Should We Stay or Should We Go

by Lionel Shriver

  Leery of getting separately caught up in the stratospheric successes of second careers, the spouses made time every year to travel to all the destinations that Kay had pined to visit in the days they’d never have afforded such extravagance. Cyril held back at first, acceding to these forays largely as a favour to his more adventurous wife, but after a trip or two he caught the bug as well, launching into excursions to Australia, Malta, Key West, Las Vegas, and Japan with enthusiasm. What a perilous pitfall, he noted: falling into a rut in one’s latter years and getting overly attached to routine.

  Once they bought a palatial holiday home in the Algarve region of Portugal, they also reserved time to spend a rambunctious fortnight every August with the whole extended clan. Like most families, theirs had suffered from frictions. Having nursed artistic ambitions when she was young, Hayley was frustrated in middle-aged motherhood. The other two were jealous of Simon’s income as a trader in the City, whilst in turn Simon worked until so late at night that he rarely got to spend it, much less see his children. Long ago, Roy had nobly volunteered for the role of black sheep, the way other sons joined the army.

  Yet their parents’ late-life flowering inspired all three kids to locate the same optimism and resourcefulness in themselves. Following her mother’s lead, Hayley opted for further education, devoting her creative flair thereafter to teaching special needs children from deprived areas of London. Beavering about town to help others less fortunate than herself, she dropped a few pounds and ceased to resent her wiry mother; the two grew close and were often mistaken for sisters. Packing it in at his brokerage firm, Simon moved to Devon to establish a wind farm. Responding to a population with the same outcast status he’d been lumbered with his whole life, Roy started working with asylum seekers, securing them English classes, coaching them on the Life in the UK citizenship test, and helping them navigate the arcane bureaucracy of the Home Office. He finally settled down, too, marrying a gorgeous woman from Senegal; their four mixed-race children were exquisite, the colour of walnuts. Although on the old side to become parents, Kay’s brother Percy and his husband had fraternal twins with a surrogate from Laos. As the older grandchildren came of age to date a Taiwanese law student, a Colombian osteopath, a Jewish coder from South Africa, and a footballer from Samoa, their once narrowly Anglo-Saxon tribe soon duplicated the multicultural crowd shots in insurance adverts—making family get-togethers so much richer than the stiff, civil convocations of boring old English people.

  Now so much more personally contented, the Wilkinsons’ three children grew more appreciative of parents whom they’d previously taken for granted or deployed as unifying targets of shared sibling mockery. Hayley went out of her way to express gratitude to her mother for being such an exemplary role model, with both long unstinting public service and a brave, no-guarantees departure into a more imaginative field. Simon bought stacks of his father’s books to distribute to his wind-farm employees at Christmas. And perhaps Roy’s turnaround was the most moving. Though he made a pittance as the deputy head of Hospitality House, he had clearly been saving for years to be able to announce that he was taking his parents on an all-expenses-paid expedition to meet his in-laws in Senegal, and he refused to accept a penny to help finance the trip. The shindig was a huge success. Though Roy’s in-laws spoke no English, everyone communicated by sign language with often hilarious misunderstandings, and they all agreed to a reunion as soon as feasible.

  Well before they hit seventy, Kay and Cyril had realized the supreme importance of taking care of themselves, and together they embarked on a project of strenuous but entirely pleasant exercise. No longer merely strolling beside the Thames, Kay took advanced spinning classes and became a passionate fan of bone-chilling wild swimming throughout the winter. Cyril took up mountain climbing and unfailingly fascinating free weights. In total agreement, as they seemed to be about everything these days, they resolved henceforth to make their holidays more vigorous, canoeing the Amazon, cycling between Michelin-starred restaurants in France, and hiking the Appalachian Trail in America—overtaking many a younger party on steeply rising switchbacks.

