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 in 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.
“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
