Should We Stay or Should We Go, Page 4

  “Whatever for?” he asked in disbelief. “In order to prevent what? Bake a cake, for heaven’s sake!”

  He didn’t, really, want the cake. He wanted her to stop making sacrifices for a long term that had become perfectly synonymous with the short term. As their personal D-day loomed, he craved some regular indication on her part that little by little all the old rules didn’t apply.

  “All right, never mind diabetes,” she’d said. “But you know how people worry about having a car accident in dirty knickers? I don’t want to be found on my death bed fat.”

  There was little danger of that. As she brought out the pie that night wearing the embroidered birds of paradise kimono they’d picked up in Kyoto, he caught a glimpse of the Registered General Nurse he’d fallen for at Imperial College London. If anything, she was thinner, and the candlelight gentled the frown lines in her forehead and the scores on either side of her mouth. He was never sure whether she looked astonishingly young for her age or he could no longer see her as others did. In the most vital sense, he did see her, and he was reluctant to regard this essence-at-a-glance as a form of clouding. Now, for example, her face exhibited the subtle twitch and churn indicative of the fact that the quantity of thoughts in her head was at inverse proportion to the quantity of her conversation.

  “I find it extraordinary,” she announced once seated, “that we never talk about it.”

  The subject to which she referred was hovering so over this mirthless occasion that as an identifier “it” more than sufficed. However apprehensive about his wife’s capacity for skittishness in the face of next year’s official use-by date, Cyril was at least relieved not to be talking about you-know-what, a subject that at any British gathering had achieved that Basil Fawlty quality of don’t-mention-the-war. The week before, their feeble prime minister had suffered the largest governmental defeat in parliamentary history. The whole business was such a horlicks.

  “I thought you were the one who doesn’t want to talk about it,” he said.

  “I’m not avoiding it exactly. I suppose I don’t know what to say. It’s still so unreal to me. Surreal.”

  He knew what she meant, as he had sometimes felt the same way, though he presently struggled in silence to put the absurdity of this sensation into words. There was surely nothing more real than what had sat sombrely on their agenda for over twenty-seven years: the final if hardly incidental item of a very long to-do list. Yet it was somehow typical of their species to perceive the starkly real—the, if anything, hyper-real, the real as sin, the real as real can get—as not real. As beyond comprehension and therefore as fake. The dissonance was on a par with people’s bizarre compulsion to “feel alive” when that’s precisely what they were.

  “You haven’t,” she added, “ever faltered? In your commitment? You’ve never hesitated, thought twice?”

  “‘Never’ might put it too strongly. You always criticize me for being rigid—”

  “I admire the strength of your convictions. It can simply be frustrating to deal with a man who thinks in black and white when the world is shades of grey.”

  “I’m afraid this is black and white for once. Something we do, or we don’t. The very first time we discussed this—”

  “Meaning, the only time we’ve discussed this.”

  “You said everyone imagines they’re exceptions and they’ll surely arrange an early and merciful exit before submitting to the intolerable. And then they do submit to the intolerable. That’s because, in order to retain agency over your own end of life, you have to be willing to give up some small portion of it that’s not particularly rubbish. Otherwise, you go downhill, doctors and relatives take over, and you’re apt to lose the very part of yourself that makes judgements and takes action. We have a narrow window in which to exercise control.”

  “We have no idea how narrow that window is.”

  “That’s true, we don’t. We’re placing a high-stakes wager. But we’re not playing a game of pure chance like roulette. It’s a calculated gamble, more like blackjack. You remember, we studied the online guidelines in Las Vegas, which were roughly reliable, even if never drawing on a hard seventeen didn’t guarantee that we’d win. We’re working within fairly strict parameters. We won’t live to three hundred.”

  “Yes, that’s all frightfully reasonable,” Kay said, her verdict withering. “But I can’t overcome a certain perplexity that here I am contemplating suicide”—she paused to let the rawness of the rare mention sink in—“in a state of relative contentment. Now. You’re the one pushing us to throw caution to the winds. So have another glass of this Barolo. It’s top drawer.”

