by David Nobbs
She went back to her office. She couldn’t concentrate on anything until she’d sorted out this business with the Royal Mail. She phoned Mr Gamble from Customer Services.
‘Now this complaint,’ said Mr Gamble. ‘It is, as you’ll realise, extremely serious. Do you think it would stand up in a tribunal?’
‘No, it wouldn’t, Mr Gamble,’ she said, ‘and neither would I. I made it all up.’
‘You made it up? Why should you do a thing like that?’
‘I was in a mood. I have problems at home.’
‘I have problems at home,’ said Mr Gamble. ‘We all have problems at home, that’s what homes are for, but we don’t all go around making up answers to questionnaires.’
‘It made me angry. I thought the whole concept so stupid. “Would you say your postman was averagely smart?” What nonsense.’
‘It was my idea, my personal initiative,’ said Mr Gamble tartly.
‘I’m sorry.’ Oh heavens, Mr Beresford was peering through the glass door at her. He loathed private phone calls. He seemed to be able to sniff them out. ‘I don’t want to offend you, Mr Gamble, but I just think people with busy lives haven’t the time for such things. I filled it in stupidly to make myself feel better. My father posted it by mistake. I hadn’t any intention of sending it.’
‘I don’t believe you. I believe something happened to make you change your mind. Has your postman threatened you?’
‘No! If I’d been serious, would I have written all that stuff about elves and herons? Do you really think I have elves and herons in my garden?’
‘Why, what’s wrong with elves and herons?’
In her anxiety, with Mr Beresford still watching her, Alison failed to read the danger signals.
‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘except that they’re the most ghastly form of sentimental bad taste.’
‘I have five elves and two herons.’
‘I’m really sorry, Mr Gamble. I had no intention of offending you.’
He was coming in! Beresford! Oh God.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘I have to go now. It was all nonsense and I want you to ignore it.’
Mr Beresford raised his great bushy eyebrows.
‘It isn’t quite as simple as that, Mrs Divot,’ said Mr Gamble. ‘Your complaint tallies closely with two others.’
‘What?? About our postman?’
Mr Beresford was capable of raising his eyebrows more than she had suspected. In the world of eyebrow-raising, he was a giant.
‘I’m not at liberty to comment on that, Mrs Divot. Replies are given in strict confidence.’
‘Mr Gamble, I meant nothing of what I said and I didn’t mean to post it. I am making no allegations whatsoever and will write to you to confirm that. So far as I am concerned our postman is wonderful and I can’t believe he would ever expose himself to anybody. Now I must go.’ She put the phone down and met Mr Beresford’s eyes. ‘Problems with our postman,’ she said.
‘So I gathered.’
‘I’m sorry to phone in office hours but I had to clear my mind before I dealt with our more pressing matters.’
‘More pressing, Mrs Divot? You really think our little business more important than your postman? Fm honoured. Fm flattered. Fm touched. When you’ve rung Mercia First Southern and Balshaw and sorted out any problems you may have with flashing milkmen, perhaps you’d run up a draft reply to Mercia First Southern arguing against their ridiculous over-reaction. Do you think you could spare me the time for that?’
The heaviness of his sarcasm, the bushiness of his eyebrows, the flashing of his eyes, it was disturbing to think that only ten minutes ago he had called her Alison.
‘I’ll get it done straightaway, Mr Beresford.’
‘Good.’
He went back to the connecting door to his office, then turned and gave a twisted smile.
‘He won’t hold his job with Cornucopia,’ he said. ‘I’ve played golf with Sir Terence Manningham.’
And he left her to pick the bones out of that.
The Throdnall Advertiser leaked the story straightaway. ‘Leading Throdnall Hotelier in Sex Change Shock.’
And there, near the bottom:
Mr Divot is married with two children. Neighbours said today that they found it hard to believe. “They’re such a lovely family, they seem so normal,” said Edith Percival (73), a retired schoolteacher. “We’ve never had any trouble with them. I could understand it if it was ‘riff-raff’.”
