Within a day or two (as the FTSE plunged again in its giddiest drop since 1987—what a joy to have liquidated all those shares), every appointment Kay had meticulously scheduled for their final month, including benedictory evenings with all three children, was also cancelled. Friends and family alike backed off for the couple’s own good, because anyone over seventy needed to be “shielded” from a disease whose fatalities had an average age of over eighty—leading Cyril to remark, “I have to say, that virus has good demographic taste.”
“Maybe we needn’t touch that black box in the fridge after all,” Kay said, the direct mention so rare that it felt risqué. “We can simply run out in the road on my birthday and inhale.”
“Now, given our circumstances,” Cyril said from behind her at the kitchen sink, “why in heaven’s name do you keep manically washing your hands?”
“Oh.” Kay had already begun a mental rendition of the happy birthday song, which Boris had urged all Britons to sing to themselves twice before concluding this vital hygienic prophylaxis. But Cyril was right. Avoiding fatal infection in order to commit suicide was inconsistent to say the least.
“I suppose it’s all those adverts on the telly,” Kay said with a wan smile, drying her hands. “Propaganda works.”
Cyril had been laconic and inward for months. The coronavirus didn’t altogether alter that demeanour. But he spent all day online on his iPad, and the energy that emanated from his hunched figure had changed frequency. It hummed in a higher register. However poorly timed any spanking new enthusiasm, the contagion was right up his street.
The following week, Boris gently discouraged his countrymen from dining in restaurants and going to the theatre. The pound dropped to its lowest level against the dollar since 1985. It was announced that all schools would shut by that Friday. The Bank of England lowered its baseline rate once more, this time from as-good-as-nothing to no-longer-pretending-to-be-anything-but-nothing. To widespread popular horror, the BBC stopped filming EastEnders.
The whole experience was dizzying. Over the course of a mere ten days, the entire political and cultural landscape transformed, as if someone had pressed fast-forward on the country’s remote. News presenters ceased utterly to mention the word “Brexit,” which overnight was no more likely to arise in everyday conversation than “suit of armour” or “mead.” In a final gesture of dividing the old era from the new, as if loudly lowering a rattling metal shutter between the gritty present and all the fluff and whimsy of the past, Boris U-turned on the cajoling and brought down the hammer. Pubs, theatres, gyms, cinemas, and restaurants would close—indeed, all “inessential” businesses. Addressing the nation, the prime minister announced that every Briton was ordered to stay home, unless they were fulfilling four specific purposes and only these purposes. The wholesale lockdown entailed the most extravagant curtailment of British civil liberties since the Second World War, during which, if Kay and Cyril weren’t mistaken, it had still been legal to walk out your own front door.
“So I’m to spend the last six days of my life under house arrest,” Kay said, after turning off the PM’s address. “I have to confess I feel resentful. It isn’t merely having all those dinners cancelled, our last opportunities to say goodbye, even to our own children. I feel sidelined. Diminished. As if the climactic conclusion of our lives has been summarily overshadowed and trivialized. With all those numbers on the news every night, who’s going to notice if two more elderly Britons snuff it?”
Not having roused from his regular armchair, Cyril was scowling into his hands and didn’t respond.
“And it’s irrational, but I feel oddly left out,” she continued. “Such a snowballing cataclysm, or so it would seem, reminds me, a bit painfully I’m afraid, of the extraordinary degree to which the world will carry on without us . . . Are you going to say anything? We don’t have much time left to say anything at all to each other.”
Cyril announced cryptically, “It’s disproportionate.”
“What is?”
“This shut-down. I’ve studied the data. That weedy, doom-mongering computer modeller at Imperial College London who predicted five hundred and ten thousand British deaths without draconian intervention—he has his head up his backside. The ponce may have Boris in his thrall, but Neil Ferguson has overestimated the lethality of this virus by at least an order of magnitude. And there has to be a reason we’ve never before responded to contagion by closing down the entire country: because it’s not a good idea.”
* * *
At least their final week would be tranquil. Traffic was sparse. Birdsong dominated the garden. Aeroplanes seldom scarred the sky.
When Kay discussed the details of their Last Supper, Cyril was kind enough to take an interest in the menu. “I love your bangers and mash,” he said, with the tinge of sorrow that had coloured his discourse for days. “Let’s have that.”
An easy request to fulfil, you would think. Yet Kay returned from her first trip to Sainsbury’s empty-handed. “It was like Venezuela, or the Soviet Union,” she told her husband in bewilderment. “All the shelves bare, fresh food and non-perishables alike. Everyone’s gone mental. As if it’s the end of days. I wanted to scream, You don’t understand! My husband and I really are facing the end of our days—this very weekend!” Fortunately, by that Friday, special shopping hours for the elderly were installed between seven and nine a.m.—during which the supermarket was jam-packed. As a crowning testimony to the gentrification of what was once a dodgy, down-at-the-heel neighbourhood, by seven-twenty a.m. the shop was already stripped clean of penne and pesto. But Kay was at least able to get her mitts on a packet of sausages.
Weaving in and out of sleep that final Sunday morning was so delectable that they didn’t arise until noon, and then with reluctance. Being eighty years old was nothing like she had imagined many years ago. Various bits hurt, but otherwise she did not feel appreciably different now than when she
