Should We Stay or Should We Go, Page 3

  The couple rarely referenced their self-designated D-day. The “effective medical solution” remained in the same back left-hand corner of the fridge for years, and Kay never touched it. It was likely that Cyril regularly replaced its contents with fresher pharmaceuticals, though if so he never rejuvenated their supply in her presence. When their faithful John Lewis fridge-freezer finally peed condensation all over the floor like a trembling old dog about to be put down, Kay took responsibility for unloading all the mayo and marmalade and chucking the mouldy lemon halves at the bottom of the vegetable drawer. But when she came to clearing the top shelf, she found a crusty open jar of mint sauce, but no black box. Once the new Bosch was delivered, she began stashing the surviving comestibles, only to find that in the otherwise empty new fridge the black box was back, restored to the far-left corner on the top shelf. Throughout the turmoil that attends the failure of a major appliance, she’d seen Cyril approach neither the defunct one nor its replacement. Mysterious.

  With pointed frequency, however, Cyril did implicitly allude to their understanding in the course of their animated but not always jolly dinnertime discourse. His idea of sparkling repartee ran to observations like, “Have you noticed that you almost never see animals in the wild which look visibly aged—which are stooped and balding and can barely walk? Deer, for example: they mature, they look roughly the same across a normal lifespan, and then they die. We get used to seeing very old people, but we’re animals as well, and for creatures to survive in a state of advanced decay is unnatural.”

  He continued to track the steady rise of life expectancy in a spirit of dismay. “In news reports about our ‘ageing population,’” he pointed out over chicken pot pie, “presenters no sooner mention increased longevity than immediately add, ‘which is a good thing, of course!’ The aside is compulsive. But it’s not a good thing! We’re not living for longer. We’re dying for longer!”

  Apropos of not much, he volunteered that since its inception in 1948 “the NHS annual budget has multiplied by four times! And that’s in real terms, including inflation!” By the time Cyril retired in 1999 and Tony Blair was injecting cash into the “free” service as if prepping a turkey with hot butter, Cyril updated, “By six times!”

  He kept his wife apprised of the escalating proportion of Britons over sixty-five, especially underscoring the increase in the “old-old” over eighty-five, whose manifold chronic conditions were fiscally ruinous, not to mention the stuff of untold private suffering.

  “People our age,” he observed whilst the couple were still in their mid-sixties, “cost the service twice as much as the average thirty-year-old. But by eighty-five, that differential is five-to-one! Five times as much dosh to keep alive some old coot who slumps half-asleep in front of Come Dine with Me all afternoon, compared to a taxpayer with young children who can still have a laugh on a fine day out and play a spot of footie.”

  He predicted to Kay jovially that the Queen, who personally signed birthday cards for all new centenarians, would soon have to relinquish the job to a computer, because so many Britons were living past one hundred that the kindly old dear would otherwise spend all day dispatching empty felicities and take to her bed from writer’s cramp.

  Cyril kept a running tally of the rising percentage of “bed-blockers” in British hospitals: elderly patients technically well enough to go home but too frail to be released on their own recognizance. What with the UK’s patchy social care, they often remained in hospital for months, taking up places urgently needed for younger patients still capable of getting well. He seemed almost to celebrate the escalating rate of surgery cancellations that the wicked bed-blockers brought about, for often a patient would have the same crucial operation delayed at the last minute multiple times because there was no hospital bed available in which to recuperate. “Can you imagine?” Cyril regaled his wife. “You’ve seen it yourself: it takes a fierce girding of loins to prepare mentally for being carved up. Physically, too, you follow all these rules, like nil by mouth after midnight. Think of going through all that anxiety, only to be told that very morning, sorry, the surgery isn’t going to happen after all, so please go home. And then to endure the same build-up and let-down, over and over again? It’s a scandal.”

