to be a calamity after all. Since we’re still in the ‘transition period,’ the first results won’t be in until next year. And now this coronavirus deep freeze introduces such a confound that the separate impact of Brexit may never be known. For that matter, I’m also intensely disappointed not to be able to see to the other side of this pandemic. Will millions die? Will the world economy implode into a dog-eat-dog depression? Why, we still don’t even know whether Boris will make it.” Boris had just tested positive, along with the Minister of Health and Prince Charles.
“That buffoon biting the dust could be one of the only good things to come out of this disease.”
“Now, you don’t really mean that.”
“Of course I do,” Cyril said irritably.
“Oh, never mind Boris. My point is—well, I find it surprisingly easy to stop caring about what happens—that is, I can readily let go of my attachment to a particular outcome—but I find it infernally difficult to stop being interested. I feel as if I’m in the middle of so many stories, and suddenly it’s time to return all these unfinished novels to the library. Doesn’t it bother you that now you’ll never find out whether Donald Trump is re-elected?”
“Not especially,” Cyril said. “Trump’s not our problem. And if that charlatan does keep squatting in the White House, maybe I’m better off spared the news. Besides, something’s bound to be up in the air, whenever one bows out.”
“Sorry. Even amidst the end of the world—ours anyway—needs must!”
Kissing Cyril’s top knuckle and giving his palm a squeeze, Kay slipped off to the loo—within whose privacy she felt a surge of the same last-minute fickleness, fecklessness, mischief, and caprice that had drawn her hand to the “wrong” box on the ballot paper in 2016. She was suddenly sorry she hadn’t smashed that plate when the peculiar urge had been upon her, if only as an expression of the very agency that Cyril expected them to exercise before the night was through. As an efficacious substitute for shouting Opa! and pitching her wedding china against a wall, she withdrew her phone from her pocket and tapped the messages icon. There was no guarantee that the gesture would be availing, but Cyril had claimed that they were making a “calculated gamble,” and in the spirit of a poker game Kay was introducing a wild card.
This moment of impulsivity came at a cost, for when she returned to the table the saturated colours of the tableaux had coarsened from Rembrandt to Hockney.
“We were talking about Trump!” she recommenced with a renewed zestfulness, returning her serviette to her lap and recharging both wine glasses. “I might rather know what happens to the git. In fact, I’d like to get to the last chapter of all manner of stories. Will the coronavirus peak and subside like any old bog-standard outbreak, or is civilization as we know it finished? Will the European migration crisis resume? Will the UK’s potentially ruinous commitment to ‘carbon neutrality’ by 2050 make the slightest difference to climate change? Will the climate change after all, but quite differently than we imagine? And what is it that will surely happen in the next twenty years—doubtless something terrible—which no one today has even thought about?”
Cyril regarded her with a new wariness. This every-day making-conversation was surely disconcerting. It was getting late. Sombre
summary pronouncements about two lives well lived and a long, loving marriage would have seemed more suitable than cant about climate change.
“Shall we clear up?” Kay proposed.
“Why on earth?”
“We always clear up.”
“Tonight is the end of always.”
She arose and carried the leftover bangers to the counter beside the fridge. “It wouldn’t do to let this food spoil.”
“Why not? Who’s going to eat it?”
“Well, maybe one of the children—”
“One of the children is going to discover both parents overdosed on Seconal and then scavenge the fridge for potatoes?”
“Probably not Hayley, she’s too theatrical,” Kay conceded. “But Simon is very practical—even if he’s become a bit snobbish for leftovers—and Roy is always hungry.”
“You’re forgetting about two large pieces of meat which are bound to go off,” Cyril said brutally, “and spoil any visitor’s appetite.”
“Yes, I was wondering about that,” Kay said, sealing cling film over the cabbage. “How long do you think it will take for anyone to notice we’re not out and about? Especially with all this ‘social distancing’ and ‘shielding’? Because I took on a design job once where an old man had died, and they’d only found him after a neighbour complained to the council about the reek. The smell lingered interminably, and halved the property’s market value.”
“So? We barely own this house any more. It’s mortgaged to the hilt.”
“But I do worry about giving one of the children a fright. It seems inconsiderate. Hayley would claim to have PTSD for the rest of her life. So I wonder if we might pop to the post box across the road and drop an advisory note to the police.”
“After privatization, Royal Mail’s got so rubbish, not to mention the Met after all those Tory cuts. When Hayley and Simon can’t rouse us on the phone, one of them will drop by, or contact the authorities themselves. I doubt a note would work any faster than leaving it to chance.”
“Oh, you’re probably right.” Kay collected the plates and slotted them into the dishwasher. “I know it seems silly to tidy up. But I like order, and I like our regular ritual, and I don’t want to spend my last night on earth surrounded by grot.”
This was an explanation Cyril seemed to accept. He put away the mustard and, as he’d always done, wiped down the counters.
“Port and crumble?” she proposed once the kitchen was spotless. As Cyril fetched the bottle, she glanced at the clock. It was already ten fifty-five p.m.—the literal eleventh hour—and she had a feeling that her husband would be a stickler about the exact conclusion of her eightieth birthday. Even arguing for an extra hour after having been cheated by the clocks’ changing wouldn’t likely wash; it would introduce the same possibility of infinite delay as last year’s pushing back of the EU withdrawal date.
When they retired to the sitting room, Kay’s mood sank. She might have prepared the meal that afternoon in a meditative swoon, but she’d been inattentive. The crumble topping was slightly burnt, the apples were overcooked, and she really should have forced herself to whisk up the custard from scratch. This poor showing was destined to be her last pudding ever? And granted, their daughter lived conveniently nearby in Borough. But Hayley did sometimes make a fashionable gesture of independence from the screen, Kay recalled morosely, and turned off her phone for days.
