“Do you believe that?”
“I can’t say I’ve mastered the art of purposelessness myself.”
“You know, you’ve grown much more humble,” Kay said.
“I feel more humble. It’s surprisingly pleasant.”
“But whatever happened to all your crying out for social justice?” she puzzled.
“After Calvin Piper’s idea of a practical joke”—it had grown commonplace to elide the gravity of the tragedy by being flippant—“everyone may not be wealthy, but they are prosperous, and I’ll not lose any sleep over whether they can all afford to dune buggy on Mars. Also, I came to worry that I championed social justice largely to think well of myself . . . Oh, right!” Cyril remembered. “The other thing I tell my patients is that, despite the impression they’ve been given that we’re all immortal, it isn’t so. At any moment, they could cross the street at an inopportune juncture and get flattened by an archetypal White Van Man. Believe it or not, that’s the reminder that seems to cheer them up.”
“You did have that one patient who died at her own hand. That was so hard on you.”
“The inaptly named Jess Hope,” Cyril recalled sadly. “Who jumped off Blackfriars Bridge chained to six kettle bells—not exactly a ‘cry for help.’ But most of these ‘worried well’ will never resort to anything so drastic. They’ll just keep coming back to me, self-consciously complaining that they’ve nothing to complain about. Remember when you talked me out of taking the Seconal on your eightieth? You quite elegantly parsed the costs and benefits: much was potentially to be gained by living, and nothing to be gained by dying. You said the only good reason to commit suicide was to bring an end to suffering. But my patients aren’t suffering—or not precisely.”
“Maybe not suffering is a kind of suffering,” Kay posited.
“You’ve never said that before either.”
“This is almost like a real conversation!”
As she leant back to savour the rare spontaneity, Kay’s gaze snagged on the framed photo on the bookshelf behind Cyril, from their golden wedding anniversary in that self-impressed restaurant. It was the one token image of themselves in real old age that they kept in open view, as it was a touchstone of sorts. Since she finished her last dose of Retrogeritox, Kay’s face hadn’t changed per se, but a chronically hard look in her eyes hadn’t been there in 2013. The cold glare was the one expression her body could give to the tumultuous package of exasperation, fury, and despair that consumed her daily, but for which she had no earthly excuse.
“Do you ever look at that picture?” Kay asked, pointing.
“Often,” Cyril said, not needing to turn around. “It presents something of a conundrum.”
“I know what you mean. I look awful. I suppose you look awful as well, but not to me. My own face in that shot—I’m repelled by it, but it also makes me wistful. As if I’ve lost something, but what? What’s valuable about looking like a dried fig?”
“I’m not only wistful,” Cyril admitted. “I’m jealous.”
“Isn’t that odd.”
“I’m jealous of our old urgency.”
“Yes,” Kay said gratefully. “That’s it on the nose.”
“So, thanks to my prescribing privileges, we still have a facsimile of Seconal in the fridge. I refreshed it recently. It’s your birthday. What say you?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, stretching and shooting a resigned glance at the dirty kitchen. “We could always do it next year.”
10
Of Ignorance and Bliss
Typically for the posh establishments, residents of Journey’s End progressed through three tiers. To begin with, if you could dress, wash, and feed yourself, and you were not incontinent or noticeably away with the fairies, you could live in a private flat, to which you were welcome to import your own furniture, wall hangings, and knickknacks. As medical needs escalated, you shifted to a more hands-on situation with greater assistance, and then finally to full-time nursing care. Residents in the last tier were not, Kay noted, trotted out to meet prospective customers. Their tour guide merely opened a door and closed it again, eager to move rapidly on to the in-house cinema.
Talking up Journey’s End as if it were a swanky country club, the more independent residents Kay and Cyril met tended to be highly educated professionals or successful entrepreneurs, so the social situation seemed promising. Though the fees were eye-watering, there was a waiting list—to which, were they to put down a substantial deposit, the Wilkinsons were free to add their names.
“I’m afraid I’m having second thoughts,” Kay confessed at the kitchen table in Lambeth on return from the visit to Aldeburgh. “I mean, I’ve little doubt that Journey’s End is the best we’re likely to do. The facilities are fabulous, it’s clean, and the staff seem personable. But I still found it depressing.”
“Well, there’s no getting round what it is,” Cyril said.
“Exactly. I realize now that what bothered me about my mother’s care home wasn’t the cheap architecture and the bad food. However you disguise it, these establishments are warehouses for the pre-dead. With bars on the windows or chintz curtains, the residents are still battery hens being farmed for fees.”
“I thought you were the one advocating that we be pragmatic, and face the future squarely, rather than lying to ourselves like everyone else.”
“I still think there’s merit to planning ahead and preparing for exigencies. We should probably keep that long-term care insurance just in case, even if the premiums are getting larcenous. But maybe there’s such a thing as being too far-sighted, and skipping to the rubbish bit of our lives before we have to. We’re not old yet, by most people’s lights. Maybe we shouldn’t push the programme.”
“That administrator at Journey’s End was very clear on the dangers of putting the move off for too long and deteriorating to the point that we won’t be admitted,” Cyril reminded her. “She said, ‘Beware the five-minutes-to-twelve syndrome,’ remember? It’s the same mistake everyone seems to make, because they don’t realize that five minutes to twelve is basically twelve.”
“Maybe waiting so long that
