“In the course of an hour, she told me about the same chamber concert at St Mark’s three times. She kept asking how ‘Cyril’ was getting on at Barclays and how ‘Cyril’ likes his new flat, so I had to infer she meant Simon. Lastly, I found a stack of freshly laundered towels in her oven. That pact of yours, my dear?” Kay raised grimly. She hadn’t alluded to her husband’s macabre proposal since he’d first mooted the idea in April. “I’m all in.”
Thus Kay and Cyril Wilkinson’s deal was sealed in October of 1991. Yet, a scant two years later, Kay had a close call with an archetypal White Van Man—who as she advanced into a zebra crossing swerved only at the last minute and crashed into a lamppost, himself much the worse for wear. So near was the miss that it brought home the finality of what her husband planned for them both, should they be so lucky as to make it to the preposterous year of 2020.
“I’m still shaking,” she said, staggering to a seat at the kitchen table. “He cut so close he restyled my hair.”
“Can I get you something?” Cyril solicited. “A glass of water?”
“I don’t want a glass of water! Why are people always offering you a glass of water?”
“Why so irritable?”
“I’m not irritable, I’m traumatized. If I’d stepped off the kerb one nanosecond earlier, I wouldn’t be here. When a different future is that vivid—or when a lack of future is that vivid—it splits off into a parallel universe that’s nearly as real as this one.”
Cyril poured her the too-early dry Amontillado that now, it seemed, ritually accompanied their frank discussions of mortality.
“I’m not sure I can drink that. I feel a bit sick.”
He left the glass. If memory served, its contents would evaporate in due course.
“Listen, my dear, I’ve been thinking,” Kay said. “We never talk about it, as if the whole business is done and dusted. But I’d like to revisit your disagreeable plans for my eightieth birthday.”
“They’re not my plans. They’re our plans.”
Kay squinted. “Mmm. That’s not altogether the way it feels.”
“I can’t change the fact that it was my idea. I’d hate to think that my proposal is permanently tainted purely for the fact that it was my proposal.”
“But of course you’re the one who would concoct such a scheme. It’s absolutist. It’s uncompromising. It’s an abstract, arbitrary, and overly tidy attempt to head off an unknowable future that’s bound to be messy, complicated, and horribly down to earth. I understand that you don’t like uncertainty, but the alternative can’t be a certainty that’s off the beam.”
“I don’t apologize for trying to organize our lives with intent, and in concert with our beliefs. We don’t want our avoidance of awkward, unpleasant subjects, and a consequent lack of forethought, to accidentally end up costing the health service perhaps millions of pounds, all lavished on misery—”
“Oh, put a sock in it.”
“I thought you liked the idea of getting our affairs in order beforehand—”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking about,” Kay interrupted, and took a slug of the sherry. “My mother has deteriorated precipitously, and we’ve had to make all these arrangements on the hoof. Scurrying round trying to find a facility that doesn’t reek and where staff don’t torture the dementia patients for sport, only to discover that one more care home in Surrey has suddenly closed after we drive all the way down there. It’s all so last minute, as if it’s a big surprise that she’s old, which anyone could have predicted who can count. What you and I need to do is what nobody does: plan for decay. Stop pretending we’re going to live forever, and stop indulging the standard conceit that we’re frightfully special, so all the wretched things that happen to other old people will never happen to us.”
Kay laid out a series of practical measures that entailed some sacrifice, but of a more modest nature than the drastic one that her husband had contrived. Cyril was impressed.
“I’ve never told you this,” Kay added, “but for a while now I’ve been considering taking retirement two years from now and then qualifying as an interior designer. I really do think the conservatory turned out smashing. I’ve quite enjoyed doing up this house, and I think I’d be a dab hand at doing up other people’s as well.”
“Retire at fifty-five!” Cyril said, recoiling. “That borders on freeloading. And in comparison to addressing this country’s escalating rates of Type 2 diabetes, selecting curtains seems awfully lightweight.”
“Presently, they’re more likely to be blinds. But don’t get your knickers in a twist. I said I’ve considered it. In light of this discussion, I think not. A second career would be a risk, with no guarantee of panning out financially. It’s probably better for me to put in ten or twelve more years at St Thomas’. Giving interior design a miss makes me sad, but it’s sensible. And no, thank you, no more sherry, not until eight o’clock—which is sensible, too. I should get going on dinner. And whilst I’m at it . . .” She scanned the open refrigerator and rose on tiptoe. “We won’t be needing this.” With a clang, she dropped the black soap-dish box unceremoniously in the bin.
