“Goodness,” Kay said. “That building is a fortress. Was it Extinction!? Or the migrants?”
“Both. They’re operating in league now. And getting better organized. Funny, that: even anarchists gravitate towards order.”
“Maybe the Bank doesn’t even matter,” Kay said hopelessly. “Sterling is worthless anyway. You know”—she nodded at their supper—“this is grim enough without our kindly caretakers refusing to give us our own cutlery.”
“It’s cultural,” Cyril said, but his heart wasn’t in it. “I think by custom most of our downstairs neighbours eat with their left hands.”
They tried to maintain a semblance of civilization by sitting formally on either side of the plate, the sharp bones of their buttocks padded by quilts passed down from Kay’s grandmother. After dipping her hand in a bucket of their only once-clean water, she politely divided the mound into two portions with a forefinger, trying to give Cyril the greater amount; he was a man, and however nominally now the larger. The fare was hardly appetizing, but they were starving, and it took discipline not to fall upon the muck all at once. Instead, they always tried to draw out their mealtimes with reflective conversation, just as in the old days. Cyril lit their last candle stub, which created a cosy atmosphere, whilst helping to dim the heaps of bric-a-brac stashed under the eaves that might have “someday come in useful.”
“Back when we decided not to end it all on your eightieth,” Cyril began, “you told me that you ‘wanted to know what happened.’ You felt as if you were in the middle of all these stories, like climate change and the coronavirus and, heavens, I think at the time you even mentioned Brexit, of all things, and Donald Trump. You said that calling it quits in March of 2020 would be like returning a pile of unfinished novels to the library.”
“And you said,” she remembered, “that whenever we died, we’d always be in the middle of some unresolved historical plotline, so leaving loose ends dangling was part and parcel of mortality.”
“But I wanted to ask you something. The collapse of the pound, the soaring crime, the loss of all our savings. The flooding of New York City. The cricket-bat-wielding rampages through the British Museum. The descent of most of Europe into autocracy. Our own house occupied by strangers. Are you glad to have lived long enough to see all this? Or would you rather have opted out earlier and spared yourself? Looking back, how strong is your ‘narrative curiosity’ when the end of the book is this depressing?”
“Hmm,” Kay grunted. “I surprise myself a bit, because I’d have imagined that ‘narrative curiosity’ of mine was properly keen. But I’m not that curious. If I had it all to do over again, I think I’d accept the grand bargain you first proposed in 1991. Looking back, I think it must have been right around my eightieth birthday that everything started to go wrong. Maybe I’d rather have died in a state of innocence, or even delusion. Because I wish I’d never seen news photos of a Caravaggio sliced to ribbons and hanging from its frame. I wish I’d never seen the Houses of Parliament burnt to the ground. I wish I’d never seen the flowers in Kew Gardens trammelled and covered in human faeces. I’d love to turn back the clock to the twenty-ninth of March in 2020, toast our wonderful marriage with a glass of good cabernet, and knock back a handful of tablets to induce—well, whatever you call amnesia that allows you to forget the future. I’d have happily dozed off in our house, when it was still our house, nicely done up, where we’d conducted so many lovely evenings with dinners better than cornmeal caulking. I’d love to have left this world with no idea what awaits on the horizon, which, as I close my eyes for the last time, still looks bright.”
Cyril frowned, staring into the middle distance, which meant looking no further than the closest cobwebbed roof beam. “I may not feel the same way, and that surprises me as well. The last twenty years have been painful, but they’ve been interesting. If this descent into bedlam was going to happen anyway, then I’d prefer to have been around to see it. I don’t fancy delusion. I’ve always tried to look life square in the face.”
“Oh, you have not,” she said with a smile, leaning over to kiss his cheek.
“Of course, take the long view,” he said more cheerfully, “and we may be witnessing creative destruction. Something different and sometimes better always arises from the ashes, does it not? Look at the Renaissance.”
“True. But the Middle Ages lasted a thousand years.”
“Look at it this way, then. Mostly, we’ve led wonderful lives. We only got old enough to truly understand the Second World War once it was over, when we knew that the white hats had won. We lived through the Marshall Plan and the triumphant rise of a cradle-to-grave welfare state. We had long, useful careers. We raised three healthy children, at least one of whom turned out to be an agreeable human being. We availed ourselves of affordable labour-saving appliances. We got in on computers, and owned more than one, and then we were blessed with the internet, which however broadly misused is still a miracle. For four-fifths of our lives, technology, the alleviation of poverty, the powers of medical science—everything did nothing but improve. We’ve watched great films, read
