Thus Kay and Cyril Wilkinson’s deal was sealed in October of 1991. Yet, a scant two years later, Kay had a close call with an archetypal White Van Man—who as she advanced into a zebra crossing swerved only at the last minute and crashed into a lamppost, himself much the worse for wear. So near was the miss that it brought home the finality of what her husband planned for them both, should they be so lucky as to make it to the preposterous year of 2020.
“I’m still shaking,” she said, staggering to a seat at the kitchen table. “He cut so close he restyled my hair.”
“Can I get you something?” Cyril solicited. “A glass of water?”
“I don’t want a glass of water! Why are people always offering you a glass of water?”
“Why so irritable?”
“I’m not irritable, I’m traumatized. If I’d stepped off the kerb one nanosecond earlier, I wouldn’t be here. When a different future is that vivid—or when a lack of future is that vivid—it splits off into a parallel universe that’s nearly as real as this one.”
Cyril poured her the too-early dry Amontillado that now, it seemed, ritually accompanied their frank discussions of mortality.
“I’m not sure I can drink that. I feel a bit sick.”
He left the glass. If memory served, its contents would evaporate in due course.
“Listen, my dear, I’ve been thinking,” Kay said. “We never talk about it, as if the whole business is done and dusted. But I’d like to revisit your disagreeable plans for my eightieth birthday.”
“They’re not my plans. They’re our plans.”
Kay squinted. “Mmm. That’s not altogether the way it feels.”
“I can’t change the fact that it was my idea. I’d hate to think that my proposal is permanently tainted purely for the fact that it was my proposal.”
“But of course you’re the one who would concoct such a scheme. It’s absolutist. It’s uncompromising. It’s an abstract, arbitrary, and overly tidy attempt to head off an unknowable future that’s bound to be messy, complicated, and horribly down to earth. I understand that you don’t like uncertainty, but the alternative can’t be a certainty that’s off the beam.”
“I don’t apologize for trying to organize our lives with intent, and in concert with our beliefs. We don’t want our avoidance of awkward, unpleasant subjects, and a consequent lack of forethought, to accidentally end up costing the health service perhaps millions of pounds, all lavished on misery—”
“Oh, put a sock in it.”
“I thought you liked the idea of getting our affairs in order beforehand—”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking about,” Kay interrupted, and took a slug of the sherry. “My mother has deteriorated precipitously, and we’ve had to make all these arrangements on the hoof. Scurrying round trying to find a facility that doesn’t reek and where staff don’t torture the dementia patients for sport, only to discover that one more care home in Surrey has suddenly closed after we drive all the way down there. It’s all so last minute, as if it’s a big surprise that she’s old, which anyone could have predicted who can count. What you and I need to do is what nobody does: plan for decay. Stop pretending we’re going to live forever, and stop indulging the standard conceit that we’re frightfully special, so all the wretched things that happen to other old people will never happen to us.”
Kay laid out a series of practical measures that entailed some sacrifice, but of a more modest nature than the drastic one that her husband had contrived. Cyril was impressed.
“I’ve never told you this,” Kay added, “but for a while now I’ve been considering taking retirement two years from now and then qualifying as an interior designer. I really do think the conservatory turned out smashing. I’ve quite enjoyed doing up this house, and I think I’d be a dab hand at doing up other people’s as well.”
“Retire at fifty-five!” Cyril said, recoiling. “That borders on freeloading. And in comparison to addressing this country’s escalating rates of Type 2 diabetes, selecting curtains seems awfully lightweight.”
“Presently, they’re more likely to be blinds. But don’t get your knickers in a twist. I said I’ve considered it. In light of this discussion, I think not. A second career would be a risk, with no guarantee of panning out financially. It’s probably better for me to put in ten or twelve more years at St Thomas’. Giving interior design a miss makes me sad, but it’s sensible. And no, thank you, no more sherry, not until eight o’clock—which is sensible, too. I should get going on dinner. And whilst I’m at it . . .” She scanned the open refrigerator and rose on tiptoe. “We won’t be needing this.” With a clang, she dropped the black soap-dish box unceremoniously in the bin.
* * *
At that time, Kay and Cyril were both still under fifty-five, which made their purchase of long-term care insurance more affordable; most people waited until their sixties, by which point premiums skyrocketed. Nose to the grindstone even longer than she’d promised, Kay continued to work in the endocrinology unit until she was sixty-eight, whereas Cyril stayed on at the clinic in Bermondsey until he turned seventy—the minimum age, he argued to anyone who would listen (i.e., pretty much nobody), until which everyone would need to keep working if the economy in future was not to go belly-up. Putting off drawing down their pensions would increase their payouts when the time came.
They also made substantial contributions to private pensions. After taking a hit when the dot-com bubble burst, they rebalanced in a more conservative direction, which helped protect their portfolios from devastation when the monster Great Recession arrived in 2008. Continuing to rise in value, the house in Lambeth could prove the ultimate nest egg if either lived long enough to receive a birthday card from the Queen.
They took no exotic foreign holidays. Kay had wistfully hoped someday to visit Japan or Australia, but such lavish expenditures were imprudent. Instead they took day trips to Brighton, visited the
