The New Woman (4 page)

After turning out the lamp, I reached across to his side of the bed and pulled his pillow under my head. I always stole it when he was away. It smelled of him: deodorant, soap and . . . Lukeness. It was the next best thing to cuddling the man himself.

A thousand tiny streams were rippling across the skylight. Putting the window directly above our bed was one of the few things Luke had insisted upon for Smith’s Barn. ‘I’ll lie and look up at the stars,’ he said. ‘Insomnia will be a privilege.’

I was sinking into the depths of sleep when my bedroom door creaked.

‘Don’t you dare, Casino,’ I whispered. ‘Master isn’t home.’

A weight landed on my legs, followed by kneading and enthusiastic purrs.
Bloody cat
. Ah, well. It was nice to have the company. I reached onto the bedside cabinet for my reading glasses and checked my phone yet again. No text. No missed call. Not to worry. Luke would be asleep at the flat by now. My stomach grew a little colder.

For a long time, I lay gazing through the watery glass at the blurred glow of the moon. Our bedroom was small and misshapen, crammed under the sloping roof of the barn. Charlotte was born in this room. On this bed. Died here too, a few minutes later. Luke and I also seemed to die for a while. I can understand why tragedy breaks couples apart: agony obliterates love for a long, long time. We stayed together, though. In the end we had a deeper understanding, because we’d shared despair.

A burst of raindrops spattered onto the skylight. I could just make out his cable knit sweater and a pair of jeans, shadows in the milky light, hanging over the footboard of the bed. These were the clothes he’d been wearing the day before he left, when we took the path across Gareth’s farm. We wandered side by side in the familiar landscape, close together, our hands sometimes touching. The fields were dotted with cotton-reel bales. We were leaning on the handrail of the footbridge, watching the slow passage of the stream, when Luke did something most unexpected.

‘I love you,’ he said, nudging his forehead against mine. ‘Thank you.’

Love wasn’t something we mentioned often. There didn’t seem to be any need. Luke and I were a pair—we fitted. I don’t think either of us felt quite complete without the other. Why go on about it? Only teenagers and film stars talk about
lerve.

‘You’re very welcome,’ I said, smoothing his hair. I liked the way it lay over his ears, blue-black and tinged with silver, like a bird’s wing. ‘I’ve no idea what I’m being thanked for, but I definitely deserve it.’

Something had changed. The world had grown dark. The rain intensified in a sudden roar, louder than machine-gun fire, and the stream was a mud-brown torrent. Luke was in the water. It was sweeping him away. I grabbed an old tyre from the mud and tried to throw it to him, but he didn’t reach for it. I screamed at him to swim, swim, but he didn’t. His dark eyes looked straight past me as water poured down his face. He seemed to see something beyond. The next moment I’d been sucked in too. I was drowning. I was shouting for Luke, but he was gone.

Panic woke me, thank God. The blanket was bundled around my face. I threw it off, yelling because I’d lost Luke in the river. Casino was on his feet, bottlebrush-tailed.

‘Horrible, horrible,’ I gasped, reaching out to touch his warm fur. ‘Horrible dream.’

For some minutes I felt breathless, winded by the gallop of my heartbeat. Then the old cat began to lick himself, and eventually
he lay down again. His calm was comforting. Above my head, the square patch of sky had lightened to a pale grey. Luke would be up by now. Perhaps he was already heading into the office, to face five hundred emails.

‘Pop downstairs and make me a nice pot of tea, will you, Casino?’ I asked, but the little tabby just curled a paw across his face. I stroked his head. ‘Too early for you? Yes, well. It
is
bloody early. It’s—hang on, is that a car?’

Casino and I both pricked up our ears at the crunch of wheels on gravel. I rolled out of bed, pulling on my dressing-gown as I peered out into the rain-streaked morning. Who on earth would turn up at this ungodly hour? I imagined the police, with bad news and solemn faces. I expected to see a panda car parked in our drive.

A moment later I’d charged downstairs and thrown open the front door with a shout of welcome. Luke was walking towards me through the rain, his trench coat over one arm.

‘You’re soaked,’ I scolded.

He looked down at himself. He was wearing suit trousers and his black corduroy jacket. His hair was plastered to his head, and droplets trickled under his collar. He seemed lost, but that wasn’t unusual for him. It was one of the things that had struck me about him on the night we met; that, and the strong feeling that I’d known him all my life.