Mr Divot’s wife Alison (40) is personal assistant to Mr Clive Beresford, Managing Director of the besieged Throdnall Carriage Works.
Em was absolutely furious about the article. ‘You promised me an exclusive,’ she said. ‘You promised!’ Bloody Mick Perkins getting a front page lead about my dad. I’m a laughing stock. Pipped to the post with a story about my own family. I’ll never live it down. You promised, Dad, and I believed you. I thought I could trust you now you’re becoming a woman. I should have realised you’re still a man.’
Nicola protested till she was blue in the face that the leak hadn’t come from her.
‘Well it was stupid of you anyway to think it wouldn’t come out,’ said Em. ‘All the people who go to your stupid hotel – God knows why – it was bound to come out. I feel such a fool. I feel humiliated.’
Mr Beresford was no less furious.
‘I don’t like it,’ he said. ‘I don’t like being associated with it. And what do they mean – “besieged”? Have they got wind of the broken nuts? Have you said anything?’
‘Mr Beresford!’ she said indignantly. ‘I am reliability personified. I embody the spirit of confidentiality. You said so yourself.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know. I’m sorry. I can’t think straight. But what do they mean – “besieged”?’
What could she say? She couldn’t say, ‘Well, Mr Beresford, I think it’s pretty well-known locally that the carriage works are going through a bad time.’ It was the great unspoken fact, which could never be acknowledged.
‘Well I don’t want it happening again,’ he said. ‘Right …’
Cold winds had set in from the east, and Alison could feel a chill of fear gnawing away at her insides. Nicola had been summoned to head office. If she lost her job with Cornucopia, how could she possibly find another one? She would have to come clean about her condition. The voice might have softened, but there’d be no mistaking those large hands.
‘Did you get that?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Beresford, I …’
‘Pull yourself together, Mrs Divot. I cannot have a Personal Assistant whose mind wanders.’
‘I’m so sorry, Mr Beresford.’
‘These are some notes I’ve made on safety of rolling stock. Things I should say when I face the Strategic Rail Authority. Knock them into shape, please, and type them up for me.’
‘Yes, Mr Beresford. Sorry, Mr Beresford.’
She was dismissed. She went to the door. She couldn’t believe how often she was having to apologise to Mr Beresford. She wasn’t an apologiser. Nick had always been the apologiser in the family. She was forthright, uncompromising Alison. What had happened to her?
‘Mrs Divot?’
She turned, and saw that he was giving her a rather intense look. She wouldn’t have gone so far as to say that his face softened. She wasn’t sure if his face was physically capable of softening. But … there was a certain … almost warmth … in his eyes. She wondered if he was going to say something personal – hoped that he would, yet dreaded it.
‘You’ve become virtually indispensable to me, Mrs Divot,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I’d do if I had to manage without you.’
A threat wrapped in a compliment with the delicacy of spicy meat wrapped in cabbage leaves on a stall in down-town Bangkok. Or was it a compliment wrapped in a threat?
She returned to her office and tried to make sense of his notes, but the words danced before her eyes. Nicola would lose her job. She would lose her job. They’d lose t
heir house. The family would disintegrate. Well, get on with the work, then. Fight for your job.
Rail travel remains the safest form of travel in every continent and every country in the developed and developing such anxiety about our future that I can’t sleep, can’t eat. No, Alison, stick to the notes, forget your puny little life. The record of carriage makers in railway history is well-nigh unblemished. In two hundred and forty-six railway accidents analysed by the Penfold Rail Safety Research Group only five contained any element of failure of component parts of me long for the sex change, parts of me are beginning to wonder if the sacrifice is going to be too much, the risk too … No! Concentrate. Concentrate, Alison. Component parts of carriages. Checking procedures are …
She began to manage to give her mind to the job. She’d finished by twenty to five. The last angry defiance of the sun was still tingeing the sky a livid pink behind Toys Us. She could sense that outside their centrally heated sauna the world was fiercely cold. She handed the typed-up notes to Mr Beresford. He read them through very quickly, he could grasp a document within seconds.
