That right shoulder was now screaming in such pain that it might have been dislocated; if only to make her daughter stop, Kay capitulated. “In the fridge. A black box, top shelf, back left.”
Hayley returned from the kitchen glaring and empty-handed. “It’s not there.”
“Then ask Cyril. He’s the master of ceremonies.”
“You mean Dad is the homicidal maniac, from the sound of it!” Hayley exclaimed. “Another Dr Kevorkian! Or Harold Shipman! He’s obviously brainwashed you into going along with one of his blinkered, fanatical socialist fixations! This whole nonsense is so like him I could be sick!”
Yet when they returned to the sitting room, Cyril had vanished. So had one of the tumblers. It was a large house, much larger than the couple needed with the children gone, and by the time they finally located his body in the tool shed, it was too late.
* * *
In the immediate aftermath, Kay couldn’t bear cooking for herself, and when the casserole from the Samsons ran out she actually ate most of the leftover bangers and mash—which kept quite well, as the cream in the potatoes had been fresh. But she didn’t have the option of a long, inert bereavement, because their savings were shot, and her pension couldn’t cover the massive remortgage. By mid-May, property transactions were allowed again, and moving house was a useful distraction—although Roy was most unpleasant about the sale, whose proceeds he’d been counting on to finance a protracted dissolution after his parents’ passing. Disposing of most of their things was painful at first but a relief in the end, and shifting into an efficient one-bed flat in Kennington allowed for meeting the divorcee next-door—who on hearing the story of her widowhood (a story she might have deployed with a trace of manipulation; it made her interesting) declared appealingly, “I’m not sure what impresses me more: him going through with it, or you not.” To her own surprise even more than the children’s, she took up with Ellis within the year, because at their age an extended courtship was a long walk on a short pier. The new relationship was neither better nor worse but different; you couldn’t replicate a long-standing marriage of fifty-seven years, but Ellis was less, as the kids said, “controlling,” and let her take the lead, even when she made the radical proposition that they knock down the wall between their flats. Her high blood pressure became more challenging to manage pharmaceutically when it began to alternate erratically with low blood pressure, but she learnt to have a lie-down when she felt faint, and one of the liberations of age was not having to worry about the underlying reasons some system of your body was on the fritz, because if that didn’t go wrong then something else would. The right shoulder grew worse, but she got surgery, which was largely, if not altogether, a success. The toes were a more enduring torture, but it turned out that those mobility scooters were a right laugh, and she and Ellis conducted races down the halls of their tower block, becoming even peskier tearaways than the youngsters on trick bikes in the car park. Attempting to make a light at Elephant and Castle one afternoon—witnesses tsked that the pedestrian signal had long before turned red, but Kay on her scooter had become a proper daredevil—she chanced her arm once too often and was sent spinning into a lamppost by an archetypal White Van Man. The end wasn’t “quiet,” as Cyril had once promised, but it was quick. She was ninety-two.
3
White Van Man Redux
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.
Yet, thumbs poised, she remembered how Hayley herself had expressed exasperation with her mother’s marital passivity during the girl’s childhood. The two had conducted fruitful heart-to-hearts about the fact that, as a member of the dismally christened Silent Generation, Kay hadn’t been gifted with the self-respect that women Hayley’s age took for granted. It was thanks to her daughter’s encouragement that she’d stood up to Cyril when she wanted to enrol in that degree course at Kingston. (Her husband had considered it a dereliction of duty to retire from the NHS at fifty-five, and strenuously urged that she stick out ten more years. He’d dismissed interior design as “frivolous.” It had been quite a showdown.) Tonight, placing her fate in the hands of fortune—effectively tossing a note in a bottle into the cybersea, on the off chance that a passing beachcomber picked it up—was no more dignified than leaving the decision entirely to her husband. After all, what punchy slogan won the referendum for Leave? Take back control.
