Drugs did not interest them nearly as much as sex, although both were new universes to be discovered for the first time. ‘Before I met you, my life was like black and white TV – now it’s all colour,’ Monty said one morning as she lay in his arms. ‘Do you suppose it was ever like this for the people before? I can’t imagine my mother ever feeling like this.’
‘Nor mine,’ murmured Simon, tracing the outline of a nipple with his finger and watching the magic spot of flesh pucker in response. ‘Rosanna and I used to wonder how we ever got to be born.’
‘So did we.’
They set about exploring the secret realm of sexuality, seeking to elaborate the physical expression of their love and feeling a sense of duty towards the unknown dimensions of human experience which had at last become available. First they learned what they could from each other.
‘What does it feel like when you come?’ Monty asked Simon. He paused for thought, screwing up his eyes.
‘Like my spine’s melting in the middle of an earthquake.’ It sounded impressive. ‘What does it feel like for you?’
‘Different. It’s like waves.’ It sounded very dull by comparison. ‘It feels like a giant sea-anemone exploding inwards.’ She could see he thought she was exaggerating. ‘Well, it feels like that sometimes, anyway. It felt like that last night.’
‘What did it feel like this morning?’
‘Bit of a non-event, really.’
‘You made enough noise about it.’
‘Well, I thought you’d be disappointed if I didn’t.’
‘I’m disappointed it was a non-event.’ He pulled her towards him and began kissing her nipples. ‘Let’s see if we can catch a sea-anemone.’
‘No, Simon, please, not yet. I’m so sore, I can hardly sit down as it is. Darling, don’t be disappointed, it just is a non-event sometimes, that’s all.’
Guilt about this enjoyment of forbidden fruit stalked them patiently. Every Friday night Simon went home for the traditional Sabbath supper, and sat at the place at the dining table which had been his since babyhood. He listened to his mother calling Monty a whore, and defended his love for her silently by throwing a switch in his mind and picturing Monty, laced in the black leather corset of a dominatrix, her eyes hot and blank with lust.
As midnight approached Simon would escape his mother’s mounting hysteria and drive fast and thankfully to the apartment, to find Monty sleeping sweetly in one of his dirty shirts, which she had taken to bed with her for the comforting smell of him. In a maelstrom of confusion he disapproved of himself for thinking filthy things about the girl he loved, reproached himself for making his mother unhappy and usually ended up rolling a substantial joint to calm himself.
Monty’s guilt was a far more stealthy animal, which operated by turning her own emotions against her. She began to worry about what Simon was doing every moment that he wasn’t with her, and took to telephoning his office several times a day, ‘just to talk,’ as she said. The voice of his secretary preyed on her mind and she couldn’t get rid of the idea that she was having an affair with him. ‘It’s ridiculous,’ she told herself with anger, but the fear would not go away, until she found herself making sneering remarks to Simon about his ‘office wife’.
‘No wonder you’re in such a hurry to get to the office,’ she snapped one morning as he dressed. ‘Not worth wasting time in bed with me when there’s a hot little number waiting for you up there, I suppose.’
Simon ignored her and started tying his flower-printed tie in the bathroom. ‘What am I saying?’ Monty asked herself in panic. Nevertheless, she got out of bed and followed him. ‘Why don’t you just tell me?’ she said with a threat in her tone. ‘I don’t mind you fucking someone else, I do mind you lying to me. We’re supposed to trust each other, remember?’
‘Monty, for the last time, I’m not fucking anybody else. Yours are the only knickers I’m interested in getting into. For Christ’s sake, what’s the matter with you?’
Tears began pouring down her cheeks. ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry, Simon, truly I am. I just can’t help it.’
At work, it was as bad. Monty burst into tears every time she dialled a wrong number on the telephone, or if she broke a fingernail or put down her keys and could not remember where they were. One morning, she arrived for work at 12.30, unacceptably late even by the relaxed standards set by Swallow. As usual nowadays, she was crying. Swallow closed the office for lunch and took her to the café next door.
