by Rose Tremain
Walter felt as though he’d swallowed a stone. It was about the size of a potato. Its surface was smooth but its weight enormous. It was lodged above his heart.
He dressed himself. He watched Gilbert put on his trousers. He thought, the real Eden died from failure and shame, but this one is alive and sailing forwards. He will never give this moment another glance.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked. His voice was faint, impeded by the stone.
‘London,’ said Gilbert. ‘I’m joining a practice in Flood Street.’
‘Where’s Flood Street?’
‘In Chelsea. The swinging part of London.’ Then he smiled his dreamy smile. ‘It’s time to swing before I’m too old. Don’t you think?’
Walter had never been to London. He thought of it as a red and black place: red buses, black churches, red guardsmen, black gates, red telephone boxes, black water. He knew this image was inadequate, childlike. He said: ‘What I think isn’t of any importance.’
Gilbert took out a comb and began combing his hair, that he now wore much longer than before. He said: ‘Perhaps it’s better if we put an end to these meetings, is it? It’s you I’m thinking of, mainly.’
Walter sat still, without blinking or moving any part of him. The stone was weighing him down. And he felt half-blind, as if there were murk behind his eyes or in his head; smog somewhere. After what seemed to him a long time, he said something. He said: ‘What will happen to my teeth?’
He heard Gilbert laugh. Then the laughter died. Walter imagined it re-surfacing again in London, on the top of a red bus. Gilbert stood beside him, very tall-seeming, and touched the bald space at his crown with one of his long caressing fingers. He said: ‘All of that is up to you, Walter. Everything is up to you.’
Walter dragged his stone-weighted body out of the chair and then out of Gilbert’s waiting room and out into the black evening. The air hurt him. He felt his windpipe freeze. He wished he had had the final word. He wished the final word had been a curse. He cursed now, silently, yet knowing that Gilbert was far beyond reach: beyond reach of his words and beyond reach of his power – such as it had ever been – to touch or wound.
When he got home, he told Grace he was feeling poorly, with a pain in his chest. She threw him a fearful glance. ‘It’s not that thing you had before, Walter, is it?’ she asked.
‘What thing I had before?’
‘That vocal thing. In your throat, after that Rose Marie business?’
‘No,’ said Walter. ‘No.’
He said he didn’t want anybody to fuss. Grace put her hand on his forehead. It felt cool, cold even. She said she would bring up a hot-water bottle.
Walter got into his pyjamas. He could still smell Gilbert’s body on his hands. He lay on his back in his bed like a corpse, with his arms crossed over his chest.
Grace brought the bottle and gave it to him. She kissed his head. She said: ‘At least you can sleep late, love. Tomorrow’s Sunday.’
He lay in the dark, weeping. He heard his mother and Aunt Josephine come upstairs and go into their bedrooms and then later he heard Aunt Josephine get up again and go down to the kitchen to boil her milk. She had told him that night starvation could kill you when you were old. You could wake and find yourself on the ceiling, looking down at your own corpse.
His weeping dried up and he closed his eyes. He felt faint with tiredness. He waited for sleep to enfold him, like a lover.
The following evening, he went to see Pete. He didn’t mention Gilbert. He said: ‘I’m in a life I don’t understand. Nothing makes sense to me.’
Pete made strong coffee. The night outside the bus was silent. The white whisper of the Tilley lamp was the only noise.
Pete said: ‘Anything in particular?’
‘No,’ said Walter. ‘Only everything. I don’t know where I’m going or why.’
‘You’re not alone there,’ said Pete.
‘I’m serious,’ said Walter.
‘So am I,’ said Pete. ‘Shall we put on some early Elvis?’
These days, the old gramophone looked like something that belonged in a museum. The sound it was capable of getting was old sound; it felt thin, night-starved. Walter wanted to give Pete a proper record player, but there was no electricity in the bus and Pete said he was happy without it. He said it was a mistake to believe you needed something only because others did.
