Mumbling something about interfering with posted mail being technically illegal, the girl reluctantly capitulated, probably just to get the rabbiting old biddy off her back.
Exhilarated by her successful mission, and perhaps exhilarated full stop, just because she was still feeling the spring breeze on her cheeks, still looking forward to a second buttered crumpet, and still, despite his infernally programmatic approach to complex problems, in love with her boneheaded husband, Kay raised the envelope high with her more functional left arm and rushed across the road to their house on the corner without looking. An archetypal White Van Man knocked her ten feet into a lamppost, and that was that. She was eighty years old and a day.
4
Cyril Has an Unexpected Change of Heart
“It’s taken me ages to realize that I still don’t understand what this is,” Kay blithered. “I mean, it’s difficult to quit something when you’ve no idea what you’re quitting. I may be eighty, and perhaps that really is as much time as I deserve, but I still can’t get my head round what it means to be alive in the first place, much less what it means to die. I don’t know what this place is, I don’t know whether it’s even real, much less whatever it was we were supposed to do here, and if I’ve wasted my time I still can’t tell you what I should have done instead. I’ve no more idea what matters than I did when I was five. I keep having this feeling that there was something I was supposed to come to grips with, and there’s not much chance of my grasping the nettle in”—she checked her watch again—“fourteen minutes!”
Cyril had been patient throughout the insensible monologue, clearly the product of hysteria. “I doubt any of us can understand what life is until the moment we lose it,” he said soothingly, stroking her hand. “Maybe a full grasp of life is only possible in the act of sacrificing it. Whatever you think you’re supposed to ‘come to grips with’ may elude you until the final epiphany.”
Kay frowned. “To live, you have to die?”
It was a crude translation, when he thought he’d put his philosophical formulation rather poetically for a medical man. There was something heartbreaking about the way his wife kept starting and seeming to prick her ears at the least sound from outside—a far-off siren, the screech of a fox—whilst continually darting her eyes wildly in the direction of the foyer, as if she were expecting rescue by an angel from the great beyond at the last minute. Perhaps it’s impossible to foretell how one will react, up against the ultimate unknown, and Kay’s reaction was panic—which was probably standard.
Yet Cyril himself felt calm and lucid. He was experiencing the sense of presence that visited him so often when sleeping with his wife but that seldom returned during the waking day. It was a deeply enjoyable sensation of being cohesive, unified, of a piece, and his thoughts, frequently clamorous, were still.
As he sucked the top from the black box, it made a satisfying swoosh, like the release of an air lock. He shook the tablets from the bottle inside and lined them up in a neat grid on the coffee table. Kay regarded his arrangement, which looked as if he were setting about a travel game of Go, with abject terror.
“What are you afraid of, bab?” he asked gently.
Emitting only the faint buzz of an incandescent lightbulb filament, she was trembling nonetheless. “Of making a mistake.”
“But this is our fate. It’s everyone’s fate. So it can’t really be a mistake, unless the design of the universe is in error.”
“Maybe it is in error.” She was stalling for time. He’d rarely felt so eloquent, yet he knew that expression on his wife’s face: annoyance.
“You should experience only a soft, slow decrescendo,” he said. “Nothing to fear. I would never do anything to hurt you.”
She shot another desperate, inexplicable glance at the entrance to the foyer.
“This is the best possible way out,” he intoned. “On our terms, in our home, when we’re still sane and recognizable to each other. When we’re able to embrace and say goodbye. Before we’re put through untold degradation and indignity. Before we cost our compatriots a mint whilst surviving as grotesque parodies of our younger selves, or as mere vessels for affliction. We’re exercising control over our own destinies. Remember what happened to your parents.”
“That was decades ago, so I suppose their decline has grown less vivid. And I don’t want to remember it. Why would I?”
“For the time being, you don’t remember their woeful deterioration because you don’t want to. Soon you could neglect to remember it because you can’t.”
“Oh, maybe you’re right. As you are about most things, of course. I mean, I’m sorry about voting Leave. I’m not sure what got into me. I dare say it will be bad for the economy, and you know I never imagined in a million years that Leave might win—”
“No more Brexit,” he abjured with a smile, brushing her cheek. “Not during our last few minutes on this earth.”
“Sorry,” she said in embarrassment. “Distracted chatter. Maybe that’s all that palaver ever was.”
“Shush. You’re still talking about it. Talk about now. Think about now. That’s all that’s left.”
“. . . At least we’re doing this together, right? Which makes all the difference, to me anyway.” She ran her hand up and down the thigh she had stroked, squeezed, and traced lingeringly with a forefinger on the way up to more intriguing anatomy for fifty-seven years. “It doesn’t make it easy, but easier—much easier.”
“And this way, neither of us has to live without the other, even for a short while,” he said. “I’ve always been