* * *
At that time, Kay and Cyril were both still under fifty-five, which made their purchase of long-term care insurance more affordable; most people waited until their sixties, by which point premiums skyrocketed. Nose to the grindstone even longer than she’d promised, Kay continued to work in the endocrinology unit until she was sixty-eight, whereas Cyril stayed on at the clinic in Bermondsey until he turned seventy—the minimum age, he argued to anyone who would listen (i.e., pretty much nobody), until which everyone would need to keep working if the economy in future was not to go belly-up. Putting off drawing down their pensions would increase their payouts when the time came.
They also made substantial contributions to private pensions. After taking a hit when the dot-com bubble burst, they rebalanced in a more conservative direction, which helped protect their portfolios from devastation when the monster Great Recession arrived in 2008. Continuing to rise in value, the house in Lambeth could prove the ultimate nest egg if either lived long enough to receive a birthday card from the Queen.
They took no exotic foreign holidays. Kay had wistfully hoped someday to visit Japan or Australia, but such lavish expenditures were imprudent. Instead they took day trips to Brighton, visited the cathedral in Salisbury, and spent the odd weekend in Scarborough. The holiday destinations of their native land were perfectly pleasant, even if these expeditions didn’t sponsor many surprises and it was nearly always cold.
Meanwhile, penny-pinching was the most painful in relation to their parents. The less than luxurious care home they found for Kay’s mother didn’t smell like pee or anything, but it had the atmosphere of a budget hotel—all plastic chairs and curling fake-wood laminate. Even so, when the money from the sale of the house in Maida Vale was used up, Kay insisted that her brother Percy pitch in his share of the fees. Objecting that his aggrieved ex-wife had secured an outrageous settlement in the divorce and his husband was a skint journeyman actor, Percy was resentful, which turned the siblings’ relationship frosty.
Once Cyril’s mother died of viral pneumonia, they also made the painful decision to let the jovial live-in Jamaican go. Kalisa might have become one of the family, but Norman could manage mostly on his own, and Cyril’s sister Fiona, who lived nearby, could regularly pop in to check on her father. The economics of the decision were cut-and-dried—a full-time salary year after year quickly adds up—but Fiona didn’t appreciate having the responsibility dumped on her by merit of proximity, and she was understandably convinced that her father’s care fell solely to her because she was the girl. That sibling relationship didn’t prosper, either. Worse, although Norman had seemed to manage the loss of his wife with impressive resignation, losing his cheerful Christian companion—who sang whilst she worked, and served up not only a mean plate of plantains but a better than passable sausage lasagne—was more than he could bear. He needed Kalisa more than they realized. Weakened from losing weight, he fell prey to flu and died at eighty-one—which was beginning to seem young.
The Wilkinsons did extensive research on assisted living facilities, which varied enormously in quality, availability, and solvency. At last they settled on a high-end outfit in Suffolk, just outside Aldeburgh—close enough to London to easily visit friends and family so long as they were still able to travel. Journey’s End was on the coast, which would allow for leisurely beachcombing during the period they remained ambulatory. Its amenities were flash: a gym, a pool, a games room with two snooker tables, a common area with pneumatic, attractively upholstered sofas and colourful cushions. The dining room for functional residents was kitted out like a restaurant, and its menu, as various as The Ivy in Covent Garden, catered to all manner of dietary requirements. They tried it out for lunch, and Cyril was impressed with the steak and ale pie, whereas Kay found it a good sign that they made their chips fresh from proper potatoes.
Typically for the posh establishments, residents progressed through three tiers. To begin with, if you could dress, wash, and feed yourself, and you were not incontinent or noticeably away with the fairies, you could live in a private flat, to which you were welcome to import your own furniture, wall hangings, and knickknacks. As medical needs escalated, you shifted to a more hands-on situation with greater assistance, and then finally to full-time nursing care. Residents in the last tier were not, Kay noted, trotted out to meet prospective customers. Their tour guide merely opened a door and closed it again, eager to move rapidly on to the in-house cinema.
Talking up Journey’s End as if it were a swanky country club, the more independent residents they met tended to be highly educated professionals or successful entrepreneurs, so the social situation seemed promising. Though the fees were eye-watering, there was a waiting list—to which, putting down a substantial deposit, the Wilkinsons added their names.
To Hayley’s consternation (their youngest was loath to lose free childminding in London), the couple took Journey’s End’s advice and shifted to the facility well before being hit by any major health crises at the ages of seventy-one and seventy-two. Early admission allowed them to take advantage of amenities like the rowing machine that might later merely taunt them. Arriving in good nick also allowed them to be admitted at all—for the facility did not accept new residents already wearing nappies or previously diagnosed with dementia. Cyril was grumpy and standoffish at first, but Kay threw herself into the wine tastings, book groups, and lectures by visiting artists and academics. She grew popular. Anyone with energy was at a premium—that is, anyone who could induce the illusion, however briefly, that they were somewhere else.
