Sex and Other Changes (34 page)

There was very little traffic in the Kenilworth Road, so he had to drive right past the Golf Club, turn left into Frog Lane, turn round at the cattle grid at the entrance to Salter's Farm, go back down Frog Lane, turn right on to the Kenilworth Road, so as to arrive at the Golf Club at four minutes past eight.

Nicola was already there, standing near the entrance doors. She looked really quite glamorous and striking in a turquoise and black long dress and jacket, with black accessories and a diamanté necklace and earrings.

At her side was a fairly tall, very neat and by no means unprepossessing man in his late forties and a white tuxedo.

‘Hello, Alan,' she said, with a hint of pride that she couldn't quite conceal, ‘this is Eric.'

Alan felt a sudden, sharp stab. He hadn't wanted Nicola to be quite as happy as that.

The first time Nicola had seen Eric had been on the day of her Churchillian speech in the kitchen. Eric had been lunching with another man in the restaurant. They had been poring over plans.

He had looked at her twice, an occurrence rare enough to make her remember him. She'd seen him in the restaurant twice more in the following months, and each time he'd looked at her once. She had felt that there was something about those looks, that she had interested him, that if he had been on his own he might have stopped to speak.

And then she saw him alone. And he did stop to speak. It was towards the end of the winter, and not very long after the ending of her relationship (if it justified so definite a word) with Gordon. He was staying in the hotel, and was crossing the foyer towards the exit. He gave her a shy smile and said, ‘Are you the manager?' and she made the stupid reply of ‘Yes. For my sins. Why? I hope you don't have a complaint,' and he said, ‘No, no. Everything's fine, thank you,' and then he looked a bit uneasy and said, ‘I don't suppose you can recommend anywhere nice to eat. Oh dear. I don't suppose that's very diplomatic. I should be eating here, but I find hotel dining rooms a little cavernous on one's own,' and Nicola said, ‘I know what you mean, sir. Well, I have to say Throdnall isn't Paris. There's the usual crop of ethnics …'

‘I don't think so. I'm not very big on spices,' he said.

‘I suppose the only two real possibilities, then, are Le Flageolet and the Trattoria Positano. I have to say … although I'm not exactly a disinterested party … that Le Flageolet has been described to me as probably the worst French restaurant in
the world. The food at the Positano is at least edible, pretty reliable, and the place is very reasonable and always cheery.'

‘Oh, I rather like the thought of somewhere cheery,' he said. ‘I think I'll settle for the Positano,' and then, to her astonishment, he went a little pink and added, ‘I don't suppose there's any chance of your accompanying me?' and, to her even greater astonishment, Nicola heard herself say, ‘I have some paperwork to finish, but I could join you in half an hour.'

The paperwork was a fiction. She just didn't want to seem too eager – and she couldn't believe how eager she was. She had decided, after the Gordon fiasco, that she had to accept that to have become a woman would be the summit of her achievements, and to expect a sex life as well would be to ask too much of her transformation.

She liked the look of Eric. He was tall, with receding brown hair, a wide forehead and gentle, observant brown eyes. His manner seemed … what was the word? … yes, courteous.

The restaurant was all clattering floors and smiling waiters and buzzing customers, with quiet Eric sitting all alone in its midst, like the eye of a storm. He coloured slightly again as Nicola joined him, rose courteously from his chair, smiled, waited till she was seated before taking his seat again. She liked that.

Nicola ordered Parma ham and melon, followed by scallopine alia marsala. Eric asked if the veal had been humanely reared and, on being told that no definite assurance could be given, ordered lemon sole. He didn't have a starter. ‘I'm not a big eater,' he explained.

Nicola felt guilty and insensitive about the veal, and called the waiter back and changed her order to spaghetti bolognese. This was stupid on several grounds: a) Spaghetti Bolognese is an English invention, the Bolognese eat the sauce only with tagliatelle, b) Bolognese sauce is a complicated affair and only good if made accurately and slowly. This was unlikely in the
‘you wanna black pepper?' atmosphere of the Trattoria Positano, c) She didn't like pasta as a main course. It was never meant to be a main course, and she was a bit of a food snob, and d) She was no good at eating spaghetti and should never eat it in i) a restaurant 2) a restaurant with a companion 3) a restaurant with a companion of the opposite sex 4) a restaurant with a companion of the opposite sex with refined and immaculate table manners 5) a restaurant with a companion of the opposite sex with refined and immaculate table manners on their first date and 6) a restaurant with a companion of the opposite sex with refined and immaculate table manners on their first date when she was wearing her best business blouse and skirt.