‘Yes. Fine. Good. Good. Ah, you’ve split up the statistics a bit. Good. Effective. Excellent. Well done, Mrs Divot. Mrs Divot?’ This in a different tone, again she sensed the approach of something personal.
‘Yes?’
‘What do you do about sleeping arrangements?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘You and your “husband”. Do you sleep in separate rooms now? I’m sorry, you think that too personal?’
‘No, I’m … er … I’m just astounded, Mr Beresford. You’ve never … you never ask me things like that.’
‘I couldn’t help thinking about … your predicament. I mean if your husband is living as a woman, then in essence, if you were sharing a double bed you would be two women in one bed, you would be … lesbians!’ He spat the word out.
‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Not that I have any objection to lesbianism between consenting adults …’ She wasn’t going to be cowed by his prejudice, ‘but, no, we … I … we … there is no physical relationship between us, there hasn’t been for some time.’ She didn’t want to be telling him all this, but she refused to be coy with him, and looked him full in the face. ‘We do share a bed, we haven’t said anything about that being odd, we just take it as a fact. We have no alternative, we haven’t a spare room with the two children and my father living with us. It’s something we, I suppose, since we can’t do anything about it, just don’t mention.’
‘Mrs Beresford and I have slept in separate beds for thirteen years.’
She didn’t think she really wanted to know that. Why had he told her? Was it a hint? Was he paving the way for an approach? Oh God, that would make things difficult; it would be harder than ever to tell him.
Oh Lord, he was going to speak again. What now?
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think armed with this little lot I shall face the Strategic Rail Authority with confidence. Thank you, Mrs Divot.’
Alison had never felt so exhausted at the end of a day’s work, and it wasn’t exactly an evening of sweetness and light at home. Nicola was very touchy because she was nervous about her impending interview with Head Office. Em was still depressed over Giorgio and still furious about the article in the Advertiser. Gray chose that evening of all evenings to announce that he’d been surfing the net for male to female sex changes that had gone wrong, and had come up with a minister in Minnesota who had died of heart failure during the operation, a chiropodist in Ecuador who had suffered a mental breakdown after his body rejected his vagina, and a financial consultant in Kuala Lumpur who had returned to work after an apparently successful operation, only to bleed to death during a seminar on company pensions.
‘Terrific,’ said Nicola. ‘Thank you for that, Gray. You’ve made my evening.’
And then Bernie came in very upset and said, ‘I’ve just been to the loo in Garibaldi Terrace.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Nicola.
‘I know what Dad means,’ said Alison. ‘It’s obvious. He went where the loo would have been in Garibaldi Terrace because he got confused.’
‘That’s right,’ said Bernie. ‘I were snoozing. I woke up. I said to her, “I’ll just pop to t’loo”, and I went there and it were the broom cupboard.’
‘I hope you didn’t pee on the brooms,’ said Gray.
‘Gray!’ shouted Nicola edgily. ‘That’s no way to speak to your grandfather.’
‘No, but what I mean is, me mind’s beginning to go,’ said Bernie.
‘Your mind isn’t beginning to go,’ said Alison, putting her arm round him. ‘I never heard such nonsense.’
‘Of course it isn’t,’ said Nicola. ‘Why, I myself went to the Gents’ in the hotel the other day by mistake. Force of habit.’
‘Aye,’ said Bernie. ‘That’s different, is that. Force of habit, I can understand that in your case, Nick.’
‘Nicola.’
‘You what?’
‘I’m calling myself Nicola now, Bernie. I did tell you.’
‘You see. Me mind’s going.’
‘Your mind is not going, Dad,’ said Alison. ‘You’d been asleep and you woke up and your mind played a trick … a wish-fulfilment if you like. You wanted to be back in Garibaldi Terrace. You wanted Mum to still be alive.’
‘Oh aye. I wanted that right enough.’
Alison was last to bed as usual, because she had to clear everything away and switch off all the lights.
