“That post box is collected on weekday mornings at eleven o’clock,” Cyril said. “I don’t imagine the police will get my note until tomorrow or the day after at the earliest. Gives us time to head them off, or at least to figure out what to say. ‘Sorry, we’re scaredy cats’? And then we’re on the public record as a danger to ourselves. That won’t look good if Roy ever gets a mind to section us in some hellhole against our will and sell the house.”
“Yes, it would certainly be Roy,” Kay said with a sigh. “But it’s still only ten forty-five. Why don’t I try to intercept the postman—or postperson?”
“Oh, I shouldn’t bother. Legally, once a letter is posted it belongs to the recipient. Besides, I just toasted another pair of crumpets.”
It was the crumpet more than the legalese that persuaded her to stay put. The last of the packet, the spongy perforated pancakes were still hot enough for the butter to fully melt, and if she left to hang about the post box hers would be hard and cold when she got back. After the trauma of the night before, when they’d both edged to the very brink of the abyss, Kay was inclined to coddle herself. The police were so stretched these days. It was more than likely that a lone blue embossed envelope would get lost in the shuffle.
It’s terribly rare that public servants are negligent when you want them to be, although they often oblige when you don’t. Two days later, the front door pounded peremptorily, and what would prove the spare key from the Samsons slid into the lock. As Kay hurried to the door, a policeman walked in, and they both jumped.
The mask provided the officer an unaccountable anonymity, and the surgical gloves conveyed distaste. He was a big fellow, and although Kay had remained slender with some discipline, she sometimes experienced her size as a social handicap. The policeman was one of those towering specimens of a younger generation that had evolved effectively into a different species. He made her feel evolutionarily backward, as if in the classic Darwinian developmental sequence from ape to homo sapiens Kay was one of the hairy, hunched-over creatures two or three stages to the left. This bloke was further girded by the hardened stoicism with which one might prepare to confront decomposition. “Ma’am, we had a report of self-harm at this address.”
When she identified herself, he seemed put out that she was not collecting flies on the floor. “I’m sorry awfully,” she said. “I’m afraid this is my husband’s idea of a prank. Perhaps a tasteless prank. You see, Sunday was my birthday, and he . . .”
“Ma’am,” he said again, looming overhead. “Mind if I look round?” It was not a question. When he barged past her into the sitting room, he seemed to be sniffing the air. Regrettably, Cyril was out, which made it more difficult to demonstrate once and for all that she had not stuffed his body in a trunk.
The officer seemed rather a bully and insisted on poking about all three floors, as Kay cowered behind him blithering. Typically, the presence of law enforcement made her feel guilty, apologetic, and timorous. At once, the intruder gave rise to an indignation that she was obliged to repress, as if clapping her hand over the mouth of a child whose crying might give their location away as they hid from the Gestapo.
Back at the door, he withdrew a crumpled piece of blue stationery, on which Cyril had signed both their names. “Can you please verify that you and Mr Wilkinson originated this ‘prank’?”
“Well, yes, but again, I’m so—”
Grandly, the officer withdrew his booklet of stencils and his all-powerful Biro. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to issue you a summons for wasting police time. A lenient magistrate might let you off light with a ninety-pound fine, but your offence is decidedly not small beer. It carries a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment.”
“Is that really necessary?” she asked. “This was merely a misunderstanding that got out of hand.” Despite her efforts to stifle it, the indignation was surfacing. British police had clearance rates for theft, fraud, and assault at near zero, whilst some forces had not arrested a single burglar for months. They pushed around elderly taxpayers because frightened, compliant law abiders were easy pickings.
When the high-handed policeman demanded her details and got to the phone number, Kay drew an unprecedented blank. It was fairly commonplace not to recall your own mobile number, which one tended to communicate to others by texting or ringing up, and she’d misplaced her iPhone all morning (perturbing in itself). Of course she didn’t know Cyril’s; her phone knew Cyril’s. Yet now she couldn’t even retrieve the landline. When a selection of likely digits eventually danced in her head, she struggled to remember whether the last four numbers were 8406 or 8604. It is strangely difficult to locate your own phone number, and she excused herself upstairs to Cyril’s study, rifling water bills and annual TV licences and finally scrounging a hard copy of a tax return from three years ago that included the landline. Aside from changes to the London prefix, they’d had the same phone number since 1972. Rattled, she no longer gave a toss about the silly summons, and when she returned to the foyer the officer, who when she’d suffered her so-called senior moment had seemed to vacillate between pity and contempt, had clearly made up his mind. He went with contempt.
