“Now,” he chided. “Who says you can’t open a third bottle?”
“You know, when you’re on the cusp of oblivion, Mr Wilkinson, I rather like your style.”
For himself, Cyril took out the single malt that his colleagues had given him at his retirement.
“I can’t believe you’re still hoarding that,” Kay said, extending on the sofa with her crystal globe filled nearly to the brim. “Selfish git. You should really have shared it with all the well-wishers at your farewell party.”
“I decided to save it for a special occasion. And what could be more special than this one?”
“Special or not, it’s the only occasion we’ve got left. Now, I’m curious. Given tonight’s spirit of fuck-everything—”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever heard you say that word.”
“I know. I thought I’d try it out. Everyone else seems to use it with such abandon now. FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK! Interesting. The sky doesn’t fall.”
“That was loud enough for the Samsons to hear.”
“I couldn’t care less. But I was asking: are you planning to be a stickler and insist on the stroke of midnight? Down to the wire, remaining the same letter-of-the-law fellow I’ve lived with for fifty-seven years?”
“Have I really been such a tyrant?”
Kay considered. “Yes!”
They laughed. Cyril slid beside his wife on the sofa. They were a nice fit, even sitting.
“I feel this question is an obligation,” Kay said. “Any regrets?”
Cyril said without missing a beat, “I could have skipped every single one of those foreign holidays.”
“What?” Kay exclaimed, sitting up straighter.
“You thought I was going to say, no, not a regret in the world, didn’t you?”
“A little white lie would have been nicer. And what you might have properly regretted is being such a tit when I wanted to study interior design, especially since I made a grand go of it after all.”
“At the time, I was giving you my honest opinion.”
“Which happened to be wrong.”
“Which happened to differ from yours, which is not the same as ‘wrong.’ And you? Regrets?”
“I should have said fuck more often.”
“Kay, seriously,” Cyril said, draining his whiskey; he seldom used her Christian name. “Is this a daft idea? Would you like to forget it?”
“Then we’d have to do the washing up.”
“I wasn’t joking.”
“Nor was I. I really don’t fancy doing the washing up.”
“We could leave the dishes for tomorrow. Be rash.”
“But we’re skint. We spent everything. We can’t afford to not go through with it.”
“We have our pensions. We could always sell up and rent a flat.”
“I’m positively looking forward to Roy finding out there’s no inheritance. I wish I got to watch his face.”
“You changed the subject. You’ve been noticeably ambivalent about this pact of ours from early on, bab, and I’m not going to push you to do something so irrevocable if you don’t want to.”
Kay put down her glass with a sigh. “That’s true. I have been . . . what? Uneasy, conflicted. But you didn’t marry such a timorous doormat that we’ve got all the way to the very brink of my eightieth birthday—the last two hours of my eightieth birthday—before I can finally bring myself to propose like Fred Astaire, ‘Let’s call the whole thing off.’ I’ve been anxious about this scheme of yours, and I’ve hoped awfully that some archetypal White Van Man might cut us to the quick on a zebra crossing and spare us carrying it out. But we’ve looked both ways before crossing the street, and here we are.
“Honestly, I’ve gone back and forth. Especially during this last year, when it’s looked as if we’ll be put to the test after all, I’ve considered bowing out ahead of time more than once. But I didn’t sign up to the idea in the first place only because I’m a pliant pushover. It’s not been in the forefront of my mind without cease, but the cautionary memory of what happened to my father, and to a lesser extent my mother, is still quite keen. You didn’t browbeat me into going along with this business, and a great deal of your hectoring about ‘bed-blocking’ and the costs of the ‘old-old’ to the NHS has been gratuitous, because in the main I already agreed with you. You’re the one who sounds as if you’re losing your nerve, which is frankly gobsmacking. Since when do you of all people lack the strength of your convictions?”
“It’s worth looking at the matter for a last time, isn’t it? If looking at the matter for a last time is the last thing we’ll ever do? And my convictions, well. They’ve always seemed a bit beside me.” Cyril lifted his wife’s memorial service printout. “As if I could pick them up and put them down.”
“I wonder if I believe in this project more fervently than you do, then. Because what’s at stake doesn’t feel abstract or at arm’s length to me, or not any more,” Kay countered. “It’s true that we’re not in as bad a shape as we might have feared. But we’re nothing like what we were, my dear. I look at old photographs of us and my heart melts—the way one’s heart melts looking at photos of people who’ve died. We’ve made all manner of compromises, but in that gradual way, in our own peripheral vision, so we almost haven’t noticed. I suspect that’s the form. You gave up the men’s choir. I do less gardening, and now we hire Dan to do the strimming. I never formally quit design work, but I might as well have. You have that stenosis, and although sometimes you seem to be playing up the pain, other times I think you play it down, and that’s when it truly hurts. You could get surgery, but the prognosis at your age would be poor. I never told you, but I’ve been diagnosed with hypertension—”
“Since when?” Under the circumstances, it was insensible for him to be worried about heart disease, but Cyril wasn’t beyond being injured by her concealment.
“We may be married, but