  * * *

  Thereafter, Cyril felt guilty. Indulging himself an extra year and two months that he would deny his wife felt like cheating, or even theft. As this was time that he would have Kay herself discard—time by inference not worth living—he was tugged by a perverse urge to make his own bonus add-on of fourteen months appear as wretched as possible. He played up his sciatica, and sometimes winced, or limped on the stairs, when the pain was merely modest. (He’d been informed in his mid-seventies that the stenosis was operable. But why go through all that agony, and cost the NHS a packet in the process, when he didn’t plan to benefit from the surgery for more than a handful of years?) He feigned a poor appetite when he might really have fancied a second helping, and in general avoided expressions of relish.

  The one circumstance in which Cyril was unable to pretend to indifference—the one circumstance in which he failed utterly to cast this extra, stolen bit of life as a burden—was in bed with his wife. Sleeping with this exquisite woman (even if at eighty he was seldom, if you will, up for much more) was simply gorgeous, as it had been since their wedding night. He was taller than Kay, which gave him just the geometric extent to wholly wrap her back. He could honestly say that he could not remember ever lying around her, beside her, or intertwined with her in a position that was even slightly uncomfortable—that was, in fact, anything short of sumptuous. The earthy tones of his wife’s natural scent hit a descant note of sweetness, and featured the same subtle complexity that Kay savoured in red wine; thus he loved nothing better than nestling a cheek on her shoulder to inhale at the base of her neck, where the heady smell was distilled. She didn’t snore, but she did have an endearing habit of talking as she dreamt, which helped convey that the shifting and realigning of their bodies during the night were a form of conversation. Their sleep was best in winter and constituted the most winning aspect of the season (in comparison, sod Christmas), when they lowered the thermostat to 12°C and doubled the duvets, the air sharp and fresh in their lungs, their bodies in due course so indolently warm that it felt almost criminal. An instep cooled outside the duvet would slip bracingly against his calf; a hand warmed under the pillow would cup the side of his neck, making him feel not only safe and beloved, but more profoundly and perfectly present in the single beating moments of his life than he ever felt during the day. For any given night’s repose comprised a sequence of accelerating ecstasies: from a glissando of descent, to the thick brown mud bath of deep slumber, to an early stirring and serene resurfacing, the return to consciousness as clean, smooth, and uplifting as those super-fast glass lifts in the atriums of modern high-rises, in which you can watch the greenery in the lobby foreshorten as you ascend, ears popping, to the eighty-ninth floor. The one element of his retirement that he cherished above all was the opportunity for lie-ins, whose sacrifice during his working years he regarded as his most personally costly tithe to the NHS. Accordingly, it was mornings, riding languid swells in and out of sleep, like rocking lazily in a boat at sea, that he experienced his greatest doubts about their treaty. The prospect of never again resting in his wife’s arms in bed was enough to make him weep, as resting in her arms nearly made him weep as well, from pleasure.

  * * *

  As 2019 advanced, Kay agonized with gathering intensity over choosing to spend a given evening visiting one of the children, havi
ng a drink with her oldest friend Glenda, or dining at home with Cyril—their oft-repeated ritual of chopping, laying the table, lighting the candles, lingering, and efficiently tidying up having suddenly grown as precious as officially festive occasions like her graduation from Kingston. Frankly, she was starting to panic. This giddy, mind-racing rush to capitalize on time remaining reminded her of those low-budget reality shows in which contestants are let loose in a supermarket to pile as many preferably high-value goods as possible in a trolley in twenty minutes. Effectively, she was clattering down the aisles with one bad wheel whilst trying to remember the pine nuts and vanilla.

