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friendly, if a little phonily rural, matching the name of their road.
    Bernie shuffled through behind her. He didn’t raise his feet properly any more. Nick followed him.
    â€˜Nights are pulling in,’ said Bernie.
    â€˜That’s extremely observant of you, Bernie,’ said Nick.
    Neither Alison nor Nick could believe that Nick had said that. Alison looked at him in horror. He met her look and shook his head slightly in wonderment at his own insensitivity.
    They needn’t have worried. Nick’s sarcasm washed over Bernie.
    â€˜Well, they are,’ he said. ‘I hate the autumn, me. Sod the glory of the Fall in New England. It’s all damp, decay and death in Old Warwickshire.’
    He had never accepted moving from Yorkshire and blamed Nick and Alison for living in Warwickshire; that was the thanks they got for providing Bernie and Marge with a home.
    â€˜Gray in his room?’ said Bernie. ‘That boy spends too much time on his own.’
    â€˜Thanks, Bernie,’ said Nick, ‘but he is only fourteen.’
    â€˜Sorry I spoke,’ said Bernie. ‘Em out? That girl goes out too much. She’s never in.’
    â€˜Have you ever thought of writing a book about how to be a good parent?’ asked Nick.
    â€˜Sorry I spoke.’
    Alison said nothing during these exchanges, just touched her dad lightly, affectionately, a gesture of solidarity: she and he against the monster, Nick, the sarcasm addict.
    At last Bernie shuffled off with his tray of tea and the swish swish of his slippers. Alison and Nick returned to the lounge, which she called the sitting room. He had to do it quickly this time.
    â€˜I’m going to change sex, Alison,’ he said.
    Because he did it so quickly it came out all wrong. It sounded far too casual, as if he’d said, ‘I think I’ll pop up to the Coach for a pint’ (not that he ever did).
    â€˜I know,’ she said drily. ‘I did pick up the point about those whelks.’
    â€˜I have to,’ he said. ‘I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body. I can’t stand it any more. I hate myself as I am, Alison. I bloody hate myself.’
    To her fury, Alison felt tears springing to her eyes. They couldn’t be. She didn’t do tears. Even when she fell from a tree she had never cried. You couldn’t climb trees if you cried when you fell off.
    She’d known that there was hatred in Nick. She’d thought some of it was for Throdnall and for his job and for his failure to go to university, but she had begun to think that some of it at least had recently been for her.
    She couldn’t stop the tears. They overwhelmed her. She cried as someone would cry who hasn’t cried for years. For the last seven years she had planned her sex change and kept her vast secret. Now this had happened. It was too much.
    He hugged her, held her tight. It was natural that she should cry, and she might have forgiven herself for it eventually. What she could never forgive herself for was what she said.
    â€˜I thought it was
me
you hated.’
    Oh the odiousness for her of his discovery of her weakness.She’d have been angry, after saying that, even if he hadn’t spoken the four worst words he could possibly have chosen to comfort her.
    â€˜There there, old girl,’ he said.
    She broke away as if stung, and hit him, hit him hard, a stinging slap on the cheek.
    Women really are the most extraordinary creatures, he thought. How strange it is that I’m desperate to become one.

5 The Dog-Leg Ninth
    The moment he’d left the room she tried to think about those poor whelks. Anything to take her mind off the crashing of her dream.
    She still hadn’t grasped what the hope was that could have justified that headline, ‘Hope For Sex Change Whelks’. She felt, in an obscure way, that if she could concentrate on the whelks’ hopes, it might help to give her hope.
    Ah! The hope was,