“Now, listen here,” Kay said back at the table, pushing the cork back in the unfinished bottle of cabernet and giving the stopper an extra party’s-over shove for good measure. “This evening has been great fun in its way, but it’s also a complete nonsense, and I’m calling time.”
“Sorry. What are you on about?”
People often employ incomprehension not as a means to clarify what you did say, but as a demand that you say something else. “This is a charade and a ridiculous charade at that. This pantomime of ours is made all the more daft by the pandemic. Here we are playing at poison-pill-popping, whilst the world outside our front door is battened down in terror that they’ll all get sick and die. Supposedly this dismal lockdown is expressly to protect the so-called vulnerable, meaning old people just like us. Ignoring younger people’s sacrifices on our behalf and popping our clogs on purpose—well, it seems ungrateful. It would be one thing if we were in agony, or were facing the lingering horrors of a terminal diagnosis, or had turned into gibbering idiots like my father—”
“In which case, we wouldn’t have the mental wherewithal—”
“Yes, yes, Catch-22, but we’re not demented. I misplace keys or have trouble remembering who wrote The Go-Between, but I had the same lapses in my twenties. We’ve our share of aches and pains, but nothing that merits suicide, for heaven’s sake. Which is dreadfully hard on survivors, even if the deceased are long in the tooth. This isn’t fair on the children. It isn’t fair on us, either. It certainly isn’t fair on me.”
“We both made a commitment. No one forced you.”
“You had an idea, and I went along with it. As usual.”
“Not that again.”
“I love you dearly, but you can be bossy.”
“And you can be reactive. Which isn’t any more independent-minded than slavish obedience. You made it damnably clear that you voted Leave to spite me.”
“Are you ever going to let that go? Because for once we’re talking about something more important than Brexit. I’ve no idea what happens after you die, but the odds are frightfully high that nothing does. The sole upside to death is the end of suffering, but we’re not suffering—or at least our incidental suffering can’t compare to the grievous kind that you and I so often witnessed in the NHS. You characterized this plan of yours as a gamble. Look at the two bets we could place in terms of the cold statistical logic of a professional high-roller, then. One wager would win—maybe win only a bit, maybe a great deal: more wine, more buttered crumpets, more pretty sunsets, along with watching our two youngest grandchildren grow up and the odd mediocre mini-series. Like those scratch cards that guarantee that you’ll always win something, if only a quid or two. What’s the other wager? Lose, full stop—lose everything, our whole stake. Win something, or lose the lot? As the kids say, duh.”
“You’ve no idea what we might end up paying for a few more sunsets—”
> “This was never a realistic proposal,” she cut him off, whisking the corked wine to the counter, “and I’m sorry I went along with it as long as I did. There’s something childish about it, and one of us has to go back to being a grown-up. I’ve no plans to overdose tonight on anything more deadly than a burnt crumble.” Kay collected the plates, suppressing a wince from her shoulder.
“And I thought for once in our lives we might get out of washing up,” Cyril quipped. It was his idea of lightening the mood.
“I don’t mind washing up,” Kay said, putting the cutlery in the dishwasher tines up, though Cyril always pointed them down. “I find it satisfying. That’s part of what this whole business is about, isn’t it? I enjoy life more than you do. That’s especially been the case since you retired. I think you’ve resented the fact that I went on to have a whole second career, in which I’ve distinguished myself and had a delightful time. Meanwhile, you’ve glowered over your Guardian and constantly looked at the clock—in the hopes that yet another burdensome hour will have been dispatched. So you contrived this levelling exercise, whereby I get dragged down to your negativity and nihilism.”
“That’s neither kind nor true,” Cyril objected. “When I proposed our private final solution, I was full-time at the clinic, where I worked for another, what, thirteen years. You were still at St Thomas’, with no second career at that time for me to, quote, ‘resent.’ Your uncharitable explanation for my motives is sheer fabrication, and not very well thought through.”
