Sex and Other Changes

by David Nobbs

  ‘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?

  Eric hesitated before continuing. She realised that what he was going to say wasn’t easy for him.

  ‘Sarah was a twitcher. Taught me most of what I know about birds. Taught me most of what I know about sex too.’

  ‘What happened?’

  He didn’t answer at first. Nicola thought he hadn’t heard, but he had.

  ‘She died. Cancer. Very slowly.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have wanted it to be quick. Every day was precious. Every day was a little triumph. She lived nineteen months longer than predicted. Just a herring gull.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The bird on that old boat. Awful to say that: “Just a herring gull.” It doesn’t know it isn’t rare. It isn’t its fault its species is so successful.’

  ‘If she’d lived …’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think so, Nicola. I think we’d have … had our own spaces, kept our own places, shared parts of each other, hidden others. But who knows?’

  They didn’t even touch as they walked back to Blakeney. They came across a young couple eating each other, dripping with each other’s saliva. They didn’t even touch. Not yet. Nicola felt sorry for people who came to sex too quickly and too easily. They missed all the tantalising excitement of gradual discovery.

  They were hungry. Eric drove, slowly, very deliberately, to Burnham Market, a posh little place hidden from modern England by low hills. They ate in a long, strikingly yellow hotel called the Hoste Arms. The food was good. At the next table, in the window, a group of happy people were chatting about bridge. Their bridge seemed like fun. One of the men made a joke, and they all laughed. Nicola knew that she was with a man who would never make her laugh. She wanted to join these people and play bridge with them, but she also wanted to stay with Eric. She realised in that second that nobody gives you everything you want, and that at that moment she was actually truly happy. There aren’t many such moments.

  The owner came round, a big chap, quite jolly. She could see that Eric wanted to introduce her to him, but he didn’t see Eric’s diffident smile, he didn’t see Eric at all, he moved on and said, ‘Caroline!’ to a lady at the window table, a striking lady, the sort of lady hoteliers notice. Nicola was with the sort of man hoteliers didn’t notice, but she didn’t mind at all. Eric was her treasure – her buried treasure.

  As they left, Eric did meet somebody he knew, and Nicola was glad.

  ‘Charles, this is Nicola,’ he said. Nicola had the nice feeling, for the first time in her life, of being shown off by a proud man.

  She shook hands with Charles.

  ‘Has Joy had her baby?’ Eric asked.

  ‘Yes. Girl. Eight pounds. She’s back home,’ said Charles.

  ‘Ah,’ said Nicola. ‘So Joy is unconfined.’

  She found that she was drawn to jokes, in Eric’s company, like moths to new sweaters.

  The man called Charles smiled, a trifle wearily, but Eric said, ‘Yes, it’s horrible being in hospital.’

  Lots of people don’t see jokes, in the sense that they don’t get them. Eric didn’t see them in the sense that he didn’t realise that there had been a joke. If you said to Eric, ‘There was an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman,’ he�
�d be thinking, ‘I wonder how they met.’

  After a couple of these gentle long weekends in Norfolk, Nicola felt obliged to invite Eric to stay at Sunny Cottage. She dreaded this.

  Again, they had separate bedrooms. Sharing a bedroom would be a massive step, and the dank gloom of Sunny Cottage was not the right venue for something so important. It seemed such a sad place with its rented furniture in comparison with the quiet elegance of Eric’s cottage. She was beginning to dislike Sunny Cottage.

  She wasn’t ashamed of her shy, serious furniture restorer. She was delighted to invite him to the Midsummer Dinner at the Golf Club. It might not have been entirely worthy, but she had to admit to herself that she wanted to show off her capture to Alan. She knew that he would be pleased for her. Apart from anything else, it would show that her having changed sex had worked, and that couldn’t but encourage Alan. She felt a bit odd, actually, saying, ‘This is my ex-wife Alan’, but she didn’t know how else to put it.

  Unfortunately the evening proved a bit of a disaster. She knew that Eric didn’t know about golf, but she didn’t know just how much he didn’t know. How could anybody be so unworldly as to think that Tiger Woods was a safari park? Nicola felt such a fool, although it was Eric who was being foolish, not her, and Eric was blithely unaware of it.