  This ministerial holding forth recalled the born-again evangelists on Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, except what Cyril seemed to be hawking wasn’t the promise of eternal life, but quite the opposite. His apparent grudge against the aged could seem uncharitable, given that all these poor people had done wrong was hang about. Yet as time ticked on, Kay was moved to note, “You’ll soon have to stop banging on about ‘them,’ my dear, and start banging on about ‘us.’”

  As they age, most people grow muddled in the course of organizing their affairs, being understandably unclear on precisely how many years these affairs are being organized for. One makes somewhat different decisions in the instance that four decades lie at one’s disposal, versus the next four days—which is why it’s surprisingly commonplace for even quite elderly people to make decisions based on the default assumption they will live forever. After all, the alternative is to fully accept that at any second one might drop dead, leading logically to the ceaseless and perhaps annoying declaration to one’s nearest and dearest of how terribly near and dear they are—whilst turning a blind eye to the paying of electricity bills, the filling out of job applications, and the scrubbing of toilets that should never be allowed to despoil one’s final moments on this earth. The alternative, then, is to sit in a dark room, unemployed, with a rank loo.

  Yet unusual certainty about the maximum extent of their shared existence enabled Kay and Cyril to plan, most crucially in regard to finance. They were in accord about the children. Simon made scads in the City, and hardly required a handout. Hayley’s degree in performance art from Goldsmiths hadn’t, predictably, led to a lucrative career, but her youthful flamboyance had snagged her a husband with a solid professorship in linguistics at University College London safely before her mesmeric volatility slid to ordinary neurosis and self-involvement. An inheritance of any size would only increase their daughter’s undermining sense of dependency. As for Roy, he was the one child who needed money, since he was up to his eyeballs in credit-card debt. But whether or not Hayley was right that the younger of her two brothers had an intermittent drug problem, Roy had dropped countless degrees mid-course, left a string of girlfriends in the lurch, and habitually appealed to his parents to bail him out. Give that boy a nest egg and he would suck it dry enough for painting by the following Easter. Cyril didn’t believe in inherited wealth anyway, and for that matter, given the knee-high ceiling on tax-free bequests, neither did the British state.

  Thus when Cyril also began to draw his pension, they refinanced the house, extracting multiples more money in equity than they’d paid for the place. They established irrevocable trusts for the five grandchildren—just substantial enough to give the youngsters a start in life, but not so lavish as to make them lazy. To cover the fiscal ravages of Godfrey’s care, Kay’s mother Dahlia had also been forced to refinance the property in Maida Vale, and the subsequently reduced proceeds of selling the house rapidly vaporized from the charges of a rather posh care home; it had better have been posh, at £78,000/year, fees whose payment Kay and Cyril assumed in due course. They also installed a live-in private carer with Cyril’s parents in Birmingham, as his younger sister could hardly be expected to shoulder the extra burden on a social worker’s salary.

  At least Dahlia Poskitt’s decline was gentle and benign, exhibiting none of Godfrey’s latter violence and personality change. Having never accepted that the care home was where she lived, she arose daily convinced that she was just “visiting.” Thus, when interacting with her fellow residents, Dahlia made the gracious inquiries after their health and despairing comments about the weather that her generation expected from English women of some position when accepting hospitality. Elaborately deferent and keen to be no trouble, she refu
sed to choose between the lemon posset and the sherry trifle when there was plenty of both. In contrast to her late husband, she remembered the bloom of her marriage in full, whilst blessedly forgetting its final fourteen years of torture. Neurological rewrite had also neatly edited any reference to “Adelaide” from her husband’s biography. Her primary lapse was an inability to remember that Godfrey had passed. Eventually, out of kindness, Kay stopped reminding her mother of her father’s demise, because the news always hit afresh and plunged the poor woman into raw grief. It seemed easier all round to instead submit that Godfrey was waiting for her back home once she finished “visiting.” When she finally died at eighty-six—it was presumed from dehydration, because she was too anxious about straining her host’s generosity to ask for water—Kay actually shed a tear or two, like a real daughter.