She was so desperately tired, too tired to sleep. She knew that Nicola, lying beside her, was pretending to be asleep. She thought of all the long hours that he had spent like that, over the years, never knowing that she didn’t feel let down, that she had dreaded their inappropriate sexual fumblings just as much as he had. She suspected that they both imagined that everyone else in the street was doing it fifteen times a night, followed by a quickie on the breakfast table.
As she lay there, she wished that she had understood, years ago, why they didn’t want sex with each other. She would never have embarked on her little affair if she had.
And it had been a little affair. Just three times she had gone to bed with her ‘lover’. He was an attractive and persuasive man, and she had felt lonely and pleased to be wanted, so pleased to be wanted. Three agonies of hope and despair and fulfilment and disgust. It was on the third occasion, as he thrashed around like an elephant in Chester Zoo, that she had suddenly wished that she was a man and he a woman. God, what a shock. And that had been the time that she had conceived! One in the eye for those sentimental fools who said that you had to be in the right mood to conceive. That had been the day when she had understood that her childhood regret at not being a boy was the central fact of her existence. And nine months later she had given birth to Gray. What a secret to carry to the grave.
She had sensed that she was pregnant almost immediately. She couldn’t be certain, but she couldn’t risk it, so she’d had to get Nick to make love to her very shortly after that. With the compliments she paid him the night it happened, the fervency with which she told him how much she loved and admired him, success was sudden and joyous. Gray was born eight months and seven days later, and Nick never worked it out sufficiently accurately to suspect anything.
All this went through her mind in the long reaches of the endless night, as she lay next to Nicola, listening to her pretending to be asleep.
The carriage clock in the dining room struck three. Only three! They couldn’t lie there like this all night, pretending to be asleep. It was farcical.
It’s very hard, at three in the morning, to be up-beat, but Alison was nothing if not a fighter, and there in that bed in the middle of the long, slow night she forced herself back into a spirit of strength and resolve. Suddenly she knew that Mr Beresford would not defeat them, Cornucopia Hotels would not defeat them, Gray’s warnings would not deflect them.
She longed to tell Nicola of her plans, but it was too soon – too soon to t
ell Bernie, she had to give him more time to grieve, and so she couldn’t burden Nicola by telling her in secret.
She must offer some support, though, so she pretended to wake up, stirred, groaned, grunted, stretched, sighed. Moments later, Nicola began to pretend to wake up, groaned, stirred, stretched, sighed, grunted.
‘Are you awake?’ whispered Alison.
‘Yes,’ whispered Nicola. ‘Just woke up. I was having a terrible dream.’
‘Nicola?’
‘Yes?’
‘There are bound to be moments of doubt, but we mustn’t let them defeat us.’
We! What a give-away! But Nicola didn’t seem to have noticed.
Alison felt a great wave of love for Nicola. Instinctively, her fingers felt for her prick.
Nicola gasped.
‘Alison!’ she whispered. ‘What are you doing? Please don’t touch that. It’s a dead thing, waiting to be removed.’
So much love to give, and no way of giving it. Hours later, the carriage clock struck four, and some time after that, eventually, they both fell asleep.
12 The Heavy Mob
Nicola presented herself at Cornucopia House, that inelegant glass box, that beacon of budget architecture, ten minutes early.
She was looking as smart as she knew how to be, not too blatantly feminine but not remotely masculine either. She’d chosen a grey pin-stripe trouser suit which she wore with a white blouse. Her shoes and handbag were black. She looked the essence of a well-groomed businesswoman. Alison had helped put the finishing touches to her make-up, and now, as she titivated in the Ladies’, she felt that she really didn’t look at all bad.
She sat in the ante-room to the Board Room, facing a large photograph of the Amsterdam Cornucopia, their first venture into Europe. She opened a copy of Hotels and Hoteliers and thumbed through the Situations Vacant.
Manageress required for elegant seaside hotel. Transsexuals preferred. The successful candidate must be requiring three months off for a major operation in the near future.
