In August Kay flew to London with the express intention of visiting a birth control clinic. Earlier in the summer she had made a point of filing a request in the book for her two stand-off days together, and when it was granted she decided to take the opportunity to cross the water and solve a problem that had been worrying her for some time.
Now as she sat in the clinic waiting-room her heart palpitated nervously. Across from her two women sat deep in conversation, their lined faces denoting them to be at the opposite end of the female scale to herself, while nearby a man busily chain-smoked.
The wait was beginning to tell on Kay’s nerves too. She shifted restlessly on the hard bench and for the umpteenth time examined the posters on the wall. As soon as she had read one, her eyes strayed to the next, then back to start all over again. They made compulsive reading and all of them shared the same universal message.
‘You Can Get Pregnant If It’s The First Time!’... ‘You Can Get Pregnant During Your Period!’... ‘You Can Get Pregnant Standing Up!’... ‘You can Get Pregnant (the last intriguing caption ran) If HE Says It’s All Right!’... seeming to suggest that men weren’t to be trusted in such matters.
Kay found such frankness a bit daunting. Back home such things were not talked about and might even be illegal! She wasn’t sure, that’s why she had chosen to come to an English clinic to seek advice on contraception.
Her eyes fixed on the posters, she thought how intimate it all was this man/woman thing so blatantly and pessimistically displayed on the clinic walls. And what pressure there was all the time on women to give in and have sex. That Graham had so far held off was a source of never ceasing wonder to Kay, though not something she could hope to count on anymore. She sighed, remembering their last meeting on the beach when passions running high the whole situation had almost got out of hand.
What a hot night it had been. Sweltering! For weeks they had been enjoying a spell of untypically hot Irish weather and even yet it was holding fine. The thought of a swim had kept Kay going all that day as she had completed a double duty to Edinburgh and the Isle of Man. When she landed, she had hurried home to be ready for Graham when he called.
Later, strolling with him through the barley field down the narrow track to the sea, she had been reminded of the passing of time in the rippling abundance of the pale sheaves. It seemed like a lifetime since the night in June when he had admitted to being married and they had ended up making passionate (if unconsummated) love on the sands.
Even after two months, Kay was still a little awed at the physical intensity of Captain Pender’s feeling for her and hers for him and such thoughts were making her cheeks glow as they arrived on the sands. As she prepared to slip modestly behind a rock he pulled her into his arms.
‘Let’s not wear anything tonight, darling,’ he whispered huskily, ‘You’ll be quite safe, I promise you... no one will see us.’
Trembling before him, Kay felt that it was one thing to be undressed at the height of passion, quite another to take off everything while being watched with such avid, burning attention. For a long moment, he gazed at her naked full-breasted young body, then quickly divesting himself of his own garments, took her hand and ran with her down to the water’s edge.
Glad of the thickening darkness, Kay cautiously dipped a toe in the water while Captain Pender watched her hesitation with a slight smile before plunging in himself and striking out to sea. She lingered in the shallows wishing he would come back, and shivered as a wave washed coolly about her waist, slapped spitefully at her breasts. Overhead the sky turned black, pricked by a handful of stars.
Suddenly she felt herself lifted in the water.
‘You’re like some lovely sea-nymph risen out of the waves to tempt me,’ Graham breathed in her ear, then waded out of the sea, pulling her with him.
As she hurried breathlessly with him over the sand, Kay was extremely conscious of the strong straight beautiful legs striding along beside her and was suddenly shy of the immensity of the thing standing out before him. Not for the first time, she felt an awed wonder at how men lived with such an encumbrance.
‘Look what you’ve done to me,’ he said with a meaningful downward glance as they reached the rug.
She snatched up a towel and wrapped it about herself but he stripped it away again and she felt a tremendous clamouring urge to hold and be held. