“Where’s Simon,” I realised he was absent from our little party.

“He caught a train up to London, about midday, a little local difficulty, apparently.”

“Goodness, I hope everything is okay,” I said sounding awfully awfully.

“I’m sure it is, young Catherine.” Tom, winked at me, “There’s a bottle of white in the fridge how about we have a glass as we talk?”

“If you’d like to forestall a little, I could cook us up something and we could talk over dinner.”

“An excellent idea.” Tom smiled, no, he beamed a smile at me.

“You will still tell us about Catherine, won’t you?” I asked.

His smiled faded rather rapidly, “Sounds like you already know.”

“I know bits.”

“So who’s been blabbing?”

“No one you could take action against.”

“Oh, go on then, get some food. I’ll pour us a drink anyway.”

I ran into the kitchen and Stella followed me. “You know all about her then?”

“Out the way, I need that pan.” I pushed her aside and set up a large frying pan on the top of the cooker and began melting some butter. Then I washed some potatoes and began slicing them. I was doing sautés.

“Well, how much do you know?”

“Only how she died, okay? Happy now? Here, chop these up.” I handed her some spring onions.

“Oh God, my hands will smell after that.”

“Would you prefer to do the garlic?”

“Where’s the knife?”

Despite having her under my feet, I did stir fry chicken with sauté spuds. In just over twenty minutes we were seated at the table and eating it. “That was delicious, Cathy.” Tom wiped his mouth on his napkin.

“Stella helped.”

“Yeah, like I chopped some onions.”

“The best chopped onions I’ve ever tasted,” Tom said, smirking. Then he said, “Ouch,” as she kicked him under the table.

I cleared away the debris and we sat with coffees and wine and I invited Tom to tell us about his daughter. I thought he was trying to escape, but he only went as far as his jacket, where he removed his wallet from the inside breast pocket and came back to the table. From this ancient leather pouch, he extracted an envelope, yellow with age. He pulled out a small passport sized photo in black and white. “This is my daughter, Catherine.” He handed the picture to me.

“She’s beautiful, Tom, you must have been really proud of her.” I touched his hand as I spoke.

“Lemme see,” squeaked Stella and took the picture. She kept looking at it and then at me. “If your hair was darker, this could almost be you.”

“Don’t be daft, she’s beautiful.” I felt myself getting hot.

“And so are you.” Tom, took back the photo and replaced it in his wallet. “Sorry, it’s the only one I have.”

“I’ll do you some copies if you’d like, my scanner could do that and I could enlarge it for you.” I volunteered because it was a relatively easy job.

“Yes, okay, sometime.” Tom postponed my offer. His face became wistful and he looked into the distance. “She died in October of nineteen eighty seven. She was brilliant with dead languages, read classics and Latin at Oxford and also Anglo Saxon. Must have got it from her mother, it certainly wasn’t from me.” He paused to sip his wine.

“She was reading Anglo Saxon studies for a PhD at Oxford, a department made famous by JRR Tolkien, although he’d long gone. Driving back from Portsmouth to the university at Oxford her car, a little Peugeot, was hit head on by a coach, a charabanc. The driver was under the influence of alcohol and was later prosecuted for drink driving. He was banned from driving, and fined two hundred pounds.”

He paused, still looking at the wall, tears now in his eyes, “That was all her life was worth, a measly two hundred quid.” He paused again and blew his nose. “It devastated us. My wife, Celia, who was already fighting multiple sclerosis, gave up the fight and in less than six months, I’d lost both my darlings. I only had my work to keep me alive.”

I put my hand on his and squeezed it gently. He looked at me and smiled. I smiled back at him and Stella dashed to the kitchen and brought back some more coffee. She then poured us another cup each.

“You can imagine my surprise when I got a letter from a student from Sussex, commenting upon a paper I did. It piqued my curiosity and I invited him to come and see the department. I was intrigued by the cheek of a new graduate making some comments about the methodology we used on mammalian surveys. It wasn’t really my subject, I did the physiology, but the young tyro had some relevant points.

