“It really doesn’t hurt?” She sounded like a child.
“No.”
Something seemed to give—to collapse, to release, to let go. She dropped her shoulders, took a breath, and looked straight into his eyes with a trust that made Cyril feel obscurely guilty. “I’ve been lucky so far, but I do have wretched genes, don’t I? And I can’t bear the prospect of ruining your life, the way my father ruined my mother’s—until you come to hate me and can’t remember anything good. We had a lovely dinner, didn’t we? And a lovely life.”
She kissed him deeply, the way they used to kiss for hours when they were courting, and withdrew from his lips at last with the same reluctance he remembered from those days as well, when they had to get back to their medical studies. That kiss sent a tingling shimmer through the entirety of their lives together, as if their marriage were a crash cymbal whose rim she’d just hit deftly with a felt mallet.
She poured the water from the pitcher herself. She held out her palm, leaving it to Cyril to decide how many. She bolted them all at once and drained the tumbler.
“Will you stay with me?” she asked. “Promise to hold me till it’s over.”
“I promise,” Cyril said, drawing her to his shoulder and putting an arm around the birdlike bones of her back. However ironically, he felt fiercely protective of her. He would wait to take his own dosage until she was safe, or until the concept of safety no longer pertained. It was a kind of absolute security, when you thought about it: to achieve a state in which no one could do anything at all to you, no matter how dreadful. He had just rescued his wife from every insult under the sun.
“I hope Hayley doesn’t think it’s her fault,” Kay mumbled before nodding off. It was the drug. She was confused.
The moment was technically peaceful, but that was not the word he would have chosen to describe the point at which he instantly sensed that she was no longer there. Even his slight wife’s body felt heavy—burdensome, cloying in its weight, like something he frantically wanted off him, and the corpse—that is what her beloved body had become, a corpse—didn’t exude a becalming serenity, but energized him with horror. As a GP, Cyril had seen plenty of people die, but they were patients, kept at a necessary clinical remove, and none of their passings had felt anything like this.
He lifted her under the arms with all the tenderness he could muster, given that the physical exertion required to hoist dead weight was considerable. (The lexicon of lethality suddenly pulsed with meaning; he had the thought, especially absurd for a physician, So this is what they were talking about.) As best he could, he settled her in a slump on the opposite side of the sofa, trying and failing to close her mouth. If not altogether formulated, the idea had floated in the back of his mind that letting Kay go first would inspire him to go second. He wasn’t so simple-minded as to imagine himself rushing to meet back up with his spouse on some harp-strewn cartoon cloud, but presumably he would welcome the offer of instantaneous escape from grief. He loved his wife, and that tidy array of tablets on the table would reprieve him from experiencing the desolate world without Kay in it for any more than a few minutes.
But that wasn’t what happened. And something did happen: a great welling up from a place in himself with which he was little acquainted. This force arose unbidden; so involuntary was its eruption that the closest comparison he could contrive was to vomiting, although the sensation was not so unpleasant. This—quantity, this—substance, this—enormous, formless thing wasn’t outside of him, or alien to him; it was him. It was what had always been there waiting and watching from within, a sort of under-seer whom he’d rarely had need to consult. In the grip of this larger, stronger, more primitive entity that he had apparently inhabited all along, Cyril looked at the pitcher. Then he looked at his hand. But he simply could not pour the water into the tumbler. The everyday task seemed a physical impossibility, as if the neurological connection between his brain and his arm were severed. Likewise, the notion of sweeping those tablets into an open palm and knocking them back was also impossible. Not merely unappealing, but impossible. With all his being, he believed in this contract he’d entered into with his wife, so he had not been disingenuous. It was his profoundly held conviction that to serve both his own and his nation’s long-term interest he should keep a vow of three decades’ standing to take his own life at the age of eighty-one.
He just didn’t want to.
Dr Cyril J. Wilkinson was still a cogent, clear-headed retired professional who had accumulated invaluable insights into the strengths and, yes, failings of the fifth largest employer in the world. He was a fount of historical knowledge, anecdotal and otherwise, about the early and middle years of one of the greatest social projects a state had undertaken. Why hadn’t he thought of this before, whilst wasting all that time gazing at mangroves in Australia? It was time he wrote his memoirs. He had never been entirely contented with the NHS trust system, which resulted in the much-derogated “post-code lottery”: care in some regions well exceeded care in others. The service was too dependent on foreign staff, and attracting doctors and nurses from Romania, Bulgaria, Pakistan, and India deprived these countries of their own medics. The neglect of GP training was a scandal, for an