* * *
The sure sign that the peculiar lapse bothered her on a profound level was that she did not tell Cyril. As time went on, there were other things she did not tell Cyril. She must have added the salt to her scone dough more than once; when she chucked the inedible batch, which tasted like colonic irrigation powder, she spirited the bag to the outdoor wheelie bin to conceal the fiasco. She’d have written off the botching of the baked goods as the kind of mistake any cook might make on occasion if it weren’t for the other mistakes. She put capers instead of currents in her spotted dick and then lied about having been experimenting. After weeding the back garden for over an hour, she returned to the kitchen to discover that she’d left the hot water running in the sink. She heated four tablespoons of sunflower oil in a cast-iron skillet in preparation for making a crispy grated-potato cake and got distracted by a pile of laundered tea towels that needed folding. She was only reminded of the oil because of the smoke, and she was really not telling Cyril about that inattention; a minute or two later, the oil could have exploded. As a treat, she picked up a whole duck, but when she put the bird in the oven she left its plastic wrapping on. That slip she couldn’t hide from Cyril, because the smell was horrendous, and her attempt to find the oversight comical failed. It wasn’t funny.
As Kay had noted herself, people in their twenties also suffered from a sudden, inexplicable inability to recall the name of one of their favourite authors like L.T. Hartman . . . that is, L.P. Hartman . . . no, L.P. Hartley—and didn’t conclude that their brains looked like Chernobyl. So when she got lost on the roundabout at Elephant and Castle on the way to Borough Market and ended up instead on Westminster Bridge—after having driven this local route thousands of times—she reasoned that all the new development in the area had understandably made an already complex intersection unrecognizable. When she ordered ten bolts of cotton for converting her friend Lacy’s library into a bedroom-with-half-bath for yet another live-in immigrant carer—when the window to be curtained was on the small side and one bolt would have more than sufficed—Kay could dismiss the error as the mere addition of an accidental zero. Why, anybody could misplace the odd decimal point.
Yet she went through a solid couple of days during which she couldn’t conjure the name of the medical school where she and Cyril had trained. Chatting over the fence, she found herself avoiding the use of their next-door neighbour’s Christian name, though they’d lived beside Whatsherface Samson for decades. It was one thing to be a bit hazy on the precise definition of “louche,” quite another to pull out a stainless-steel bowl with many little holes in it and not know what it was called. Appalled, Kay placed the bowl-with-holes on the countertop and stared it down; she would not allow herself to proceed with dinner until after twenty minutes she finally produced “colander,” a word that had never afforded her such relief. Yet her grasp of the syllables remained perilous, and forever after “colander” had a tentative, barely-within-reach quality. The word was changed. She couldn’t trust it.
“Do you realize what you just said?” Cyril noted that autumn. “We need more ‘Abyssinian foil.’”
“Not at all,” she said. “I said we need more Abyssinian foil.”
“You just did it again. It’s aluminium foil.”
“That’s what I said.” She was getting annoyed. “Abyssinian foil.” She didn’t care for the look on his face. The expression was something like—horror.
It was when she put two sponges in the toaster that Cyril announced he was taking over the cooking. She was consternated. Simon might have got all very cheffy, but theirs was a more traditional household, and the kitchen was her field day . . . her falafel . . . her fife and drum . . . her fiefdom.
* * *
“She’s not a completely different person,” Cyril said. “She just has to be watched very carefully.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hayley said. “My real mother doesn’t put sponges in the toaster. For that matter, my real mother doesn’t have to be ‘watched very carefully.’”
They were doing it again, talking about her in her presence as if she weren’t there and couldn’t hear them.
“It’s understandable that you’re angry,” Cyril told their daughter, “but it’s not fair. You have to distinguish between there being something wrong with someone and her doing something wrong.”
“I’ve had quite enough of your criticism!” Kay said, bustling about the kitchen and putting dishes away, though goodness knows where the utensils belonged; in desperation, she stuck the spatula in the spice rack. “I don’t think I should be held to a standard that for anyone else would be unreasonable. We all have our . . . our . . . our moments of doing something strange. Why, just this morning I found the box for that stainless-steel soap dish in the fridge! How sensible is that? Rest assured, I didn’t stash it there.”
There was that look on his face again.