  As for Cyril’s parents, his mother died with little warning at seventy-nine. Although Cyril was suitably sorrowful, his grief exhibited a curious overlay of what Kay could only identify as approval. Betsy Wilkinson had expired at the perfect knell of female life expectancy in England and Wales, and she hadn’t set a poor example by wetting her feet in his personal Rubicon of her eightieth birthday. The onset of viral pneumonia was rapid, her fatal illness brief: ergo, she had not unduly burdened the sacred National Health Service with a drawn-out decline, only to meet the same fate in the end at many times the price. In her son’s view, Betsy Wilkinson had proved a model senior citizen. As she’d been wont to observe a bit too often herself, she had suffered her life’s travails without complaint. (Ha! thought Kay. With barely suppressed resentment, more like it. Betsy’s unsparing disapproval of her daughter-in-law’s continuing to work at the endocrinology unit whilst raising three children, and the vinegary old woman’s undisguised derision when Kay enrolled in the interior design course at Kingston, was all a blind for envy. When after the outbreak of the Second World War the Longbridge automotive plant converted to munitions, she’d joined the workforce for the duration of hostilities, and she’d never felt as bracingly useful since.) Betsy had produced a demographically spot-on two children. As a considerate, frugal subject of the realm, Cyril’s mother left the world on time.

  Cyril’s father was another matter. More robust than his arthritic late wife, Norman didn’t really require help with his shopping but still kept on the live-in carer for companionship—although Kalisa, an upbeat, ardently Christian Jamaican, was now getting on herself. Less wading than hydroplaning across Cyril’s strict Rubicon of eight decades, he remained a famous raconteur at his local, continuing to rewire lamps and refurbish vacuum cleaners for his neighbours, whilst railing against “yampy” modern mechanisms that weren’t designed for repair. “Plastic!” he’d despair of contemporary Dysons. “One tab broke, and that’s it for the whole blooming thing!” (Thing with a Brummie’s hard G.) He wheeled his own bins to and from the kerb, and by ninety-two was still holding his own with Cyril regarding Britain’s new prime minister, a Tory toff whom Norman derided as looking like an “overfed teddy bear.”

  For Kay, given Cyril’s fondness for his boisterous dad, her husband’s detectable ambivalence about his father’s hale constitution struck an odd note. To his son, Norman’s unlikely mental and physical sturdiness seemed almost an annoyance. Yet it wasn’t as if she and Cyril had reason to resent paying the caretaker’s modest salary. Unlike the rest of their cohort, they’d no need to keep a packet in reserve in case they themselves contributed to the Queen’s writing cramp by living past a hundred. (At this rate, the indestructible royal would soon be sending a birthday card to herself.) The problem, then, wasn’t financial drain. Rather, Norman was spannering Cyril’s worldview. As a specimen of the “old-old,” Norman should have been miserable, costly to the public purse, and better off dead. Yet so little was he faltering that Norman might also sail gaily beyond one hundred. In that event, were they to follow through on their undisclosed vow, Cyril would subject his elderly father to sudden, devastating bereavement. Kay was fairly certain that putting his father through the trauma of an only son and daughter-in-law’s joint suicide would present itself as a bridge too far. Cyril was an ideologue; he wasn’t a monster.

  Meanwhile, with the small measure of their savings remaining after supporting their parents, two ample NHS pensions, and a dribble from freelance decorating, Kay and Cyril had taken a series of exotic holidays—to Malta, to Australia, to Key West, to Las Vegas, to Japan. Other than delving enthusiastically into the details of competing health care systems, Cyril merely endured these adventures, within a day or two pining to get back home (to do what? Kay always wondered). Kay had a reliably glorious time, for she easily made new friends on the fly and hadn’t yet lost an appetite for novelty, be that for new words, new venues, or new food. “I make a rather grand old bag, don’t you agree?” she’d exclaim merrily, twirling a parasol on a boat to an island off the coast of Queensland known for its gnarly mangroves. Cyril would smile tightly and wait a seemly amount of time before complaining, again, about his back.

