Kay plunked back in the kitchen chair, eyes dry. Why, they were so dry they hurt.
Cyril scrutinized his wife. This seeming stoicism of hers was uncharacteristic. Of the two of them, she was the far more impassioned. He was the methodical thinker, which meant that others sometimes mistook him for cold-hearted. Nevertheless, she was not an emotional liar. Eight days ago, when the call from Maida Vale awoke them at four a.m., Kay had also been matter-of-fact. The news hadn’t been unexpected. Apparently they’d had difficulty feeding his father-in-law for weeks, because the poor fellow had trouble swallowing. (That’s what happened: the brain became so dysfunctional that it forgot how to close the epiglottis. At its most extreme end, the disease delivered its coup de grace: the brain forgot how to breathe.) After Kay finished talking to her mother in the hallway, she lodged the cordless phone in its cradle at their bedside and announced without ceremony, “Dead.” She’d slid under the duvet and gone straight to sleep.
“You can’t stir up any feeling for him at all, then?” Cyril asked. “Sorrow, a moment of nostalgia?” As of her shockingly unsentimental pragmatism last week, it was a little too easy to picture Kay noticing that he himself had just dropped dead beside her and then harrumphing to her side of the mattress with relief: finally, a certain someone would no longer crank the bedclothes systematically to the left, and she’d have the duvet to herself.
“No, I feel absolutely nothing, and I’ve tried,” she said. “This dying by degrees, it cheats everyone. I feel as if he’s been dead for years. I’ve never been allowed a proper bereavement, either. But I shouldn’t feel sorry for myself, because for my mum it’s been so much worse. My father continually accused her of stealing his things, or of rummaging through his legal papers. More than once he called the police, and he could have periods of lucidity long enough to persuade an officer at the door that the strange woman in the sitting room really was a con artist or a thief. I can’t possibly appreciate how painful it’s been for her. I’m sure I must have told you that during the last few years he forgot their entire marriage. Instead he fixated on ‘Adelaide,’ remember? The sweetheart he married after he came back from the Great War. They hadn’t been married two years when Adelaide died; maybe it was influenza. Think how it made my mother feel, her marriage of fifty-five years obliterated by an eighteen-month relationship from 1920. It would be as if in my dotage I eternally pined for David Whatshisname—”
“David Castleveter,” Cyril filled in sourly.
“See, you remember my old boyfriends better than I do. So my dad kept calling for Adelaide and accusing my mother of having kidnapped his bride. He thought Mum was some jealous harridan who’d trapped him in this strange house. I’ve seen the portrait, a black-and-white kept high up on his study bookshelf, and Adelaide was a stunner—more of a knockout than my mother ever was, to be honest, and for Mum I’m sure that didn’t help.”
“Can’t you compartmentalize?” Cyril poured her another half glass. He’d heard about Godfrey’s demented obsession with Adelaide before, but this rehearsal seemed to be getting something out of his wife’s system. “You seemed to have a real soft spot for your father before his decline. Can’t you keep your memory of him in his heyday in a separate place?”
“Nice idea, but memory is too fragile. You can’t mangle it like that. My memory of what he once was is like a delicate daddy longlegs that the last ten years have stepped on. I think about my father, and I can’t control the pictures that pop in my head. Naked below the waist, purple with rage, and covered in faeces: one of my favourites.”
“I still have a fair recollection of Godfrey when he was younger. Bit straight-laced, and a Tory, but we forgive our elders their misjudgements out of respect.”
“You forgave no such thing. You two got into terrible rows when Thatcher came in—by which point he’d already lost a marble or two, so it wasn’t a fair fight.”
“There. You do remember something from before all the marbles rolled away.”
“My mother is convinced that she brought this calamity on herself.”
“How so?”
“Well, maybe my father really was devastated by losing Adelaide, because he didn’t remarry until . . . I think it was 1936. He was a fine-looking chap in his day—trim figure, high cheekbones, that flaming head of hair he kept to the very end. My mum’s job as a receptionist for his practice wouldn’t have paid much, and marrying a solicitor seemed to offer a security she could only dream of. The only reason a single young woman like my mother would have worked back then was that her family hadn’t the means to keep her—and her father was a hand-to-mouth shopkeeper.”
“Spare us Maggie’s humble origins routine, bab. Your upbringing was altogether prosperous, and you know it.”
Back in the day, pompous Britons would lay claim to a distant relative with aristocratic credentials—a baroness, a duke—the better to bootstrap themselves up a social tier in the eyes of their fellows. More recently, the broadly middle-class populace laid pompous claim instead to relations who were coal miners or steel workers. But with a
