‘You’re a saint,’ I said.
‘No, no. I wish I was.’ Meg shook her head. ‘He was suffering. That’s what I can’t get over, that’s what keeps me awake at night. I keep thinking back and remembering how that boy of mine never smiled. I knew something was up but I didn’t ask. I was too scared. I let myself get caught up in the farm and the girls and Robert, and things I wouldn’t give a bar of soap for now.’ Her hand was trembling as she took a sip of her wine. I reached out and touched it, and she murmured, ‘It’s all right, dear.’
‘Mothers aren’t mind-readers,’ said Kate. ‘They can’t know everything their children are thinking. You mustn’t blame yourself.’
A waitress—Sophie—turned up with cutlery and serviettes. She was a friend of Kate’s who’d built many a hut by our pond, and she stopped to chat. I listened vaguely to the small talk, smiling in the right places, but I was fretting about what Kate had just said.
She’s wrong. Isn’t she wrong? Mothers can almost be mind-readers. I remembered the jolt I’d felt when two-year-old Simon touched an electric fence—as though the shock had bolted through my own body; and what about those sleepless, tearful nights when Kate was being bullied? Luke and I felt what our children felt, feared what they feared. I’d be horrified if I learned that Simon had been depressed as a youngster and I hadn’t even known.
Then I remembered the hints Jim had dropped, over dinner at The Lock. He hasn’t always found life easy, has he? Bit of a loner. I hadn’t known my husband, after all; perhaps I hadn’t known my son either. Perhaps we never really understand our families at all, any of us. Perhaps those we love the most are really a bunch of strangers, with secret thoughts and inner lives. I didn’t like the idea.
After Sophie left, Kate rolled up her sleeves.
‘Now,’ she said. ‘There’s something I have to say. I want to talk to both of you about Christmas Day with Dad. I’m not sure either of you is going to like this, but I think you have to know.’
Meg and I listened with increasing astonishment—and, in my case, indignation—as she described her day. By the time she came to the end of the story, I imagine our jaws were touching the table.
‘Sorry,’ I said, blinking in bafflement. ‘Sorry? You’re telling me you went for a sedate little promenade around East London with two . . . with two . . .’
‘Two women.’
‘Both of whom had . . . ?’
‘Wedding tackle,’ suggested Meg helpfully.
Kate nodded. ‘Wedding tackle. But two women, all the same.’
‘One of whom was my husband and your father,’ I said.
Kate opened her hands. ‘I can’t describe it in any other way, Mum. I’m telling you, I felt as though I was out and about with two women. I was not in the company of men. Their . . . I don’t know, their life force was female.’
I don’t do New Age, and I wasn’t going to start talking about life forces now. ‘You never met Chloe when she was Carl or Geoffrey or whatever she was,’ I said. ‘Fair enough, I can see how you might suspend your disbelief about her. But surely you can’t do that when it comes to your own father?’
‘Yes. No.’ Kate pressed her fingers to her temples. ‘Aargh, how do I explain this? Yes and no. I don’t think gender’s about wedding tackle, or the lack of it. The problem is this obsession we’ve got with categorising people into discrete little boxes.’
I sat back in my seat. ‘Kate, I’m appalled! How could he ask this of you? He never used to be a selfish man—never, ever. Maybe Simon’s right, he’s gone completely mad.’
‘I asked him to do it.’
Meg was swirling her wine around in the glass. It caught the light from the fire.
‘Seeing him,’ she said. ‘That’s going to be a real test. I don’t know how I’ll cope with that.’
Kate was positively evangelical, as though the sight of her father cross-dressed had been a road to Emmaus experience. ‘Granny, I was dreading it too, but, believe me, it was okay. I think I understand now. When I picture Dad as I grew up, he was gorgeous, but somehow . . . there was something dark. It’s hard to put your finger on it.’
I knew exactly what she meant.
‘A shadow,’ said Meg. ‘That’s how I see it.’