  In kind, although Cyril lent a considerable hand in the kitchen now, Kay took it upon herself to improve their diet. Leaving behind the stodgier fare of shepherd’s pie and bangers and mash, she introduced more nuts, seeds, olive oil, and leafy greens. Cyril didn’t especially fancy kale to begin with, but the more Kay served it the more it grew on him, until on those occasional evenings she steamed pointed cabbage instead he could grow petulant. Where was the kale? Once she weaned them off nutritional traif, they both lost any taste for red meat, sugar, butter, and cream, and their favourite pudding was a refreshing branch of celery.

  Thus throughout their seventies, both spouses were lean, tan, and sinewy. If anything, the two were more attracted to each other than they’d been as newlyweds. So electrifying and various had their sex life become that they would sometimes catch each other’s eyes across a table in a crowded restaurant with a distinctive knowing smile—a smile that remembered the night before and promised for the night to come. Carved with wry humour and hard-earned wisdom, their faces as they aged grew in many ways more beautiful than the smooth, bland countenances of their callow youth. It was not unusual for the couple to glide gracefully down the pavement hand-in-hand and turn the heads of Londoners in their twenties.

  The referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union might have been an occasion for the rest of the country to cleave into hostile, irreconcilable camps, but for the Wilkinsons the run-up to 23 June 2016 was a welcome opportunity to have long, in-depth discussions in which they shared what began as divergent positions. These conversations were thoughtful, productive, and open-minded. Both spouses had so much respect for their better half’s fine analytic mind that each couldn’t help but entertain the validity of the other’s view. So as their compatriots tore into each other at dinner parties, the gentle antagonists in Lambeth came only to a deeper appreciation for the opposite side—so much so that when the day of the ballot came round, Cyril had grown convinced that on balance Britain was better off on its own and voted Leave, whereas Kay, having gained a far better understanding of the many regards in which their country benefited from the political solidarity and market access provided by the EU, voted Remain.

  Although the initial months-long coronavirus lockdown appeared to be trying for everyone else, the couple found it terribly touching how loyally all three children rang every day to make sure that their parents were well. The Wilkinsons weren’t sure what so many other older Britons were whingeing about, because they had no problem securing weekly delivery slots from Waitrose. Moreover, given that Cyril had been repeatedly jetting off to literary festivals in Zagreb or Mumbai, whilst Kay had often been up to her neck in choosing sofas for some Saudi prince’s mansion on Kensington Palace Gardens, the period of enforced stay-at-home orders proved one of the most tranquil and luxuriously intimate few months of their marriage. Cyril apologized profoundly for having been “unforgivably” patriarchal in the early years of their relationship, and Kay forgave him anyway.

  “I’m curious if you remember a certain early evening,” Kay recalled during the gradual lifting of restrictions that summer, about which they were both mournful. They’d come to love their captivity. Like so many of their fellow Britons, they’d lost any desire to return to a frenetic life in which one dealt with troublesome other people and onerously earned one’s own keep. “It would have been 1991, right after my father’s funeral. You proposed we kill ourselves at eighty.”

  “Of course I remember,” Cyril said, faintly affronted. “I remember everything.” The assertion was no exaggeration. As they’d been doing Sudoku puzzles and the Times crossword, their memories were eidetic.

  “If I’d gone along with your scheme, we’d be dead as of three months ago,” she noted.

  “I wonder if I wasn’t going through some undiagnosed depression,” Cyril puzzled. “That proposition was abnorm
ally defeatist. Why, I’ve more energy, I feel healthier, and I take more enjoyment in life at eighty-one than I did at twenty-five. I feel more fully connected to the rest of humanity than ever. I love being eighty-one. I don’t think I’d want to be any other age.”

  “So how will you feel about turning eighty-two, then?” she teased.

  “Why—I imagine I’ll love being eighty-two even better.”