“I don’t even care. Because you know what? I’m enjoying expressing myself and saying whatever I like. Even having this argument beats hands down swooning on the sofa in ‘fatigue’ whilst I begin to experience ‘blurred vision.’ I don’t even mind saying things that aren’t true or aren’t nice so long as I get to say something. I may never have appreciated it before: talking, simply talking, is a joy.”
“Are you making this summary decision for the two of us? Because working myself up to this moment has taken years of concentration, contemplation, and resolve.”
“Yes, I believe that,” she said. “This morbid project of yours has substituted for doing something more positive. I may have done the cooking, but tonight was supposed to be your crowning act of creation. A passion play of bravery and nobility. But real bravery and nobility entail losing everything you love by degrees like everyone else, and taking what comes like everyone else, and dying when you least expect it and when you don’t want to, like everyone else.”
“I can’t remember when you were last such a chatterbox.”
“It’s the reprieve. Like in those old black-and-white films, when the phone finally rings in the penitentiary at two minutes to twelve. They don’t show it, but I reckon the fellow with the commuted sentence who’s already strapped in the electric chair is suddenly a chatterbox, too.” Cupping the flames, Kay blew out the candles, then licked her thumb and forefinger to extinguish the glowing wicks with a tiny ch-shsh, the benedictory sound of another splendid dinner done. The aroma of the wax mixed with the singe from the wicks was heady.
“What if I still want to go through with it?” Cyril said.
“That’s your business. Though I’d strongly prefer that you didn’t. Besides, admit it: without my following suit, you’d lose the symmetry, and the grandeur of the gesture. You’d appear to be just one more old man who’d got isolated and a bit depressed. The stunt would look small if not pathetic, or even silly. I would have to tell Simon, no you can’t speak to your father, because he just took his own life for no good reason. Your passing would still be sad, but you’d seem batty. You wouldn’t make a forceful statement. You wouldn’t set an example. Because—sorry—there’d be no media coverage, not when so many men your age are already dropping like flies from COVID-19. So you can forget this notion that thousands if not millions of your fellow socialist utopians will follow your heroic lead when they reach eighty, and the elderly’s mass self-sacrifice will prove the salvation of the NHS. Think I don’t know what kind of overblown fantasies circle that grandiose head of yours? In sum, my dear, keeping to plan wouldn’t reflect well on you. And I’m afraid my memory of you would be tarnished. Any nostalgia would be compromised by annoyance and disappointment. I’d remember your churlish, bloody-minded insistence on having your way, your refusal to change your mind or to listen to reason—listen to me—as a desertion, a betrayal, and an insult.”
“But if I did . . . Would you ring nine-nine-nine?”
She considered, washing the champagne glasses, which didn’t go into the dishwasher or they’d etch. “Probably, yes. And then there’d be the possibility of not coming out the other side in tip-top shape.”
“Were you ever going to go through with it?” he asked mournfully, still slumped in his chair.
That pulled her up short. “I’m not entirely sure. Some days, probably. This morning, almost. And I’ve loved the holidays, spending all our money. I’ve quite fancied the proposition that I’ll never have to face getting any older than I am today. I’ve fancied the denial. Why not? Worrying about getting old doesn’t make it easier.” She leant into his ear as she cleared off the potatoes. “Tonight, you may even have given me a gift, whether or not you meant to. I’m happy to be alive. As I should be.” She kissed his forehead. “It’s my birthday.”
But it was only when Cyril finally pulled himself up and began to wipe down the counters that Kay exhaled with relief. She put away the food. There was just about enough left over of every dish for tomorrow night’s dinner.