When he arrived, I nearly died, he could have been my grandson–except for the small matter that my Catherine, couldn’t have kids. So after a meeting where he stated a few points we could have improved, I challenged him to come here and do a master’s degree and show us how it could be done better.

A few months into the course and he came to see me. He was transgendered. It hit me like a bomb. He was too pretty to be a boy, and I wondered if he was gay, except he kept much to himself and his work was first class. It was so coincidental, it almost felt as if my daughter had been reborn, except this Cathy, was already alive when mine, died.”

I felt my ears burning, I was blushing so much and the alcohol seemed to make it worse. Tom took a sip of his wine and continued his narrative. “You see, Cathy, my Catherine was also transgendered.”

My blushing got a sight worse. “Oh,” I squeaked as my throat seemed to constrict around the words. It made it obvious why he was so unfazed by my revelation and why he was so supportive on a personal as well as official level. Stella had told me she’d learned from him a bit of this, so it wasn’t entirely a revelation, but it still choked me.

“We knew from early on, that there was something different about our son. At first I thought he was gay and while it didn’t exactly disturb me, I saw it as a complication for his life. However, it wasn’t a case of homosexuality, it transpired to be a gender thing. That did disturb me, I mean, it’s so obvious to all who know you, once things start changing. Anyway, we pulled together as a family and her mother was brilliant. So just before going away to Oxford, my son became my daughter — Cameron Agnew, became Catherine.”

“Cameron!” Stella squeaked loudly, “How many more coincidences are there going to be? If you tell me her second name was Stella, I’m going to ask a paranormal researcher to investigate.”

“No, that was my mother’s name.”

“Geez, I bloody knew it,” she said taking a gulp of wine.

“Cameron Simon Agnew, became Catherine Simone Agnew. Oxford were quite helpful, given this was in the late seventies and I paid for her to go to the States for surgery at John’s Hopkins in Baltimore. She had it done during her first summer vac. After that she didn’t look back, she had a girlfriend and they loved each other. It broke up and she had several relationships afterwards, all with blonde girls–which she had a thing about. So when I am presented with a blonde, almost look-alike, it nearly blew me away.”

I finished my coffee. “No wonder you found it so easy to accept my changeover?”

“The hard part was stopping myself from projecting the person I had lost onto you. At times it was so hard. Then when you moved in here, it was like the gods had rewarded me, they had given me back my daughter and another reason to live, other than just my work.”

“Except, I wasn’t your daughter.” I touched his hand and he held mine.

“No, more like my wilful granddaughter, who constantly gets herself into scrapes.”

“Yeah, erm, sorry about that.”

“You know the Dean is retiring?”

“No, when?”

“He’s actually gone, Dr Mathers has taken on the role temporarily.”

“Who?”

“He’s from Marine Biology, so you probably haven’t met, oh, yes you have, he was witness to your little outburst.”

“Oh, oh well.”

“I’ve sussed him out, he told me on the QT, that he had some sympathy with you. Which means, I’m offering you your job back.”

“What?”

“What is it with you young women, don’t you ever bloody listen?”

“No, erm, I mean yes.”

“Oh goody!” said Stella, and she began a little dance around the kitchen.

“Tom, where is your daughter buried?” I asked him quietly.

“She was cremated and interred at the local church in Portsmouth, why?”

“Next time I’m there, I’d like to take her some flowers, if that’s okay?”

“I’m sure she’d have liked that, she loved flowers.”

“Is that where you take the dog, every week?”

“Damn you, woman, how did you guess that?”

“Intuition, I suppose.” I squeezed his hand again, and he put his second one on top of mine.

“So are you coming back?” He asked as Stella danced in with another bottle of wine.

“I don’t think I have any choice, do I, granddad?”

“Still as cheeky, but then with my daughter being similar, I should have been used to it, shouldn’t I?”

“Absholutely,” said Stella, her tongue poking out of her mouth as she tried to get the corkscrew into the bottle.

(no picture tonight, it wouldn't work.)