Should We Stay or Should We Go

by Lionel Shriver

  There were testimonials, and in truth they grew a tad trying; it was funny how weary you could grow of listening to what a wonderful person you were. After one of the great-great granddaughters finished reciting a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, the couple gently urged their admirers to wrap it up.

  It was light until well after ten. As the sun faded reluctantly from the long-shadowed garden, Kay and Cyril slipped out back with recharged glasses (in this white dress, she might have declined to switch to red wine, but given the reason for this party a drop or two on the rayon would hardly matter). The garden, too, was full of revellers. Yet as the fairy lights came on, the hosts located a deserted copse with two weathered teak chairs and a table for their drinks. On this private patch of lawn, Kay and Cyril slow-danced to a Van Morrison rendition of “I Wanna Go Home” and the Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me.” But it was only once “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” came on that Cyril announced, “They’re playing our song.”

  They sat. Kay sampled the cabernet (which she never called a “cab”). Her table manners faultless to the last, the white dress remained immaculate.

  “So you feel it, too?” she asked.

  “Of course I do. I feel as if we’ve been in the process of convergence since 1963, and finally we’re in perfect sync. I wouldn’t say we’ve become the same person. It’s more as if we make up the same person.” He inquired in sudden concern, “Not in any pain, are you, bab?”

  “No, no, not at all,” she assured him. “It’s only that feeling of resolution again, but much more intense.”

  To emphasize the heady sensation, she inhaled a lungful of the cabernet’s concentrated fruit. There had always been a touch of the immoderate about Kay’s passion for red wine, and now no purpose would be served in its restraint. Yet despite the implicit permission of the moment, she wanted to face this mysterious frontier in a state of clarity. Her single blissful sip was chaste.

  “I must say, we chose the red splendidly, my dear,” she added, dabbing her mouth with a napkin. “Robust, and balanced. Just like you and me.”

  They held hands and kissed deeply, the way they used to kiss for hours when they were courting, and withdrew from each other’s lips at last with the same reluctance they 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 they’d just hit deftly with a felt mallet.

  Kay’s head dropped onto Cyril’s shoulder. Cyril’s cheek rested against her crown. None of the other tipsy partygoers raising glad voices and breaking into spontaneous waltzes on the main lawn noticed—just as the couple preferred. Whilst the moon rose behind Kay’s resplendent white hair and created a silvered corona, Cyril murmured his wife’s final benediction: “Robust, and balanced.”

  Fortunately, it turned out that there was life after death after all.

  13

  The Last Last Supper

  All day, Kay had been lifted by this 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. Her pervasive giddiness, detachment, and lack of seriousness were awfully 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 her 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. The 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.

  She considered going on a riff about the many news stories they were stuck into whose resolution they would now never learn, but at the moment all those erstwhile nail-biters seemed to bob by like passing flotsam. The pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, the pandemic, and the perilous health of Britain’s prime minister might have been those ocean-clogging plastic carrier bags that David Attenborough was always on about. Shutting the book on these ongoing dramas was far from a frustration; au contraire, the disengagement came as a great relief. The floating sensation persisted, except that now she was soaring even higher, until she was suspended hundreds of feet overhead and looking down at all the little people scurrying and clashing and fomenting as they always did. Her gaze wasn’t precisely pitying, but it was close.

  “What do you suppose we’ll miss?” Kay posed more generally instead, rising to open a pricey bottle of cabernet that she was damned if she’d leave for Roy.

  “Each other,” Cyril said.

  “Yes, of course,” she said with a smile, pouring the wine with a heavy hand. “But whatever is going to happen to this place?” It was already “this place,” at a remove. Perhaps she had finally mastered the government’s mandatory social distancing.

  “Good things. Terrible things. The usual,” Cyril said. “I’m tired of worrying about it—as if worrying does any good. Look at the economic disaster we’re in the midst of—”

  “It’s so quiet,” Kay observed wistfully. “You’d think disaster would make more noise.”

  “Yes, it’s eerie, isn’t it? I’m reminded of that novel, On the Beach. Remember? They’re in Australia, where everything is calm and the weather is warm and the skies are clear, but they’re awaiting the inexorable arrival of nuclear fallout. If the Tories keep their lockdown lunacy in place for months, we’ll be fortunate to escape this hysteria’s fallout, which could be just as dire as the radioactive kind. In fact, the catastrophes we’re sure to give a miss are countless. Who knows—an invasion by aliens, like in H. G. Wells. Or even a return to the plain old want and scarcity that you and I grew up with. I’d hate to try to survive in a world in which my wife can’t get her mitts on a bottle of red wine.”

  “Very funny.” After taking a defiant slug, Kay excused herself with theatrical umbrage to the loo.

  “But it’s also possible,” she said zestfully on return, “that medical science comes up with a cure for ageing. What fools we’d seem then!”

  “Or cryogenics could take a great leap forward,” Cyril posited, “and it could become possible to awaken in a world hundreds of years hence. So if you’re going to be that way, we’re turning our backs on time travel as well.”