Five years in, the national referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union generated its own energy, since residents were divided, and arguments in the dining hall grew fierce. Naturally Cyril was vociferous, so much so that he was taken to task by a staff member who chided that deriding his companions as “cretinous dunderheads” and “knuckle-dragging bigots” was unacceptable. Kay focused on helping other residents attain and fill out their postal ballots, whichever way they voted. Never daring to tell Cyril, she flirted with the idea of voting Leave, but inevitably came round to the more level-headed position that keeping matters just as they were was surely the safer course. In that she had imagined the British people as similarly small-c conservative, the referendum result was a shock. Perhaps the calculated caution that had characterized the conduct of their own lives for the last twenty-three years had made risk-taking of any kind inconceivable. Fair play to the narrow majority of the electorate willing to go out on a limb, then, so Kay put her foot down: Cyril was forbidden from making a rashly sizable contribution to the campaign to hold yet another referendum, as if the state could bludgeon the people into delivering the “correct” answer by making them vote over and over until they surrendered from exhaustion. Whatever happened to the UK either way, Kay argued, in due course they weren’t even going to be here, and they had to safeguard their resources for extortionate care-home charges that their flimsy insurance didn’t begin to cover.
Assisted living wasn’t all perfume and roses. To their surprise, they rarely made the trip back to London even in the early years, and after a while they didn’t return at all. Something about the enclosed, hermetic atmosphere of Journey’s End made the city seem vastly further away than it looked on a map. Moreover, back in the days when they both beavered hither and yon—popping in the supermarket after work, swinging by B&Q to pick up tiles for the eternally unfinished conservatory, giving Hayley a lift to netball practice—a state of constant motion was the norm. When shopping, cooking, cleaning, and laundry were all seen to by oppressively helpful minions, the most minor exertion came to seem like too much trouble. Apparently the less you did, the less you cared to do—an irony that inexorably accelerated until you sat all day, every day, in a chair.
Within the facility, Kay was unsurprisingly the more sociable of the two, which sometimes entailed submitting to a digressive, hour-long explanation of the “just in time” delivery of parts in the automotive industry—for these particular care-home residents were rarely people she’d have chosen to befriend. Living at Journey’s End was a cross between jury duty and summer camp, save that the trial would never arrive at a verdict, and it was never time to tearfully exchange phone numbers and hit the back-to-school sales. Worse, given the nature of this cohort, new “fast friends” were often just that: suddenly whisked to the grimmer end of the facility after a coronary and never seen again by the healthier residents, or carried off on a stretcher and never seen again by anybody.
Despite remaining physically active and passing on the dining hall’s chocolate cheesecake, both spouses were still subject to the steady medicalization of life that now tyrannized even the old and fit. Along with a growing mountain of tablets to be choked down multiple times per day, ceaseless check-ups, blood tests, urine samples, colonoscopies, hearing tests, eye exams, weigh-ins, stool smears, ECGs, and MRIs were the apparently mandatory price of overstaying your earthly welcome. Whilst professionally they’d seen tens of thousands of patients, in times past they’d both gone for years at a go without seeing a doctor themselves. The only medication either had taken for decades was multivitamins, and even those they ditched when research verified that the supplements were worthless.
By contrast, nowadays Kay’s vacillating blood pressure was proving fiendishly difficult to control, and physicians were constantly tweaking her prescriptions, each of which came with a new raft of odious side effects. A steroid injection in her right shoulder provided relief for only a couple of months. She would have to opt for surgery or resign herself to chronic pain—and after Cyril’s only partially successful spinal surgery at seventy-four, followed by a full year of exacting recovery, the optimal choice seemed anything but obvious. The arthritis in Kay’s toes first kept beach walks short, then ruled them out. From the moment they left their house in Lambeth, Cyril’s vigour had palpably waned. Though the referendum had seemed to get his juices running again, once the country left the European Union in early 2020, his former piss and vinegar drained right down the plughole. He blamed his irascibility on his back, but the problem was more global than stenosis.
Strictly speaking, the couple achieved Cyril’s prime purpose. They’d planned for the future. Financing their care privately, they were not a drag on the public purse and solely burdened hirelings handsomely compensated for the imposition. No younger workers would have their pay packets taxed to peanuts in order to repair a certain old lady’s rotator cuff. The NHS might have been teetering on collapse, but no one could justly have claimed that this precariousness was even fractionally the Wilkinsons’ fault.