‘Look, you’ve got to get yourself sorted out, Monty. What’s the matter?’
Monty’s face crumpled again and she howled with sobs. Eventually she gained enough control over herself to gasp, ‘I don’t know what’s the matter, Swallow. If I did, don’t you think I’d stop? I hate being like this. I cry so much it’s not worth putting on mascara in the morning. I’m saying such crazy things I don’t know how Simon puts up with me. This morning I just couldn’t get out bed, I couldn’t. What is it, Swallow – am I going mad or something?’
The next day, Swallow thumped a copy of Queen magazine down on her desk. ‘Page 63 – read it,’ she ordered. ‘It’s the answer to all your problems. Go on, read all of it. I’ll do the phones for a while. Go outside and read it.’
Monty took the magazine round to the café and read through the article. ‘Side-effects of the birth control pill can include skin rashes, varicose veins, weight gain, tenderness of the breasts, nausea and depression,’ she read. ‘Depression is a little-known psychological condition which can take many forms including melancholia, lethargy, loss of energy, and the feeling that life is no longer worth living.’
She turned the page, her eyes devouring the elegant black type. ‘Doctors who prescribe the birth control pill are often reluctant to advise their patients of these side effects in case they experience them through the process of suggestion.’ She finished her coffee and ran back to the office.
‘Swallow! Do you really think …’
‘Yes of course I do. Look, it’s everything, isn’t it – crying and flopping around everywhere? If I were you I should go back to that lovable doctor of yours right away.’
The doctor nodded wisely, and said, ‘Quite a few of my patients have reported this type of thing – I’ll give you a cap instead. It’s not quite as effective, but you and your husband will be starting your family soon, I expect.’ And she gave Monty a diaphragm that was perhaps a little smaller than the ideal size for her inner dimensions; the next size up would have been perfect, but the doctor did not have a diaphragm of that size in her small stock of contraceptives. ‘Be very careful to check that it is in position correctly,’ she warned as Monty left.
In two weeks Monty’s ankles were delicately delineated once more, her waist was as small as it had ever been, the beginnings of her double chin had vanished and she was 10lbs lighter. The vale of tears through which she had passed seemed like a bad dream, and she kissed Simon goodbye each morning without a pang of the crazy jealousy that had overpowered her before. She did not, however, tell Simon why she had suddenly returned to her old, slender, smiling self.
Their love life, temporarily inhibited by Monty’s depression, soon began to reach new heights. Secure in their love once more, they began eagerly to explore the limits of their feelings.
Like the enthusiastic students they were, they tried to read up their subject. They discovered a small magazine written by doctors with an extensive correspondence section full of letters by men whose wives liked wearing rubber or having sex with Alsatian dogs.
Through an advertisement in an underground newspaper, Monty ordered a book called The Eastern Encyclopaedia of Erotica which was thin, limp and rather smudgily printed.
‘The Lingam sweetens the Yoni with its tears,’ she read, puzzled.
‘It’s got one hundred and twenty-three positions.’ Simon eagerly took the book away from her. They tried a few positions, and gave up during ‘The Way of the Enlightened’, which required them to sit
naked, cross-legged and face to face with their palms pressed together, and meditate until they achieved simultaneous orgasm.
‘Maybe it works in a hot climate,’ said Monty, scrambling into her clothes with a shiver.
‘Maybe we weren’t meditating properly,’ Simon suggested. Next they sent away to Sweden for a pornographic magazine catalogue, and ordered three volumes called Forbidden Lust, Swedish Weekend and Rule of the Lash, which were easier to understand than the Eastern Encyclopaedia but still rather small and grubby.
They scoured the city for erotic films, sitting through endless dreary masterpieces of Czech cinema because the Sunday newspapers had described them as explicit. Then they discovered a sex shop, with black windows and a small sign saying ‘Marital Aids’on the door. They decided to buy a vibrator, having read extensive testimonials to their erotic capabilities in the medical magazine.
