This ministerial holding forth recalled the born-again evangelists on Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, except what Cyril seemed to be hawking wasn’t the promise of eternal life, but quite the opposite. His apparent grudge against the aged could seem uncharitable, given that all these poor people had done wrong was hang about. Yet as time ticked on, Kay was moved to note, “You’ll soon have to stop banging on about ‘them,’ my dear, and start banging on about ‘us.’”
As they age, most people grow muddled in the course of organizing their affairs, being understandably unclear on precisely how many years these affairs are being organized for. One makes somewhat different decisions in the instance that four decades lie at one’s disposal, versus the next four days—which is why it’s surprisingly commonplace for even quite elderly people to make decisions based on the default assumption they will live forever. After all, the alternative is to fully accept that at any second one might drop dead, leading logically to the ceaseless and perhaps annoying declaration to one’s nearest and dearest of how terribly near and dear they are—whilst turning a blind eye to the paying of electricity bills, the filling out of job applications, and the scrubbing of toilets that should never be allowed to despoil one’s final moments on this earth. The alternative, then, is to sit in a dark room, unemployed, with a rank loo.
Yet unusual certainty about the maximum extent of their shared existence enabled Kay and Cyril to plan, most crucially in regard to finance. They were in accord about the children. Simon made scads in the City, and hardly required a handout. Hayley’s degree in performance art from Goldsmiths hadn’t, predictably, led to a lucrative career, but her youthful flamboyance had snagged her a husband with a solid professorship in linguistics at University College London safely before her mesmeric volatility slid to ordinary neurosis and self-involvement. An inheritance of any size would only increase their daughter’s undermining sense of dependency. As for Roy, he was the one child who needed money, since he was up to his eyeballs in credit-card debt. But whether or not Hayley was right that the younger of her two brothers had an intermittent drug problem, Roy had dropped countless degrees mid-course, left a string of girlfriends in the lurch, and habitually appealed to his parents to bail him out. Give that boy a nest egg and he would suck it dry enough for painting by the following Easter. Cyril didn’t believe in inherited wealth anyway, and for that matter, given the knee-high ceiling on tax-free bequests, neither did the British state.
Thus when Cyril also began to draw his pension, they refinanced the house, extracting multiples more money in equity than they’d paid for the place. They established irrevocable trusts for the five grandchildren—just substantial enough to give the youngsters a start in life, but not so lavish as to make them lazy. To cover the fiscal ravages of Godfrey’s care, Kay’s mother Dahlia had also been forced to refinance the property in Maida Vale, and the subsequently reduced proceeds of selling the house rapidly vaporized from the charges of a rather posh care home; it had better have been posh, at £78,000/year, fees whose payment Kay and Cyril assumed in due course. They also installed a live-in private carer with Cyril’s parents in Birmingham, as his younger sister could hardly be expected to shoulder the extra burden on a social worker’s salary.
At least Dahlia Poskitt’s decline was gentle and benign, exhibiting none of Godfrey’s latter violence and personality change. Having never accepted that the care home was where she lived, she arose daily convinced that she was just “visiting.” Thus, when interacting with her fellow residents, Dahlia made the gracious inquiries after their health and despairing comments about the weather that her generation expected from English women of some position when accepting hospitality. Elaborately deferent and keen to be no trouble, she refused to choose between the lemon posset and the sherry trifle when there was plenty of both. In contrast to her late husband, she remembered the bloom of her marriage in full, whilst blessedly forgetting its final fourteen years of torture. Neurological rewrite had also neatly edited any reference to “Adelaide” from her husband’s biography. Her primary lapse was an inability to remember that Godfrey had passed. Eventually, out of kindness, Kay stopped reminding her mother of her father’s demise, because the news always hit afresh and plunged the poor woman into raw grief. It seemed easier all round to instead submit that Godfrey was waiting for her back home once she finished “visiting.” When she finally died at eighty-six—it was presumed from dehydration, because she was too anxious about straining her host’s generosity to ask for water—Kay actually shed a tear or two, like a real daughter.
As for Cyril’s parents, his mother died with little warning at seventy-nine. Although Cyril was suitably sorrowful, his grief exhibited a curious overlay of what Kay could only identify as approval. Betsy Wilkinson had expired at the perfect knell of female life expectancy in England and Wales, and she hadn’t set a poor example by wetting her feet in his personal Rubicon of her eightieth birthday. The onset of viral pneumonia was rapid, her fatal illness brief: ergo, she had not unduly burdened the sacred National Health Service with a drawn-out decline, only to meet the same fate in the end at many times the price. In her son’s view, Betsy Wilkinson had proved a model senior citizen. As she’d been wont to observe a bit too often herself, she had suffered her life’s travails without complaint. (Ha! thought Kay. With barely suppressed resentment, more like it.
