Not only the hairs felt kinky. It had been a while, more than a while, and with this racy new frizz Kay couldn’t resist taking it for a test run.
“You’re frisky tonight,” Cyril remarked in surprise, once she’d seized his joystick and shoved their bedtime reading up a gear. In the end, the experiment in nostalgia wasn’t wholly a success, but no one was keeping score, and over the years they’d developed techniques for crossing the finish line by a variety of resourceful means. By custom, these improvisational encounters would mutually suffice for weeks thereafter. Consequently, on the following night, Cyril was begging to be allowed to sleep.
Although one always notices the arrival of the unpleasant, one often fails to notice the alleviation of the unpleasant. Hence Kay blithely thought about other things until finally realizing that she hadn’t needed to tweeze out those ugly coarse dark hairs on her upper lip for months. If she picked up on the brightening at all, she dismissed the radiance of her teeth as a trick of the light, or attributed the sparkle to a reformulated toothpaste—as she also attributed the fading if not disappearance of the unsightly brown mottles on her hands to a rare beauty cream that actually worked. She’d certainly grumbled a fair bit to Cyril about how arduous it had become simply to arise from a seated position, but she went back to popping up effortlessly from her chair without remark. Kay had been consternated when she was diagnosed with hypertension, but when in taking her own blood pressure she discovered that it had dropped much too low, she simply stopped taking the medication, and once she regularly tested at below 120/80 she didn’t give the matter a second thought. Months must have gone by before she did a double-take whilst brisking about the back garden: her toes didn’t hurt. Her shoulder didn’t hurt. After weeding, her knees didn’t hurt when she stood. So she reinstated her original Sunday walkabout along the Thames, skipped the restorative coffee, covered the distance more quickly, then added an extra mile.
Whatever curious transformation was underway seemed not only to regard stamina and strength—she could now carry two bags of wood at a time to the log burner—whose increase she casually ascribed to being a bit more demanding of herself, and thus resisting the temptation in old age to reflexively rely on others. If you believed you could open the marmalade jar, it was amazing how by applying a tad extra determination the seal would break. She also evidenced a subtle shift in temperament, which was harder to explain away. A year previous when harvesting their fig tree, she’d never have risen on tiptoe on the ladder’s penultimate step and leant so far over the party wall that the ladder began to topple, all for two pieces of ripe fruit—which if she wanted so badly they could always buy. That sort of lousy risk–benefit analysis was for kids, and Kay was old and wise.
She did seem to get more done lately. With fervid apologies for having abandoned the job halfway through, she returned to doing up Glenda’s ground floor, going decisively with a hint of the Victorian that her best friend was sure to prefer to modern minimalism. Dispatching the makeover took half as much time as she’d expected. In preference to retiring altogether, she solicited still more design work; they needed the money. Finally accepting that she’d always hated the ungainly extra-terrestrial plant with blooms like eyeballs on sticks, she ripped out their deep-rooted fatsia in an afternoon. She reorganized the tool shed so that it no longer took half an hour to locate a screwdriver. Befuddled as to why the straightforward project had ever inspired such procrastination, she attacked her wardrobe and culled the clothes she never wore.
About to bundle the discards into a bin bag for Oxfam, she had a sudden change of heart. The frock atop the pile certainly didn’t pass the standard test of having been worn at least once in the previous year. In a canary-yellow dotted Swiss, the dress was a peasant design, with puffed sleeves, a full skirt, a gathered neckline, and a black bodice that laced in a criss-cross pattern down the front. She’d looked quite fetching in the thing back in the day, like a cowherd in the Alps, but had firmly slid the garment down the rail because there was nothing more embarrassing than women who didn’t dress their age, and the styling was simply too girlish. But on a whim, she decided to wear it that evening.
“Bloody hell,” Cyril said when she swanned downstairs to start dinner. “Gotta say, bab. It’s not that you don’t always look young for your age. But tonight . . . You look smashing.”
She went to glance with satisfaction in the mirror of the downstairs loo. It was surely due to a fluke effect of the waning sun, but those harsh lines from her nostrils to the corners of her mouth did seem to have grown less pronounced; why, from this angle they appeared to have vanished. Likewise smoothed away were the pleats on either side of her philtrum that had made her lips look permanently pursed, previously imparting an unappealing schoolmarm disapproval. When she smiled, for once her face didn’t look like a crumpled paper bag.
“I think eating more healthily has a perceptible knock-on effect on one’s appearance,” she said zestfully, whisking back into the kitchen and going at the courgettes, slicing three at a time. “During the hoarding of the coronavirus outbreak, you remember, we couldn’t get green vegetables for love nor money.”
“Yes . . .” he said, staring at his wife with unnerving intensity. “There’s nothing like the tonic of vitamin C . . .”
“Also,” she added, top-and-tailing the onions, “lately I seem to have embraced a more positive attitude. For a while there, I may have been a bit traumatized by our last-minute abortion of ‘D-day.’ At our age, being on the very
