Meanwhile, Cyril threw himself into the campaign for a second referendum, leafleting and banging out diatribes on the social media he used to decry as background noise. He helped organize a petition by the British Medical Association protesting prospective restrictions or tariffs on drugs imported from Europe and the dangers this could pose for NHS patients. His further donations to the People’s Vote campaign pinched their budget even if they were only eking through next March, obliging Kay to economize during a period they ought sensibly to have been loading up on smoked salmon, quails’ eggs, and cognac. He conceived an outsize loathing for Boris Johnson, whom he’d always dismissed as a dishevelled, lightweight chancer and whom Cyril elevated, once the tousled pro-Leave Tory became prime minister, to a diabolical, double-dealing demagogue (alliteration itself being a signature Boris-ism). Cyril joined still another People’s Vote march to Parliament Square that October, dubiously vaunted as one million protesters strong.
In tandem, Kay had grown so apathetic about the unending legislative impasse that she couldn’t be bothered to get her head round some nonsense about parliamentary “prorogation” that was or was not “judiciable” and was or was not “unlawful,” which for some reason wasn’t the same thing as “illegal”; for pity’s sake, in comparison deciding on kitchen fixtures was positively riveting. The spectacle of her husband throwing body and soul into a reversal of that stupid referendum bewildered her. For Kay and Cyril Wilkinson, whether the UK remained a member of the EU—or NATO, or the UN, or the Commonwealth—was perfectly on a par with whether the country entered the Eurovision Song Contest. In a handful of months, they were planning to commit suicide, at which point there would be no EU, NATO, UN, or Commonwealth, and no song contest. There would be no UK. There would also be no magpies, no skies blue or otherwise, no quails’ eggs, no paperclips, no best friends with their noses out of joint, no cyberspace, no wellingtons, no household dust mites, no £6 discount coupons from Tesco if you spend £40 by 7/11/19, no scalp eczema, no elusive concepts like “populism,” no such colour as “burnt orange,” no words like “louche” whose definition she’d never quite pinned down, no emotion called “ebullience”—and not just the word for it but the very feeling of explosive joyfulness would exist no more. There would be no “supranational institutions”—not the names of them, not the overpaid, supercilious salarymen who ran them, not the ideas of them, not their acronyms or their unaudited finances. There would be no democracies and no parliaments, prorogued or unprorogued. In sum, there would be no Kay and Cyril, and therefore all these scraps that combined to form their perceived universe would vanish. She had the impression that Cyril didn’t exactly get it.
To the best of her ability, Kay finally concluded that for her husband the country’s death struggle over Brexit, of all things, was a priceless distraction from his own struggle. He was like their most feckless grandson, who locked himself in his bedroom playing video games when he should have been writing his essay on Wuthering Heights. At once, Cyril clung to the political crisis as a stand-in for all that in a short time hence he had vowed to give up: the arbitrary, transitory, irrational passions of the human world. She’d been exasperated by his lack of historical perspective (England as a nation had lasted for a thousand years and had been an EU member for only forty-six of them), but it was obvious that the last thing Cyril wanted was a sense of perspective. Brexit was intoxicating for its very status as a mania of the moment. The imbroglio had become his anchor to the present, which he gripped blindly like a lamppost in a gale. To “let go,” as she put it on her seventy-ninth, of what currently so absorbed their neighbours was also to let go of everything else. He cared so much because the divisive issue of the day, which could very well appear negligible in fifty years’ time if not in two or three, had come to represent caring itself.
Pointedly at first, that autumn Kay started planning their joint memorial service. Because Cyril wasn’t the only one desperate for a source of attachment, the project soon became all-consuming. She combed through volumes of poetry, especially responding to the verses she’d been required to memorize at school—Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving? . . . It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for—though the extraneous name “Margaret” might confuse congregants, and the poem’s theme was a shade morose. She listened tirelessly to Spotify playlists from the late 1950s and early ’60s, when she and Cyril had come of age and married—Roy Orbison, Shirley Bassey, the Everly Brothers, Tommy Bruce and the Bruisers—and sometimes the silliest numbers like “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” could move her to nostalgic tears. She paged methodically through a C of E hymnal, as more traditional churchgoers might appreciate respectfully sombre selections. Perusing the vast collection of family photographs that Hayley had kindly digitized, she searched for a suitable pic to put on the cover of the programme, and perhaps also to enlarge and prop on an easel before the altar. She was torn over whether to use a shot that included the children or a more romantic one of just the two of them. There was also the question of whether to use a recent (meaning depressing) likeness or an earlier photograph that captured their comely youth.
