GPs were expected to retire at sixty, but Cyril hung on an extra five years—and perhaps he should have stayed on even longer, considering that any hint of indolence made him grumpy (he’d no interest in the garden). He had his reading, though the dry non-fiction tomes to which he gravitated served no purpose beyond his own edification—and who cared what subjects a superannuated physician had mastered? Even before his rants decrying another gratuitous Gulf War, he spent hours over the Guardian muttering about what on earth was the use of having a Labour government at last with a glad-handing, plastic prime minister who was a Tory in sheep’s clothing? If only to fill out the day, he physically slowed, whereas Kay, ever a vigorous woman, had sped up. There was always a paint colour to choose, another estate auction to attend, a kooky kerbside love seat that begged for rescue and reupholstery before the council hauled it to the tip.
The couple rarely referenced their self-designated D-day. The “effective medical solution” remained in the same back left-hand corner of the fridge for years, and Kay never touched it. It was likely that Cyril regularly replaced its contents with fresher pharmaceuticals, though if so he never rejuvenated their supply in her presence. When their faithful John Lewis fridge-freezer finally peed condensation all over the floor like a trembling old dog about to be put down, Kay took responsibility for unloading all the mayo and marmalade and chucking the mouldy lemon halves at the bottom of the vegetable drawer. But when she came to clearing the top shelf, she found a crusty open jar of mint sauce, but no black box. Once the new Bosch was delivered, she began stashing the surviving comestibles, only to find that in the otherwise empty new fridge the black box was back, restored to the far-left corner on the top shelf. Throughout the turmoil that attends the failure of a major appliance, she’d seen Cyril approach neither the defunct one nor its replacement. Mysterious.
With pointed frequency, however, Cyril did implicitly allude to their understanding in the course of their animated but not always jolly dinnertime discourse. His idea of sparkling repartee ran to observations like, “Have you noticed that you almost never see animals in the wild which look visibly aged—which are stooped and balding and can barely walk? Deer, for example: they mature, they look roughly the same across a normal lifespan, and then they die. We get used to seeing very old people, but we’re animals as well, and for creatures to survive in a state of advanced decay is unnatural.”
He continued to track the steady rise of life expectancy in a spirit of dismay. “In news reports about our ‘ageing population,’” he pointed out over chicken pot pie, “presenters no sooner mention increased longevity than immediately add, ‘which is a good thing, of course!’ The aside is compulsive. But it’s not a good thing! We’re not living for longer. We’re dying for longer!”
Apropos of not much, he volunteered that since its inception in 1948 “the NHS annual budget has multiplied by four times! And that’s in real terms, including inflation!” By the time Cyril retired in 1999 and Tony Blair was injecting cash into the “free” service as if prepping a turkey with hot butter, Cyril updated, “By six times!”
He kept his wife apprised of the escalating proportion of Britons over sixty-five, especially underscoring the increase in the “old-old” over eighty-five, whose manifold chronic conditions were fiscally ruinous, not to mention the stuff of untold private suffering.
“People our age,” he observed whilst the couple were still in their mid-sixties, “cost the service twice as much as the average thirty-year-old. But by eighty-five, that differential is five-to-one! Five times as much dosh to keep alive some old coot who slumps half-asleep in front of Come Dine with Me all afternoon, compared to a taxpayer with young children who can still have a laugh on a fine day out and play a spot of footie.”
He predicted to Kay jovially that the Queen, who personally signed birthday cards for all new centenarians, would soon have to relinquish the job to a computer, because so many Britons were living past one hundred that the kindly old dear would otherwise spend all day dispatching empty felicities and take to her bed from writer’s cramp.
Cyril kept a running tally of the rising percentage of “bed-blockers” in British hospitals: elderly patients technically well enough to go home but too frail to be released on their own recognizance. What with the UK’s patchy social care, they often remained in hospital for months, taking up places urgently needed for younger patients still capable of getting well. He seemed almost to celebrate the escalating rate of surgery cancellations that the wicked bed-blockers brought about, for often a patient would have the same crucial operation delayed at the last minute multiple times because there was no hospital bed available in which to recuperate. “Can you imagine?” Cyril regaled his wife. “You’ve seen it yourself: it takes a fierce girding of loins to prepare mentally for being carved up. Physically, too, you follow all these rules, like nil