‘Bang on!’ Kate clapped her hands. ‘Well, I think Dad’s shadow is finally lifting. And I’ll tell you what, he’s bloody convincing as a woman. He’s been practising. She’s been practising. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s not. He’s lonely and he’s scared. Chloe seems quite worried. She reckons transition is a dangerous time . . . actually, she said it’s the hardest fucking thing ever and if we don’t front up, Dad might not get through it. I think she means suicide.’
The word winded us all. Our meals arrived; we made appreciative noises and said no thanks, we don’t need ketchup. Then we let our food go cold. We were a silent trio of women, all of us thinking about the same man.
Meg recovered first. ‘Right,’ she said, pulling her knife and fork from a serviette. ‘I’m not having that. I failed him when he was a kid and I’m not going to make the same mistake now. If you can face seeing him like that, Kate, then so can I. It’s lucky Robert’s gone. This would definitely kill him.’
‘Have you heard from Gail?’ I asked. I barely knew Luke’s eldest sister.
‘Oh, Gail.’ Meg rolled her eyes. ‘Yes, I’ve heard from her. She phoned the day she got his letter. She said she always knew he was a freak. She said she never wants to hear his name again. I told her that was her business.’
‘She’s a piece of work, isn’t she?’ said Kate.
She and Meg talked for a while about Gail, but soon their conversation began to range through quite a sweep of topics: Owen’s new girlfriend (Meg disapproved—old enough to be his mother), Meg’s appointment at the audiology clinic (Meg disapproved—there was nothing wrong with her hearing), and a pop star who’d frolicked about completely naked for her latest music video (thereby objectifying all women, according to Kate; Meg just thought the poor lass looked cold).
I half listened, even chipped in from time to time, but my mind was on Luke. I wondered what he was doing right now, tonight, and whether he was safe from himself. For the first time, I began to imagine what kind of a woman he would be.
Kate thought his shadow was lifting. If that were true, then all this might be worth it.
The new term began. Every day, somebody in the staffroom would complain about the fact that it was January. I was tempted to have badges printed for them to wear, save them the trouble of moaning out loud.
‘Nothing left of Christmas but the overdraft,’ someone would drone gloomily, opening their packed lunch. ‘Hate it. Don’t you hate it? Forecast says more rain for the weekend. Been raining for weeks. Thank God we’re going to Tenerife for half-term.’ There would be general nodding and tooth sucking from the chorus. Then someone would look out of the window and mutter, ‘It’s so . . . bloody . . . dark.’
I hate to sound like Pollyanna, but I’ve always rather liked January. There’s something clean about it. I like the skeletons of bare trees against the sky; I like the frosty mornings when the pond has a thin rime of ice, and leaves crackle under your feet. Luke was gone, but that wasn’t the fault of the season. I’d been dreading that first Christmas apart from him, and was relieved to have got through it. The immediate agony had dulled to a constant throbbing. In the evenings I’d close my curtains and tell myself to be grateful for the warmth of the Rayburn. There were refugees who’d lost everything, who didn’t even have a blanket or food for their children, and all I’d lost was my husband. Sometimes I managed not to think about him for . . . ooh, minutes at a time.
‘For goodness’ sake,’ I protested, when I’d heard the January lament once too often. ‘We don’t live in the Arctic Circle. The sun does actually rise, you know.’
‘Not for long,’ mumbled one of the Eeyores. ‘Dark by four, never see my house in daylight; so depressing.’
I was on my w
ay out. During Friday lunchtimes I ran a Brain Gym club. The most restless and uncoordinated teenagers in the school would already be waiting for me in the drama room, so I was in a hurry to get there before anarchy broke out.
Mick Glover looked up from his tablet. He spent his life gazing at its screen; I was sure he watched porn on there. ‘You and Luke going away at half-term?’ he asked.
‘Probably not.’
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw heads swivel my way. They were all wondering.
Mick raised one eyebrow. ‘Still working on the Big Project?’
The cynicism in his tone set my teeth on edge. What do you know about love, or loyalty? I thought furiously.
‘Actually,’ I said loudly, ‘Luke and I have separated. Permanently. We’re getting divorced.’