I put my arms around his neck and kissed him on the mouth. ‘Wet or dry, I am very, very glad to see you! So you changed your mind about going into work? Well, what a lovely surprise! You’d better have a hot shower.’ I led him inside and shut the door on the rain. ‘Coffee or tea?’

Casino had heard all the commotion. He lolloped down the spiral staircase, made a beeline for Luke and arched against his legs. He was meant to be the children’s cat, but Luke was his idol.

‘He’s a one-man cat,’ I said, taking two coffee cups down from the dresser. They were handmade, painted in red and yellow and with matching saucers. Relief was making me chatty. The
cold clutching in my stomach—the drowning nightmare—had meant nothing, after all. I rambled on about the weather and the garden, and Kate and Owen. Luke stood watching me, dripping rainwater onto the tiles.

‘Chop-chop,’ I nagged, pushing him towards the stairs. ‘You’ll catch your death. How come you set out so early?’

‘I lost the keys to the flat.’

I gaped. ‘
Sorry?
Don’t you have a spare set?’

‘They’re here. So I went to Paddington and waited for the first train.’

It didn’t make sense. ‘But . . . you’ve surely not been sitting in Paddington station all night?’

‘No, not sitting. I walked around.’

‘All night, in the storm? Why didn’t you just go to Simon and Carmela’s place? They’d have put you up. For heaven’s sake—you could have phoned me. I’d have driven in. You know I would.’

‘Yes, I know that.’ He seemed to retreat into the hollows of his eyes. I watched him, and that aching chill returned. I’d seen him like this before. It was as though he were being tortured: silently, privately.

‘What were you thinking, as you walked all night?’ I asked.

He didn’t answer.

‘Darling man.’ Sliding around the edge of the island, I touched his face with the palms of my hands, turning it to face mine. ‘Is it back? You know these low times always pass. Why on earth didn’t you phone me?’

‘I was making a choice,’ he said. ‘I have made it. And now I have to tell you something.’

The room faded away. There was only Luke, ghost-faced and soaking wet. I remembered the day my father turned up here—standing pretty much where Luke was now—and told me they’d found a shadow on his lung. I’d wanted to weep at the determined optimism in his voice:
It’s not a one-way ticket nowadays, the Big C. They can do amazing things with chemo.
Six months later, we
buried him. My mother didn’t even come to the funeral. Death’s powerful, but it couldn’t dent her bitterness—though why she’d been bitter when it was she who ran off with somebody else, I never understood. She outlived Dad by ten years before the Big C got her, too.

‘Are you ill?’ I asked now.

‘No.’ Luke gave a sniff of laughter. Well, not really laughter. ‘Sick, perhaps. Yes. People will certainly say I’m sick.’

I breathed again. Not cancer, then. Not some other terminal illness. Anything else could be borne. ‘Are you having an affair?’

‘No. No! I’d never . . . there’s never been anyone but you.’

I had no idea what was coming. I really thought it was something quite trivial. Perhaps he’d lost his shirt in some dodgy investment? Well, so be it. Money isn’t the most important thing in life.

‘Sit down,’ I said, as I carried our coffee to the table. ‘Tell me what’s going on. A problem shared . . .’

It’s seen some action, our kitchen table. For over a quarter of a century, our lives have revolved around its blue-painted legs and scrubbed oak top. It’s seen children’s baptisms and birthday parties; it’s hosted flaming family rows and teenage revels and endless games of Monopoly. Its face bears the honourable scars of hot saucepans, Kate’s henna, and Simon’s early attempts at soldering. It knows us all, very well.

Luke didn’t sit down. ‘You’ll be revolted,’ he said.

‘Try me! Whatever it is can’t be so terrible, if you aren’t ill and you’re not having an affair. Is it financial? Have you lost our pension? Our house?’

‘No.’

‘Has Bannermans gone bust?’

‘No. No.’ He held out his hands, palms downward, as though trying to suppress my guesses. ‘It’s who I am. I have to tell you who I am.’

‘You look like Luke Livingstone to me.’

‘Yes, I look like him. But I’m not.’

‘I think you’ll find you are.’ I was forcing a smile.

‘I’ve been running from this all my life. I can’t run any further, Eilish.’