Kay put a brave face on it, because that was her nature, and she probably resisted the entropy of end-of-life institutionalization better than most. But there was no getting round the fact that they were both irrelevant. They had sidelined themselves, perhaps prematurely. The grounds were landscaped, the buildings hygienic, the staff compassionate, but Journey’s End still constituted an exile—like one of those open-air prisons for white-collar criminals convicted of insider trading. Whilst they were technically at liberty to leave, freedom was tantamount to incarceration if you never took advantage of it. Indeed, the infectious agoraphobia of the care home’s culture induced a kind of locked-in syndrome: with the best of intentions, Kay had buried them alive.
After making a stab at writing his memoirs, Cyril abandoned the project fifty pages in. No one would ever publish the wandering reflections of a doddering old coot, he said, and Kay never thought she’d see the day when she’d feel nostalgic for her husband’s grandiosity. She sometimes posited that they had prepared for decline too well. They’d given in to the same crazed prudence of arriving at the airport five hours early, where there was nothing to do but suck on sweets that furred your teeth, order coffees that would make you pee, and try on glasses you weren’t going to buy at the Sunglass Hut. Perhaps her own game plan for old age and Cyril’s more dramatic exit strategy were not so different—except that Cyril would have had them die cleanly at a cliff edge, whereas Kay had them die by degrees down a long messy slope of scree.
It was darling of Hayley, Simon, and the grandkids to occasionally drive up, but there was agonizingly little to talk about, and both parties were relieved when these halting visits concluded. As the hysteria over COVID-19 gathered speed, their family seemed a bit too eager to avoid contact with elderly relatives “for their own protection.”
Belonging to the cohort at the greatest risk of a lethal response to the disease, their fellow residents were petrified. Before visitors were disallowed altogether, every grandchild or local plumber was soon subject to the full-on folderol of sanitizing gels, face coverings and visors, plastic gloves, and disposable gowns. The facility was frantically cleansed multiple times per day—every railing, countertop, and snooker ball. Nevertheless, the social atmosphere at Journey’s End recalled “The Masque of the Red Death,” and even long-time confederates regarded one another with wariness. Well before Boris announced his national lockdown, the residents were rooting for one. As far as this affluent, erstwhile prominent contingent was concerned, the whole country could not be shut down too severely or for too many months. Years, if necessary—as long as required to produce and disseminate a vaccine that was a hundred percent safe and effective. For the coronavirus was a plague. Having ravaged the residents’ contemporaries in Italy and Spain, it was now gunning for the venerable pillars of the community sheltered outside of Aldeburgh, who regarded this grave international catastrophe as threatening the very survival of the human race.
The pandemic having provided a new talking point, it briefly revived Cyril’s inclination to opine. Yet whilst he had spearheaded the majority view during three and a half years of Remainer revanchism, he garnered less support—more precisely, no support—as a coronavirus contrarian. His “sense of proportion” was not well received. As fatalities soared both domestically and abroad, Cyril Wilkinson’s pooh-poohing was widely deplored as in poor taste.
“All these ‘lockdowns’ are an overreaction,” Cyril announced in the dining hall, whose denizens fell silent and glared. “Every resident here is old enough to remember the Hong Kong flu in 1968, which killed eighty thousand Britons whilst the rest of the country got on with their lives. For that matter, fifty-eight million people died worldwide last year. A few hundred thousand extra is a drop in the bucket.”
“If you were one of those drops in a kicked bucket,” the former software engineer at the next table snarled, “you might not be so cavalier.”
“I’m eighty-one and I’ve had a full life,” Cyril said. “If I pick up a bug that doesn’t agree with me, that may be a pity, but it’s not tragic.”
“You’re disrespectful of the victims of this crisis!” the female ex-CEO at the opposite table charged. “I’ve a sister in Durham who’s already at death’s door, and if she gets infected that door will swing wide open. You’ve no regard for human life!”
“I’ve plenty of regard for human life, Carol,” Cyril said calmly. “For example, last year one and a half million people died from TB, as well as over six hundred thousand of malaria, and world leaders didn’t close a single newsagent. The developing world lives with lethal endemic disease as a matter of course, and we don’t care because it’s Africa and they’re supposed to suffer.”
“What a load of posturing rubbish,” the software engineer muttered.