  What was especially disconcerting? Nothing had really changed. Whether or not she and Cyril took the exact end date into their own hands or left it to chance, her life was always fated to wrap up after a countable number of nights. Accordingly, each and every one of those nights had been just as important as every other, and every bit as important as the abruptly prized 365 that apparently remained as of her seventy-ninth birthday. What was peculiar, then, was not this sweating over what to do on Tuesday, but the heedless caprice with which she had hitherto scheduled all the other Tuesdays.

  This strange rising hysteria, which too often took the form of paralysis, went beyond what to do with her evenings. She would begin reading The Week, to which they had subscribed for many years, and seize in confusion over why she was reading a summary of seven days that were over. She could no longer identify why she should give a toss about high inflation in Iran. Suppose she were to take Cyril’s proposition seriously for once (which, were she honest with herself, she almost never did, or . . . never did—why, she didn’t take his preposterous plan seriously at all, not a whit; now that was sobering, perhaps even portentous). Presumably, nothing whatsoever that occurred after the end of March 2020 anywhere in the world—not only in the Middle East, but in Britain, London, Lambeth, at the Samsons’ next-door—in her very own house—had the slightest bearing on her life. What life? There was meant to be no life to have bearing on. Therefore, did The Week contain a single item that should reasonably command her scarce and terrifyingly terminal attention? And if nothing in that magazine deserved her time now, had it ever?

  It wasn’t only The Week. She wasn’t sure what had taken her so long, but she was finally beginning to intuit that the Guardian and the BBC’s News at 10 were lying—and not in the fashionable sense of “fake news.” Most of the news was true enough, as far as it went, and she had every confidence that its purveyors were sincere in their pursuit of what they believed worthy of public interest. She had the impression of having been misled just the same. None of these journalists seemed to have been covering what mattered. It was anything but obvious what did matter, but she was increasingly certain that the gist, whatever it was, did not involve trade talks about chlorinated chicken, shadow foreign secretaries, or the divorce settlements of the superrich.

  This crisis of . . . of value, of what to do with her life now that she didn’t, or wouldn’t in such short order, even have one (the crisis itself wasteful: still more scarce time squandered on flailing and confusion) came to a head over the one issue that had been the focus of an immoderate degree of emotion for the last three years. Not only was the fervour nationwide, nay, worldwide, but for Kay it had been a private obsession also. The fact that in the main her feelings were secret had made them only more intense. Yet as her looming private departure eerily mirrored the approach of a larger will-we/won’t-we public one, she seemed to split in two. The Kay she had always been followed the fracas’s every twist and turn with the absorption of watching one of those Bourne thrillers. Every media outlet, every dinner party quarrel, every shouty exchange on Facebook fed the version of events whereby this impasse constituted the most important historical juncture since the Second World War. It concerned the alignment of great powers and her nation’s very soul. So exhaustive, and exhausting, had the debate grown by 2019 that most of her compatriots were attesting to total burn-out, claiming to have become so sick to the eyeballs of the whole business that they wished to talk about anything but. Yet these same people employed this very declaration of weariness as a preface for pontificating for hours on end about what they ostensibly could not bear even to mention. There were those who argued that this or that result would engender the ultimate test of democracy, the triumph of democracy, the death of democracy, or what was wrong with democracy, but in any case “democracy” got bandied about by both sides with the sort of frequency that makes you get a bit fuzzy about what the word means.

  Then there was the other Kay, a new Kay, a woman she wished she had more time to get to know. This Kay didn’t, it turned out, give a sod about “democracy” one way or the other. This Kay whispered seditiously that, however it was resolved, there was no better an example of mere bagatelle than Brexit.

  Thus Kay Wilkinson awoke on her seventy-ninth birthday in a strangely schizoid state. By sheer coincidence, Kay was born on March twenty-ninth, the very date on which for the last two years the United Kingdom had been slated to formally depart the European Union. As of a week previous, with no small sense of anticlimax, for the time being Britain would continue to stay put. The two Kays being at odds, she wasn’t sure if she felt happy, sad, or indifferent.