And then he began to talk; but it was as though he were speaking in some foreign language because I could get no sense from his words. He kept saying that he was not who I thought he was, he had never been who I thought he was; that he wasn’t unique, that there were others.
You must have noticed
, he kept saying.
You must have suspected
. Suspected what? I wondered, my mind racing in terror. Noticed what? Luke was a rational man—sensitive, occasionally depressed, but above all rational.
Perhaps he’s had a bang on the head. Or—dear God, maybe he’s had a stroke? Brain tumour? Must get him to a doctor, right away
.

‘Stop,’ I snapped. ‘You’ve been talking for ten minutes and I still have no idea what you’re trying to say. You seem disorientated. I think I should drive you straight to the hospital.’ As I talked I was hurrying around, looking for my bag, fetching my car keys from their hook beside the fridge.

‘I think I was meant to be a woman,’ he said.

‘They might keep you in for tests. You’ll need warm, dry clothes. I’ll go up and—’

‘Eilish, listen. Please listen.’ Something in his tone made me stop and turn around. He’d pressed a hand across his eyes. ‘I look like a man called Luke. I’m imprisoned inside the body of a man called Luke. But I
am not him
.’

I didn’t want to understand. I was afraid to understand. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘just stay calm. Are you in any pain?’

‘Eilish.’

‘An ambulance might be faster.’

‘I’m not ill.’ He sat down heavily, as though his legs wouldn’t take his weight any longer. ‘There’s a name for it.’

‘Don’t say any more,’ I begged him. ‘Let’s just—’

He spoke over me, so loudly that I couldn’t ignore him. ‘It’s called gender identity disorder.’

Gender identity disorder
. I’d heard the term. A couple of years before, at a teachers’ conference, I’d attended a seminar on the subject. We spent an entire day learning about boys who wanted to dress, play and be treated as girls; and about girls who longed to be male. Some had help from a clinic—even took hormones, which shocked me. There was lots of trendy discussion about which toilets they should use; one of the people on the course had been in a legal dispute with some parents because the school wouldn’t let their boy dress in a skirt and call himself Tanya. I like to think of myself as open-minded, but I didn’t really get it. Poor tormented things, I thought. I even—very secretly—suspected that the parents might be to blame.

And as for adults? Well. We’ve all seen those strange creatures, men with wigs and handbags, lurching along on high heels: the wrong shape, the wrong voice, and always alone. I pitied them—actually, when I was young and cruel I laughed at them—but they had nothing to do with me. They were from another world altogether.

‘Enough,’ I said now. ‘This isn’t funny. You aren’t a . . . That’s got nothing to do with you.’

‘It has everything to do with me.’

‘No, darling, it hasn’t.’ I wanted to talk sense into him, as though he were one of my pupils. I sat down next to him. ‘That’s for children who are still finding their way, their sexuality, maybe trying to please parents who always wanted a boy or a girl. They’re just very, very confused young people. It’s got nothing to do with middle-aged solicitors with wives and families.’

‘I’m female. My body looks male, but I am not. It isn’t new, Eilish, I’ve felt this all my life. I was born with the wrong body.’

He might as well have announced that he was an alien from some far-off galaxy, inhabiting the body of a human. I knew it wasn’t true. I didn’t know why he was putting on this charade, but I knew it wasn’t true.

‘I
know
you,’ I insisted, with a panicky little laugh. ‘I know exactly who you are! You’re a man. You’re
my
man. This is crazy.’
I’ll wake up in a minute, I thought. I tried to shake myself out of sleep, but it didn’t work. ‘You expect me to believe that you’ve felt . . . been hiding . . . this . . . what, since the day we met? You wouldn’t do that to me. I know you wouldn’t. I
know
you. You’re Luke.’

He put his face in his hands. Casino jumped onto his lap and began to knead.

‘I’ve got to explain,’ Luke said. ‘Please let me try.’

I was too stunned to interrupt as he described how he had always thought of himself as female, even when he was a little boy. He said again and again how sorry he was; he would understand if I divorced him, but he could no longer keep up the pretence that he was a normal man. He said he didn’t want to lie anymore. He said that he loved me.

I sat and listened without comprehending, and thought about how he’d walked all night in the storm. A nail had begun to work its way out of my chair. Quite deliberately, I pressed my shoulderblade against its sharp tip. The pain was at least real and tangible in that nightmare fog. The world was tipping, and I was going to fall off. Water began hosing against the windows. Spouting’s buggered again, I thought, as though it mattered about the bloody spouting.