The blood drained from Cyril’s face. His posture collapsed and his limbs went slack. He looked his age and then some. The fact that his bottle was filled with bitter seemed horribly apt.
For the immediate future was a foregone conclusion. There would be no second referendum. Every Tory candidate had pledged to support Boris’s tweaked withdrawal bill, which would now sail through Parliament like one of the crumbling building’s many bats. The United Kingdom would depart the European Union at eleven p.m. on the thirty-first of January. There would be no further delays, and no appeal. The Remainers had lost. Kay was minded to take the eerie finality of the moment as an omen. There was such a thing as a deadline, a hard-and-fast deadline, a deadline that truly came due.
After that night, Cyril was lifeless. His dependency on the seemingly ceaseless political drama had bordered on chemical. Kay was reminded of the film Awakenings, in which comatose patients were given a drug that made them walk and talk like real people again, until the drug wore off. For Cyril, as of the worst result for Labour since 1935, the drug had worn off.
* * *
The UK left the European Union at the end of January with little fanfare. When the prime minister addressed the nation that evening, major broadcasters including the BBC refused to carry the speech in full. There was some boisterous flag-waving around Parliament Square, though the poor revellers weren’t even allowed to drink. Relieved to see the back of the whole business, Kay was already disconcerted why membership of a trading bloc had ever seemed worth fighting over. The whole country seemed to be sheepishly recovering from a feral childhood tantrum. On both sides, everyone acted slightly embarrassed to have got quite so purple-faced over who got to play with the stuffed bunny.
On the heels of the devastating general election, Kay had worried that Cyril would arrive at her red-letter birthday on March twenty-ninth irretrievably unravelled. But as the first two months of 2020 inexorably advanced, he progressed from dismal, to pensive, to elegiac. Maybe it was for the best that his crusading high had subsided. He had used the diversion of Brexit to avoid thinking about their own exit—Cyrexit, if you will; Kayexit—and to approach such a Gethsemane without pause for contemplation would have reflected poorly on his intellect.
Understandably distracted by the imminence of making good on a suicide pact, Kay was slower than most Britons to pick up on murmurs about some illness in China. She paid the business no mind at first; taking care not to blight her last winter on earth by lying febrile and abed, she’d had her flu shot in the autumn. As infections began to spread, to Seattle, to Lombardy, they seemed to have nothing to do with her, even when the WHO declared a pandemic. Surging and subsiding across the globe all her life, communicable disease constituted yet one more travail in the conduct of human affairs that she would soon gladly leave to others.
Up against a stark final reckoning, Kay had zero interest in going anywhere further away than Waitrose—making her wonder whether their previous beaverings to foreign destinations had been diversionary, and if so, a trip to Malta had been diversion from what? Yet her less introspective compatriots continued to rush hither and yon, so it was inevitable that this highly contagious pathogen would eventually pop up in the United Kingdom. Indeed, on the first of March, the Today programme cited that the number of confirmed cases in Britain was five. On the second of March, the same presenter announced there were thirty-six.
Three days thereafter, the first British fatality was declared. By the eighth of March, the fatalities had risen to three. While the Wilkinsons theoretically regretted anyone’s demise, the couple had more pressing matters to ponder. What had the sum total of their lives come to? Had they left anyone in their extended family or social circle feeling injured or neglected, and might amends be made before it was too late? And hold on a minute: was this pact of theirs flagrantly barking?
Yet if the spouses were unperturbed by three British fatalities and under three hundred cases, the rest of the world seemed to care a great deal. At the beginning of the second week of March, something unpleasant happened to the London stock market. Luckily for Kay and Cyril, the big advantage of having no more money was perfect imperviousness to its loss.
During the same week that the FTSE crashed, at the beginning of which the Wilkinsons had exactly twenty-one days to go before lights out, Kay received her first social cancellation. That Thursday, she and Glenda had planned to hit Borough Market to score some early wild garlic, meander to the Tate Modern, dander across the Millennium Bridge, pop into St Paul’s, and saunter along the Strand to end up at The Ivy in Covent Garden for a well-earned fish supper. It was an engaging route they’d traced before. But on that Wednesday, when the Bank of England lowered its baseline interest rate from almost nothing to as-good-as-nothing and total UK deaths from so-called COVID-19 had reached eleven, Glenda begged off. Kay burst into tears.
“Sweetheart, why ever are you taking such a minor disappointment so hard?” Glenda puzzled. “It’s just, this coronavirus does seem to have it in for us oldies, and Boris is discouraging us from socializing. I’m not a nervous Nellie, but staying put does seem sensible. We can reconvene when the excitement subsides and enjoy our outing twice as much for the wait. The weather will have improved as well.”
“But how long do you think it will take for the ‘excitement to subside’?” Kay whimpered.
“Oh, heaven knows. A few weeks? Goodness, a fortnight or two of Amazon Prime Video? You’ll hardly die.”
At
