Kay spent hours on end composing her farewell from beyond the grave, mindful not to leave anyone out, and therefore writing a personalized passage addressed not only to all three children and their partners, but to each of the five grandchildren, her surviving cousins, her brother Percy and his husband, Percy’s estranged children and his ex-wife, and Kay’s four closest friends—then, worried that Charlotte might take offence, making that the five closest.
Then she set about drafting an explanation for why she and Cyril had chosen to take their own lives whilst still of sound mind and body, trying to do justice to her husband’s reasoning that in order to exercise agency over one’s own old age one had to sacrifice a small bit that “wasn’t rubbish.” She submitted that Western society seemed to promote longevity at any cost, whereas a shorter life vibrant to its very end was surely more desirable than blighting a fine and fruitful existence with protracted decay. She wrote about her father, and how painful it had been for his memory to be overwritten by a violent, paranoid lunatic, and she reminisced about her mother’s gentler deterioration that had still turned a sensitive, intelligent woman into a vacuous, killingly polite guest at an eternal tea party. She went on at length about the NHS, researching the statistics online and laying out for their friends and family what a terrible burden the escalating number of frail, elderly patients was placing on a health service to which she and Cyril had devoted most of their working lives.
Alas, as enriching as the composition of these texts proved for her personally, by the time she finished the valedictory it ran to thirty-one pages, which took (she timed it) ninety-two minutes to deliver, and that was before a single musical interlude or vaulting prayer. The exegesis of their motives for the bulletin also grew as extensive as a small book, and the printing costs alone would be exorbitant; she was reluctant to saddle the kids with stiff expenses, especially after they discovered that the better part of their parents’ “estate” had already been liquidated and that, beyond those token trusts for the grandchildren, there would be no inheritance. Worse, on rereading the treatise, she realized that her message could be misconstrued as a castigation of anyone who chose to endure beyond eighty as short-sighted and selfish. The essay seemed intent on making the “old-old” feel literally guilty for living. She sounded hectoring, unfeeling, and fanatical. Only in a few wistful asides did her tone strike notes of sincerity.
At least one advantage to an early exit was that they could probably fill out a reputable number of pews in St Mark’s. Their friends weren’t all dead. They had loads of extended family. Many grateful patients would remember their long-serving GP. Kay still received Christmas cards from osteoporosis sufferers and patients with thyroid imbalances whose medication she’d managed at St Thomas’. Then there were all the satisfied customers whose lives she had brightened with sprightly new window treatments. She could ask the members of Cyril’s old men’s choir and the chatty fellow homeowners at their local residency association. For that matter, Cyril had made any number of new contacts through the People’s Vote campaign. All told, compiling the invitation list—which would save the children such a headache, especially since she was helpfully including postal and email addresses—was gratifying. The couple had led full, useful lives.
Kay might have found the project engrossing, but getting Cyril to participate in the design of their memorial service was like pulling teeth—especially once Parliament finally acceded to a general election on the twelfth of December, and anything that didn’t concern defeating Boris and his imbecilic Leaver henchmen couldn’t hold her husband’s interest for two minutes. “Just tell me,” she prodded him. “Do you like Lonnie Donegan’s ‘I Wanna Go Home’ for a processional, or would you prefer ‘Save the Last Dance for Me’ by the Drifters?” Cyril continued to bang away feverishly on Twitter, under whose soothing influence he’d grown convinced that not only was Boris headed for an ignominious loss of seats, but that Labour had a serious chance of attaining a proper majority. “And I was wondering whether it’s too much of a stretch to invite our old dentist,” she added. “I don’t have his home address, but I imagine his former practice would forward a memorial announcement.” Still no response. “Also, I’m sorry to nag, but it simply won’t do for me to say goodbye to the whole family, and then for you not to leave behind so much as a fare-thee-well. You know the children would be hurt. So when do you think you can get around to drafting something? It needn’t be exceedingly long, but it does need to be personal—”
Finally Cyril slapped his iPad shut. “Listen. You’ve been fretting about that service for weeks on end. I fear you may have forgotten one salient detail: we’re not going to be there.”
* * *
On the evening of December twelfth, the Wilkinsons ate on the early side and hurried the washing up. Switching on the telly, Cyril settled himself in his regular armchair with a ceremonial bottle of ale and a festive bowl of barbecue-flavoured peanuts. “Even if it’s a hung parliament after all,” he announced with relish, “Labour and the SNP will have more than enough MPs to form a government, and that, as for Brexit, is that.”
At ten p.m. on BBC One, the familiar chimes of Westminster tolled the hour.
