“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, having 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