The effect was rather satisfying. The staffroom fell silent, coffee mugs halfway to open mouths. It was a bit like being in one of those westerns when Clint Eastwood walks into a saloon and asks for a whisky, and the pianist stops playing, and everyone ducks except the barman.
Mick had the grace to look embarrassed. I heard a general murmur: I’m sorry, and I don’t believe it, and Eilish, I had no idea.
‘It’s perfectly amicable,’ I told them. ‘No fault attached, neither of us has anybody else. I am fine, absolutely fine.’
With those words, I barged out through the saloon doors.
School staffrooms are the most gossipy places in the world—and it’s mostly the men who do the gossiping, in my experience. By the time I left the building at five o’clock, every adult in the school knew that my marriage was over. People were kind. They touched my upper arm, adopting the sad eyes and sober smiles reserved for funerals. Even the lab technician—who lives in her storeroom and never speaks to anyone if she can help it—said she’d heard things weren’t going well for me, and she’d been through it too.
Not one of them could hide their curiosity, though they tried to do so, with varying degrees of tact. Of course they were curious; I would have been, too. When a plane crashes, they look for the black box because they want to understand what happened and avoid it happening again. It was the same with Luke and me. They wanted to understand why, after thirty years, the most stable marriage in the world had suddenly foundered. Someone had to be at fault. Someone must have had an affair. I later heard that the staff were divided roughly fifty-fifty on which of us had been playing the away game. A small but vocal majority thought it was me, with Jim Chadwick. The rest thought it was Luke, perhaps with Penny O’Neil, headmistress of St Matthew’s Primary. Apparently he’d been seen in her office a lot—which was hardly surprising, since he was chair of her board of governors.
I wondered how they’d react if they knew that Luke’s days as a man were numbered. When that news breaks, I thought grimly, the old saloon piano really will stop playing.
Thirty-nine
Lucia
My bedroom curtains were glowing in the light of a February sunrise. Everything was exactly the same as it had been the day before, and yet something was different. It was me. I felt . . . happy. I lay still, revelling in this unfamiliar serenity, prodding it to see if it was real. Something had left me; some deep ache of unhappiness. It was like waking up after having an infected tooth extracted, to find the pain is gone. Call it what you like: the placebo effect, hysteria, pure madness—but, for the first time in my life, I felt right. I fitted.
A new year, a new woman. Kate had seen and accepted me at Christmas; and in January my mother had rung to ask what I was doing for my birthday on the fourteenth. When I confessed to having no plans, she suggested we go to a P.G. Wodehouse adaptation that was on in the West End. We arranged to meet in Trafalgar Square.
‘And, Luke.’ She had a determined edge to her voice; I knew it well. ‘You can be a girl. It’s time I met this daughter of mine. I won’t swoon.’
I’d tried on three different outfits that day, looking for one that wouldn’t shock her too much. Chloe had given me a string of green glass beads for my birthday. I was very touched, because I knew she was often short of money. I put them on, wanting a little of my friend’s panache. It was a drizzling afternoon. I felt cripplingly self-conscious as I walked up to my mother, who was waiting by one of the lions. I watched her eyes come out on stalks when the smiling woman in a dove-grey pashmina and pearl earrings turned out to be her son.
‘It’s all right, dear,’ she said stoically, though for several seconds she’d been doing a fair imitation of a goldfish. ‘I’m not going to have a heart attack.’
‘Please don’t,’ I begged her. ‘Not right under Nelson’s Column, which Kate tells me is really a giant phallus and symbol of the filthy patriarchy.’ My voice sounded quite feminine now; I’d found that pitch overlap after hours of practice, and the new inflections and intonations were coming more easily. It made all the difference to people’s reactions.
Mum stepped back to look at me. ‘I’m not going to pretend this isn’t a strange moment. But I will say this—I’m impressed.’ There was incredulity in her voice. ‘Classy, not brassy.’
We went to the play, which was hilarious; and then out to dinner in a nearby restaurant.
‘People stare,’ whispered Mum, her eyes flicking around at the other diners.
