The Secret Life of Luke Livingstone (27 page)

‘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.’

‘Wally can’t see beyond his own ego,’ I said, relieved that the conversation was back on the safe ground of school politics; Fran’s story had unsettled me. The shortcomings of our headmaster continued to be a shared passion, and we were soon talking shop. Jim seemed in no hurry to leave, and I was very glad of his company, so I suggested a stroll across the fields. Casino appeared from Luke’s carpentry shed and fell in, trotting along beside us. He likes to go for a walk.

That walk was a tonic for me. We wandered all the way to the farmyard and back, talking about all kinds of things. I felt as though I were having a holiday from my failure as a wife. We were on our way back when Jim came out with something astonishing.

‘I’ve been very slightly in love with you for a long time,’ he said as we crossed the last stile. ‘I think you know that.’

I was speechless. It’s one thing to flirt with a colleague, quite another to be fighting off declarations. I’d forgotten how it felt to be desired by someone other than Luke. Then again, despite the toe-curling awkwardness, I felt a bubbling champagne rush of pleasure. There’s a teenager in all of us, and mine was blushing.

‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to knee me in the balls. I’m going to leave now. I won’t do anything embarrassing.’

‘I think you just have.’

‘Better get used to it. When the news comes out that you’re separated, you’re going to be fighting them off. Men you’ve known as friends and colleagues will look at you differently. Wally Wallis is going to be a royal pain in the backside.’

‘Wally? He’s not interested in me!’

‘Ha! Believe me, I know how it works. I’ve been through the divorce machine myself.’

‘So you’re getting in before the rush?’

‘Precisely.’

‘I’m flattered.’

We’d arrived at his car. ‘Thanks for coming around,’ I said as he opened the door. ‘And don’t worry about your student. We’ll have him using a laptop in no time.’

Autumn sunlight has a special brilliance. It lit up Jim’s eyes, with their fan of smile lines. I felt the old spark, the fizz of possibilities.

‘I just wanted you to know,’ he said.

Casino and I watched him drive away. I’ll admit it: I was smiling. After all, I’m only human.

Later that week—thirty years and seventeen days after we married—a judge in Oxford pronounced decree nisi. We were halfway to divorce. Neither Luke nor I was there to hear it. Our case was read out as one of a long list of failed unions. Production-line divorce. My marriage was in its last gasps.

Twenty-nine

Luke

It was like landing in the middle of a sitcom. The coffee was dreadful, but the armchairs were comfortable. I’d never been to a support group before; I didn’t think of myself as that kind of person. I was in danger of giggling, out of sheer nerves.

It was Usha Sharma’s idea. If she and I had been stuck on a desert island together, one of us would have built a raft very quickly; but as a counsellor she did me good. I’d arrived in her room all wound up, and spent our session talking about the decree nisi. She asked me about what she called my ‘transsexual community’ and ‘support networks’, as though my life were a social whirl.

‘What community? I don’t know anyone like me,’ I protested. ‘Only online. Wish I did. D’you want me to be visiting clubs in Soho or somewhere?’

‘Hmm. Perhaps not. They can be quite, um, well . . . let’s just say I don’t think you are their target customer. But there are some groups. Hang on.’ She swung around to her computer, printed out three addresses and gave them to me. The most convenient was the parish lounge of a church in Barking, once a week. The Jenny Marsden Trust.