While she ate her Parma ham and melon, Eric told her a bit about his life. He loved architecture. ‘I first discovered I had architectural leanings when I was in Pisa,' he said. Nicola was on the point of laughing when she realised that he was absolutely serious, he'd seen nothing funny in the remark. ‘That trio of duomo, battistero and torre pendente,' he continued, ‘astonishing.' It struck Nicola that if most of the people she knew had used the Italian words in that way it would have sounded dreadfully snobbish and affected. With Eric it didn't. He used the words not to impress but unselfconsciously in genuine enthusiasm. ‘Utterly inspiring. Bad, perhaps, to be inspired by something so beautiful. One is doomed from the start to be disappointed by one's own efforts.'

He studied in Hull. Anyone less suited to Hull Nicola couldn't imagine, and that might have been one of the reasons why he dropped out four days before his finals. ‘Exams fill me with dread,' he said. ‘That's why I became a furniture restorer. I could teach myself.'

He lived in North Norfolk in a small flint cottage. His business was successful enough, he told her, to finance his modest life style.

He ordered a bottle of Montepulciano, but only drank two glasses. ‘I love wine,' he said, ‘but I'm not a big drinker.'

Nicola drank the rest of the bottle. She hated waste. Also, although she was not habitually a big drinker, she found herself drinking more as a woman than she ever had as a man.

What a lot of chance there is in life. Eric had never been to Throdnall before the day she first caught sight of him, but an old friend from his college days (‘well, acquaintance more than friend, I'm not terribly big on friendship') had commissioned him to restore twelve Georgian dining chairs and had then got him interested in helping with a barn conversion west of Throdnall. Eric had thought about the plans and had made further visits to discuss them, deliver the chairs, see the halfcompleted barn and now to offer some ideas about furnishing it. He had decided to stay overnight … ‘I don't drive big distances' … and had invited his friend out to dinner, but his friend had begun to go down with flu and had cried off. So here Nicola was.

She had come to the conclusion, after the disappointment with Gordon, that while she still wouldn't go around talking about her sex change in everyday life, she would have to do so in the context of personal sexual relationships, but she hadn't expected to talk of it on a first date. Now, with her tongue loosened by the wine, and her mood stimulated by the lively buzz of the restaurant, and her heart encouraged by a sudden feeling of confidence in this kindly and gentle man, she began to tell him.

‘Eric,' she said, lowering her voice (they put the tables close together at the Positano, at those prices you had to expect it), ‘I have something important to tell you.'

‘Who's the spaghetti?' asked the waiter, with the usual immaculate timing of his calling.

Their conversation remained suspended while the waiter placed their main courses in front of them.

‘Something important to tell me?'

‘Yes. Er … something you ought to know right at the …' She couldn't finish the sentence. She had talked herself into a corner.
She couldn't say, ‘right at the beginning of our relationship'. It would have been presumptuous. Even ‘right at the outset' would have seemed presumptuous. An outset assumes a continuation. ‘I … er … a few years ago, Eric, I decided to have …'

‘Black pepper, madam?'

‘Er … yes, thank you. Yes. Just a bit. That's fine. Thank you.'

‘You decided to have?'

‘I decided to have … Eric, at that time I wasn't as I am now. I was suffering from …'

‘Parmesan cheese, madam?'

‘Er … yes. Thanks. Yes … yes, that's fine. Thank you.'

This was not quite the dignified description of her great journey that she had planned.

‘Four years ago, Eric, that waiter would not have said, “Parmesan cheese, madam?” '

‘I'd be surprised if he was working here four years ago. There's a tremendous rate of staff turnover in these places.'

