Now so much more personally contented, the Wilkinsons’ three children grew more appreciative of parents whom they’d previously taken for granted or deployed as unifying targets of shared sibling mockery. Hayley went out of her way to express gratitude to her mother for being such an exemplary role model, with both long unstinting public service and a brave, no-guarantees departure into a more imaginative field. Simon bought stacks of his father’s books to distribute to his wind-farm employees at Christmas. And perhaps Roy’s turnaround was the most moving. Though he made a pittance as the deputy head of Hospitality House, he had clearly been saving for years to be able to announce that he was taking his parents on an all-expenses-paid expedition to meet his in-laws in Senegal, and he refused to accept a penny to help finance the trip. The shindig was a huge success. Though Roy’s in-laws spoke no English, everyone communicated by sign language with often hilarious misunderstandings, and they all agreed to a reunion as soon as feasible.
Well before they hit seventy, Kay and Cyril had realized the supreme importance of taking care of themselves, and together they embarked on a project of strenuous but entirely pleasant exercise. No longer merely strolling beside the Thames, Kay took advanced spinning classes and became a passionate fan of bone-chilling wild swimming throughout the winter. Cyril took up mountain climbing and unfailingly fascinating free weights. In total agreement, as they seemed to be about everything these days, they resolved henceforth to make their holidays more vigorous, canoeing the Amazon, cycling between Michelin-starred restaurants in France, and hiking the Appalachian Trail in America—overtaking many a younger party on steeply rising switchbacks.
In kind, although Cyril lent a considerable hand in the kitchen now, Kay took it upon herself to improve their diet. Leaving behind the stodgier fare of shepherd’s pie and bangers and mash, she introduced more nuts, seeds, olive oil, and leafy greens. Cyril didn’t especially fancy kale to begin with, but the more Kay served it the more it grew on him, until on those occasional evenings she steamed pointed cabbage instead he could grow petulant. Where was the kale? Once she weaned them off nutritional traif, they both lost any taste for red meat, sugar, butter, and cream, and their favourite pudding was a refreshing branch of celery.
Thus throughout their seventies, both spouses were lean, tan, and sinewy. If anything, the two were more attracted to each other than they’d been as newlyweds. So electrifying and various had their sex life become that they would sometimes catch each other’s eyes across a table in a crowded restaurant with a distinctive knowing smile—a smile that remembered the night before and promised for the night to come. Carved with wry humour and hard-earned wisdom, their faces as they aged grew in many ways more beautiful than the smooth, bland countenances of their callow youth. It was not unusual for the couple to glide gracefully down the pavement hand-in-hand and turn the heads of Londoners in their twenties.
The referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union might have been an occasion for the rest of the country to cleave into hostile, irreconcilable camps, but for the Wilkinsons the run-up to 23 June 2016 was a welcome opportunity to have long, in-depth discussions in which they shared what began as divergent positions. These conversations were thoughtful, productive, and open-minded. Both spouses had so much respect for their better half’s fine analytic mind that each couldn’t help but entertain the validity of the other’s view. So as their compatriots tore into each other at dinner parties, the gentle antagonists in Lambeth came only to a deeper appreciation for the opposite side—so much so that when the day of the ballot came round, Cyril had grown convinced that on balance Britain was better off on its own and voted Leave, whereas Kay, having gained a far better understanding of the many regards in which their country benefited from the political solidarity and market access provided by the EU, voted Remain.
Although the initial months-long coronavirus lockdown appeared to be trying for everyone else, the couple found it terribly touching how loyally all three children rang every day to make sure that their parents were well. The Wilkinsons weren’t sure what so many other older Britons were whingeing about, because they had no problem securing weekly delivery slots from Waitrose. Moreover, given that Cyril had been repeatedly jetting off to literary festivals in Zagreb or Mumbai, whilst Kay had often been up to her neck in choosing sofas for some Saudi prince’s mansion on Kensington Palace Gardens, the period of enforced stay-at-home orders proved one of the most tranquil and luxuriously intimate few months of their marriage. Cyril apologized profoundly for having been “unforgivably” patriarchal in the early years of their relationship, and Kay forgave him anyway.
“I’m curious if you remember a certain early evening,” Kay recalled during the gradual lifting of restrictions that summer, about which they were both mournful. They’d come to love their captivity. Like so many of their fellow Britons, they’d lost any desire to return to a frenetic life in which one dealt with troublesome other people and onerously earned one’s own keep. “It would have been 1991, right after my father’s funeral. You proposed we kill ourselves at eighty.”
“Of course I remember,” Cyril said, faintly affronted. “I remember everything.” The assertion was no exaggeration. As they’d been doing Sudoku puzzles and the Times crossword, their memories were eidetic.
“If I’d gone along with your scheme, we’d be dead as of three months ago,” she noted.
“I wonder if I wasn’t going through some undiagnosed depression,” Cyril puzzled. “That proposition was abnormally defeatist. Why, I’ve more energy, I feel healthier, and I take more enjoyment in life at eighty-one than I did at twenty-five. I feel more fully connected to the rest of humanity than ever. I love being eighty-one. I don’t