I shrugged. ‘Some do. Not all. Most don’t even notice nowadays.’
‘You’re amazing,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Just amazing.’
I didn’t ask her what she meant. She tucked into her steak, and we talked about golf for the rest of the evening.
That had been a turning point. I now had my mother’s approval, as well as my daughter’s, and Lucia blossomed. Each evening, a conventional man in a suit carried his briefcase into the flat in Thurso Lane. An hour later a woman emerged, holding her head high. I rarely saw my neighbours—mostly Somali refugees, with problems of their own—and I honestly don’t think they noticed anything unusual. I travelled on buses, went ice-skating with Kate and Chloe (they skated, I was the admiring audience), and had lunch in a bistro with some of the Jenny Marsden group. My friend the Che Guevara man would always remember if Luke had bought The Big Issue, and not ask Lucia.
People who become fluent in a second language tell me they actually think in that language; they aren’t translating. It was like that with me. I began to think in Lucia’s voice, with her words. She was the reality now. Luke was a fancy-dress costume I donned for work. It was a strange double life; it took me an hour or so to change from one person to the other—not physically, but mentally. Sometimes I accidentally used the wrong voice or body language. It was a strain, but I wasn’t sinking.
As I took a shower on that glorious February morning, wincing at the increasing soreness across my chest, I noticed something new. It was very slight indeed, but nevertheless it was there. My body had begun to change. Fat and muscle were redistributing themselves. Even my face seemed different, when I looked in the shaving mirror.
I dressed in a white blouse, cardigan and flowing skirt and did several hours’ work. At about ten I made a sortie to the newsagent’s for more milk. On my way back, I picked up a magazine from Che Guevara man. He too was feeling chirpy, he said, because spring was on its way and soon it wouldn’t be so effing cold. I stopped to chat for a while. He told me he used to sell sound systems and had a home and family. Then he’d fallen into gambling, become a total arsehole (his words) and lost everything.
I had appointments in the office that afternoon, and was reluctantly changing into a suit and tie when Chloe phoned. I told her about my euphoria.
‘I feel so calm,’ I said. ‘Everything’s lovely today.’
I could hear the smile in her voice. ‘You know what that is? The hormones. For the first time in your life, your body isn’t fighting your mind.’
‘You could be right.’
‘I am right! That’s how cis people feel all the time.’
She meant cisgender people—those whose bodies matched their identities. I was pretty
sure Mr Che Guevara didn’t feel calm and happy all the time; quite often he felt cold and lonely. Still, I didn’t argue.
‘Will it last?’ I asked.
‘No.’ She laughed. She was always laughing; I knew it was to cover up the pain. ‘Hang on tight, Luce, you’ve boarded a roller-coaster—up, down, up. But when things get tough, remember how you’re feeling today. Hold on to that and don’t let go.’
‘And where are you?’ I asked her. ‘Where on the roller-coaster?’
The laughter carried a flutter of panic. ‘Not so good today.’
Poor Chloe. She’d tried to phone her mother the previous evening, and it hadn’t gone well. Her mother insisted on calling her Callum (‘Why does she do that? I haven’t been Callum since I was fourteen years old!’) and gleefully announced that her grandparents had changed their will to cut Chloe out. They don’t even want to hear your name, Callum. Chloe had hung up on her. I suspected she’d then spent the night in tears and this was the real reason she’d phoned me.
‘I wish there was a pill,’ she said, in one of those rare, bleak, not-laughing moments, ‘to make them feel what we feel. Just for a day. Just for an hour. Then they’d stop hating us.’
I told her I’d a good mind to take the first train up to Manchester and have words with the old bat. Chloe said her mum wasn’t old, she was forty-six, but she was a bat.
‘Thanks,’ I said, as we ended the call.
‘What for?’
‘Well, you know . . . putting up with a fuddy-duddy like me.’
I could hear her laughter as I hung up.
I was still floating several feet above the ground when Judi turned up in my office. She was wearing some kind of trouser suit in dark crimson. Apparently, she’d had it made while on holiday in India.
The Secret Life of Luke Livingstone Page 28