  And so it transpired. Being eighty-two was delightful, an experience topped only by being eighty-three, so there was no reason to do anything other than look forward to turning eighty-four. Oh, they both felt an occasional twinge in a joint or minor ache in the lower back when rising from a chair, but these tiny reminders of ageing were always passing, and merely served to make them more grateful for their wonderful lives, their wonderful occupations, and their wonderful marriage. Because they ate so many vegetables, naturally neither came down with any illness more serious than a bout of sniffles, whilst daily squats, lunges, planks, and press-ups (Cyril still did 200 every morning, albeit, he was quick to modestly point out, in two sets) kept their muscles firm, their limbs flexible, their skin radiant, and their bones strong.

  Meanwhile, events in the larger world seemed to mirror the unremitting improvement of life in Lambeth. After the scare of what, in historical retrospect, proved a relatively brief economic downturn following the global lockdowns to suppress COVID-19, an obliging monetary theory was demonstrated to be faultless. Lo, it was more than possible for the government to print an infinite amount of money and then give the money to its citizenry to buy things. If the citizenry ever wanted to buy more things, then the government could print still more money so that the citizenry could buy more things. Everyone marvelled at why retrograde economists had ever installed the unnecessarily convoluted business of employment and taxation. The technique caught on all over Europe, effectively establishing an indefinite lockdown, except in this one you could leave the house.

  Earlier concerns about the potential for uncontrolled migration from “overpopulating” countries in Africa and the Middle East proved altogether unfounded, and a certain demographic grump named Calvin Piper, with his alarmist, racist predictions that Europe was sure to be “swamped” with refugees, became a byword for there being no fool like an old fool. As long forecast by more upbeat observers of the continent, Africa became the global nexus of technological innovation and eventually overtook China as the world’s economic powerhouse. Far from forcing their starving or disaffected inhabitants to flee abroad to seek a “better life,” African leaders implored their countries’ diaspora to please come back home and take high-paying jobs that were going begging. (Roy’s Hospitality House started running so short of asylum seekers that the charity was obliged to reorient towards tutoring underachieving working-class white kids.) Women having been granted full political and social equality in the Middle East helped to make the likes of Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq peaceful, affluent societies that no one would dream of leaving, and the region’s only serious problem was so many infatuated American tourists overstaying their visas. Meanwhile, Muslims having joined Christians in a new worldwide religion (“Jeslam”) meant the end of terrorism.

  After reducing carbon emissions to absolute zero in perfect unison (because who didn’t care about their children’s future?), all the nations of the planet kept atmospheric warming to a level low enough to be widely hailed as beneficial. If nothing else, the minimal rise in average global temperature had a salutary effect on the quality of British sparkling wine, which overtook champagne as the go-to bubbly even in France.

  Thereafter, it was discovered that energy could be extracted from carbon dioxide (after all, if trees could do it . . . ), so fossil fuels and even the likes of Simon’s wind farm became anachronisms. Energy was free, just like all those products in Europe. Also free, and effortless, was the new process of desalination, so that the fresh water shortages that had seemed so ominous a few years before turned out to be one more product of a neurotic scientific establishment reliant on an infinite supply of insoluble problems to justify its existence. Likewise, antibiotic-resistant bacteria naturally evolved to be resistant to themselves.

  Alas, however harmonious, prosperous, and environmentally sustainable, it was still a world in which people died. Yet for the Wilkinsons, a final leave-taking was merely one more occasion to pull off with panache.

  Once Kay and Cyril turned 110 and 111 respectively, they had perhaps slowed an increment—Cyril’s morning press-ups had dropped to 180—yet they were otherwise fit, healthy, and so stunningly attractive that artists would stop them in the street and plead to be allowed to paint their portraits. The pair were more curious than ever, jollier than ever, and more involved with the lives of others than ever, as a consequence of which they were also ever more beloved. Cyril had just received the proof of the thirty-second book in his medical series, concentrating on the breakthrough cures for pancreatic cancer and ALS, whilst Kay was debating whether to accept the commission to redecorate Windsor Castle. Sure, they took a tincture of quinine to ward off muscle cramps and popped the odd low-dose aspirin to reduce the risk of untoward vascular events. Otherwise, it was full steam ahead.

