Sex and Other Changes (39 page)

‘You don't deny that you had an affair with my … ex-wife?'

‘Not at all. It was a very long time ago, when she wasn't entirely happy. I brought a little happiness. I did nothing that she didn't want me to do.'

So Hungarians use double negatives as well, thought Nicola with absurd irrelevance. All Ferenc said was true, but, damn it,
the man might have the manners to look at least a trifle discomfited.

‘Did you truly have no idea that Gray was yours?'

‘Of course not. I hardly saw him. By the time I did see him, the affair was buried in the past. When I had the idea of painting your family, I thought it a lovely gift to mark your brave achievement and to thank you for the support you have given to my painting. I am devastated that it has had this unintentional effect, Nicola.'

Well have the common decency to look devastated, then.

‘I painted from photographs given me by your lovely daughter, apart from meeting Gray once. I never saw. Why should I? You didn't.'

‘Then how did it come out in the painting?'

‘Art reaches deeper, Nicola. Art reaches deeper than the artist knows.'

‘How did you know Em?'

‘I met her in a pub. Her and another girl. They were attractive. I talked to them.' He smiled, slightly complacently and with irritating urbanity. ‘I talk to every attractive girl I see in Throdnall. The number is not so overwhelming. Oh, Nicola, nothing happened. In any case I soon discovered that your daughter keeps goal for the opposing team, as we say in Hungary.'

‘We say “bats for the other side”.'

‘Yes. Nicola, if you want me to say I'm sorry, of course I will, it's only polite, but don't expect me to mean it. There. That's honest, isn't it?'

Nicola abandoned her attempt to disconcert Ferenc. It had been an unworthy aim. She must be more generous than that. She must put Gray's interests before her own. She had discussed this with Alan, and they were agreed.

‘Ferenc,' she said, ‘Alan and I both want you to know that we will be very happy for you to see as much of Gray as you want, and to be as much of a father to him as you want to.'

The blood drained from Ferenc's face. He shifted uneasily in his chair. He was discomfited, disconcerted and devastated.

‘Good God, no!' he said. ‘None of this must ever come out. My wife would kill me.'

It took a couple of months more, after Nicola had left, before Alan really felt ready to burst upon the world in all his manhood. It's unusual for a young buck to reach manhood at the age of forty-six, but that was what happened to Alan, and it happened at a time when he was free of responsibilities, and suddenly all alone in the house. Perhaps we can forgive him for letting it go to his head just a little bit?

He enjoyed feeling that he was a man about town. He could have wished that the town that he was about had been more glamorous than Throdnall, but he didn't let it dampen his spirits.

It was such a relief, after all those years combining the roles of PA to Mr Beresford and housewife, to find that number thirty-three was transformed almost overnight into a bachelor pad. It all happened so quickly. It wasn't entirely a pleasant phenomenon, of course. He could feel quite lonely in the evenings, in the suffocating quiet of Orchard View Close. He was not a man to kneel on a pad and weed his little garden, as dusk laid her velvet counterpane upon the world, and the first dew formed on his tiny lawns.

He wasn't too surprised that Em had left home and bought a little flat with Clare. He'd expected her to move in with somebody sometime, even though he hadn't expected it to be a woman.

He was rather more surprised to find Gray moving out, but, once he had dipped his toes into the real world, Gray had decided that it was a wonderful place and had whipped off his clothes and jumped in – figuratively and literally. He and Juanita
lived with a bunch of students in a large, crumbling house at the wrong end of Leamington Spa.

And then Bernie too had gone, as you will have deduced.

Had he died on his cruise? Please please don't tell us that he had died on his cruise.

No. He hadn't.

Had he died after his cruise?

Nope.

Was he then still alive?

Very much so.

So had he moved into a home?

Yes.

Was it Honeyfields? Please don't tell us that it was Honeyfields.

Relax. It wasn't Honeyfields. It was his own home! Well, his and Peggy's.

Peggy's???

