“It was exactly the way I knew: she was sharp as a tack. And I don’t appreciate you sullying her memory by pretending she’d gone all drooling and doolally.”
“You’re grieving. If it helps to take out your pain on me, I’m willing to oblige as a whipping post, so long as you always bear in mind that I lost her as well.”
“Uh-huh. And why was that?”
“As I said, she was forgetting things! This conversation is getting circular—”
“Dad. One of the many things Mum did not forget was to text me that night. She was pretty explicit about your plans for after the pudding.”
Hayley paused to let this sink in, whilst Cyril’s feelings ricocheted between woundedness and horror. He was stricken that Kay would betray his confidence, and it injured him beyond words that the last night of her life included an act of such disloyalty. Yet her disclosure of their pact also put a different slant on events thereafter.
“I usually take my phone up to bed and set its alarm,” Hayley continued. “But during the lockdown, John doesn’t have to go into UCL, and we’re sleeping in. So tragically, when we went upstairs to read in bed, I left the phone behind in the kitchen. That’s where it was sitting when Mum’s text pinged in. A stupid little change of routine whose consequences I now have to live with forever. So I repeat: why are you not dead?”
He bowed his head. “I couldn’t.”
“Mum was always braver than you.”
“It’s hard to explain, but I don’t think the problem was being too fearful.”
“Well, if it wasn’t cowardice, then it was egotism. Which takes the biscuit, because the whole melodramatic proposition would have been your idea! The stroke of midnight on her birthday, the inflexible cut-off of turning eighty, the self-righteous fake altruism behind the reasoning—the whole ball of wax has got Cyril J. Wilkinson written all over it!”
Hayley had long displayed a hectoring side, and although Cyril loved his daughter, the badgering was not attractive. “You can at least take comfort that your mother wasn’t alone in her final moments, but in my arms. She died knowing she was cherished—”
“I could tell the police, you know.”
“Tell them what? I didn’t break the law.”
“You just admitted to me that you watched her die. That has to qualify as criminal negligence. Maybe it’s not murder, but it’s freaking close. Besides, you lied to the cops. You weren’t upstairs in bed. She didn’t overdose in secret. You helped her. And in the UK, assisted suicide is super illegal.”
“Most of those cases are never prosecuted—”
“Honestly, what did you accomplish? You basically killed my mother. Now you’re all by yourself. Is that what you wanted? Were you tired of her?”
“Don’t be absurd. And there’s no evidence of anything criminal. No one will be interested in pursuing an investigation, and you shouldn’t be either.”
“She texted me because she obviously wanted to be rescued. From my father, the zealot. Who didn’t even have the decency to carry out his own dumb idea.”
“You sound as if you wish I were the one who’d topped himself.”
“Yeah, well”—Hayley’s forefinger loomed towards the screen, poised over her red “Leave” button—“the truth hurts.”
* * *
Even before agreeing to leave this world hand-in-hand on 29 March 2020, Kay and Cyril had long embraced the commonplace romance that if one of them died, the other would soon follow. After all, this actuarial mirroring in long marriages had plenty of precedent. The prospect of soldiering on single again, perhaps even continuing to have a pleasant time, had seemed traitorous. They’d a mutual understanding that either losing the other would also entail losing the will to live.
Yet it turned out that Cyril could live without his wife. He couldn’t decide if this reflected on him poorly or well. The discovery that he was able to carry on alone was saddening in a way, as it threatened to cast the defining relationship of his life as ancillary or expendable. Still, it was worth remembering that he did not create himself, and so could not be held responsible for his own essence. Besides, his surprisingly unshakable determination to endure did not reduce to petty selfishness or, as Hayley put it, egotism. From an early age, Cyril was naturally possessed of a ferocity—also not of his concoction—that could be directed towards ill or good. In the main, he had aimed the energy at his long, distinguished medical career, throughout which he had helped thousands of ordinary people to experience less pain, enjoy greater functionality, and overcome disease. The same ferocity had also sent his wife hurtling towards a D-day of her husband’s design.
Looking back, Hayley was right: the grand scheme had accomplished nothing but tragedy. Perhaps the proposition had always been a bit too high-concept. The trouble was that on reaching the improbable year of 2020 neither spouse had been ailing. Such a hard-and-fast deadline might have been feasible had everyone else in the country also agreed to reach the knell of eight decades and call it quits. But everyone hadn’t. The eccentric protocol was therefore fragile. Admittedly, Cyril had always been bloody-minded, and now he didn’t benefit from the moderating, cajoling influence of a more flexible companion. Kay had been more given to caprice; good grief, consider that absurd impulse to vote Leave. Thus he’d little doubt that had he implored her to abandon their plans rather than pushing their original agenda that fateful birthday, she’d have popped the Seconal cheerfully back in the bottle and washed her teeth.
His life as a widower was not as warm and not as fun. The chill wind that blew through his days was made the colder by the fact that Hayley, predictably, could not keep her gob shut, and now all three children blamed him for their mother’s death. Furthermore, their filial attachments had probably skewed in the maternal direction to begin with. Even once the lockdown was lifted, visits from the kids and their