‘You ought to buy it, you’ll be getting more out of it, and anyway I paid for the books,’ Simon announced, half-pushing her towards the doorway. Almost speechless with embarrassment, Monty walked in and hurriedly picked the first instrument she saw in the display. It was black, with gold bands, and the name on the box was Non-Doctor.
Simon was very quiet for a week, until Monty said, ‘It’s different, I suppose, but I think I prefer you, darling. All those women who have multiple orgasms with them must be making it up. I can’t manage more than two.’ A week later the battery ran down, and they never bothered to buy a new one.
In time, Monty noticed that the weight which she had lost was beginning to creep back. Then she noticed something much more worrying. She had grown out of the habit of watching the calendar, but now there was no doubt that her period was late. At last she could not evade the terrible truth that, vague as she was about dates, she had not had a period for a full six weeks.
‘The doctor will give you something,’ Swallow told her with confidence. ‘They have a pill that can make your period start if it’s late.’
‘I can’t go back to that doctor. She thinks I want to get pregnant. Her bloody surgery looks like a nursery as it is.’ Monty could just imagine the conversation.
‘Well, go to my doctor, then. Old Dr Robert will come up with something, I’m sure.’
Monty shook her head. ‘I want to think about it. I rather like the idea of having Simon’s baby. I can see it inside me, all curled up like a miniature Simon already.’
Swallow snorted with contempt. ‘You’d better think fast, girl. They won’t be able to give you an abortion if you leave it too long, you know.’
The more Monty thought about the baby, the more wonderful it seemed, especially since Cathy was now pregnant, too. She thought how wonderful it would be to share the experience with her sister. By the end of the day she was imagining herself as a triumphantly pregnant bride – or perhaps they could get married after the birth, when their child was old enough to stand beside them in white rompers.
That evening the telephone rang.
‘Monty, it’s me, Rosanna. Tell Simon the minute he gets in to come home at once.’
‘What’s the matter? You sound terrible.’
‘Father’s collapsed. The doctors are with him now.’
‘Is he …’ Dead seemed a tactless word.
‘He’s alive but he looks awful.’ Rosanna gulped at the end of the line and finished hurriedly, ‘Just get him to phone, Monty. Our mother is going mad.’
Simon came in shortly afterwards, and Monty sent him out again as she had promised, sensing that the Emanuel family was drawing together at a time of crisis. At midnight he telephoned from the hospital to say he would not be back that night, and he returned next morning, drawn and looking older.
‘He’s had a heart attack,’ he told her, slumping on to the sofa with relief. ‘They’re going to keep him in hospital at least a month. Apparently it’s quite a good sign that he’s in his sixties, because there’s more hope the later they start. The doctor said he might be dead already if he was forty-five.’
The carefree pattern of their life abruptly changed, with Simon now rushing to the hospital every evening to sit at the bedside of the weak, yellow-skinned hulk which looked so unlike his father. Monty barely saw him, and felt wound taut with anxiety as the days stole by and her period still did not come.
One evening Rosanna called in on her way home. ‘I can’t face Mother just yet,’ she said, dropping her music case on the kitchen worktop. ‘Let’s have a quick coffee to give me strength. She’s been howling like a banshee for days. She’s absolutely hysterical. You can’t imagine what it’s like.’
Mechanically, Monty filled the Italian percolator and set it over the heat. Rosanna talked on as the coffee was made then said, ‘You’re very quiet, Monty. Is everything all right?’
‘Mmm, yes, everything’s fine.’ As she opened the refrigerator to get the milk, she felt a wave of nausea. She pushed the bottle on to the breakfast bar with haste and ran to the bathroom, fearing that she was going to be sick; nothing happened.
Rosanna looked closely at her friend. ‘Are you sure you’re all right? You look a bit puffy about the face.’
The weight of her secret was becoming unbearable, so Monty decided to share the burden with her friend. ‘I think I’m pregnant, Rosanna, my period’s weeks late.’
‘My God, I’m so sorry,’ Rosanna pressed her hands with ready sympathy. ‘How terrible for you. What are you going to do?’