  They sat with a few golfing Rotarians who were customers at the Cornucopia. These people were polite to Eric, but didn’t get very far, and the conversation just swirled around him. He didn’t finish any of the courses, the food at the club was stronger on quantity than quality, and everyone assumed that he was drinking so sparingly because he was driving. But Nicola was driving. It’s a bit galling when you drink carefully because you’re driving, and the person whom you’re driving doesn’t have the decency to get over the limit. She could see that Eric was completely unaware of this consideration.

  Mind you, the house wine at the club was pretty dismal. The comedian made a joke about it. ‘I hear the tickets are twenty-five pounds with half a bottle of house wine, and thirty pounds without it.’ That did not go down well with the PP.

  Nicola thought that it was a mistake to have a comedian. What comedian worth his salt is going to be free to go to Throdnall Golf Club on a Saturday night? She didn’t meet a single person who had ever heard of ‘Bubbly Ben Broadhurst – the Champagne Comedian’. She laughed where she could, but Eric’s face never cracked. Nicola wondered if he realised that there were any jokes. Perhaps he thought there really was an Irish salesman who tried to flog a Nomad a tow-bar for his caravan in the Sahara.

  The thought crossed Nicola’s mind that they couldn’t have done much worse if they’d booked Prentice.

  She saw Eric through the Golf Club’s eyes that evening, and she saw the Golf Club through Eric’s eyes. By the end of the evening she wanted to ditch Eric and resign from the Golf Club. She did neither.

  Nicola and Alan had just a few moments’ chat together right at the end of the evening.

  ‘Long time no see,’ said Alan.

  ‘Is that meant to be a criticism?’

  ‘Well, Em and Gray are your children – and I have phoned you more than once.’

  ‘Ah. Well I’ve spent a couple of long weekends in Norfolk, and my phone’s been out-of-order. I get so few phone calls that I didn’t realise for several days. There’s been this new development in my life.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘Eric and I could pop over tomorrow, perhaps.’

  ‘I’m not sure the kids could cope with meeting your men friends just yet, Nicola.’

  ‘I thought you might be pleased that I’m happy.’

  ‘I am. I’m delirious. It’s been the one bright spot in a simply awful evening.’

  And Alan strode off. Nicola couldn’t believe it. She didn’t even have the chance to tell him how good he looked in evening dress, and how amazed she’d been to see Bernie holding court like a man of the world. Alan’s jealousy shocked her. Her stomach, already shaken by being filled with sticky toffee pudding in the middle of a heatwave, lurched in dismay.

  ‘I’m really looking forward to seeing you, darling.’ And this on the phone! It would have been a pretty intimate remark from Eric face to face, but on the phone! The phone, for him, was a medium for conveying essential information only. ‘I … er …’ he continued. ‘I … thought we might perhaps take things a little further if … if you … er … felt you were ready.’

  Did she? Was she? Surely?

  ‘Right. Right. Thank you for telling me.’ She had to resist saying ‘Warning me’.

  ‘I mean I thought maybe, because you did say that you hadn’t much room in your small case and you didn’t want to bring your big case, I thought maybe …’ he lowered his voice, as if he feared that telephone engineers, working up poles, might hear his intimate confidences,‘… you might feel you didn’t need to pack pyjamas.’ He gave a nervous little cough.

  There’s boldness, thought Nicola.

  She arrived at about three. They went for a rather brisker walk than usual. Already she loved these coastal marshes, the flint villages hugging the low hills, the Dutch gables and windmills, the wide skies, the cruelly beautiful sunsets.

  They went to the Hoste Arms for dinner. Nicola’s choice. Her treat.

  Before the meal they had a drink in the front bar. It was a lively, buzzing place, a sexy place. Nicola could see that this quiet man of hers liked to lose himself in the froth of humanity, where London girls bronzed and smoothed by sun lamps mingled with salty men bronzed and roughened by briny winds, and financial consultants down for the weekend wore yachting caps to drink their pints of bitter. Eric had a half, she had a sherry, they tried to relax.