  “Or maybe we’d find out that Alzheimer’s is only wretched for the people around you—but actually being demented is jolly good fun, like watching a reel of your lifetime’s highlights. Maybe we’d find out that a care home is just like a Butlin’s holiday camp, and we’d make fast friends playing bowls.”

  “Or for all we know, I’d drop dead within the year anyway, and you’d have a whole second marriage to a younger man who voted for Brexit, just like you.”

  “A second marriage? That sounds exhausting.”

  “I’m the one who’s been exhausting,” Cyril said.

  “Better you said that than I.”

  Finishing off the cabernet allowed for generous musing over the fate of their children—Kay was convinced that because Simon’s long office hours were courting divorce, the lockdown might at least save his marriage, whilst Cyril maintained that suddenly being trapped with one’s family all day could as readily end in mass murder—after which they left the dirty dishes on the dining table and didn’t clean up the kitchen. The neglect was so liberating that before departing for the sitting room Kay gave in to an earlier impulse: she picked up her china dinner plate and dropped it on the floor.

  Cyril merely raised an eyebrow. “I’d have thought you’d want to keep the set complete for Hayley.”

  “Hayley will never use our wedding china. It’s a generational thing. She’ll try to sell it, find out there’s no market, and break half of it on the way to Oxfam.”

  “Port and crumble?” Cyril proposed.

  “The crumble, my dear, came out rubbish, and I
’m damned if I’m leaving this earth with the taste of failure on my tongue. And sod some twee thimbleful of port. I’m opening another cabernet.”

  “Why do I get the feeling this is your real, intemperate self coming to the fore—the secret sot who’s lurked in there for years and has finally got out?”

  “Perhaps you’re right.” Kay pulled the cork with a resonant pop. “That’s one sound I’m truly sorry to hear for the last time.”

  “Now,” he chided. “Who says you can’t open a third bottle?”

  “You know, when you’re on the cusp of oblivion, Mr Wilkinson, I rather like your style.”

  For himself, Cyril took out the single malt that his colleagues had given him at his retirement.

  “I can’t believe you’re still hoarding that,” Kay said, extending on the sofa with her crystal globe filled nearly to the brim. “Selfish git. You should really have shared it with all the well-wishers at your farewell party.”

  “I decided to save it for a special occasion. And what could be more special than this one?”

  “Special or not, it’s the only occasion we’ve got left. Now, I’m curious. Given tonight’s spirit of fuck-everything—”

  “I’m not sure I’ve ever heard you say that word.”

  “I know. I thought I’d try it out. Everyone else seems to use it with such abandon now. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK! Interesting. The sky doesn’t fall.”

  “That was loud enough for the Samsons to hear.”

  “I couldn’t care less. But I was asking: are you planning to be a stickler and insist on the stroke of midnight? Down to the wire, remaining the same letter-of-the-law fellow I’ve lived with for fifty-seven years?”

  “Have I really been such a tyrant?”

  Kay considered. “Yes!”

  They laughed. Cyril slid beside his wife on the sofa. They were a nice fit, even sitting.

  “I feel this question is an obligation,” Kay said. “Any regrets?”

  Cyril said without missing a beat, “I could have skipped every single one of those foreign holidays.”

  “What?” Kay exclaimed, sitting up straighter.

  “You thought I was going to say, no, not a regret in the world, didn’t you?”

  “A little white lie would have been nicer. And what you might have properly regretted is being such a tit when I wanted to study interior design, especially since I made a grand go of it after all.”

  “At the time, I was giving you my honest opinion.”

  “Which happened to be wrong.”

  “Which happened to differ from yours, which is not the same as ‘wrong.’ And you? Regrets?”

  “I should have said fuck more often.”

  “Kay, seriously,” Cyril said, draining his whiskey; he seldom used her Christian name. “Is this a daft idea? Would you like to forget it?”

  “Then we’d have to do the washing up.”

  “I wasn’t joking.”

  “Nor was I. I really don’t fancy doing the washing up.”

  “We could leave the dishes for tomorrow. Be rash.”

  “But we’re skint. We spent everything. We can’t afford to not go through with it.”

  “We have our pensions. We could always sell up and rent a flat.”

  “I’m positively looking forward to Roy finding out there’s no inheritance. I wish I got to watch his face.”

  “You changed the subject. You’ve been noticeably ambivalent about this pact of ours from early on, bab, and I’m not going to push you to do something so irrevocable if you don’t want to.”

  Kay put down her glass with a sigh. “That’s true. I have been . . . what? Uneasy, conflicted. But you didn’t marry such a timorous doormat that we’ve got all the way to the very brink of my eightieth birthday—the last two hours of my eightieth birthday—before I can finally bring myself to propose like Fred Astaire, ‘Let’s call the whole thing off.’ I’ve been anxious about this scheme of yours, and I’ve hoped awfully that some archetypal White Van Man might cut us to the quick on a zebra crossing and spare us carrying it out. But we’ve looked both ways before crossing the street, and here we are.