  For his part, Cyril Wilkinson was finding old age less than enchanting. It was making the expected inroads on his pleasures: his voice got too craggy to keep singing in his men’s choir; his joints grew too painful to keep accompanying Kay on her brisk Sunday walkabouts along the South Bank. But in addition to vigour, something more crucial was waning: how much he cared—and not just about the state of the NHS, but about whether the Lib Dems would sufficiently constrain the Tories in coalition, whether Simon and his family were coming for Christmas, even whether the M&S focaccia from last night was still fresh enough to stretch to a second dinner. He felt, in a way he couldn’t seem to control, a dwindling sense of investment—in events, other people, his own day-to-day contentment. The single matter in which he remained as invested as ever was his pact with his wife.

  He theorized to himself that all lifetimes trace a distinctive energy arc, and Kay’s and his were out of sync. She’d always been such a busy bee; were she a clockwork toy, the key at her back would still be chuntering at a stable rate, whilst his own wind-up motor was starting to stutter. Hence he kept watch on his wife with leeriness and even a touch of dread. It wouldn’t have done to waste the time they had left together by focusing solely on the point at which they would be together no longer, and it was all to the good that she didn’t reference their contract with morbid frequency. Yet it made him uneasy that by the time the countdown forever ticking in his head notched to a single decade, his wife had gone from mentioning their plans seldom to not at all.

  Cyril remembered from his own youth that the steady succession of New Year’s Eves didn’t strike younger people as remarkable, much less as hard to believe. One took the year of one’s birth as a given, and the years immediately thereafter seemed numerically nearby and altogether likely. Those so-called millennials, for example, would hardly have viewed as inconceivable an arithmetic turn of the wheel for which their generation was christened. But for helplessly older people like Kay and Cyril, the relentless advance of Anno Domini had progressed from the expected to the surprising, from the surprising to the implausible, and then onward to the incredible, until the date in the left-hand corner of their daily Guardian became a manifestation of the impossible. He found it a peculiar experience to be living in 2010 itself whilst simultaneously convinced that such a year belonged exclusively to the realm of science fiction.

  For if, as Cyril submitted over that fateful sherry in 1991, young people had no imagination, neither did the middle-aged. Back when Kay signed onto their mutual treaty to spare family, friends, and most of all each other the anguish and disgrace of extreme senescence—a commitment he’d never have accused her of having made lightly, but perhaps her acquiescence had displayed an element of impulsivity all the same—even the year 2000 had still sounded fanciful, all rather Arthur C. Clarke. At fifty-one, she’d been adept enough at elementary maths. Born in the nice round year of 1940, she’d have readily calculated that her eightieth birthday would land i
n 2020. It would have sounded like a ridiculous year, an unfathomable year, the stuff of late-night films with spaceships and dying suns that drive the human race to colonize other planets—and so clearly, she must have blithely assumed, it would never arrive.

  2

  The First Last Supper

  In the approach to the twenty-second of January 2019, Cyril went out of his way to insist that the family not organize a big do for his eightieth birthday. With a ferocity intended to nip in the bud any prospect of a party, he stressed his ardent desire to mark the occasion by having an intimate dinner with his wife. Best to condition the family to regard the couple’s landmark birthdays as private affairs. Way back when, he and Kay had agreed that, unless a diagnosis or faulty ticker intervened to spare them, they’d wait until she, too, turned eighty before acting on their pledge. His own eightieth was therefore a trial run.

  The ominous symbolism of the threshold he was crossing wasn’t lost on Kay, whose demeanour on waking on the twenty-second was dolorous and reserved. At Cyril’s urging, this evening they planned to stay in, and Kay would make a small effort: a homemade steak and ale pie, cauliflower cheese—common fare, but well prepared. He far preferred British classics to the sea foams and thin trails of venison reduction that passed for gravy at the chic eatery where Simon had sponsored their fiftieth anniversary bash in 2013. At lunchtime, Kay suggested that maybe they should give a cake a miss this year, since at their age they should be keeping a lid on sugar.