  “So I assume you’re as relieved as I am,” Cyril said. He had taken her to a little neighbourhood bistro. It was obscurely disheartening that he’d ordered the chicken. “Even if a mingy fortnight’s reprieve isn’t all that comforting.”

  “Oh, they’ll push back the date again,” Kay said dispassionately. She had toyed with making a confession tonight—what had she to lose, with only a year to go?—but decided abruptly against it. This was supposedly her last year, and she didn’t want to mar it with recrimination and penance.

  “Probably,” he agreed. “That withdrawal bill is a dog’s dinner, and I can’t see it passing in this parliament even three-times-lucky. Theresa May is incompetent. But at least she’s a Remainer at heart, and it’s begun to show.” Her husband spoke with his usual certitude. There were not two Cyrils. Ever since the referendum, he’d been perpetually enraged by their witless countrymen’s confounding attempt at “national suicide.” For the UK to top itself was an atrocity; for the two of them to do the same was an act of social generosity.

  “You know, it’s been a bit queer . . .” No one used that word to mean “strange” any more, but one of the few pleasures of living on Death Row was release from the linguistic tyrannies of the day. “Having people argue so vociferously all the time about whether to ‘leave’ or ‘remain.’ It’s as if they’re debating our personal quandary.”

  “Since when are we in a quandary?” he snapped. “We’ve made a decision and we’re sticking to it. But as for Brexit”—he pronounced the pestilent neologism with distaste—“there’s all to play for. The chances of a second referendum are rising by the day. It’s the only way out of this gridlock. And the next time round, the knuckle-dragging Neanderthals won’t bludgeon us civilized Britons with clubs. Polly Toynbee got all that stick for observing the plain demographic facts: any number of addled older voters who opted for Leave in 2016 have now died, whilst more progressive young people have come of age, so in a re-run Remain would win hands down. The ruckus in response to that column was mental. As if she wished those older voters dead, or was happy they were dead—”

  “For the sake of both her argument and her electoral convenience, I think she was happy.”

  “All that matters is that statistically Toynbee was right. Look at my father. I’m hardly celebrating, but it’s one positive aspect of our loss: he can’t vote for flagrant idiocy a second time.”

  Two years earlier, Norman’s death at ninety-nine had doubly saddened Kay. She liked him, and not merely as Exhibit A for cogent, energetic old age. (He’d fallen from a ladder and broken his hip, after which his decline was swift. It was the perfect way to go: pruning an overgrown magnolia.) But she’d also treasured the way his longevity complicated
the consummation of that 1991 covenant. If she was right, that Cyril would never bereave his dad, then so long as he survived Norman had provided an insurance policy of sorts. Now the policy had been cancelled.

  “I wish you hadn’t squandered your last few months together squabbling about the EU,” she said, signalling a third time for a breadbasket refill. Throughout the last decade or so, in restaurants she and Cyril had seemed invisible. “For that matter, is this really how we’re going to spend my birthday as well? Talking about Brexit? Because in case you need reminding, as of exactly a year from today, we’re not voting in any second referendum, either.”

  “The People’s Vote movement best get their act together pronto, then.”

  “But doesn’t it . . . mean something to you,” she said cautiously, “how much you still seem to care? As a Remainer, how passionate you still are? This involvement of yours, ever since 2016 . . . I didn’t want to say anything and just make you feel worse, but for a time there you’d got draggy and cranky and cantankerous, like a proper old man. You tried to humour me, but it was obvious from the very start of a holiday that you were counting the days before we’d go home. You seemed to be losing interest in everything. You let that new iPad Simon gave you sit for nearly a year before I bullied you into learning how to use it, and there wasn’t much more to it than turning it on. You even started to leave the Guardian half unread. So you may rail against it, but that referendum gave you a new lease on life. You’ve got back your old energy, as if you’re closer to sixty than eighty. Even your voice sounds stronger. You’ve stayed home from my constitutionals for years, but nothing stopped you joining that massive Remain march to Parliament Square last Saturday. Honestly, with that back of yours, I was worried you might get trampled.”