  “Honestly, I’ve gone back and forth. Especially during this last year, when it’s looked as if we’ll be put to the test after all, I’ve considered bowing out ahead of time more than once. But I didn’t sign up to the idea in the first place only because I’m a pliant pushover. It’s not been in the forefront of my mind without cease, but the cautionary memory of what happened to my father, and to a lesser extent my mother, is still quite keen. You didn’t browbeat me into going along with this business, and a great deal of your hectoring about ‘bed-blocking’ and the costs of the ‘old-old’ to the NHS has been gratuitous, because in the main I already agreed with you. You’re the one who sounds as if you’re losing your nerve, which is frankly gobsmacking. Since when do you of all people lack the strength of your convictions?”

  “It’s worth looking at the matter for a last time, isn’t it? If looking at the matter for a last time is the last thing we’ll ever do? And my convictions, well. They’ve always seemed a bit beside me.” Cyril lifted his wife’s memorial service printout. “As if I could pick them up and put them down.”

  “I wonder if I believe in this project more fervently than you do, then. Because what’s at stake doesn’t feel abstract or at arm’s length to me, or not any more,” Kay countered. “It’s true that we’re not in as bad a shape as we might have feared. But we’re nothing like what we were, my dear. I look at old photographs of us and my heart melts—the way one’s heart melts looking at photos of people who’ve died. We’ve made all manner of compromises, but in that gradual way, in our own peripheral vision, so we almost haven’t noticed. I suspect that’s the form. You gave up the men’s choir. I do less gardening, and now we hire Dan to do the strimming. I never formally quit design work, but I might as well have. You have that stenosis, and although sometimes you seem to be playing up the pain, other times I think you play it down, and that’s when it truly hurts. You could get surgery, but the prognosis at your age would be poor. I never told you, but I’ve been diagnosed with hypertension—”

  “Since when?” Under the circumstances, it was insensible for him to be worried about heart disease, but Cyril wasn’t beyond being injured by her concealment.

  “We may be married, but there’s still such a thing as my business,” Kay said. “Apparently my blood pressure is all over the map, which makes it much harder to treat. Obviously, that increases the risk of stroke, which—I need hardly tell a GP—can effectively end one’s life without warning over the course of a few minutes, and some of the worst outcomes are those in which one survives. I also have a persistent pain in my right shoulder, which I haven’t mentioned either. It sends pain down the arm and sometimes feels numb; the problem is clearly neurological and could be a symptom of something grave. Aside from joint replacement, there’s no cure for arthritis, and mine is getting worse. I could probably manage no longer being able to walk, but I don’t want to manage not walking.

  “Because it’s not as if we can’t live with these ailments. The trouble is that we can live with them, as we can also live with all the other ailments that are coming soon to a theatre near you. We’re already well into the process of whittling away what we’ve always done, who we’ve always been—making sacrifices by degrees, like frogs in a heating pot. So it’s already out of the question that we’ll live some sort of fantasy old age in which we’re wise, spry lives of the party until we’re a hundred and ten.”

  “That would never have been possible,” Cyril said. “I was no life of the party when I was twenty-five.”

  “You were the life of my party,” Kay said. “And tonight’s party has been splendid.”

  “It will still have been a wonderful evening even if we get cold feet about the pièce de résistance.”

  “But if we go ahead and simply do the washing up, it’s actuarially likely that you predecease me. I don’t kn
ow about that second marriage to a strapping Brexiteer—I’m not sure I’d have the energy, and I worry that he’d never shut up about fishing rights—but I could probably function on my own. I dare say that I could get to the shops, and warm up a tin of beans—”

  “You’d do better alone than I would. You’re more sociable.”

  “Possibly, but the question is whether I’d have an appetite for that life. Whether I want to shamble to the shops for beans.”

  “Come, come,” Cyril said. “It’s 2020. You could at least make it penne and pesto.”

  “I’m being serious. I want to let all this go when it still hurts to let it go. When we can still feel a sense of loss. When what we’re losing is still whole, and not corrupted, and diminished, and made dreadfully sad. When other people will still be sorry to see us go. I’m not sure about Roy, but I’m certain that Simon will be sorry. To be fair, Hayley will be sorrier than she expects to be. She’s such a drama queen that it’s hard for her when she has to feel real emotions. She apes so much. It’s a form of avoidance, really, all her histrionics. Funny how pretending to feel things is really a way of not feeling them.”

  “That’s what I find hardest to abandon,” Cyril said. “Your asides. They’ve made the course of my days infinitely more stimulating.”

  “But what I’m saying is no aside, and it should be music to your ears. There’s only one thing you love better than a good steak and ale pie, and that’s being right. So, back in 1991? You were right. I know I’m always castigating you for being such an obdurate ideologue. But every time I’ve struggled against your unnatural proposition, I’ve ended up boomeranging back to your way of seeing things. Eighty years, whether it feels that way to us right now? It’s a long time. We’ve had a good run. And we—not you and I, but the Big We—we’re getting into the habit of destroying everything good about ourselves before taking our belated leave. Remember those horror films we grew up watching? About zombies, and mummies, and Frankenstein’s monster, staggering around with gaping mouths and vacant eyes? Those creatures played on a primal fear: of living death. And despite the fact that it’s one of our mythic terrors, that’s what we’re trying to arrange for everyone now: a living death. It’s a defilement! A desecration—!”