After the young men left, Hayley marched to the downstairs loo, head held aloft in a posture of sacrifice and resolve. As Cyril eyed her from the hallway, she located a bin bag under the basin and proceeded to empty out the entire contents of the medicine cabinet. There went the ibuprofen, aspirin, antacids, cold-sore cream, anti-fungal toenail treatments, and constipation tablets with which her gaga parents could no longer be trusted. By the time Hayley finished child-proofing the two loos upstairs, they should have counted themselves lucky to have retained a spare toilet roll—and not because of the nationwide shortage due to hoarding, but because, theoretically, they might have looped the paper multiple times round the shower-curtain rail and used it to hang themselves.
Struck dumb by Kay’s treachery, when the spouses went to bed Cyril couldn’t bring himself to speak to his wife. Not one word. Once they arose in silence the next morning, it was as well that they’d no fruit or baked goods for breakfast. Their daughter had removed all the knives.
* * *
All day, they were effectively under house arrest—even more so than their compatriots, who could at least still go to the supermarket. That evening, Simon and Roy arrived; as the new head of household, Hayley let them in. Typically for a bloke who never got with anyone else’s programme, Roy alone was not wearing personal protective equipment. Although Roy was just the type to contract COVID-19 and spitefully cough and sputter his way about town as a “super-spreader,” Cyril gave their middle child begrudging credit for resistance to suffocatingly self-righteous social pressure. Once the parents were exiled to the sitting room, Simon went presumptuously upstairs; as the floorboards creaked overhead, Cyril could hear him nosing about the study and unashamedly slamming file drawers containing not a single document that should concern the boy. Thereafter, their children’s collusive muttering round the kitchen table was punctuated by unkind-sounding bursts of laughter. The couple’s situation recalled those movies in which Nazis invade a local’s home, billeting in the bedrooms and making free with the wine cellar, all the while expecting the frightened inhabitants to be nice to them or else.
At last, the three siblings filed into the sitting room an ostentatious two metres apart, as Boris would have instructed. They rearranged the chairs in a “socially distanced” semi-circle around their misbehaved progenitors on the sofa. The pulled-back seating seemed to indicate less a consideration for the dangers of contagion than a wholesale withdrawal of familial warmth.
“We want you to understand,” Hayley began, clasping her gloved hands piously in her lap. “We’re all here out of concern, and we only want what’s best for you. It’s not like we’re putting you on trial.” Whatever people go out of their way to tell you that they are not doing is a reliable indicator of what they are doing. “It’s obvious you’re having emotional problems, like, depression and that. And maybe you’re having trouble living on your own. Naturally you value your independence, but we can’t elevate independence above safety. I’m afraid you’ll have to consider this an intervention. You’ve clearly become a danger to yourselves.”
If some children of geriatric parents found generational role reversal uncomfortable, Hayley wasn’t one of them. Twisting in his chair, Simon was the one who looked uncomfortable. Cyril was accustomed to seeing his firstborn in nothing but the smart dark suits he wore in the City, but during this lockdown folderol he was trading from home; a shabby flannel shirt and ill-fitting jeans compromised the investment banker’s usual air of authority. After all, the eldest ought logically to be presiding, but this was his sister’s show. Roy was slumped with his signature smirk, tipping the chair back on its hind legs as if to remove himself from the festivities an extra few inches. He always placed himself outside the family unless he was looking for money. The trendy short beard he’d sported in recent years had sprouted in patches. A bald section on his chin was the shape of Norway.
“It’s not as if we set the kitchen on fire because we can no longer tell the difference between vinegar and white spirit,” Cyril said levelly, disliking the fact that in his own home with his own children he felt compelled to control his temper—and not to spare their feelings, but to protect his interest. He didn’t care for the texture of this encounter one bit. “You interrupted the execution of a plan of many years’ standing, made in a state of rationality at an age younger than Simon is now.”
“Mum wasn’t into it,” Hayley said.
“If your mother was having second thoughts, she should have told me, not you,” Cyril said.
“Yes,” Kay said, looking to her writhing hands. “I should have put my foot down with your father myself and not dragged you into it, dear. I put you in an untenable position, for which I apologize awfully.”
“That last-minute text was a cry for help, and I’m glad you sent it,” Hayley said.
“The point is what we’re going to do now,” Simon said, clearly accustomed to meetings in which digressions had to be contained. “The three of us can’t keep popping by to make sure you aren’t trying to kill yourselves again.”
“It’s called being put on ‘suicide watch’ in the nick,” Roy said.
“You should know,” Hayley said curtly.
“Legally,” Simon added, “we’re not meant to be popping by at all.”
“Indeed,” Cyril said. “So however delighted we are to see our three lovely children, your well-intended ‘intervention’ entails the mixing of multiple households. Your best mate Boris, Simon, wouldn’t approve a-tall, a-tall. In the nicest way possible, then, I’m going to have to invite you all to go home.” This absurd and profoundly un-English lockdown was a time of hair-splitting legalism, line-toeing, tattle-taling, and