Monty shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Simon’s so upset about his father, I daren’t even tell him at the moment. We’ll have to get married, I suppose.’
‘But I thought you didn’t want to get married!’ Rosanna looked positively shocked.
‘I didn’t, but I think it’s different if you’ve got children, don’t you?’
Before her disbelieving eyes, her friend was transformed into a dynamic, decisive, young woman in whom it was possible to see her mother’s ruthless adherence to the dynastic principle. Rosanna began quietly, ‘Simon can’t marry you, Monty.’ She put up a hand to quell the indignant question on Monty’s lips. ‘You don’t understand, and it’s our fault, not yours. Simon can’t marry you because he’s Jewish, and a Jewish man has to marry a Jewish woman.’
‘But not nowadays, surely?’
‘Believe me, nowadays more than ever. One of our cousins married out and you know what the family did? They sat Shivah for him. That’s what you have to do when people die, Monty. The idea was that he was dead to his family. They sat in mourning for him for a week.’
‘But that’s…’
‘That’s the way it is, Monty. Didn’t you realize? I suppose not. We’ve tried so hard to fit in, and tried to pretend there isn’t any difference between us, and really there is, and this is part of it.’ She pushed away her cold coffee. ‘Do you know what I think you should do? Get rid of it, as fast as you can. And don’t tell Simon. It’d kill my father if he ever found out, my mother would go mad – madder than she is going already, that is.’ She pulled a face to acknowledge that Mrs Emanuel’s mental stability was almost beyond prediction.
‘But worst of all, think what it would do to Simon. Right now, anyway – he’d be in agony. You can’t do it to him, you just can’t.’
Monty nodded in agreement. She loved Simon too much to inflict any more emotional torment on him. Rosanna hugged her and they both sighed.
‘Poor, poor Monty. How could you have been so stupid?’
That was the question everybody asked her.
‘How could you have been so stupid?’ asked Swallow’s doctor. ‘In a few months this Abortion Act should be law and there would be no problem. But now, my dear, I’m afraid you’re going to have to jump through quite a few hoops. You must see one of my colleagues. He won’t be very difficult, but then you’ll be interviewed by a panel and they can be a bit sticky.’
‘What do I have to say?’ Monty felt acutely anxious – suppose they refused to let her have an abortion? Now that the happy vision of having Simo
n’s baby had faded, she once more saw pregnancy as a disaster.
‘Just look miserable and answer their questions. Cry a bit, if you can. We’ve got to prove that having the baby will be injurious to your physical or mental health, and since you’re obviously in the pink, we’ll have to go for the mental angle. Just keep saying you don’t know what’ll you’ll do, you won’t be able to cope, that sort of thing.’ Monty nodded and he gave her a sympathetic pat on the shoulder.
‘Don’t worry, they won’t turn you down. Now, I’m afraid, I’ll have to ask you for twenty guineas.’
The second doctor barely raised his eyes from his prescription pad to listen to her as he wrote out his recommendation, and at the end of the week, Monty found herself standing in a huge, mahogany-panelled room in a large London hospital looking at three flint-faced men and one woman. The woman was the most vicious.
‘You girls think you can get away with anything nowadays,’ she said in lofty tones. ‘If you want to know what I think, you’re a selfish, irresponsible little hussy.’
Monty had no difficulty in crying at this point but in the end the woman’s spite defeated itself because her three male colleagues overruled her. Nevertheless, she had the final say.
‘We have decided, Miss Bourton, to recommend that your pregnancy be terminated,’ she announced, ‘and frankly I cannot imagine how a girl stupid enough to become pregnant in this way could ever prove an adequate mother. And for the future, remember that the best contraceptive is the word “no”. Fortunately, there’s a very good chance you won’t be able to conceive again.’ The doctor believed this final statement implicitly. It was an opinion she based on statistics relating to illegal abortions, which were frequently followed by infection. She felt it was important to punish these girls by scaring them, so that they would be more careful in future.
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