* * *
The next morning at breakfast, Kay was still relishing the rare sensation of sitting in the marital driver’s seat—not to mention the sensation of sitting anywhere at all. She’d had to run out for provisions, because before a certain change of plans she’d had no reason to stock up; to the contrary, she’d made a concerted effort to systematically run down the larder to a cup or two of sugar, an impulse-buy tin of red bean paste from the Asian supermarket near Elephant, and a bag of dried red lentils (which so disappointingly lost their colour when cooked). But thanks to the morning’s hasty excursion to the M&S Metro, whose shelves weren’t yet entirely emptied by hoarders, these crumpets were extra fresh.
“Now, I’m not saying we have to toss the tablets in the toilet,” Kay said, waiting for the butter to melt into the perforations. “We could still face some medical calamity and require a resort. They can stay where they are. I’m accustomed to that box, and I find it a useful reminder to try to enjoy the day.”
Cyril had seemed sheepish since they got up. Having begged her for a few extra minutes of embrace in bed, he didn’t seem to wish he were dead any more than she did. “Dear me, I just remembered,” he said. “Whilst you were in the loo last night, I slipped out the front to pop a note to the Met in the post box. It told them where to find us and that we’d be—you know.”
“Why alert the police? The smell? Or to spare the children?”
“To spare the house. I informed the police that the Samsons have a key. You picked out such a corker of a new front door, with all those fiddly diamonds of leaded glass. I couldn’t bear the peelers smashing those panes with a battering ram.”
She was touched. Cyril might have been resistant to her second career at first, but in time he’d grown proud of her good eye. “Does that mean they’ll be letting themselves in at any moment? As I picture the scene, it’s awkward.”
“That post box is collected on weekday mornings at eleven o’clock,” Cyril said. “I don’t imagine the police will get my note until tomorrow or the day after at the earliest. Gives us time to head them off, or at least to figure out what to say. ‘Sorry, we’re scaredy cats’? And then we’re on the public record as a danger to ourselves. That won’t look good if Roy ever gets a mind to section us in some hellhole against our will and sell the house.”
“Yes, it would certainly be Roy,” Kay said with a sigh. “But it’s still only ten forty-five. Why don’t I try and intercept the postman�
��or postperson? She’s always seemed sweet, and I might talk her into giving the letter back.”
Kay positioned herself by the red pillar-box a few minutes before eleven. Sure enough, the pretty young Somali who’d delivered their post for the last year showed up with her mail cart and key right on time. She was wearing blue Latex surgical gloves and a paper mask on her chin.
Kay wasn’t about to divulge the real story, so came up with an elaborate tale about having become convinced that the couple had been victims of fraud (which happened so often these days; the number of pensioners cleaned out by unscrupulous scammers was a scandal). But husband and wife simply hadn’t been communicating, and the charge Cyril had put on their credit card—for her birthday, which was yesterday, and yes, thanks so much for your good wishes—well, it was perfectly valid after all . . .
The story didn’t make much sense. Obviously, you didn’t write to the police about fraudulent card charges but contacted Visa directly. Happily, a young person would readily assume that the decrepit were procedurally clueless. Besides, the girl wasn’t really listening, another advantage, in this case, of the petitioner’s advanced years, and she seemed eager to get away from an old woman, because the elderly had already acquired an ominous air of contagion.
Kay pointed. “There! That’s it. The light blue one, with Mr and Mrs Cyril Wilkinson embossed on the flap.” Even if the girl didn’t recognize the wizened woman whose post she delivered daily, the distinctive envelope made Kay’s claim to its ownership credible. Only oldies would purchase engraved stationery.
Mumbling something about interfering with posted mail being technically illegal, the girl reluctantly capitulated, probably just to get the rabbiting old biddy off her back.
Exhilarated by her successful mission, and perhaps exhilarated full stop, just because she was still feeling the spring breeze on her cheeks, still looking forward to a second buttered crumpet, and still, despite his infernally programmatic approach to complex problems, in love with her boneheaded husband, Kay raised the envelope high with her more functional left arm and rushed across the road to their house on the corner without looking. An archetypal White Van Man knocked her ten feet into a lamppost, and that was that. She was eighty years old and a day.
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