The one matter that could wholly absorb him was mental rehearsal of Kay’s eightieth. Having dodged a full reckoning with that night ever since, he had probably plunged into his memoirs as a flight from coming to terms with what he had done. What Kay had done? What he had done. So perfectly deprived of distraction, he finally came to recognize that he had been living in a permanent state of searing self-excoriation from the instant the dead weight of her head had sagged against his shoulder. From that moment forward, he’d been hating himself far more ferociously than his children had ever done. However unacknowledged, the verdict had been instantaneous: if he’d not killed his wife outright, he might as well have. He’d not only been missing her, but grievously ruing the fact that he had allowed dogma to take precedence over the love of his life.
No one would ever witness a none-too-subtle reordering of this version of events. Lying supine and motionless, lonely and suffocating, the ventilator tube raw in his throat, Cyril not only forgave himself, but thanked himself. Oh, yes, he missed her, all right. But he had spared her. Now Kay would never lie for an eternity staring up at a water spot the shape of Norway. Tipping those tablets into her waiting palm had constituted his purest act of altruism. For when he envisioned his wife slack in his arms, he no longer felt guilt, but envy.
* * *
This epiphany onwards, Cyril’s sole purpose became getting his life support withdrawn. Achieving this aim was impeded by the fact that Marshall Evans, the lead doctor on his case, was one of those wet sorts forever trotting out that muddy metaphor, the “slippery slope.” A Catholic tritely attached to the “sanctity of human life,” the neurologist had already been queasy about taking his patient off the ventilator even back when Cyril appeared to have lapsed into a persistent vegetative state. Once the patient’s blinking established that someone was home, his hallowed “human life” became all the more sacred. As a GP, Cyril had encountered plenty of Evans’ ilk—the type who lobbied to keep flagrantly unviable infants alive for as long as medically possible, when the babies were doubtless in pain and were going to die anyway. It was the same type who spent tens of thousands of pounds at the vet on a fifteen-year-old arthritic dog. Besides, Cyril detected in his physician an unhealthy professional fascination with a rare waking coma that the doctor had read about but had never before encountered in practice. Evans wouldn’t readily relinquish such an interesting specimen. With this chap, even passive assisted suicide was going to be a hard sell.
Consequently, Cyril left no room for ambiguity. As a nurse trailed her finger across the alphabet board and transcribed each letter that elicited a blink, he instructed Dr Evans starkly, P . . . U . . . L . . . L . . . [] . . . T . . . H . . . E . . . [] . . . P . . . L . . . U . . . G . . . [.] Yet all too typically keen to emphasize his status as a former colleague in our NHS, he made the mistake of elaborating: M . . . Y . . . [] . . . C . . . A . . . R . . . E . . . [] . . . I . . . S . . . [] . . . C . . . O . . . S . . . T . . . I . . . N . . . G . . . [] . . . A . . . [] . . . F . . . O . . . R . . . T . . . U . . . N . . . E . . . [.] . . . I . . . [] . . . A . . . M . . . [] . . . A . . . [] . . . B . . . E . . . D . . . [] . . . B . . . L . . . O . . . C . . . K . . . E . . . R . . . [.] From this perfectly rational concern, one that any advocate of a sustainable national health care system should regard as paramount, the neurologist concluded that the patient was suffering from the “low self-esteem” indicative of clinical depression. (Who would NOT be clinically depressed when buried alive?) Cyril was therefore in no fit state to make life and death decisions on his own behalf.
Consultations with the family were no more availing. If he didn’t stand to benefit from an inheritance, Roy wasn’t fussed either way. Simon was the most decent of the lot, but as a bean counter for the City, and a bloody Tory to boot, he wasn’t a deep thinker; simplistically, he didn’t want to assume the ethical responsibility for patricide. Hayley was a sadist who wanted to keep her father in living hell for as long as possible as punishment for her mother’s “murder.”
Stroke victims with locked-in syndrome did not commonly live longer than about four months. Yet if Cyril qua person had lost the will to live, Cyril qua organism was unusually robust. He lived to ninety-three.
5
The Precautionary Principle
“In the course of an hour, she told me about the same chamber concert at St Mark’s three times. She kept asking how ‘Cyril’ was getting on at Barclays and how ‘Cyril’ likes his new flat, so I had to infer she meant Simon. Lastly, I found a stack of freshly laundered towels in her oven. That pact of yours, my dear?” Kay raised grimly. She hadn’t alluded to her husband’s macabre proposal since he’d first mooted the idea in April. “I’m all
