“There is a whole movement that advocates ‘ageing in place.’”
“I’m all for it,” Kay said emphatically. “I like it here. I’ve put loads of work into this house. The conservatory is exquisite. I’m thrilled with the trailing orchid wallpaper in the sitting room. I want us to keep our garden. I want to pour myself a second glass of red wine without having some officious matron whisk it away because it isn’t good for me.”
“There’s still the danger that I whisk it away,” Cyril said.
“Just try.”
In the end, they never put down that stonking deposit for Journey’s End. Giving the ritzy safe haven a miss was a gamble, but, as Kay observed, every decision we make in this life is a gamble, isn’t it?
That said, the couple did continue to organize their affairs with an eye to the future, keeping wills up to date, ensuring that the DNR directives in the event of mental vegetation were easy for the family to find, restricting their spending primarily to necessities, and investing their assets with caution. With no little sense of fiscal seasickness, they’d already survived the choppy waters of the dot-com crash and the market hysterics after 9/11. The Great Recession of 2008 proved especially worrying, because at sixty-eight Kay was just starting to draw down her private pension, which had nearly halved in value, whilst London property prices took a hit, making their six-bedroom backstop less of a consolation. But they’d no intention of selling their house and rode out the slump. The markets better than recovered, and even the financial apocalypse forecast by the Confederation of British Industries and the Bank of England in the event of a win for Leave in 2016 failed conspicuously to materialize.
Yet no investment strategy no matter how conservative could ever have countered the veritably worldwide economic shutdown during the coronavirus pandemic. Once the UK finally lifted the last of the restrictions on commerce and freedom of association, the much-hoped-for “V-shaped” recovery resembled a letter closer to the beginning of the alphabet: a backwards J. A host of businesses had been obliterated. The welfare rolls were groaning; unemployment was sky-high. It proved a great deal easier to shut down an economy than to rev it up again.
Like most other governments, Her Majesty’s injected so much cash into benefits, interest-free loans, debt forgiveness, tax deferments, and infrastructure projects that early on in the give-away free-for-all the public lost track of the difference between “billion” and “trillion.” All very well, save that the funds for these frenetic expenditures were borrowed. When in turn central banks across the world gobbled up sovereign debt and overloaded their balance sheets with government bonds through quantitative easing—QE7, QE8, etcetera, though governors stopped bothering to number the buying binges after QE12—the money was effectively conjured from thin air. Kay didn’t understand this alchemy one bit, and often got angry with her husband for being such a bore about it. “Well, in a way all money is made up, is it not? I mean, money is an idea, a conceit. And I know you’ve explained it to me repeatedly, but I still haven’t a clue what it means to ‘monetize the debt.’”
“They don’t want you to understand it,” Cyril said miserably.
It was difficult to discern whether Cyril had grown habitually glum due to advancing age or to the gloom that had freighted the whole country ever since the likes of Trafalgar and Leicester Squares grew hushed and deserted as the moon—a gloom that had never entirely lifted, even throughout the cathartic exuberance over being allowed once and for all to actually leave your own home.
“You’re not usually such a conspiracy theorist,” Kay said.
“It’s not a conspiracy,” Cyril said, and he looked as if he could barely keep his head up. “It’s worse than that. It’s incompetence. Malfeasance on an incomprehensible scale, and all over the world at the same time.”
“Please tell me you’re not listening to that Shriver woman. She’s a hysteric. And so annoyingly smug, as if she wants civilization to collapse, just so she can be proved right. I can’t bear the sound of her voice.” There was indeed an annoying American import—another one of those Yankee anglophiles who wouldn’t go back where she came from—who kept claiming on Radio 4 that some book of hers had predicted the whole debacle now supposedly well underway. A handful of deluded groupies regarded the hyperventilating loon as a modern-day Nostradamus. But apparently the lady’s stupid novel, The Madrigal or something, which Kay had zero interest in reading, made no mention of any pandemic, and the self-promotional author was obviously just trying to flog more copies with her irresponsible alarmism.
Throughout the 2020s, governments spent money like there was no tomorrow, but with all this pump-pump-pumping something didn’t quite work. Collectively, these unrelenting rescue packages, tax holidays, universal-income experiments, and industry bailouts recalled the commonplace experience of inflating a bicycle tyre whose tube, unbeknownst to you, has a small hole in it. So you can depress the handle of the floor pump over and over, but the tyre never quite gets resiliently firm, and the moment you give the project a rest because surely that’s sufficient, the tyre starts gradually to go soft again. Under pressure, too, small holes become larger holes, until eventually you frantically push and pull and push and pull, and the tyre sits flat on the pavement.
Kay didn’t understand quantitative easing, but she did understand when the cost of Marmite—even more beloved as national metaphor than as spread on toast—doubled, then tripled. Although their NHS pensions were inflation-adjusted, official inflation rates from the Office of National Statistics grievously lagged reality on the street, and in due course the
