Meanwhile, Cyril finally gave himself credit for having paid his own dues to the NHS. When he retired at sixty-two, the fervent send-off at his Bermondsey clinic moved him to tears, and he forbade any of the nurses, physicians, and receptionists from leaving the do until they’d helped him finish off their farewell gift of a twenty-five-year-old single malt. Back home, he wasn’t long footloose before he started in earnest on his memoirs. He was apologetic about the project at first, claiming that the manuscript was really for his own satisfaction. Although he harboured small private hopes that perhaps the children might be interested in an account of their father’s life, he nursed no serious expectation that the memoir would ever see print. The process of reviewing his life proved enjoyable for its own sake. When he shyly allowed Kay to read the final draft, Cyril was as abashed by her effusive response as he had been by the unstinting admiration of his former colleagues in Bermondsey. “You needn’t exaggerate!” he begged her. “Darling, it’s enough that you didn’t find the thing unbearably tedious.” Only at her insistence did he email the file to a fellow member of his men’s choir whose wife was an editor at Orion.
Given how riveting she’d found his account, Kay claimed that matters proceeded precisely as she’d expected, but Cyril himself was gobsmacked. Orion made an offer on the memoir within the week, and the size of the advance on the table made him blush. On publication, Fit for Purpose became an instant Sunday Times bestseller. At the urging of his editor, Cyril embarked on a companion volume, and eventually authored a whole series of medically oriented books for laymen, with a wildly popular mix of health tips, folk wisdom, philosophizing about mortality, and anecdotes about anonymized patients. Cyril varied his more humdrum workdays at the computer with signings, festival appearances, and formal lectures at medical schools. He was open-handed with the press in granting interviews.
Indeed, their home in Lambeth became a Mecca for junior doctors suffering from a crisis of commitment, unsure they could take the long hours, the sacrifice of family life, and the devastation of losing patients. Meanwhile, aspirant designers rocked up to see Kay and pick her brain on challenging aspects of their fledgling projects. The mentors were generous with tea and wine, and their house often teemed with young people clamouring for advice, shyly soliciting compliments that would probably mean too much to them, and sharing stories from that poignant phase of life that combined crippling under-confidence with wildly unjustified arrogance within the same five minutes. The young blood around the kitchen table was a tonic. When the acolytes made profuse professions of veneration, the couple were embarrassed at first. Yet they soon learnt to take the tributes in stride, never letting it go to their heads when told repeatedly, “You’re way more fun than friends my own age,” or, “You two understand me loads better than my parents,” or, “Come on—you could both pass for thirty-five!”
Leery of getting separately caught up in the stratospheric successes of second careers, the spouses made time every year to travel to all the destinations that Kay had pined to visit in the days they’d never have afforded such extravagance. Cyril held back at first, acceding to these forays largely as a favour to his more adventurous wife, but after a trip or two he caught the bug as well, launching into excursions to Australia, Malta, Key West, Las Vegas, and Japan with enthusiasm. What a perilous pitfall, he noted: falling into a rut in one’s latter years and getting overly attached to routine.
Once they bought a palatial holiday home in the Algarve region of Portugal, they also reserved time to spend a rambunctious fortnight every August with the whole extended clan. Like most families, theirs had suffered from frictions. Having nursed artistic ambitions when she was young, Hayley was frustrated in middle-aged motherhood. The other two were jealous of Simon’s income as a trader in the City, whilst in turn Simon worked until so late at night that he rarely got to spend it, much less see his children. Long ago, Roy had nobly volunteered for the role of black sheep, the way other sons joined the army.
Yet their parents’ late-life flowering inspired all three kids to locate the same optimism and resourcefulness in themselves. Following her mother’s lead, Hayley opted for further education, devoting her creative flair thereafter to teaching special needs children from deprived areas of London. Beavering about town to help others less fortunate than herself, she dropped a few pounds and ceased to resent her wiry mother; the two grew close and were often mistaken for sisters. Packing it in at his brokerage firm, Simon moved to Devon to establish a wind farm. Responding to a population with the same outcast status he’d been lumbered with his whole life, Roy started working with asylum seekers, securing them English classes, coaching them on the Life in the UK citizenship test, and helping them navigate the arcane bureaucracy of the Home Office. He finally settled down, too, marrying a gorgeous woman from Senegal; their four mixed-race children were exquisite, the colour of walnuts. Although on the old side to become parents, Kay’s brother Percy and his husband had fraternal twins with a surrogate from Laos. As the older grandchildren came of age to date a Taiwanese law student, a Colombian osteopath, a Jewish coder from South Africa, and a footballer from Samoa, their once narrowly Anglo-Saxon tribe soon duplicated the multicultural crowd shots in insurance adverts—making family get-togethers so much
