4
Cyril Has an Unexpected Change of Heart
“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 been patient throughout the insensible monologue, clearly the product of hysteria. “I doubt any of us can understand what life is until the moment we lose it,” he said soothingly, stroking her hand. “Maybe a full grasp of life is only possible in the act of sacrificing it. Whatever you think you’re supposed to ‘come to grips with’ may elude you until the final epiphany.”
Kay frowned. “To live, you have to die?”
It was a crude translation, when he thought he’d put his philosophical formulation rather poetically for a medical man. There was something heartbreaking about the way his wife kept starting and seeming to prick her ears at the least sound from outside—a far-off siren, the screech of a fox—whilst continually darting her eyes wildly in the direction of the foyer, as if she were expecting rescue by an angel from the great beyond at the last minute. Perhaps it’s impossible to foretell how one will react, up against the ultimate unknown, and Kay’s reaction was panic—which was probably standard.
Yet Cyril himself felt calm and lucid. He was experiencing the sense of presence that visited him so often when sleeping with his wife but that seldom returned during the waking day. It was a deeply enjoyable sensation of being cohesive, unified, of a piece, and his thoughts, frequently clamorous, were still.
As he sucked the top from the black box, it made a satisfying swoosh, like the release of an air lock. He shook the tablets from the bottle inside and lined them up in a neat grid on the coffee table. Kay regarded his arrangement, which looked as if he were setting about a travel game of Go, with abject terror.
“What are you afraid of, bab?” he asked gently.
Emitting only the faint buzz of an incandescent lightbulb filament, she was trembling nonetheless. “Of making a mistake.”
“But this is our fate. It’s everyone’s fate. So it can’t really be a mistake, unless the design of the universe is in error.”
“Maybe it is in error.” She was stalling for time. He’d rarely felt so eloquent, yet he knew that expression on his wife’s face: annoyance.
“You should experience only a soft, slow decrescendo,” he said. “Nothing to fear. I would never do anything to hurt you.”
She shot another desperate, inexplicable glance at the entrance to the foyer.
“This is the best possible way out,” he intoned. “On our terms, in our home, when we’re still sane and recognizable to each other. When we’re able to embrace and say goodbye. Before we’re put through untold degradation and indignity. Before we cost our compatriots a mint whilst surviving as grotesque parodies of our younger selves, or as mere vessels for affliction. We’re exercising control over our own destinies. Remember what happened to your parents.”
“That was decades ago, so I suppose their decline has grown less vivid. And I don’t want to remember it. Why would I?”
“For the time being, you don’t remember their woeful deterioration because you don’t want to. Soon you could neglect to remember it because you can’t.”
“Oh, maybe you’re right. As you are about most things, of course. I mean, I’m sorry about voting Leave. I’m not sure what got into me. I dare say it will be bad for the economy, and you know I never imagined in a million years that Leave might win—”
“No more Brexit,” he abjured with a smile, brushing her cheek. “Not during our last few minutes on this earth.”
“Sorry,” she said in embarrassment. “Distracted chatter. Maybe that’s all that palaver ever was.”
“Shush. You’re still talking about it. Talk about now. Think about now. That’s all that’s left.”
“. . . At least we’re doing this together, right? Which makes all the difference, to me anyway.” She ran her hand up and down the thigh she had stroked, squeezed, and traced lingeringly with a forefinger on the way up to more intriguing anatomy for fifty-seven years. “It doesn’t make it easy, but easier—much easier.”
“And this way, neither of us has to live without the other, even for a short while,” he said. “I’ve always been anxious that if anything happened to you, I’d fall apart. Not be able to eat, wash, or shop, much less sleep. I’ve pictured myself as one of those widowers in a brown moth-eaten cardigan and slippers with crushed heels—who stares into space for hours on end. Who smells.”
“It really doesn’t hurt?” She sounded like a child.
“No.”
Something seemed to give—to collapse, to release, to let go. She dropped her shoulders, took a breath, and looked straight into his eyes with a trust that made Cyril feel obscurely guilty. “I’ve been lucky so far, but I do have wretched genes, don’t I? And I can’t bear the prospect of ruining your life, the way my father ruined my mother’s—until you come to hate me and can’t remember anything good. We had a lovely dinner, didn’t we? And a lovely life.”
She kissed him deeply, the way they used to kiss for hours when they were courting, and withdrew from his lips at last with the same reluctance he remembered from those days as well, when they had to get back to their medical studies. That kiss sent a tingling shimmer through the entirety of their lives together, as if their marriage were a crash cymbal whose rim she’d just hit deftly with a felt mallet.
She poured the water from the pitcher herself. She held out her palm, leaving it to Cyril to decide how many. She bolted them all at once and drained the tumbler.
“Will you stay with me?” she asked. “Promise to hold me till it’s over.”
