Yet even sodium chloride couldn’t maintain their spirits. A single prospect kept the Wilkinsons alive in more than body. Escape.
* * *
When exactly the COVID care-home quarantine was finally lifted was unclear; the “shielding” regulations could have been relaxed for months by the time they were notified of their first visitor. Cyril was so incandescent over the children’s betrayal that only his wife’s beseeching persuaded him to meet their son. Even so, after Kay embraced their eldest in the day room, Cyril’s mere handshake was stiff and withholding. Simon must have been mortified to see his once-stylish mother drowning in some stranger’s shapeless paisley shift and his father’s wide-boy shirt blazing with palm trees and parrots. Cyril hadn’t had a shave in ten days. They both looked as if they belonged here.
“Can’t someone shut up Gordon Ramsey?” Simon implored. Scanning the day room’s petting zoo in a panic, he perched on the very edge of a folding chair. He might no longer have feared contamination by the virus, but he didn’t want to catch the despair.
“So when are you springing us from this joint?” Cyril charged, skipping any prefatory niceties. “You kids have put your parents in hell—I’d say ‘living hell,’ but there’s nothing living about it. What exactly did we do to you to deserve this? Give you life? Feed you, clothe you, care for you when you were sick, support you through university, and mind your children? Tell me, where did we go wrong?”
“I’m sorry if you’re having a rough time,” Simon said. “The online reviews of this place are pretty positive. Four and a half stars.”
“But who would write those reviews?” Cyril pointed out. “We’re not allowed access to the internet. The outside world, we’re told, is too ‘upsetting.’ You’re usually cannier than that, son. Because I’ll tell you who writes those glowing reviews: the director. Who cuts so many corners that this building must look like a geodesic dome. Your parents are surviving on salad-cream sandwiches.”
“Honey, we know this was more your sister’s idea than yours,” Kay said. For now, Simon was their only lifeline, and a barrage of hostility would not help their cause. “So never mind how we got here. The question is how we get out.”
“The problem isn’t Hayley,” Simon said. “It’s Roy. I thought at first it was a good sign that he wanted to take some responsibility for once, and I’m so busy . . . But now that he’s legally your ‘nearest relative,’ it’s a bastard to dislodge him from the position. And he’s, um. Shifted into the house in Lambeth. I think he likes it there.”
“Who gave that boy permission to live in our house?” Cyril asked in indignation.
“He doesn’t need permission,” Simon said miserably. “With power of attorney, he can do what he likes. He’s managed to keep up to date on your mortgage by tapping your pension payments, and last I heard he was planning to refinance again. Meanwhile, he’s been, ah, ‘decluttering.’ It seems to be fashionable.”
“Decluttering what?” Kay asked. “I didn’t decorate that house with any clutter!”
“I mean he’s selling stuff off. Like those two end tables in the sitting room. He claims they didn’t match.”
“They’re not supposed to match,” Kay said, having trouble controlling her own temper, which was rare.
“The point is,” Simon said, “there may be some protracted process by which Roy could be removed as your guardian, but I’d have to do some research, and probably hire a lawyer—which given present economic circumstances would be a stretch—and Roy would oppose it tooth and nail. There’s no guarantee we’d prevail. So for now, you’re going to have to sit tight. I can urge Hayley to visit, and maybe Uncle Percy, though I think I’ll hold off on rallying my kids. If you don’t mind. See . . . All this babbling and chaos . . . Geoff especially is fragile, and this place would mess with their heads.”
Time was short, and during what remained of the hour they pressed their elder son for news of the larger world. One revelation of this Brigadoon was how integrally those big social stories that Kay had been so ambivalent about “returning to the library” on her eightieth interwove with their small personal ones. Having lived through the Second World War, the foundation of the British welfare state, all those assassinations in America, the miners’ strikes, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the IRA bombing of Canary Wharf, the near collapse of the international financial system in 2008, their entire country being put under general anaesthesia during the hysteria over COVID-19 . . . Well, the totality of these events was part of who they were, and having observed, commented upon, and sometimes borne the brunt of this series of upheavals was for both spouses a vital aspect of being alive. So Dr Mimi having sealed them in a news vacuum like boil-in-a-bag vegetables induced a more clawing sense of starvation than salad-cream sandwiches ever did.
“I have to say,” Simon said as they parted; the nurse who’d pilfered Kay’s dressing gown was pointing sternly at her watch. “This place is way more depressing than I expected. I pictured you two, like, playing bingo—”
“Why would we have any interest in bingo merely because we’re old?” Cyril said.
“No, I mean, maybe meeting with book groups and going to guest lectures and, I don’t know, even going to wine tastings—”
Kay guffawed.
“But I won’t lie to you. I can’t promise I can get you out of here. I was surprised how easy it was to