  Nevertheless, there came a day in late May when Kay turned to her husband at dinner and said, “My dear? I don’t know how to explain it, but I feel a bit odd.”

  “Yes, now that you mention it,” Cyril said, “I feel a measure peculiar myself.”

  “It’s not that I feel unwell,” she assured him.

  “Certainly not, bab,” Cyril said. “We never feel unwell.”

  “It’s more like a tingling. An inkling. An intimation.”

  “Foreknowledge,” he said gravely. “Does it make you—sorrowful?”

  “No,” Kay said in wonderment. “Not at all. It makes me feel complete.”

  “That’s a good way of putting it. I would miss your insights, your ways of putting things, if I were going to be around to miss anything.”

  “Looking back, I don’t believe we’ve missed anything whatsoever. But I do sense we’ve time to make preparations.”

  Kay and Cyril literally put their house in order. They went through their drawers and threw out all the instruction booklets for printers, toasters, electric griddles, and microwaves that had broken years ago. Kay reserved a small selection of exotic apparel from their travels for Hayley, then carefully folded the rest of her wardrobe for the charity shops. They disposed of all their old bills, tax returns, and bank statements, whilst Cyril compiled a scrapbook of his own rave reviews, Kay’s design awards, and appreciative correspondence that might mean something to their descendants when they were gone. Kay went through the larder and chucked open bags of grains, seeds, and flours that might attract vermin if the house were left idle for a protracted period. In general, they agreed that the last task they wanted to bequeath to their progeny was clawing through drawers full of crenulated knickers and orphaned socks.

  “I think we owe it to all those great- and great-great grandchildren to gather the troops,” Kay suggested.

  “Yes,” Cyril said. “I keep picturing a bed. Us in our bed upstairs with lots of pillows, holding court.”

  “That’s the cliché,” Kay said. “But I don’t want to loll about having my cheek kissed, smelling of camphor and having to listen over and over to what a bloody marvellous example I’ve set. It sounds terribly staid and like something out of Tolstoy.”

  “That may be why I keep picturing the scene in sepia tones.”

  “I think we should hold our own wake. None of this lazing-abed business. A proper knees-up, in the Irish tradition, when everyone gets stewed.”

  Naturally, none of their family, friends, and disciples took the nature of the invitation seriously. It was assumed that the Wilkinsons were being droll—as if such roundly revered luminaries needed an excuse for a party. This wink-wink “wake” was widely regarded as the highlight of London’s social calendar for 2050, and regrets were not merely few; the
y were non-existent.

  By late afternoon, the house in Lambeth was overflowing. Having failed to register the sincerity of the purported occasion, most guests arrived with presents, which toppled in mountains by the door. It was midsummer, and the weather was warm and fair—as Kay had somehow intuited it would be. Murmuring tenderly to all she met, the hostess sipped champagne that never went to her head. She’d reluctantly acceded to having the do professionally catered, after Cyril called her attention to the length of the guest list; she shouldn’t spend this of all days filling trays in the kitchen. Mischievously, they’d agreed to serve all the creamy, carnivorous fare they’d spurned for decades, and when Kay sampled a passing almond tart the shock of sugar was subversively thrilling. They’d also compiled a playlist, so the property-wide sound system cycled through favourites from the era in which they wed: Shirley Bassey, the Everly Brothers, Tommy Bruce and the Bruisers.

  Kay wore a long flowing dress in white rayon that she hadn’t donned in eons, whereas Cyril, who wanted more than anything simply to feel comfortable, wore his usual ivory button-down and roomy trousers with a break in the leg, keeping his navy cardigan with wooden buttons and a roll collar at the ready for later in the evening when it was bound to get cool. In context, he was conspicuously underdressed, for their guests had gone all out. Kay was especially touched that Hayley (now seventy-eight, but also benefiting from her parents’ enchanted genes) must have spent hours swirling her hair up with chopsticks, the better to match the gifted birds of paradise kimono.