“I promise,” Cyril said, drawing her to his shoulder and putting an arm around the birdlike bones of her back. However ironically, he felt fiercely protective of her. He would wait to take his own dosage until she was safe, or until the concept of safety no longer pertained. It was a kind of absolute security, when you thought about it: to achieve a state in which no one could do anything at all to you, no matter how dreadful. He had just rescued his wife from every insult under the sun.
“I hope Hayley doesn’t think it’s her fault,” Kay mumbled before nodding off. It was the drug. She was confused.
The moment was technically peaceful, but that was not the word he would have chosen to describe the point at which he instantly sensed that she was no longer there. Even his slight wife’s body felt heavy—burdensome, cloying in its weight, like something he frantically wanted off him, and the corpse—that is what her beloved body had become, a corpse—didn’t exude a becalming serenity, but energized him with horror. As a GP, Cyril had seen plenty of people die, but they were patients, kept at a necessary clinical remove, and none of their passings had felt anything like this.
He lifted her under the arms with all the tenderness he could muster, given that the physical exertion required to hoist dead weight was considerable. (The lexicon of lethality suddenly pulsed with meaning; he had the thought, especially absurd for a physician, So this is what they were talking about.) As best he could, he settled her in a slump on the opposite side of the sofa, trying and failing to close her mouth. If not altogether formulated, the idea had floated in the back of his mind that letting Kay go first would inspire him to go second. He wasn’t so simple-minded as to imagine himself rushing to m
eet back up with his spouse on some harp-strewn cartoon cloud, but presumably he would welcome the offer of instantaneous escape from grief. He loved his wife, and that tidy array of tablets on the table would reprieve him from experiencing the desolate world without Kay in it for any more than a few minutes.
But that wasn’t what happened. And something did happen: a great welling up from a place in himself with which he was little acquainted. This force arose unbidden; so involuntary was its eruption that the closest comparison he could contrive was to vomiting, although the sensation was not so unpleasant. This—quantity, this—substance, this—enormous, formless thing wasn’t outside of him, or alien to him; it was him. It was what had always been there waiting and watching from within, a sort of under-seer whom he’d rarely had need to consult. In the grip of this larger, stronger, more primitive entity that he had apparently inhabited all along, Cyril looked at the pitcher. Then he looked at his hand. But he simply could not pour the water into the tumbler. The everyday task seemed a physical impossibility, as if the neurological connection between his brain and his arm were severed. Likewise, the notion of sweeping those tablets into an open palm and knocking them back was also impossible. Not merely unappealing, but impossible. With all his being, he believed in this contract he’d entered into with his wife, so he had not been disingenuous. It was his profoundly held conviction that to serve both his own and his nation’s long-term interest he should keep a vow of three decades’ standing to take his own life at the age of eighty-one.
He just didn’t want to.
Dr Cyril J. Wilkinson was still a cogent, clear-headed retired professional who had accumulated invaluable insights into the strengths and, yes, failings of the fifth largest employer in the world. He was a fount of historical knowledge, anecdotal and otherwise, about the early and middle years of one of the greatest social projects a state had undertaken. Why hadn’t he thought of this before, whilst wasting all that time gazing at mangroves in Australia? It was time he wrote his memoirs. He had never been entirely contented with the NHS trust system, which resulted in the much-derogated “post-code lottery”: care in some regions well exceeded care in others. The service was too dependent on foreign staff, and attracting doctors and nurses from Romania, Bulgaria, Pakistan, and India deprived these countries of their own medics. The neglect of GP training was a scandal, for an inability to get appointments at the general-practice level was driving countless patients with non-urgent complaints to Accident and Emergency, far more costly than a clinic. The book he would write washed across his brain like a foetal hormone, and after thirty seconds it seemed the work was already composed and getting it down on paper would be a mere formality.
As for Kay, there was nothing for it. She had made her choice. Perhaps a prudent choice as well; her DNA was indeed riddled with dementia, whereas his own father, the old bastard, remained of sound mind to ninety-nine. He hadn’t forced her. She had poured her own water and extended her hand for the tablets, which she’d swallowed of her own accord. This was nothing like a homicide, but a mere forking in the road of once-mutual intent.
That said, it was a great relief to Cyril that his wife would never know he changed his mind.
The ability to think methodically at such a juncture was nothing short of shocking, but he had already found out something about himself this evening that he hadn’t known before. This capacity for calculation was simply one more door opening in a character whose floor plan turned out to include many more rooms than he’d imagined. He would need to notify the authorities in due course, though surely the tearful call could wait for daybreak. In the meantime, best arrange matters in such a way as to allay any suspicion of foul play. He could already hear himself bewailing to an abashed, mutely respectful officer, “It’s true, for the last few weeks she’s seemed depressed, but I’d no idea her spirits had sunk this low . . . She must have come downstairs late last night, as she sometimes does when she can’t sleep, usually to read without disturbing me—though I’ve always assured her that I’m not bothered in the slightest if she keeps her bedside light on . . . And then I found her on the sofa this morning!” It wouldn’t be a strain to appear upset, because he was.