Kay’s printed-out directions for their memorial service were arrayed on the coffee table, along with a flash drive with the digital files for the family’s convenience. But so much for liking order; the papers looked neat, but their contents were a shambles. She’d listed well too many musical selections, and before dinner had even scribbled “Dock of the Bay” onto the hard copy, as if twenty-three songs needed a twenty-fourth. When she’d tried to trim her farewell address, she kept thinking of indispensable additions, and the document had grown only more bloated. In kind, when she’d tried to soften the chiding self-righteousness of the essay to accompany the order of service, she merely managed to sound condescending (we’re responsible, but it’s too much to ask for you to be responsible). Besides, when Cyril had finally got round to writing his own farewell, he refused to be “sentimental” and instead pontificated about the same costs to the NHS, the looming “economically unsustainable support ratio,” and the “burden on younger taxpayers” that she’d cited in her own essay, so the compositions were redundant. Worst of all, during the coronavirus lockdown, which could prospectively last for months, funerals were restricted to a handful of mourners spaced two metres apart. No one would sing anything or read anything or even be there, and the couple would be cremated as carelessly as this crumble.
Alas, whilst she was fretting over the disappointing pudding with its lacklustre commercial custard, Kay’s motions became so jagged that she knocked over her port glass, splashing fortified wine onto the printouts and using up three or four minutes of the twenty-eight that apparently remained of her entire life on mopping up the spill. Port had also splattered her lovely white dress. Although she didn’t want to waste even more time changing clothes, being found covered in ruby stains seemed déclassé.
Cyril fetched her a refill, but when he returned with a tray it also held a pitcher of water and two tumblers. He set the tray in the middle of the coffee table with the stern priestly air of serving communion.
“It’s taken me ages to realize that I still don’t understand what this is,” Kay blithered. “I mean, it’s difficult to quit something when you’ve no idea what you’re quitting. I may be eighty, and perhaps that really is as much time as I deserve, but I still can’t get my head round what it means to be alive in the first place, much less what it means to die. I don’t know what this place is, I don’t know whether it’s even real, much less whatever it was we were supposed to do here, and if I’ve wasted my time I still can’t tell you what I should have done instead. I’ve no more idea what matters than I did when I was five. I keep having this feeling that there was something I was supposed to come to grips with, and there’s not much chance of my grasping the nettle in”—she checked her watch again—“fourteen minutes!”
Cyril had just launched into some Jonathan Livingston Seagull-style pap about only being able truly to understand what you have once you’re in the process of losing it when the front door banged open and slammed. Hayley burst into the sitting room. Kay couldn’t stop herself thinking what a pity it was that at only forty-eight their daughter had grown awfully dumpy. She’d been just a slip of a thing at university.
“Mum!” Hayley knelt and took her mother’s face in both hands. She was wearing a kooky homemade mask whose fabric was incongruously covered in smiley faces. “Look at me! Have you taken anything? Tell me, quick, whilst you still can, if you’ve taken something, what is it?”
In their daughter’s clutch, Kay could just catch Cyril’s face in the corner of her eye. His expression communicated in an instant that he could indeed distinguish between a mere difference of opinion on a political matter and full-on personal betrayal. He had never in their marriage shot her a look that cutting. “You told her.”
“Sweetheart, please stop slapping my cheeks like that,” Kay implored over sirens wah-oo-wha-oo-wha-ooing terribly close to this house. “I’m quite awake, we’re both fine, and no one has consumed anything untoward, unless you count an underwhelming crumble.” Just then she wished that she had indeed popped upstairs to change, because the splattered white dress conveyed the very derangement that Cyril’s scheme was designed to avoid.
Impatient pounding sounded on the front door.
“Whoever’s that?” Kay said.
“Who do you think, Mum?” Hayley said. “I obviously rang nine-nine-nine!”
“Emergency services!” More pounding. “Open up!”
Kay realized that she was still foolishly clutching the stem of her port glass, which with all Hayley’s patting and shaking had spilled yet more fortified wine on her dress. When she
reached to put it on the coffee table, a sharp, excruciating pain in her right shoulder was another reminder of the corruption that Cyril would have spared her. As she attempted to scurry to the door, just rising from the sofa was slow going, and one didn’t “scurry” with arthritic toes. Hayley hurried ahead to let in the ambulance crew.
“We got a call-in about an attempted suicide?” a male voice boomed.
“My mum claims she hasn’t taken anything,” Hayley said, “but I’m not sure I believe her.”
When Kay arrived in the foyer covered in port, which they might have mistaken for blood, she didn’t make for a very credible witness when she protested again that neither she nor her spouse had imbibed anything more poisonous than watery Sainsbury’s custard. There was a hullabaloo about pumping her stomach anyway or at least taking her to hospital for observation.
“Hayley, it’s true I was having second thoughts, and on balance I’m glad to see you,” Kay said. “But we needn’t trouble these fine paramedics, who must have far more urgent situations to attend to during a national emergency. I don’t want all this fuss!”
“Madam,” one of the medics said through his mask and from behind a Perspex facial shield, in a tone that denoted anything but respect. They were both wearing not only blue surgical gloves, but full-body protective suits, as if en route to outer space. “Can you please inform us if the household contains any firearms?”
“Of course we weren’t planning to use a gun,” Kay dismissed. “What a messy business that would be.”
“Mum, if you’re telling the truth about not having taken anything yet, then where’s the bottle? Where are the tablets?”
“I’m not sure I prefer to tell you,” Kay said stiffly. “I might care to stick around a bit longer, but it’s our business if we—”
“Mum!” Hayley violently shook her mother’s shoulders; this scene would surely satisfy the girl’s keen appetite for high drama for weeks. “Where are the tablets?”
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