The New Woman (27 page)

It was a Saturday morning, and Rosa was ten days old. I took a cup of tea back to my bedroom, smiling at the latest photographs of her and Nico. Thanks to Kate, I was amassing quite a collection. Rosa had been allowed out of the neonatal unit, and today they were taking her home. She already had her mother’s determined pout. I could see that Nico was growing up, too. He’d started at school, and had a proper boy’s haircut. He’d just turned five. I’d sent him a card. I hoped it had got to him.

I took a shower with soap that smelled of roses, and dressed in a calf-length skirt and pale blue jersey. My hair was growing. If I brushed it forward around my face, it looked quite feminine. Not young—a bit granny—but feminine.

The post had arrived. Letters and leaflets lay scattered on the wet doormat, next to my umbrella. While my coffee was
brewing I flicked through them. Mostly advertising. All except one: a brown envelope. It had rain spots on it, and was slightly creased. I had some vague thought that it might be about my father’s will, though that had all been finalised months ago.

I slid a knife under the flap and pulled out its contents.

I should have expected it. But I didn’t.

She’d walked up the aisle to Mendelssohn. The church was full to bursting, its ancient air scented by flowers. The world had come to my wedding; all except Gail. Dad had bought a new suit for the occasion; Mum had bought herself several outfits. Benjamin Rose caught my eye as he came into the church, and winked. I sat in the pew near the pulpit, straightening the collar of my morning coat and checking that Toby still had the ring. Then I heard the sudden silence, the shuffling, and I knew she’d arrived.

This was it: the first moment of my new life. I was twenty-five years old, and from now on I would be whole. I was going to be the son my father wanted; the husband Eilish deserved; the father my future children needed. I made a solemn promise both to Eilish and to myself that day.

My new mother-in-law was weeping under her designer hat. Katrina French never pretended to like me much; I think she saw through me. As the music began, and Toby and I rose to our feet, he muttered in my ear:
Last chance to make a break for it, cuz.

I didn’t want to make a break for it. I wanted to see her. Unable to resist, I turned around.

She was breathtaking. There’s no other word for it. She was a beautiful woman on her wedding day. It was a dazzling October morning outside, and the light from a stained-glass window tinted the lace of her dress and the ivory flowers in her hair. She looked supremely relaxed, holding her father’s arm and mouthing
hello
to people as she passed them. Tom looked far more nervous than his daughter. Good old Tom; we did love him—though how
he ever came to marry her mother is a mystery to me. Then she met my eye, and we both smiled.

She walked up the aisle to Mendelssohn, to stand by my side. We stood side by side for the next thirty years. Our story began in the magical light of a stained-glass window.

And what heralded its end? A damp, slightly creased brown envelope from the county court, containing a petition for divorce.

Twenty-eight

Eilish

The weeks passed. The sky became higher, the mornings sharper. The poplars in the copse were embossed with gold. When I left for work each day, Gareth’s tractor was already rumbling along the rows. I like autumn, but this time the dying of the year felt melancholy. Our wedding anniversary came and went. I wept for it alone. No party. No fireworks.

Instead, the divorce ground on. Luke behaved impeccably. He returned the acknowledgement of service to the court and agreed to everything my solicitor and I wanted. In the days and weeks that passed we talked often about the practicalities of our divorce. It was a bit like arranging a funeral: you’re grieving, you’re denying, but you still have to choose the readings and organise a caterer. We agreed to divvy up some of the savings now and take account of it in the final settlement. We talked reasonably and sensibly, as though we were no more than business partners. And all the time my heart was tearing right across the middle. I could actually feel it. I think his was too.

He wanted news of the children. He pressed me for every tiny detail, and chuckled adoringly when I described seeing Nico kiss Rosa one day when he thought nobody was looking.

‘It was a big, smacky kiss,’ I said. ‘Right on her nose.’

‘Little chap!’ After a short pause he added, ‘I wish I could see them.’

‘You
could
see them.’

I was blackmailing him, as I had the day Rosa was born. I knew it, even as I said it—and why not? Surely I had a right to use every weapon in my arsenal to salvage our marriage? I’d spoiled the conversation. Soon after that, we ran out of things to say.