They listened to a song called ‘Workin’ on the Building’. It was a Spiritual. Elvis had hired a backing group of gospel singers. Pete knew the words and sang along:
I’m workin’ on the building,
It’s a true foundation,
I’m holdin’ up the bloodstained
Banner for my Lord.
Pete shook one of his wide, grimed hands in time to the beat, as if he were holding an imaginary tambourine.
Well, I’ll never get tired of
Workin’ on the building.
I’m goin’ up to my Heaven,
Getting my reward!
It was while Pete was singing, when he leaned forward nearer to the gramophone and his features were harshly illuminated by the lamp, that Walter noticed for the first time the change to Pete’s nose. One side of it had put on flesh. The flesh was pocked and fat. It looked stuffed, like a chicken’s arse. Walter stared at it. It horrified him. It looked as if it contained something that was going to burst out.
Pete stopped singing and Elvis began a melodic number.
In the early morning rain
With a dollar in my hand,
And an aching in my heart,
And my pockets full of sand …
Walter said to Pete: ‘What’s happening to your nose, Pete?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ Pete said. ‘Nothing.’
‘One side of it’s grown bigger.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well?’
‘That’s what a nose can do, grow irregularly. It’s the only bit of us that doesn’t stop growing. Knew that, didn’t you? The rest of us shrivels but the nose expands – even in the grave.’
‘Someone ought to look at it, Pete.’
‘Why?’
‘In case there’s something wrong.’
Pete began singing again: ‘Out on runway number nine/Big 707 set to go …’
‘Are you listening to me?’ asked Walter.
‘Yes,’ said Pete, ‘I’m listening, Walt. But there’s nothing wrong. It’s just my nose doing what it’s doing.’
Walter felt moody, defeated. He’d come to the bus to talk, not specifically about Gilbert, but about the way things confused and astounded him, about his inability to predict how anything was going to turn out. And now, with this fat nose of Pete’s visible above the Tilley flame, he found himself confronting yet another mystery. He drank his coffee and was silent and Pete sang on, ignoring his sulking. Walter thought, it’s cause I never understand. Cause and effect. I haven’t the least idea why I wanted to marry Sandra. I have no answer to why I feel love for Gilbert and not loathing. And if I can’t understand cause, then of course I don’t understand effect.
Then he said suddenly to Pete: ‘I want to write a song. I want to go back to that. Can you help me?’
Pete nodded. He stood up stiffly and went to his small kitchen to fetch some whisky. He had the feeling that this was going to be a long night.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1967
Mary:
My lover, Georgia Dickins, was thirty-nine. She worked for a weekly magazine called Woman’s Domain. She ran the Problem Page. Her nom de plume on the Problem Page was D’Esté Defoe. She thought this a wonderful name, far superior to Georgia Dickins. And her readers liked it. Especially the barren readers. They sometimes put, as a kind of footnote to their Problem: ‘I hope you do not mind my saying that if God is good enough to give me a beautiful baby daughter I shall christen her D’Esté.’
I thought it a ridiculous name. It sounded like a corrupted word, short for Destitute. But I didn’t say this. I had t
o say enough hurtful things already. I had to say: ‘I don’t know whether I love you, Georgia. I would like what I feel to be love, but I have a feeling that it isn’t.’
She would cry sometimes and her mascara tears would make her face stripy. And then she would catch sight of herself and say: ‘My God, I’m a wreck. I look like a badger. No wonder no one fucking loves me!’
She taught me to swear and to drink Campari. She showed me St James’s Park and Heal’s department store. She tried to get me to love my breasts. She invited me to live with her in her flat in Notting Hill Gate, but I refused. I’d become fond of my building and of my grey room. And I didn’t want to wake up somewhere else, in a Heal’s bed, lying with Georgia.
She was proud of the Problem Page. She said: ‘D’Esté Defoe is a woman with empathy. Her readers trust her. And she’s a professional. She has a team of doctors and psychiatrists advising her. She offers genuine solutions.’ She talked like this, Georgia. As if she were always advertising something. She told me her flat was nicely situated. She said London was the toast of the world.