‘Oh, Eric, don't be so literal. Listen to me. He would not have said, “Parmesan cheese, madam?” He would have said, “Parmesan cheese, sir?” '

Eric raised his eyebrows. It was a minimalist's expression of surprise.

‘You've changed sex.'

‘You're quick on the uptake.'

‘It
was
a pretty broad hint. Well, well, well, Nicola. Fancy that. Er … have you just called yourself a woman, or have you actually had the operation?'

‘I've actually had the operation.'

‘Right. Well … good … that does make things … er … I say “good”. I'm assuming you're pleased.'

‘I'm very pleased.'

‘Good. That's good, then. Well thank you for telling me. Would you like to … talk about it?'

So Nicola told him her story, interrupted by her attempts to
eat her spaghetti with dignity. If you have never embarked on a long, important story about your personal life while wearing a smart blouse and eating spaghetti bolognese, don't. She tried so carefully, avoided disaster so narrowly on more than one occasion. Then, right at the end, a long strand of saucedrenched pasta snaked down her blouse.

‘Blast and damn it,' she said.

‘You need a man to look after you,' said Eric.

He invited her to Norfolk for a long weekend. Separate bedrooms. He made that clear from the start. ‘I don't want to rush you,' he said. She liked that. It implied a future.

His cottage was in Blakeney, in a little backstreet relatively untouched by the tourist hordes. (Yes, there were hordes even in Blakeney, fairly up-market hordes, but still hordes.) The walls were entirely of flint, and the cottage was side-on to the road, and therefore very private.

At the back of the cottage was his workshop, where pieces of furniture sat in various stages of restoration.

Eric didn't restore any furniture that weekend. He restored Nicola instead. By the end of her visit she felt mended, smoothed and polished. She forgot entirely that she had ever been a man and she forgot entirely, therefore, that she was a woman. She was just herself.

They went out with binoculars. Eric had a spare pair. She wasn't surprised. He was the sort of man who would have a spare everything. They walked along paths across the marshes, and watched the tongues of the sea as they licked the deep, muddy creeks. They watched the tide sliding round dead boats, hulks listing in the mud. They watched it give them life. They watched the boats bob proudly, buoyantly, briefly. They watched the sea take away their lives again, and slip away from the glutinous creeks.

They watched a barn owl hunting in broad daylight, ghosting
slowly over the rich marshes, silent, white, deadly. Eric told her that the great dark hawk gliding over the reed beds was a marsh harrier. They sat on a bench by the coastal path and scanned the marshes with their binoculars. An avocet flashed above them, a leggy streak of smart black and white with its spectacular upturned beak. And there, beneath the wide, wide sky, they chatted about their lives. Nicola would never forget their first morning on the salty marshes, with the sea invisible beyond the dunes in front of them, and the ancient villages of north Norfolk sheltering beneath the low hills behind them. The early days of a love affair are so sweet. There is so much to tell.

They didn't hold hands. They didn't gaze into each other's eyes. They didn't stop looking through their binoculars, yet Nicola felt already that they were lovers.

‘Have you never married, then, Eric?' she asked gently.

‘Never got that far, Nicola, no.'

‘You've never wanted children?'

‘Happen to believe – those are ringed plovers; brave, lively little things, aren't they? – I happen to believe that it's wrong to want children. They aren't a commodity, Nicola. I don't think you should be able to order them. “Two children, please. One of each, I think.” So, not having them, I didn't want them. I can't see me with children, actually, can you? Bedtime stories and football and school plays. Can't see it. But, had I had them, I would have loved them, Nicola, of that you can be sure.'

‘I'm sure you would. But you've –'

‘Well, yes, of course.'

‘How did you know what I was going to ask?'

‘Conversations roll along in a certain way, Nicola. You were going to ask if I've had lovers. Redshank. Two redshank over to the left. Look. There. Did you see the flash of the sun on their red legs? Oh yes, I've had lovers. Not many. Among proper lovers, lovers who lasted, just one for each redshank. Felicity was a florist from Farnborough.'

Nicola felt a shiver of surprise at this remark. It echoed her own recent alliterative thoughts about her solitary sex life. Would all that soon be unnecessary?