Cyril’s father was another matter. More robust than his arthritic late wife, Norman didn’t really require help with his shopping but still kept on the live-in carer for companionship—although Kalisa, an upbeat, ardently Christian Jamaican, was now getting on herself. Less wading than hydroplaning across Cyril’s strict Rubicon of eight decades, he remained a famous raconteur at his local, continuing to rewire lamps and refurbish vacuum cleaners for his neighbours, whilst railing against “yampy” modern mechanisms that weren’t designed for repair. “Plastic!” he’d despair of contemporary Dysons. “One tab broke, and that’s it for the whole blooming thing!” (Thing with a Brummie’s hard G.) He wheeled his own bins to and from the kerb, and by ninety-two was still holding his own with Cyril regarding Britain’s new prime minister, a Tory toff whom Norman derided as looking like an “overfed teddy bear.”
For Kay, given Cyril’s fondness for his boisterous dad, her husband’s detectable ambivalence about his father’s hale constitution struck an odd note. To his son, Norman’s unlikely mental and physical sturdiness seemed almost an annoyance. Yet it wasn’t as if she and Cyril had reason to resent paying the caretaker’s modest salary. Unlike the rest of their cohort, they’d no need to keep a packet in reserve in case they themselves contributed to the Queen’s writing cramp by living past a hundred. (At this rate, the indestructible royal would soon be sending a birthday card to herself.) The problem, then, wasn’t financial drain. Rather, Norman was spannering Cyril’s worldview. As a specimen of the “old-old,” Norman should have been miserable, costly to the public purse, and better off dead. Yet so little was he faltering that Norman might also sail gaily beyond one hundred. In that event, were they to follow through on their undisclosed vow, Cyril would subject his elderly father to sudden, devastating bereavement. Kay was fairly certain that putting his father through the trauma of an only son and daughter-in-law’s joint suicide would present itself as a bridge too far. Cyril was an ideologue; he wasn’t a monster.
Meanwhile, with the small measure of their savings remaining after supporting their parents, two ample NHS pensions, and a dribble from freelance decorating, Kay and Cyril had taken a series of exotic holidays—to Malta, to Australia, to Key West, to Las Vegas, to Japan. Other than delving enthusiastically into the details of competing health care systems, Cyril merely endured these adventures, within a day or two pining to get back home (to do what? Kay always wondered). Kay had a reliably glorious time, for she easily made new friends on the fly and hadn’t yet lost an appetite for novelty, be that for new words, new venues, or new food. “I make a rather grand old bag, don’t you agree?” she’d exclaim merrily, twirling a parasol on a boat to an island off the coast of Queensland known for its gnarly mangroves. Cyril would smile tightly and wait a seemly amount of time before complaining, again, about his back.
For his part, Cyril Wilkinson was finding old age less than enchanting. It was making the expected inroads on his pleasures: his voice got too craggy to keep singing in his men’s choir; his joints grew too painful to keep accompanying Kay on her brisk Sunday walkabouts along the South Bank. But in addition to vigour, something more crucial was waning: how much he cared—and not just about the state of the NHS, but about whether the Lib Dems would sufficiently constrain the Tories in coalition, whether Simon and his family were coming for Christmas, even whether the M&S focaccia from last night was still fresh enough to stretch to a second dinner. He felt, in a way he couldn’t seem to control, a dwindling sense of investment—in events, other people, his own day-to-day contentment. The single matter in which he remained as invested as ever was his pact with his wife.
He theorized to himself that all lifetimes trace a distinctive energy arc, and Kay’s and his were out of sync. She’d always been such a busy bee; were she a clockwork toy, the key at her back would still be chuntering at a stable rate, whilst his own wind-up motor was starting to stutter. Hence he kept watch on his wife with leeriness and even a touch of dread. It wouldn’t have done to waste the time they had left together by focusing solely on the point at which they would be together no longer, and it was all to the good that she didn’t reference their contract with morbid frequency. Yet it made him uneasy that by the time the countdown forever ticking in his head notched to a single decade, his wife had gone from mentioning their plans seldom to not at all.
Cyril remembered from his own youth that the steady succession of New Year’s Eves didn’t strike younger people as remarkable, much less as hard to believe. One took the year of one’s birth as a given, and the years immediately thereafter seemed numerically nearby and altogether likely. Those so-called millennials, for example, would hardly have viewed as inconceivable an arithmetic turn of the wheel for which their generation was christened. But for helplessly older people like Kay and Cyril, the relentless advance of Anno Domini had progressed from the expected to the surprising, from the surprising to the implausible, and then onward to the incredible, until the date in the left-hand