They wouldn’t let her drive any more, and it wasn’t lost on Kay that nowadays when Cyril was away there was always someone else underfoot: that vaguely familiar-looking woman she’d seen in the garden next-door, or Hayley, or Simon, or whatever his wife was called. Once, she was escorted home by a policeman, who was obviously persecuting her over that summons nonsense; she seemed to recall having sent them a letter, and this pettifogging officer must have been dogging her because the phone number under her address had been incorrect. The next time she decided to strike out on her regular South Bank constitutional, the front door was chained from the outside. From Kay’s perspective, she had remained the same and all the people around her had gone insane. Yet some voice outside her whispered that the problem was quite the other way round. When she was petulant, this was the voice that informed her from overhead, “You’re being petulant.” When she grew exercised that her whole family was conspiring to convince her that she was cuckoo, this was the voice that said, “You’re being paranoid.”
That voice might have provided an anchor, but it was also a source of torture, for it was when she heard the overmaster direct, “You should know this” or “You used to know this,” or press her sternly, “That is not an overweight stranger here to steal your wedding china; that is your daughter,” that she was most apt to collapse into tears. Accordingly, little by little the voice shut up, and Kay felt fine. It was possible, of course, that she was sometimes misguided or in error, but heavens, so were most people.
Pleasantly, Kay entered a state of confidence and airy surety. Because everything had achieved a sense of surprise, the physical world was the source of eternal captivation. Picking at a hole in her favourite grey cardigan, she found that the threads could unweave into a fringe that was frightfully pretty, and eventually the hole was big enough to put her whole fist through, and how handy to have designed an extra sleeve. She darted her fingers in and out of the sunlight streaming through the parted crimson drapes in the bedroom, fascinated by how her hands kept going bright and then dark. Tiny maggoty grains on her plate could be arranged along the rim like a necklace, or pinged one at a time with her thumb and forefinger a quite astonishing number of feet, which made her laugh. A smooth soft white pile next to a sausage doubled as make-up, and she slathered the pale foundation over her cheeks, certain that the application would make her eyes appear less baggy—and a girl did need to look after herself. The red sauce in the plastic bottle with the small hole in the top was good for drawing on the table, and sometimes she squeezed it to make a volcano that went everywhere, and that was hilarious.
Then there was the brown stuff whose texture was so various, dense in bits and watery in others, though it wasn’t entirely clear where the substance came from. It had a nice strong farmy smell, and could make intricate patterns on her ankles, like henna. She used the same paste to smear her hair from her forehead, streaking the strands back in a dramatic do. Perhaps it would be a nice change of pace to go brunette.
“Mum, for God’s sake, that’s disgusting!”
“Hayley, calm down. Believe it or not, she doesn’t know what it is.”
This rather pudgy woman shoved Kay into the shower and hosed her down roughly. She didn’t mind the warm water, but the gruff mishandling seemed impolite.
For a time, Kay confided in a handsome middle-aged man, who suffered under the peculiar impression she was his mother. (Tired of correcting this extraordinary mix-up, at length she humoured the fellow—though she couldn’t determine whether he was innocently delusional, or a fraudster.) She whispered in his ear conspiratorially that she was keeping a deep and devastating secret, which must at all costs be kept from her husband: she was a Leaver. This chap so fiercely convinced that he bore her some relation kept insensibly urging her to stay put.
“I’d urge my kids to come by more often,” the middle-aged pretender said, “if she could keep her clothes on. It’s not fair on Geoff to expect him to keep a straight face with her tits hanging out.”
“It’s unusual at her age, but she still has hot flushes,” said an older gentleman who’d been making free with the house rather a lot. “So she breaks out in a sweat, and tears her top off.”
“Listen, Dad, I’m afraid this is even more awkward,” the scam-artist-slash-fantasist said. “After this collapse in the City—whatever they’re telling you on the news, it’s not just a recession this time, ‘great’ or otherwise—I’m not going to be able to keep subsidizing your mortgage payments. Our portfolios have tanked, and Ellen and I just don’t have the dosh. You’re going to have to downsize big time, like, to a one-bed flat—and maybe out of London. Sell off this monster, even if the timing could hardly be worse. You’ll take a hit.”
“Oh, it was good of you to chip in, but I’ve been expecting this,” the old man said. “Maybe a smaller place would make it easier to keep an eye on Kay. Here, I’m always afraid she’s going to burn the house down.”
“To be honest, I can’t for the life of me understand why you spent down your savings to the last penny and refinanced the house to the gills in the first place. Were a few foreign holidays worth it? I finally told Roy that he won’t be inheriting two bits, and he’s livid.”
The older gentleman slumped in a dejected attitude that made Kay feel sorry for him. Whilst he could come across as strident, he still seemed like a very nice man. “Well, son, you’re missing a piece of the puzzle. We didn’t want to tell you kids in advance, because we didn’t want you to try and stop us. And we didn’t tell you afterwards, either, because we didn’t want to cause you undue anxiety or to incite you to become interferingly protective. But in 2020 it was your mother’s and my original intention to, um. Beat a mutual retreat.”