I was going to be twenty-one. I was still small. Sometimes I made myself hang from a door lintel, like in the old days. I wanted to reach 5 foot 4 inches. I hadn’t given up on any possibility, not even on growing. And now I saw that a moment had arrived for action. I remembered Cord saying: ‘Without action, Martin, nothing can be begun, what!’ He said this sitting beside me on the hearth rug making a paper chain. We were both of us drunk. Drunken words sometimes get remembered because they’re unexpectedly wise.
I wrote a letter to the Problem Page. Every letter had to begin ‘Dear D’Esté Defoe’. I made several drafts of my letter and then I typed it out in the Liberty offices, during a lull in rejections. This is how it went:
Dear D’Esté Defoe,
You may feel shocked by the contents of this letter. My problem is not one shared by any of your other readers, as far as I can tell.
I am a woman of twenty-one. Or rather, my body is a woman’s body, but I have never felt like a woman or colluded with my body’s deceit. In my mind, I am, and have been from childhood, male. This belief is an ineradicable thing. I am in the wrong gender.
I dress as a man. I loathe my breasts and all that is female about me. I have never been sexually attracted to a man. I do not even dream of Sean Connery.
Please help me. Please tell whether anyone else has ever felt this? Please tell me whether it could ever be possible to alter my body to fit my mind. Since the age of six, I have suffered very much and I want, at last, to take some action. I have no friends in whom I can confide.
I signed myself ‘Divided, Devon’. I thought D’Esté Defoe would be attracted by the letter D. I had no faith in Georgia, but it was the team of doctors and counsellors she had mentioned that gave me hope.
The following evening I spent in the nicely situated flat. Georgia showed me a new kind of grapefruit she had discovered, with pink flesh. She loved new things. As she cut my half of the pink grapefruit she said: ‘D’Esté had an extraordinary letter today. From a transsexual.’
I had never heard this word before. I thought, if there’s a word for this, then it exists outside me, it exists in other people. I’m not alone.
Then I thought, is the time actually coming, is the date actually coming at last for the invention of Martin Ward?
It was difficult to concentrate on anything, on the grapefruit and then on Georgia’s lips, tasting of Revlon. I wished I was in my grey room, sitting absolutely still.
Two weeks later, an answer to my letter appeared in Woman’s Domain:
Dear Divided, Devon,
I have given a great deal of thought to your problem, and no, you are not unique. Others have suffered as you are suffering and have been helped by counselling and, in some cases, by surgery. The first male-to-female sex change operation was performed on an American GI, George Jorgensen, in 1952 and he/she is now living happily as Christine Jorgensen. In 1958 it was revealed that ship’s Doctor, Michael Dillon, had been born Laura Maude Dillon and had changed herself surgically.
But a word of warning, Divided, Devon. The route to surgery is long. And it is not a route that all can take. Your first step must be to see your GP and ask him to refer you to a psychiatrist specialising in sex counselling. Only he will be able to ascertain what path is the right one for you. Only he will be able to discover whether you could adapt to life as a member of the opposite sex. Put yourself in his hands and he will help you towards your future.
Good luck and bon voyage!
D’Esté Defoe
The person in whose hands I put myself was called Dr Beales. The teams of experts at Woman’s Domain found him for me.
I had thought all people like him had consulting rooms in Harley Street, but Dr Beales did not. He had his consulting room in Twickenham and the journey there from Earl’s Court took an hour and a half Twickenham isn’t really even in London, but in Middlesex. By the side of Dr Beales’s house flowed a slow bit of the Thames, brown as tea. The smell of it was rank. It reminded me of the smell of the Suffolk ditch where I’d found my green tennis ball. And after my first visit to Beales, I had a dream of my childhood on the old farm. I was picking stones and dusk was falling.
Dr Beales had a face like a kitten, squashed and small but with bright eyes. He was about forty. His hair was black. He had a habit of pinching the slack skin under his chin. He dressed like a school teacher, in brown corduroy. He sat me down, within sight of the water, on a leather chair. He stared at me. He said: ‘You’re very small. There aren’t many men of your height.’