Cyril rescued the remaining tablets from the coffee table and pipped them in the bottle, which he restored to the black box. The box he fitted back in its ritual location, the far upper left corner of the fridge—who knows, he might still require an exit strategy at a later date—then occluded the box with Kay’s 2018 thick-cut Seville marmalade (a vintage batch) and a darkening jar of mint sauce. He slid his clean tumbler back in the cupboard. He sponged the last sticky remnants of the spilled port from the table and scrubbed a few spots from the carpet. He slipped the flash drive with Kay’s memorial documents into an upstairs mug of pens and pencils where it would never attract attention. He flipped through the printouts and removed his own farewell address, as well as Kay’s essay on why they had resolved to slough off their mortal coils in tandem. These papers he set afire in their log burner, then shovelled out the black flakes and stirred them into the ash pail. He kept the order of service and her memorial farewell, which unambiguously established her dire intentions. The spatter of port on the printout’s edges added a convincing touch of emotional disarray.
Yet he could not allow his beautiful wife to be pawed over by paramedics or policemen, perhaps photographed as well, whilst her becoming white frock was stained with ruby port. Lovingly, he unfastened the buttons at the back and worked the frock down her hips. Kissing her neck in apology for the impertinence—she was still warm—he removed her undergarments as well, taking a moment to gaze mournfully at the woman still comely in old age whose every square inch he knew as intimately as his own skin. Upstairs in her bureau, he located a pretty but modest nightdress—an old Christmas present from her mother, which in truth she never wore, because she and Cyril had always slept in each other’s arms naked. From a hook on the back of the bedroom door, he also took a dramatic robe he’d found her on eBay that she adored: a black satin number with a crimson sash and bold 1940s shoulders that would have suited Joan Crawford. Getting the gear on her body was awkward, and however he arranged it the robe still looked askew, but she looked ever so much more presentable—and more as if she’d left him behind in bed to read downstairs.
Lastly, he washed up their crumble dishes and put the remainder of the pudding in the fridge, along with the open carton of Sainsbury’s custard.
* * *
“You’re the one who’s a fanatic. So why aren’t you dead?”
It had struck Cyril as ominous that after all the other guests who participated in the Zoom memorial service had sorrowfully logged off (the ban on gatherings being still in force), Hayley had remained online. Ever since receiving the terrible news, his daughter had seemed not only furious, but bulging with some undisclosed knowledge, like a cat who’d eaten the canary and the cage to boot.
“I realize this loss has been very difficult for you, Hayley,” he said, as ever careful to keep from reclining onto the side of the sofa where he had arranged Kay in her robe. “But you should take heart that your mother led a full and wonderful life. It’s just that she had started, you know, to forget things . . . After dementia ravaged both Grandpa and Nanna Poskitt, I can only assume she wanted to spare us—”
Hayley didn’t seem interested in the pat explanation he had generated for the memorial’s other virtual guests. “Her rambling ‘so long, it’s been nice to know you’ thing that Simon read out on Zoom. Am I the only one who found it freaking weird that Mum remembered to say goodbye to her fourth-best friend, but not to her own husband?”
“Well, she’d have regarded things between us as private.”
“Besides,” Hayley continued, “Mum wasn’t losing it. She was totally on the ball.”
“She was skilful at covering her lapses. It was worse than you knew.”
“It was exactly the way I knew: she was sharp as a tack. And I don’t appreciate you sullying
her memory by pretending she’d gone all drooling and doolally.”
“You’re grieving. If it helps to take out your pain on me, I’m willing to oblige as a whipping post, so long as you always bear in mind that I lost her as well.”
“Uh-huh. And why was that?”
“As I said, she was forgetting things! This conversation is getting circular—”
“Dad. One of the many things Mum did not forget was to text me that night. She was pretty explicit about your plans for after the pudding.”
Hayley paused to let this sink in, whilst Cyril’s feelings ricocheted between woundedness and horror. He was stricken that Kay would betray his confidence, and it injured him beyond words that the last night of her life included an act of such disloyalty. Yet her disclosure of their pact also put a different slant on events thereafter.
“I usually take my phone up to bed and set its alarm,” Hayley continued. “But during the lockdown, John doesn’t have to go into UCL, and we’re sleeping in. So tragically, when we went upstairs to read in bed, I left the phone behind in the kitchen. That’s where it was sitting when Mum’s text pinged in. A stupid little change of routine whose consequences I now have to live with forever. So I repeat: why are you not dead?”
He bowed his head. “I couldn’t.”
“Mum was always braver than you.”
“It’s hard to explain, but I don’t think the problem was being too fearful.”
“Well, if it wasn’t cowardice, then it was egotism. Which takes the biscuit, because the whole melodramatic proposition would have been your idea! The stroke of midnight on her birthday, the inflexible cut-off of turning eighty, the self-righteous fake altruism behind the reasoning—the whole ball of wax has got Cyril J. Wilkinson written all over it!”
Should We Stay or Should We Go Page 9