“You mean, leave the country?”
“Leave the country and everything else besides.”
“Why on earth would you do that?”
Kay didn’t care for the fact that both these two gentlemen were visitors in her home, and yet they ignored their hostess. She herself was better brought up than that. Also owing to a proper upbringing, she often avoided pointing out that other people did not always make a great deal of sense. Here the strident chap wanted to find a missing piece of a puzzle, in which case they should all be on their hands and knees searching under the sofa. Which is just what she did.
“Well, both Grandpa and Nanna Poskitt met such a discouraging end,” the older chap said, moving his legs out of the way as Kay patted the rug under the coffee table. “So your mum was afraid she might have inherited a susceptibility to dementia. On my own account, I also wanted to head off any sudden short-of-fatal stroke or something that might burden you kids with caretaking and burden the NHS with bills. It’s not that unusual, Simon. When your mum and I spent that fortnight in Key West, we met a paramedic at a local bar who was vowing to get out of his line of work. What was the problem? The island has become a destination for elderly couples having a final fling—maybe arriving with diagnoses, maybe just falling apart. So emergency medical teams are constantly called to the scenes of messy double suicides, and the poor fellow found it all too depressing to bear.”
“I can’t find it,” Kay said, sitting up on the floor.
“Find what, bab?” the nice old man said, though he didn’t sound very interested.
“The piece, the piece!” Kay said. “You said you wanted it.”
“Well, we all want peace,” he said with a sigh, looking at the pretend son as if they had a special secret.
“It’s like having a dog,” muttered the middle-aged one.
“I assure you, it’s considerably more difficult than having a dog.”
“Mummy won’t let me have a dog,” Kay said, happy to join in. “But Percy wants one, too.”
“Why didn’t you and Mum go through with it, then?” the younger one said.
“Our health was roughly holding, and your mother changed her mind. She was still enjoying her life, and sticking to the plan myself would have meant abandoning her. But not long after that, she started to decline.”
“Do you really want her into the Quality Street?”
Kay had discovered a tin of shiny packages, all twisted up like tiny presents. There was gold and red and blue. She smoothed the wrappings flat to lay out a tapestry, and then lined up the lumps inside as an audience on the rug.
“Oh, let her play with the sweets. Better the Quality Street than treacle,” the nice old man said. “That was a right nightmare. She turned the whole house into a giant sticky toffee pudding.”
The other one chuckled. “Though she used to make a cracking sticky toffee pudding, remember? That stayed in the bowl.”
“I’ve inevitably wondered whether, that night she got cold feet, she’d have gone ahead with it after all, if she could have seen herself now. What a misery.”
“She doesn’t seem miserable to me,” the fake son said. “You seem miserable. She makes me feel bloody well miserable. But look at her: she seems happy as Larry.”
“Is this Larry fellow coming to dinner?” Kay said, meticulously peeling a purple foil from the clear sheet on top. “Should I set an extra place?”
“You said ‘if she could see herself,’” the pretender continued. “But that’s, like, the whole deal: she can’t see herself. I may not care for that glazed look in her eyes any more than you do, but otherwise her expression is always either rapt or bemused. So maybe she makes us want to top ourselves, but Mum? She seems miles from suicidal.”
“Miles from suicidal!” Kay repeated, delighting in the musicality of the phrase.
“Have you ever offered her the option of ending it?” the handsome one asked quietly.
“Oh, yes, more than once,” the nice old man said. “But when I bring it up, she can’t concentrate. She seems to understand what I’m talking about to start, and then bingo, she doesn’t. She’s been well beyond a capacity for consent for quite some time now. You can’t offer tablets to people who don’t know what tablets are or what they do.”
* * *
Kay went to pains to impress upon these visitors who threaded inexplicably in and out that she had a terribly important appointment with a young woman named Adelaide, who was astonishingly lovely and wore long flowing dresses in sepia tones. Adelaide had been entrusted with Daddy’s crucial work papers, which Kay was to deliver to her father before he went to the surgery tomorrow. Mummy was jealous of Adelaide, so Mummy had to be assured that there was nothing between Daddy and this poorly wisp of a girl, who was not long for this world anyway. Meanwhile, the nice old man seemed to have money problems, so they were all going on a trip. Kay loved to go on trips. The nice old man said she would like it where they were going, and Kay had no reason to believe otherwise. Kay liked it everywhere.