Yes. Peggy's. Peggy had money. Peggy was a wealthy widow. Bernie had found himself a sugar mummy. Well, that was what he called it, and Peggy just smiled and didn't spoil the story by saying that she was only three years older than he was. When you're aged five and two, a gap of three years is vast. When you get to eighty-seven and eighty-four it isn't of much significance, but she played along with Bernie, and called him her toy boy.

Wonderful things can happen to old people if they don't give up, and the whole idea of cruising is a bit of a romantic fantasy anyway. They were introduced to each other in the Crow's Nest Bar on the
Oriana
. They soon became inseparable. They sat together in the Pacific Lounge listening to a man called Mike Craig, who brought the old comedians wonderfully to life. They discovered that they both liked laughter. They lunched together in the Peninsular Restaurant, took coach trips together, played Scrabble together in the games room, went to the shows together, took a nightcap (or two) together. After the cruise they decided to live together. Peggy had no family left, except a son
in New Zealand, so she came to Throdnall. They decided not to get married, ‘for tax reasons'. Her son in New Zealand disapproved. ‘Then sod the little prig,' she said. The little prig was fifty-eight.

So there was Alan on his own, as much of a man as he would ever be, and definitely ‘up for it'. His only problems were that he wasn't sure what ‘it' was or where it could be found.

He began his voyage of pleasure in a safe port, the Coach, but the joys of drinking pints and peeing standing up were not sufficient for him. His aim was to meet women, and women on their own did not wander into the Coach, as he knew all too well.

Occasionally he propped up the bar at the Golf Club, which had its share of divorcees and lonely women, but none of them (except for Jennifer Griffin, who would go out with almost anybody) would even consider going out with this man who had formerly been a lady member at this very club. He thought of approaching Jennifer Griffin and attempting to go bravely where two hundred and seventy-eight men had bravely gone before, but he couldn't face the barely concealed ridicule and contempt that would follow.

He visited the pubs of down-town Throdnall, which were heaving with young people. He felt very out of place.

His children came to his rescue, leading him on pub crawls and club crawls in Throdnall and Warwick and Birmingham. When he'd last been to a club a DJ had meant a dinner jacket. He was unprepared for the frenzy of the modern world.

Gray and Juanita took him on a tour of Throdnall's night spots: to Danny's and Pemberton's and Ricky's Raver and the back bar of the Metropolitan. It was the beginning of winter now, but often he was the only person with a jacket. On the streets it was freezing. He found himself looking at unattainable young women whose tempting goose-pimpled legs seemed to extend all the way to their waists. He found himself avoiding looking at attainable young women with untempting goosepimpled
thighs that made Prentice seem almost dapper by comparison. He realised why nobody wore coats when he got very hot in Pemberton's and discovered how difficult it was to find anywhere to hang your jacket, especially if you wanted to be reunited with it later in the evening.

He moved among young people drinking beer out of bottles and Red Bull and exotically flavoured vodkas. He saw much popping of pills, and very little ecstasy except in drug form. Calling a drug Ecstasy was like calling his street Orchard View Close and calling Nicola's hotel the Cornucopia. Modern English replaced reality instead of illuminating it.

Juanita commented that people here had so much compared to Peruvians, why did they seem so desperate? Alan said that the British in the mass had never had a natural talent for enjoying themselves.

Desperation and violence never seemed far away, Alan thought, but he didn't feel disposed to condemn these people. Many of them worked in jobs of mind-numbing boredom in call centres and banks and building societies and insurance companies, jobs where all the interest was in the balance sheet and none in the job. It was a society whose main activity was moving money around so that as many people as possible could get their hands on some of it. It was a society without any real foundation, and one day it might implode.

If you spent your mornings saying, ‘Good morning, my name is Donna, how can I help you?' and your afternoons saying, ‘Good afternoon, my name is Donna, how can I help you?' it would be a very harsh moralist who condemned you for spending your Friday and Saturday evenings saying, ‘Good evening, my name is Donna, how can I fuck you?'

Alan didn't condemn this new world that he was discovering. He even found it exciting at first. His attitude was, ‘I'd like a slice of the action before I decide that I disapprove of it all.'