  The meal was good; neither of them chose anything with raw onions or garlic. They lingered nervously, drove back to Blakeney slowly in a mauve dusk, Eric offered her a nightcap, she refused: she felt it might burn her throat and give her indigestion. Supposing she belched in Eric’s bedroom. What a solecism.

  ‘Well, I’m for bed,’ said Eric.

  ‘Me too.’

  They walked up the narrow stairs to the tiny, immaculate, pale pink bedroom. An owl hooted and Nicola thought, They don’t change sex, they don’t have pre-coital nerves, I wish I was an owl. That was a silly thing for her to think, because she was no good at late nights and would have been very unsuccessful as an owl.

  We should perhaps spare Nicola the embarrassing details of that first experience of sexual intercourse as a woman. You can imagine, can you not, how little natural confidence she would have had in her unnatural, medically created genitalia?

  Can you imagine how difficult her first attempt at dancing was, as a woman, learning to be led? Would it not have been at least as challenging, after half a lifetime as a man, to learn to find lying under a man and opening your legs for him a natural expression of that great and wonderful thing – sexual love?

  It was difficult to be unselfconscious about one’s vagina when one had spent several months sticking pieces of plastic into it at regular intervals. Most virgins hadn’t had to do that.

  Virgin? Could a woman who had experienced intercourse as a man be described as a virgin?

  To be thinking of such linguistic niceties at a time like this! But Nicola just couldn’t find it in herself to respond to Eric in a more appropriate fashion.

  We have discovered that Eric was not a big drinker, he didn’t have a big appetite, he wasn’t big on spices or on friendship, he didn’t drive big distances. It perhaps needs to be said, in fairness to our dear furniture restorer, that, if Nicola had made a certain deduction from these facts, she would have found out that she was wrong, on that star-studded, owl-rich night in Norfolk. It should perhaps be no surprise that such a private man proved to be good at what is, or should be, among the most private of all activities.

  Nicola felt that she had blown her great chance of fulfilment as a woman, and hoped that her dramatic performances were good enough to conceal her failure from Eric.

&
nbsp; On later weekends she learnt to relax, learnt to think of Eric’s pleasure more than of her own fears, and finally found fulfilment beyond the reach of owls.

  28 Dropping Off

  What was it about Nicola’s smiling, reassuring face that made him feel so uneasy?

  Was it the sense of déjà vu? It was the third time he had awoken in a hospital room, after a major operation, to see his exhusband smiling at him. Silly thoughts, like: We can’t go on meeting like this, flashed through his mind.

  No, it was more than the sense of déjà vu. It was a feeling of guilt.

  ‘Congratulations, Alan,’ said Nicola fervently. ‘You’ve made it! You’re a man.’

  Of course! Alan tried to clear the fog from his head, but he was still in the grip of the anaesthetic. Yes, that was it, he was a man.

  ‘The operation’s gone well,’ said Nicola. ‘They’re very pleased.’

  He remembered that he had cheated on Nicola, that Nicola was not Gray’s father. Was that the cause of this unease? No. He had come to terms with that long ago.

  ‘Eric sends his very best wishes,’ said Nicola, slightly defiantly.

  Eric! That was it.

  Nothing had appalled Alan more about himself than his outbreak of jealousy at the Golf Club.

  They said that jealousy was a woman’s thing. Alan was a man now. Did that mean that he would no longer feel jealous?

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘It’s hard to tell. I haven’t dared move yet.’

  The spoken words needed to engage only a tiny piece of Alan’s brain. The greater part continued to debate this jealousy thing. He didn’t want to debate it, he was far too tired, but you can’t switch worry off. You have to defeat it first.

  No, he didn’t believe that jealousy was a woman’s thing. It was a human being’s thing. It was the Siamese twin of love. He had loved Nick and so it was natural that he should not wish Nick to take another lover, even though Nick was now Nicola.

  But it was absurd. He was no longer married to either Nick or Nicola.

  ‘Do you need the nurse for anything?’

  ‘No, I … I think I’m fine.’