Oh, she experienced brief interludes of agitation. She’d quite an altercation with the nice old man, when she put her foot down that she was not leaving the house without her husband Cyril, who had obviously been kidnapped, perhaps even by the old man himself. But in time she accepted the geezer’s dubious assurances at face value (whilst resolving at first opportunity to ring the police). When she insisted that Hayley had to have her breakfast immediately or she’d be late for school, the nice old man promised on a stack of Bibles that he would drive their young daughter to the school himself, with a parental note if necessary to explain the girl’s tardiness.
Yet for the most part, the whole world of vexation had been miraculously neutralized, as former sources of annoyance converted to sources of merriment or absorption. Sitting for hours in a nearly stationary traffic jam was every bit as entertaining as whooshing along at seventy-five. She was as content to wait at a bus stop indefinitely as she was to get on if the bus arrived. She had defanged the eternal bugbear of “taxes” by neatly forgetting what exactly the word alluded to. On her every side, other people exploded with a host of complaints (she’d long ago stopped worrying about who they were; if they were so rude as to neglect to introduce themselves, that was their problem). They railed against telecom providers whose ignorant customer service personnel were all patchy English speakers in India, lamented the devastation of their pension funds due to some worldwide event to which Kay was under no obligation to attend, and forecasted Armageddon along a variety pack of vectors—climate change, mass migration, fresh water shortage, food insecurity, unsustainable sovereign debt—whilst for Kay these were mere sounds that came and went. The one certainty to which she cheerfully clung was that, whatever these whinge-bags were on about, it would eventually go away. Although it pleased her to spend a fair bit of time on the floor, her prevailing sensation was of floating overhead, looking down on all the little people and observing the paltriness of their supposed troubles. She felt very wise.
Kay was sometimes discombobulated, but the confusion passed, and who cared about being a bit at sixes and sevens anyway. Looking out the windows was a delight: so many people and shapes and cars and lights. The skies raced with clouds that formed faces, smiling as they passed by. And the inside of her head bulged with a fabulous grab bag of miscellany, like those big snarled bins in charity shops whose every item cost a quid. Suddenly that poofy green sofa in Rotherhithe would float across her consciousness like another cumulous cloud, and she would remember with a sly secretive grin what she and her husband had got up to on those pillows in the early days of their marriage. A funny little soap-dish box would loom in her mind pulsing with outsize powers, and the fact that for some reason the black box was always cold made it seem all the more excitingly sinister. She paraded before herself a sequence of her favourite frocks through the ages, as if putting on her own private fashion show—including an especially stylish dress with an off-centre, check-shaped collar in which she had waltzed into their first real home. Sometimes she imagined whisking up a roux for her famous cauliflower cheese or cutting lard into flour for a meat pie, and this whimsical style of cookery had the advantage of dirtying no dishes and never getting flour on your sleeves. There was sleep as well, of course, which afforded great sweeping vistas of Australian outback, gnarls of mangroves weaving like live snakes, swaying palm trees of the southernmost point of the continental United States, or the austere Buddhist temples in the mountains of Japan. She must have seen terribly much in her life to have stored such a boundless library of pictures that she could mix and match, though often the landscapes in her dreams were of her own contrivance—plunging with great chasms or rushing with mighty waters that she had never seen, even with all her journeys. Yet the mosaic of waking and the cinema of slumber tended to blend. A memory of the long flag-lined promenade of the Mall in the approach to Buckingham Palace melded indistinguishably with a faintly distorted facsimile of the boulevard in her sleep; the intermingling of confection and recollection didn’t trouble her in the slightest. It was all just one vast glorious canvas of colour, texture, horses, and big pompous buildings. This undulating montage was every bit as transfixing as the grandiose epics she and Cyril had seen in Leicester Square: Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, which she could also project in eidetic sequences on the back of her skull. A young Arab’s heartbreaking sink into quicksand until only a hand remained. The gallop of the sled across snow-covered hills with red-cheeked Lara and a soaring soundtrack.
Other times she sang: “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini!” or “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay.” Some afternoons she serenaded the pelting British weather on the other side of a pane with scraps of poetry she’d memorized at school: Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving? When oftentimes she couldn’t complete the verse, she made up the rest—It’s a flight plan for foreigners / Margaret is a porn star—then moved blithely on to disconnected phrases that had scored themselves on her mind with uncanny insistence: Eight out of ten cats prefer it! Every little helps! It does exactly what it says on the tin! The milk chocolate that melts in your mouth, not in your hand! Or, if inexplicably, Compare the meerkat dot-com!
It was a bit concerning that the nice old man could sometimes be so forward. Though it felt nice and safe and close when he held her, she was worried that allowing him to touch her like that was disloyal to Cyril.