Back at the door, he withdrew a crumpled piece of blue stationery, on which Cyril had signed both their names. “Can you please verify that you and Mr Wilkinson originated this ‘prank’?”
“Well, yes, but again, I’m so—”
Grandly, the officer withdrew his booklet of stencils and his all-powerful Biro. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to issue you a summons for wasting police time. A lenient magistrate might let you off light with a ninety-pound fine, but your offence is decidedly not small beer. It carries a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment.”
“Is that really necessary?” she asked. “This was merely a misunderstanding that got out of hand.” Despite her efforts to stifle it, the indignation was surfacing. British police had clearance rates for theft, fraud, and assault at near zero, whilst some forces had not arrested a single burglar for months. They pushed around elderly taxpayers because frightened, compliant law abiders were easy pickings.
When the high-handed policeman demanded her details and got to the phone number, Kay drew an unprecedented blank. It was fairly commonplace not to recall your own mobile number, which one tended to communicate to others by texting or ringing up, and she’d misplaced her iPhone all morning (perturbing in itself). Of course she didn’t know Cyril’s; her phone knew Cyril’s. Yet now she couldn’t even retrieve the landline. When a selection of likely digits eventually danced in her head, she struggled to remember whether the last four numbers were 8406 or 8604. It is strangely difficult to locate your own phone number, and she excused herself upstairs to Cyril’s study, rifling water bills and annual TV licences and finally scrounging a hard copy of a tax return from three years ago that included the landline. Aside from changes to the London prefix, they’d had the same phone number since 1972. Rattled, she no longer gave a toss about the silly summons, and when she returned to the foyer the officer, who when she’d suffered her so-called senior moment had seemed to vacillate between pity and contempt, had clearly made up his mind. He went with contempt.
* * *
The sure sign that the peculiar lapse bothered her on a profound level was that she did not tell Cyril. As time went on, there were other things she did not tell Cyril. She must have added the salt to her scone dough more than once; when she chucked the inedible batch, which tasted like colonic irrigation powder, she spirited the bag to the outdoor wheelie bin to conceal the fiasco. She’d have written off the botching of the baked goods as the kind of mistake any cook might make on occasion if it weren’t for the other mistakes. She put capers instead of currents in her spotted dick and then lied about having been experimenting. After weeding the back garden for over an hour, she returned to the kitchen to discover that she’d left the hot water running in the sink. She heated four tablespoons of sunflower oil in a cast-iron skillet in preparation for making a crispy grated-potato cake and got distracted by a pile of laundered tea towels that needed folding. She was only reminded of the oil because of the smoke, and she was really not telling Cyril about that inattention; a minute or two later, the oil could have exploded. As a treat, she picked up a whole duck, but when she put the bird in the oven she left its plastic wrapping on. That slip she couldn’t hide from Cyril, because the smell was horrendous, and her attempt to find the oversight comical failed. It wasn’t funny.
As Kay had noted herself, people in their twenties also suffered from a sudden, inexplicable inability to recall the name of one of their favourite authors like L.T. Hartman . . . that is, L.P. Hartman . . . no, L.P. Hartley—and didn’t conclude that their brains looked like Chernobyl. So when she got lost on the roundabout at Elephant and Castle on the way to Borough Market and ended up instead on Westminster Bridge—after having driven this local route thousands of times—she reasoned that all the new development in the area had understandably made an already complex intersection unrecognizable. When she ordered ten bolts of cotton for converting her friend Lacy’s library into a bedroom-with-half-bath for yet another live-in immigrant carer—when the window to be curtained was on the small side and one bolt would have more than sufficed—Kay could dismiss the error as the mere addition of an accidental zero. Why, anybody could misplace the odd decimal point.
Yet she went through a solid couple of days during which she couldn’t conjure the name of the medical school where she and Cyril had trained. Chatting over the fence, she found herself avoiding the use of their next-door neighbour’s Christian name, though they’d lived beside Whatsherface Samson for decades. It was one thing to be a bit hazy on the precise definition of “louche,” quite another to pull out a stainless-steel bowl with many little holes in it and not know what it was called. Appalled, Kay placed the bowl-with-holes on the countertop and stared it down; she would not allow herself to proceed with dinner until after twenty minutes she finally produced “colander,” a word that had never afforded her such relief. Yet her grasp of the syllables remained perilous, and forever after “colander” had a tentative, barely-within-reach quality. The word was changed. She couldn’t trust it.
“Do you realize what you just said?” Cyril noted that autumn. “We need more ‘Abyssinian foil.’”
“Not at all,” she said. “I said we need more Abyssinian foil.”
“You just did it again. It’s aluminium foil.”
“That’s what I said.” She was getting annoyed. “Abyssinian foil.” She didn’t care for the look on his face. The expression was something like—horror.
It was when she put two sponges in the toaster that Cyril announced