I said: ‘Growing is something I’ve been trying to do for years and years.’
He smiled. He had one of those smiles that vanishes the moment it’s there, like English spring sunlight. He began to write notes on a pad. I imagined he was describing me to himself – the open-neck shirt I wore, my jeans and my jeans jacket, my heavy-frame glasses, my brown hair cut in a Beatles style by Rob, my look of dread.
He invited me to relax, to make myself comfortable in the chair, to look out at the water. I felt tired and far away from anywhere that I knew. The dirty river wasn’t a consoling sight. I thought, if Rob were here he would say: ‘It’s a bleddy cesspit, Mart. Nothing can stay alive in it.’
Dr Beales began asking me questions. He asked me whether I could mend an electric fuse and whether I knew the rules of cricket. He said: ‘Do you enjoy or repudiate domestic tasks, such as hoovering?’ He said: ‘Are you jealous of men’s superior strength?’ He said: ‘Have you ever been train spotting?’
I kept one eye on the water, imagining shrimps and water snakes trying to have an existence there and drowning in sewage and floating to the surface, like feathers and like rope. I said that I had never possessed a Hoover. I said that I thought men used their strength to annihilate women, as my father had tried to annihilate me. I said: ‘If I’d let myself be a true girl in my childhood, I would have been destroyed.’
Then Dr Beales said: ‘I’d like you to tell me about your parents.’
I turned from the river and stared at his kitten face. I was about to say that I still had dreams of being Sir Galahad and going to rescue my mother from Mountview and from Sonny when Dr Beales gave me one of his fleeting smiles and said: ‘You know that they’re going to have to be brought into this, don’t you? Family support for what you’re attempting to do is vital. Patients whose families are opposed have to fight an almost impossible battle.’
So then I saw them arriving here: Sonny in his farm clothes, smelling of beer; Estelle in a polka-dot dress with her grey hair in a tangle.
I said: ‘They’re dead.’
‘Ah,’ said Dr Beales and he wrote this down – parents dead.
I was going to tell him that my father had been killed on the Rhine, but I realised in time that if he had died in the war I wouldn’t have been born. So I thought then, I won’t tell him about my life as it’s been, but as it might have been. I’ll tell him a sto
ry.
I said: ‘I was six years old when they died. They died in a plane going from Southampton to Cherbourg. The airline was called Silver City. You could put cars into those planes and fly them to France. My parents’ car was a Humber Super Snipe and it died in the plane also.’
Dr Beales wrote this down, too – car dead.
‘What happened to you then?’ he asked.
I thought of Cord and Miss McRae and I knew that neither of them would want to come to Twickenham. I said: ‘I went to live with a family called Harker. They had been friends of my mother’s. Edward Harker is a very wise person and he knows about my predicament and he would come and see you if this was necessary.’
‘And your adoptive mother?’
‘Irene. I’ve never talked to Irene. Irene is very simple and good.’
‘If she’s “good”, then she might be in sympathy with you?’
‘No. It’d be beyond her. Beyond her understanding.’
‘You can’t be sure of this.’
‘Yes, I can.’
‘But she’ll have to know, in the end.’
‘You mean, in the end when I’m a man?’
‘You will never be a man. Not a true biological male. It’s important that you understand this. Do you understand this?’
‘Yes.’
‘You will – if you proceed, if I recommend that you proceed with hormone treatment and eventually surgery – be able to pass as a man in ninety-nine per cent of social situations. But you will not be a man. Nor will you any longer be a woman. Have you heard me? Are you keeping relaxed? Stay looking at the water while you answer.’
I looked at the water. A barge was passing. Its cargo appeared to be stones. ‘What will I be?’ I said.
Dr Beales pinched and pulled his bit of neck skin. I imagined him old, looking like a turkey. ‘You will be a partially constructed male. The world will take you for a man and you will look like a man – to yourself. And so your internal conviction of your essential maleness will receive confirmation when you look in the mirror – and your anguish will cease, or so it is hoped.’