L. Ow lif e
Man's world
Jeffrey Bernard
Last Monday evening I was only able to Catch the very beginning of what looked to he a promising television programme. Inside Story had made a documentary about a transsexual called George Roberts and, as I saW him apply some make-up and heard the Fommentator tease us with the promising information that we would see 'what difficulties he would meet in becoming a W.oman., I was, sadly, summoned to the dinner table by the dear thing I am married to (and who, luckily, had no more than average difficulty in becoming a woman). Having said grace and thanked God that Mr Justice Cantley was not called upon at Newbury a fortnight ago to separate One No Trump and Columnist. I began to reflect on just what sort of difficulty I might have in becoming a woman should the question descend. Perhaps it was the heat of the Curry, perhaps it was the solicitous glance that my dear wife gave me as I dipped into the Lambourn yoghurt. but I just couldn't Concentrate on the problem. Instead. I became so rapidly obsessed with what sort of woman I might become that I unthinkingly put on an apron and rubber gloves to wash up in — giving my hair a reassuring pat and myself a glance in the mirror.
The more I thought about it the more horrified I became at the sort of woman I would be — or indeed half am. Of all the daymares I've had this was one of the worst. on a par with the recurring one of serving seven years in Wandsworth for something I did, being stoned to death in Baghdad for adultery. being married to Jill Tweedie. Luckily, I am not afflicted by such horrors as I sleep. but these things do tend to surface from the valley of the idle mind by day. The harder I tried to see myself as a truly wonderful little woman the more she was elbowed out by the dreadful creature I had become.
There I was, looking as though I'd left a load of ironing undone, my handbag a complete and utter mess, containing a final demand — from the electricity people. not Robert Redford — a stub of lipstick, one key. a f1 note, a Dutch Cap prescribed for me in 1948, and a creased photograph of my son. the bane of my life and an alcoholic working as a computer trainee. Glancing in the remaining half of my vanity case mirror I saw the face of a woman who mutters paranoically to herself in supermarkets and whose lips tremble at the sight of a receding bus. She is usually alone — any port in a storm — and trying to look self-contained.
This wasn't what I'd hbped for, not after those massive doses of hormones, that ghastly surgery and all the electrolisis. I'd hoped for some sort of amalgam of Dorothy Parker. Callas. Lombard and Fonteyn with a dash of Nightingale and Thatcher to keep my tiny feet firmly on the ground. But what did I see? I saw myself sitting in a taxi on the way to meet an implausible shit.
As the taxi stopped at the lights at the corner of Wardour Street. I wondered, for the umpteenth time that day, if I was pregnant and, if I was, who by. My nails had been bitten to the quick wondering whether , or not the Guardian was going to accept or reject my piece about being a single. mad, divorced, sterile, battered. unpublished housewife living with an out-of-work black actor. And I had a hangover and my roll-on was biting into my waist, added to which my mascara was running — on top of the fact that it was definitely a man's world.
As the taxi edged its way towards the York Minster. the clock ticking away relent lessly. I noticed that my tights had started to run and that I'd somehow lost an ear-ring. I looked at a barrow boy standing on the kerb and reflected that I hadn't had a multiple 'orgasm since the night of the last Sunday Times magazine party. Suddenly I became aware of the awful gap that existed between what I'd wanted to be and what I was. I could hardly remember what a hockey stick looked like, or how George had looked during the latter half of our marriage when I had brought him his slippers and Ovaltine and then told him I had a headache. Something like a bewildered dog. I thought. Oh. I could have gone on. Luckily a phone rang. I woke up. so to speak. Thank God. I was at least half a man.
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