Cyril’s voluble concern that a recession or even depression resulting from a sustained economic deep freeze could produce even higher casualties than the virus somehow translated into wanting to kill all the old people, despite him being a card-carrying codger himself. By the time the lockdown was declared, his fellow residents were practising “social distancing” of the old-school variety: sniffing pointedly and harrumphing to an opposite corner of the common room when he sat down. The cold shoulder wouldn’t likely last—because his antagonists wouldn’t last.
* * *
Marriages tend to involve a division of labour, and Kay’s job as the upbeat one who knew how to savour life in all its piquant detail could become a tyranny. It didn’t seem fair that she was obliged to be all very jolly hockey sticks the livelong day; surely getting down in the dumps was a human right. Why, it was a human right even on your birthday. Your eightieth birthday.
Journey’s End never left residents to their own devices when such milestones came round. After all, nothing ever happened here aside from a novel diagnosis or another catastrophic fall, and even the appearance of new residents was facilitated by the disappearance of the old ones. Grateful for occasions of a more jovial variety, well-meaning but unimaginative staffers had planned a party for that night, when Kay could expect trite streamers, humourless banners, and bland cake with too much icing. At least there’d be wine. But she was dreading the evening all the same. None of these people cared it was her birthday really, and the only reason Kay cared she couldn’t share.
At a private table in the dining hall at lunch that day, she slumped over a wild mushroom fajita that had long ago ceased to excite a sense of discovery. If this was a restaurant, it was always the same restaurant.
“I sometimes wonder if you had the right idea to begin with,” she told Cyril glumly. “You know, live it up, spend the money down to the last fiver—and then go out in style, with music, and dancing, and tablets washed down with champagne.”
“You’re the one who chucked them in the bin,” Cyril reminded her. “Why, would you take them now if we still had them?”
“Of course not.” She gestured to the comely wooden blinds slatting the room with springtime sun. “This is fine, right? There’s nothing wrong with it. You were bang on the money back when my father died. The only way to do it would have been to commit to the date massively in advance, as you proposed, and marshal our resolve massively in advance—”
“As I proposed.”
“Because otherwise, it would always seem like a good idea to do tomorrow. Why, do you wish we’d committed to a firm exit date after all? If I hadn’t tossed the Seconal, would you take it now? I mean right now, today, the way we planned to before I bottled it.”
“No, but I’m not sure why not.”
“The body is in control,” Kay said. “The body wants to live, and the body will put up with anything. It has no standards. We get bored. Our bodies don’t get bored. They don’t even feel pain. We feel pain, but our bodies will never throw themselves off a bridge because they can’t take it. The residents in this care home: I bet a lot of them, as people, don’t want to be here any more. But their bodies want to be here. The body is so determined to keep chugging on until the last little valve sticks that it’s amazing suicide is even possible. It’s amazing that the body will allow you to lift an overdose of tablets to your mouth. Or to squeeze a trigger with a gun to your head—you’d think the finger would refuse. That hackneyed old survival instinct—it’s bigger than we are, bigger than reason or desire, and it’s astonishing that we ever get the better of it.”
“Sometimes you still entertain me, birthday girl,” he said with a kiss. “Good enough reason to hang about.”
* * *
At least with medical attention at ready hand, the instant Cyril exhibited symptoms of a stroke the following year, he was rushed to the infirmary and administered tissue plasminogen activator, which substantially limited the brain damage. Full recovery was doubtful, but significant recovery was on offer if he worked diligently with the on-site therapists. Learning to wash his teeth, feed himself, and go to the loo all over again was a considerable demotion after having mastered these biological rudiments as a toddler. Yet glad for a project of any sort, Cyril made an effort.
He slowly learnt to speak again, though this time round his accent reverted to a Brummie brogue, whilst his vernacular returned to the idioms of his childhood. The hard Gs at the end of his gerunds were back. He’d reproach Kay for “clarting about,” and now muttered, “I’m off to get my snap,” as he shuffled off for lunch. (To begin with, he was barely able to shift his right foot an inch forward at a time with the help of a walking frame, but he was determined not to end up in a wheelchair, and one inch became two.) When frustrated by his progress in learning to hold a fork again, he exclaimed to the therapist in exasperation, “This ain’t gettin’ the babby a frock and pinny!” Kay was taken aback at first, for he didn’t sound at all like her husband of nearly sixty years, but she was charmed in the end; his altered persona proved a welcome change of pace. He had more energy and optimism as a Brummie, and the return to his regional roots brought out his resemblance to his animated late father. Gesturing overhead in the hospital bed of their new Tier Two digs, he exclaimed in hearty surprise, “Well, go to the foot of the stairs!” And sure enough, she concurred, once he pointed it out: the water stain on the ceiling was the shape of Norway.