However, there was no slice of the action for Alan. He was too
old. He wouldn't have stood a chance even if he hadn't formerly been a woman. He was surrounded by female flesh, and none of it was for him.

The only person who spared him a second glance during those lonely evenings in crowded rooms was a gay young man who thought
he
was gay. Unlike Nicola, he had never been spotted as a transsexual by members of the public. Small hands and feet don't stand out like large ones. But he had been the object of occasional homophobia from men who noticed something unusual about him. When he'd asked for best minced beef in Frogmore's, a customer had said, ‘Oh! Mince. Not surprised. She minces beautifully, doesn't she?' and it had taken resolve to continue to use the butcher's and not go to the supermarket for meat. Now he found himself being horrified, and that horrified him. Surely he of all people couldn't be homophobic? He rationalised it afterwards, ascribing his revulsion to the thought of what a waste it would all have been if he'd gone through three painful operations and ended up fancying men. But it made him feel uneasy.

He found it quite restful, if the truth be told, when Em and Clare took him to a lesbian club, and he knew from the start that there would be nothing doing for him. He noticed a lot of charming and gentle young lesbian couples, and others with spiky hair and even spikier manners who moved through the crowds with the relentlessness of frigates on manoeuvres. Clare's thesis was that the nice ones were motivated by love of women, and the nasty ones by hatred of men.

‘I grieve when I see young people full of hate,' said Alan. ‘I long to tell them that hate always hurts the hater more than it hurts the hated. I realised that when I was visited by Prentice and Mr Beresford on the same evening in hospital.'

‘Sorry, what did you say?' shouted Em.

That was another problem about this world. The noise level was so high that conversation was exhausting, if not impossible.
That was the whole point of this world: that you couldn't hear yourself speak and you couldn't hear yourself think. Alan, who couldn't stop thinking, who longed to communicate, felt as out of place as a diva on a karaoke night.

He thanked his children for their efforts on his behalf, and abandoned his attempts to be a man about town. He did something far more suitable for his age: he went to the Cornucopia Hotel for a quiet drink in the Warwick Bar. You never knew. He might meet a beautiful female executive on a business course far, far from home.

Oh, the ageless moaning of the rain-flecked wind. Oh, the rippling glory of the curlew's cry. Oh, the flapping of the halyards against the masts. Oh, the bobbing of the tiny boats. Oh, the startled whistle of the oystercatcher. Oh, the silence of the setting sun. Oh, the loving of a peaceful man.

Nicola couldn't have imagined what it was like to be a man about town. She was so very happy to be a woman about marsh.

Alan met her on the steps of the Cornucopia. He didn't even need to go in.

She moved to her left to avoid him just as he moved to his right to avoid her, so they blocked each other's passages – as it were. They had a little laugh about that, and he could see that she had lovely teeth. She had full lips, a long but shapely nose, and warm, grey eyes.

‘I was just going in there for a drink,' he said. ‘Would you think it awfully bold if I asked you to have a drink with me?'

‘
Awfully
bold,' she teased. ‘I don't know that I could face such boldness. Not in Throdnall.' She smiled. ‘I'd love a drink,' she said, ‘but not in there.'

He suggested the Norfolk, and it proved an eminently suitable watering hole.

She told him that her name was Sally Garfield, and she was
forty-two. She was wearing a blouse and skirt, and he could see that she had delicious, shapely, slightly fleshy legs and not inconsiderable breasts. He decided that he liked Sally Garfield. He enjoyed listening to her tales of her youth in Devon, her unsuccessful marriage to a boat builder, her career as a designer for a furniture maker in Bristol, her trip to Throdnall to see a client.

He was more than happy to tell her the details of his life too. He told her that his name was Alan Hargreaves, and he was Professor of History at Warwick University. The next day he would wonder what possessed him to tell these lies. Was it a juvenile desire to impress a lady, or a sudden loss of faith in his own credentials, or did it run deeper? Had he begun to realise that his new role as a bachelor hunter was untenable?

He took her to dinner at the Positano. She asked if the veal was humanely reared and, when told that no assurance could be given, chose melanzana parmigiana instead. He liked that.