“Oh, it was good of you to chip in, but I’ve been expecting this,” the old man said. “Maybe a smaller place would make it easier to keep an eye on Kay. Here, I’m always afraid she’s going to burn the house down.”
“To be honest, I can’t for the life of me understand why you spent down your savings to the last penny and refinanced the house to the gills in the first place. Were a few foreign holidays worth it? I finally told Roy that he won’t be inheriting two bits, and he’s livid.”
The older gentleman slumped in a dejected attitude that made Kay feel sorry for him. Whilst he could come across as strident, he still seemed like a very nice man. “Well, son, you’re missing a piece of the puzzle. We didn’t want to tell you kids in advance, because we didn’t want you to try and stop us. And we didn’t tell you afterwards, either, because we didn’t want to cause you undue anxiety or to incite you to become interferingly protective. But in 2020 it was your mother’s and my original intention to, um. Beat a mutual retreat.”
“You mean, leave the country?”
“Leave the country and everything else besides.”
“Why on earth would you do that?”
Kay didn’t care for the fact that both these two gentlemen were visitors in her home, and yet they ignored their hostess. She herself was better brought up than that. Also owing to a proper upbringing, she often avoided pointing out that other people did not always make a great deal of sense. Here the strident chap wanted to find a missing piece of a puzzle, in which case they should all be on their hands and knees searching under the sofa. Which is just what she did.
“Well, both Grandpa and Nanna Poskitt met such a discouraging end,” the older chap said, moving his legs out of the way as Kay patted the rug under the coffee table. “So your mum was afraid she might have inherited a susceptibility to dementia. On my own account, I also wanted to head off any sudden short-of-fatal stroke or something that might burden you kids with caretaking and burden the NHS with bills. It’s not that unusual, Simon. When your mum and I spent that fortnight in Key West, we met a paramedic at a local bar who was vowing to get out of his line of work. What was the problem? The island has become a destination for elderly couples having a final fling—maybe arriving with diagnoses, maybe just falling apart. So emergency medical teams are constantly called to the scenes of messy double suicides, and the poor fellow found it all too depressing to bear.”
“I can’t find it,” Kay said, sitting up on the floor.
“Find what, bab?” the nice old man said, though he didn’t sound very interested.
“The piece, the piece!” Kay said. “You said you wanted it.”
“Well, we all want peace,” he said with a sigh, looking at the pretend son as if they had a special secret.
“It’s like having a dog,” muttered the middle-aged one.
“I assure you, it’s considerably more difficult than having a dog.”
“Mummy won’t let me have a dog,” Kay said, happy to join in. “But Percy wants one, too.”
“Why didn’t you and Mum go through with it, then?” the younger one said.
“Our health was roughly holding, and your mother changed her mind. She was still enjoying her life, and sticking to the plan myself would have meant abandoning her. But not long after that, she started to decline.”
“Do you really want her into the Quality Street?”
Kay had discovered a tin of shiny packages, all twisted up like tiny presents. There was gold and red and blue. She smoothed the wrappings flat to lay out a tapestry, and then lined up the lumps inside as an audience on the rug.
“Oh, let her play with the sweets. Better the Quality Street than treacle,” the nice old man said. “That was a right nightmare. She turned the whole house into a giant sticky toffee pudding.”
The other one chuckled. “Though she used to make a cracking sticky toffee pudding, remember? That stayed in the bowl.”
“I’ve inevitably wondered whether, that night she got cold feet, she’d have gone ahead with it after all, if she could have seen herself now. What a misery.”
“She doesn’t seem miserable to me,” the fake son said. “You seem miserable. She makes me feel bloody well miserable. But look at her: she seems happy as Larry.”
“Is this Larry fellow coming to dinner?” Kay said, meticulously peeling a purple foil from the clear sheet on top. “Should I set an extra place?”
“You said ‘if she could see herself,’” the pretender continued. “But that’s, like, the whole deal: she can’t see herself. I may not care for that glazed look in her eyes any more than you do, but otherwise her expression is always either rapt or bemused. So maybe she makes us want to top ourselves, but Mum? She seems miles from suicidal.”
“Miles from suicidal!” Kay repeated, delighting in the musicality of the phrase.
“Have you ever offered her the option of ending it?” the handsome one asked quietly.
“Oh, yes, more than once,” the nice old man said. “But when I bring it up, she can’t concentrate. She seems to understand what I’m talking about to start, and then bingo, she doesn’t. She’s been well beyond a capacity for consent for quite some time now. You can’t offer tablets to people who don’t know what tablets are or
