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