We’re resilient, us human beings. More so than we think. I kept going; I functioned. One Sunday morning in late October, I had Neil Young on the stereo and was designing a series of lesson plans. I hadn’t been to church that morning. In fact, I hadn’t darkened its doors for several weeks. People were becoming more insistent when asking about Luke, and I wasn’t prepared to answer their questions. I hadn’t told anyone but Stella that we’d separated, because . . . actually, why hadn’t I? Because they would ask
why
he’d gone.

I’d made quite a bit of headway when I spotted Jim Chadwick’s green MG driving by the window with its roof down.

‘Chadwick!’ I cried, stepping outside to greet him. I thought fleetingly of the moment I’d last opened this door to Luke; that morning back in July, when he came in soaking wet, and our world changed forever. By contrast, Jim looked confident and uncomplicated and definitely male. That was something I used to take for granted in a man.

‘Is this a bad moment?’ he asked.

‘On the contrary, your timing is inspired. I was about to stop for coffee.’

‘Oh good. I’ve come to drum up your support,’ he said, getting out of his car. ‘We have battlements to storm.’

It was cheering to see my colleague striding towards me across the gravel. I found myself admiring the laughter lines around his blue eyes, and his sandy hair, receding a little. He brought energy and honesty at a time when I needed both. I felt my spirits lift.

‘Neil Young!’ he exclaimed, as he stepped inside and heard the singer’s reedy voice permeating the house. ‘Takes me back to my misspent yoof.’

‘Luke says the man’s a poet.’

I made coffee while Jim explained his mission. He was dean of year nine, and wanted my alliance in his latest skirmish with the school’s management. It had been triggered by a gifted but chaotic boy who could read anything, but was unable to write legibly. Jim wanted him to be allowed to use a laptop in all his classes.

‘I’ve hit a brick wall. Wally Wallis says it’ll open the floodgates,’ he complained, as I pottered around the kitchen. ‘He’s hell-bent on screwing up this kid’s education. I’m not having it. Could you assess him, and write a report that Wally can’t ignore?’

‘It sounds rather like dysgraphia. If I . . .’ Suddenly, I felt tears crowding into my eyes. Treacherous things. I fiddled with the coffee plunger, blinking them away. ‘Luke’s left,’ I said. ‘We’re in the throes of divorce.’ I pressed down on the plunger, listening to Jim’s silence. ‘You don’t take milk, do you?’

When I turned around, he was staring at me. ‘I’m so sorry, Eilish.’

‘Sorry, perhaps, but I doubt you’re surprised. You must have been wondering by now. Everyone must be wondering. It doesn’t matter. I’m fine.’ I laughed at myself even as I spoke. What foolish, empty words! Why do we deny our grief?

‘It
does
matter. You and Luke are an icon of conjugal bliss!’

I turned off the music and led the way through the folding doors. It was still warm enough to sit outside. We sat looking across the garden, exactly as Luke and I used to do. Charlotte’s maple tree had turned a deep red. Nearby, Robert’s sapling was thriving. Luke’s daughter. Luke’s father. It felt odd to be there with someone else, another man, knowing that Luke was gone forever.

‘What happened?’ asked Jim.

I began with that July morning, and told the story as best I could. Jim’s characteristic energy was now channelled into listening. He leaned forward with his elbows resting on his knees, gazing at the paving stones, nodding sharply from time to time. There wasn’t the flicker of a smile. No remarks about dresses. No hint that he found Luke ridiculous.

‘What’s especially hurtful,’ I said, ‘almost inconceivable, is that he’s prepared to lose contact with Nico and never meet Rosa. Luke and Nico were like
this
.’ I held up two fingers twined around one another. ‘They’re a mutual appreciation society. I just don’t understand how Luke can break that bond. It’s as though he’s infatuated with this idea of himself as a woman.’

‘Hmm.’ Jim pushed a pebble around with his foot. ‘Maybe it’s evidence of his desperation?’

‘Or—as Simon thinks—that he’s a kid in a sweetshop. He wants it all, and he wants it now, and he doesn’t seem to care who gets hurt. He’s going to wake up one day and realise what he’s lost.’

‘Maybe.’

I wasn’t impressed with my friend’s reaction. I was the wounded wife, after all. I was the innocent one and I expected outrage on my behalf. I told him so.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘We can take it as read that you are blameless. I didn’t think it needed to be said.’

