Kay’s head dropped onto Cyril’s shoulder. Cyril’s cheek rested against her crown. None of the other tipsy partygoers raising glad voices and breaking into spontaneous waltzes on the main lawn noticed—just as the couple preferred. Whilst the moon rose behind Kay’s resplendent white hair and created a silvered corona, Cyril murmured his wife’s final benediction: “Robust, and balanced.”
Fortunately, it turned out that there was life after death after all.
13
The Last Last Supper
All day, Kay had been lifted by this peculiar floating sensation, as if she were drifting two or three inches above the floor, the way a hovercraft glides across the waves without touching water. Her pervasive giddiness, detachment, and lack of seriousness were awfully inappropriate considering, as if the guiding principle for all their major decisions for decades were merely a fanciful leg-pull. As she sipped the last of her champagne, this feeling of fizzy levitation intermingled with the refreshing spritz of bubbles on her nose, but the buzz wasn’t from the wine. She felt as if she were the champagne, rising into the air, pip, pip, pip. The whole evening, she should have been consumed with dread and anxiety, and instead she couldn’t remember a night in recent memory when she and her husband had had a better time.
She considered going on a riff about the many news stories they were stuck into whose resolution they would now never learn, but at the moment all those erstwhile nail-biters seemed to bob by like passing flotsam. The pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, the pandemic, and the perilous health of Britain’s prime minister might have been those ocean-clogging plastic carrier bags that David Attenborough was always on about. Shutting the book on these ongoing dramas was far from a frustration; au contraire, the disengagement came as a great relief. The floating sensation persisted, except that now she was soaring even higher, until she was suspended hundreds of feet overhead and looking down at all the little people scurrying and clashing and fomenting as they always did. Her gaze wasn’t precisely pitying, but it was close.
“What do you suppose we’ll miss?” Kay posed more generally instead, rising to open a pricey bottle of cabernet that she was damned if she’d leave for Roy.
“Each other,” Cyril said.
“Yes, of course,” she said with a smile, pouring the wine with a heavy hand. “But whatever is going to happen to this place?” It was already “this place,” at a remove. Perhaps she had finally mastered the government’s mandatory social distancing.
“Good things. Terrible things. The usual,” Cyril said. “I’m tired of worrying about it—as if worrying does any good. Look at the economic disaster we’re in the midst of—”
“It’s so quiet,” Kay observed wistfully. “You’d think disaster would make more noise.”
“Yes, it’s eerie, isn’t it? I’m reminded of that novel, On the Beach. Remember? They’re in Australia, where everything is calm and the weather is warm and the skies are clear, but they’re awaiting the inexorable arrival of nuclear fallout. If the Tories keep their lockdown lunacy in place for months, we’ll be fortunate to escape this hysteria’s fallout, which could be just as dire as the radioactive kind. In fact, the catastrophes we’re sure to give a miss are countless. Who knows—an invasion by aliens, like in H. G. Wells. Or even a return to the plain old want and scarcity that you and I grew up with. I’d hate to try to survive in a world in which my wife can’t get her mitts on a bottle of red wine.”
“Very funny.” After taking a defiant slug, Kay excused herself with theatrical umbrage to the loo.
“But it’s also possible,” she said zestfully on return, “that medical science comes up with a cure for ageing. What fools we’d seem then!”
“Or cryogenics could take a great leap forward,” Cyril posited, “and it could become possible to awaken in a world hundreds of years hence. So if you’re going to be that way, we’re turning our backs on time travel as well.”
“Or maybe we’d find out that Alzheimer’s is only wretched for the people around you—but actually being demented is jolly good fun, like watching a reel of your lifetime’s highlights. Maybe we’d find out that a care home is just like a Butlin’s holiday camp, and we’d make fast friends playing bowls.”
“Or for all we know, I’d drop dead within the year anyway, and you’d have a whole second marriage to a younger man who voted for Brexit, just like you.”
“A second marriage? That sounds exhausting.”
“I’m the one who’s been exhausting,” Cyril said.
“Better you said that than I.”
Finishing off the cabernet allowed for generous musing over the fate of their children—Kay was convinced that because Simon’s long office hours were courting divorce, the lockdown might at least save his marriage, whilst Cyril maintained that suddenly being trapped with one’s family all day could as readily end in mass murder—after which they left the dirty dishes on the dining table and didn’t clean up the kitchen. The neglect was so liberating that before departing for the sitting room Kay gave in to an earlier impulse: she picked up her china dinner plate and dropped it on the floor.
Cyril merely raised an eyebrow. “I’d have thought you’d want to keep the set complete for Hayley.”
“Hayley will never use our wedding china. It’s a generational thing. She’ll try to sell it, find out there’s no market, and break half of it on the way to Oxfam.”
“Port and crumble?” Cyril proposed.
“The crumble, my dear, came out rubbish, and I’m damned if I’m leaving this earth with the taste of failure on my tongue. And sod some twee thimbleful of port. I’m opening another cabernet.”
“Why do I get the feeling this is your real, intemperate self coming to the fore—the secret sot who’s lurked in there for years and has finally got out?”
“Perhaps you’re right.” Kay pulled the cork with a resonant pop. “That’s
