Cyril’s cutlery froze. “Is this a joke?”
Kay laughed. “In a way. What’s not a joke now? Darling, I’m positively wounded if you can’t finally find it funny. And amidst the chloroforming of the entire UK during a global pandemic, I am astonished—perhaps even impressed—that you still care. Goodness, all your dire warnings about how Brexit was ‘committing economic suicide.’ Now the UK is committing real economic suicide by putting a ‘Gone Fishing’ sign on the whole flipping country. Continuing to hyperventilate over whether a few goats can scamper unimpeded across the Northern Irish border seems incongruous to say the least.”
“But the referendum seemed to matter monumentally in 2016. What in God’s name got into you?”
“Something impish. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing at the polling station. I simply marked the X in a different box. The whole experience was terribly refreshing, like a tall drink of water on a hot day.”
“You threw your country’s future in the toilet on a whim?”
“My dear, we don’t want to get into a row tonight of all nights. It wasn’t a whim precisely. I did it because I knew I wasn’t supposed to. Sometimes I wonder how well you know me after all. I don’t like being told what to do. Including by you. Maybe especially by you.” But she made these assertions lightly.
“Our countless conversations . . .” His expression gave human form to the “recalibrating!” declaration of their GPS when you took a turn in defiance of its officious instructions. “I always assumed you were testing our arguments the better to strengthen them. Playing devil’s advocate.”
“Honestly, I’ve long found those haughty, patronizing bureaucrats in Brussels hard to take. They’re the same authoritarian sort who’ve imposed all these bossy stay-at-home orders.”
“So all along this household has had a fifth column.” He looked gutted.
“Yes, and all those insults you pitched at the ‘ignorant bigots’ and ‘pathetic Little Englanders’ you were hurling at me!” she said gleefully. “But I’m truly fascinated that right up to the brink you’re still holding onto your umbrage over Brexit.”
“First I discover that more than half my compatriots are self-destructive, small-minded louts. Next I discover that they’re also sheep—‘freeborn Englishmen’ who will accept indefinite house arrest without a bleat of protest. Who blindly embrace as gospel the wild, unfounded forecasts of one maverick, historically alarmist epidemiologist at our alma mater, because after all this time they apparently still don’t know how to use the internet on their own. Maybe it’s easier to leave behind a country I no longer recognize.”
“And a wife you no longer recognize?”
He reached to clasp her hand across the half-eaten mash; she’d made too much. “Nothing makes that easy, bab,” he said, and his eyes filmed.
All day, Kay had been lifted by a peculiar floating sensation, as if she were drifting two or three inches above the floor, the way a hovercraft glides across the waves without touching water. This giddiness and detachment and lack of seriousness were dreadfully inappropriate considering, as if the guiding principle for all their major decisions for decades were merely a fanciful leg-pull. As she sipped the last of the champagne, this feeling of fizzy levitation intermingled with the refreshing spritz of bubbles on her nose, but the buzz wasn’t from the wine; she felt as if she were the champagne, rising into the air, pip, pip, pip. This whole evening, she should have been consumed with dread and anxiety, and instead she couldn’t remember a night in recent memory when she and her husband had had a better time.
“You know, after all the threats of disaster from the IMF, the CBI, and the Bank of England?” she mused, rising to open a pricey bottle of cabernet that she was damned if she’d leave for Roy. “I’m a bit disappointed that now I’ll never learn whether leaving the EU turns out to be a calamity after all. Since we’re still in the ‘transition period,’ the first results won’t be in until next year. And now this coronavirus deep freeze introduces such a confound that the separate impact of Brexit may never be known. For that matter, I’m also intensely disappointed not to be able to see to the other side of this pandemic. Will millions die? Will the world economy implode into a dog-eat-dog depression? Why, we still don’t even know whether Boris will make it.” Boris had just tested positive, along with the Minister of Health and Prince Charles.
“That buffoon biting the dust could be one of the only good things to come out of this disease.”
“Now, you don’t really mean that.”
“Of course I do,” Cyril said irritably.
“Oh, never mind Boris. My point is—well, I find it surprisingly easy to stop caring about what happens—that is, I can readily let go of my attachment to a particular outcome—but I find it infernally difficult to stop being interested. I feel as if I’m in the middle of so many stories, and suddenly it’s time to return all these unfinished novels to the library. Doesn’t it bother you that now you’ll never find out whether Donald Trump is re-elected?”
“Not especially,” Cyril said. “Trump’s not our problem. And if that charlatan does keep squatting in the White House, maybe I’m better off spared the news. Besides, something’s bound to be up in the air, whenever one bows out.”
“Sorry. Even amidst the end of the world—ours anyway—needs must!”
Kissing Cyril’s top knuckle and giving his palm a squeeze, Kay slipped off to the loo—within whose privacy she felt a surge of the same last-minute fickleness, fecklessness, mischief, and caprice that had drawn her hand to the “wrong” box on the ballot paper in 2016. She was suddenly sorry she hadn’t smashed that plate when the peculiar urge had been upon her, if