‘But I feel stupid.’ I smiled unhappily. ‘I mean, how blind and gullible can you be? I shared a bed with that man for three decades.’

‘It’s not your fault. You know that. I know that. The gossips in the village pub and the staffroom will certainly agree. So you can take blaming yourself off your to-do list. Have you researched this problem of Luke’s?’

‘Of course.’

‘And?’

‘I’m not alone. You spot a new story in the paper every week once you start noticing. There are lawyers and accountants and prostitutes. There are famous people: a
Vogue
model called
April Ashley. Jan Morris, the writer. She was the
Times
correspondent—male—with Hillary and Tenzing when they made it up Everest. She and her wife have stayed together. Um, who else? That American whistleblower . . . Memory like a sieve at the moment, I can’t remember his name.’

‘Bradley Manning.’

‘That’s the one. There’s even a clinic in London that helps children. I covered this once in training, but I’ve never come across it in the classroom. Have you?’

To my surprise, he nodded. ‘More than once.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Left it to the school counsellor.’ He was tapping out a drum solo on the bench with his hands. He’s a restless type, is Jim. More like rapids, where Luke is deep and still.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I knew someone at university.’

‘Really?’

‘Mm. Francis Bates. Fran. She was flamboyant, wore miniskirts. She was taking hormones. I didn’t know her well. None of us did, though she was very affable. She asked us to use the feminine pronoun, which we didn’t do because we were so bloody small-minded. We used to call her Frank, just to be clever. The university put her in a male hall of residence. Nowadays there are rules about that kind of thing.’ Jim stopped, rubbing his cheek. ‘One night she was attacked by a gang of yobs. Young, pissed people coming out of a club—girls, too—who objected to her using the female public toilets.’

‘What happened?’

‘They chased her onto the roof of a multistorey. Seven floors up. Baying for blood. They got her down on the ground and they all kicked her. It came out in the papers that one of them was flashing a knife around. He said he was going to finish the job. You know. Cut off her genitals. Later, he claimed that he never really meant to mutilate anyone, just to teach “that pervert” a lesson. Anyway, we’ll never know, because someone was monitoring the CCTV cameras and the police turned up.’

‘That was lucky. Was Fran badly hurt?’

Jim reached down between his feet to gather a handful of pebbles. He began to throw them, steadily, one by one. He was aiming at an empty flower pot. Every time he hit the pot, his pebble bounced off with a soft
ting.

‘A black eye, and nasty bruising. A week later she climbed the stairs, the same route they’d chased her, right to the top of the same car park. She took a takeaway coffee and a Mars bar with her. She loved Mars bars. She sat down on the parapet and wrote a letter to her parents. Several people saw her writing. Nobody spoke to her. She ate her Mars, drank her coffee.’ Another pebble.
Ting.
‘Then she jumped.’

I’d seen it coming, but still I gasped. ‘Seven floors up!’

‘Yep.’
Ting
. ‘Killed instantly.’
Ting
. ‘You know, Eilish, the nastiest, most depressing aspect of the whole business was that
nobody cared
. Sensation! Gossip! A weird cross-dresser got turned to pizza in a car park. Nobody shed a single tear. Nobody, including me, even asked about the funeral. Everyone seemed to think she’d brought it on herself. The jokes began on campus within two hours.
How d’you like your pizza, thin crust or tranny?
’

‘You were young.’

‘It wasn’t because we were young. It was because we didn’t see Fran as a person. She was a caricature. It was a lot easier to joke about her death than it was to question the part we’d all played in it.’

‘It wasn’t you who chased him with a knife.’

Jim’s next pebble missed the pot. ‘Why was she alone that night? I never knocked on her door and invited her along to the bar with the rest of us. I met her parents when they came to collect her things. They wanted to talk about her. I’ve never, before or since, seen two such shattered people. That’s when it finally dawned on my stupid, ignorant twenty-year-old brain that Fran was someone’s child. She was loved.’

He threw down the rest of the pebbles in a handful. They scattered across the paving stones.

‘What d’you think made Fran want to be a woman?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, and I don’t really care. There’s no single blueprint for a human being. If there was, you’d be out of a job. This is what Wally can’t understand.’