“May I finish, oh salt of the earth?” Kay said. “In the mid-1930s the economy was still crap. And of course my mother was flattered by an older man’s attentions. I think she did truly fall for him, but in that overawed way you get infatuated with an imposing professional who’s your boss. He represented a port in the storm. The eighteen-year age difference must have seemed more an advantage than a sacrifice.”
“Young people have no imagination,” Cyril said.
“Exactly,” Kay said. “She might have considered the consequences for their children—since for Percy and me, our father always seemed like an old man; little did we know how young he still was. Our classmates’ fathers had all fought in ‘the war,’ and we tended to conceal the fact that ours had fought in the other one. Still, the last thing my mother would have calculated at her wedding is that when her groom turned eighty, she’d be only sixty-two, looking right smart for a woman getting on, and stuck with a basket case who suddenly can’t remember who’s prime minister. And since almost no one lived terribly long in the thirties, the very, very last thing my mother would have calculated is that when he finally died at ninety-flipping-four, she’d be seventy-six, with bad hips, after having squandered a decade and a half on toilet duty, cursed and vilified for her efforts, mind you—only to be looking at the next tranche of her life and wondering if the same thing is about to happen to her!”
“I’m not accusing you of being self-centred,” Cyril said gently, touching her hand. “But are you crying for your mother, or for you and me?”
“Oh, I have no idea,” Kay said, wiping her eyes, on this day of all days relieved to be crying over someone, if only herself.
“Are you by any chance also angry at me?” Cyril asked tentatively. “For not covering for you more often, with your father?”
“No, no, we’ve talked about this. Please stop castigating yourself. One of us had to be here for Hayley whilst she was still in school, and someone had to remember to pick up a loaf of bread. You surely remember that those few times you relieved me my father got dreadfully agitated. Maybe he perceived you as a rival for Adelaide’s affections. Besides, you run up to Birmingham to check on your own ageing parents practically every month. And who knows what will happen to my mother . . . I’m utterly wrung-out, and how much of this overseeing of corruption can we take? It’s as if our full-time job in future is watching a fruit bowl rot.”
Cyril waited a contemplative beat. “Should your mother also prove long-lived, I can see why you’re worried about going through this all over again. After all, Percy has only lent a hand by planning the funeral once the truly hard part was dispensed—”
“And what a hash he made of that. He should have talked Mum out of the main sanctuary at St Mark’s, which must seat five hundred people. It looked ridiculous. All my father’s friends are dead. His siblings are dead. He’d alienated his nieces and nephews by going doolally, and most of them are also too old to attend a service in North London without walking frames. No one was there. It looked less like a congregation than a tour group.”
“I can also see why you’re worried about having to take care of my parents,” Cyril resumed patiently. “But my sister is bound to help. And I’ll pay whatever it takes to keep them from living with us, because obviously you and my mother have never got on. So. If you don’t mind. I’m much more worried about what will happen to us.”
“In our early fifties, aren’t you pushing the programme a mite?”
“Not at all. The time to consider one’s options in old age is when one is still relatively young and fit. You’ve been terribly kind and given me a virtual free pass. But the real reason I avoided doing my part in your father’s caretaking is that I found my comparatively brief exposure to his decline intolerable. He wasn’t my father, so strictly speaking he wasn’t my responsibility, a technicality I eagerly took full advantage of: I didn’t take care of him because I didn’t have to, full stop. I may have a few patients at the clinic who are also elderly and compromised, but the appointments are only ten minutes, they almost always attend with a relative, and I’m not expected to change their nappies or to decide fifty times a day whether to humour or correct their delusions. I’ve found these encounters discouraging and gloomy, but not incapacitatingly so. By contrast, your father frankly made me suicidal—or homicidal—or both. Half an hour in his presence passed like a mini ice age. He made me feel as if all of life is pointless and horrid. Politically misguided, yes, but Godfrey had always been well-spoken, well-educated, and well-kept, only to become worse than an animal. At least you can take real animals to the vet to be put down well before they reach a state that biologically scandalous. I will do almost anything to keep the two of us from acceding to such a fate.”
“That’s what everyone says,” Kay said morosely, propping her feet on the opposite chair. “Everyone thinks they’re the exception. Everyone looks at what happens to old people and vows that it will never happen to
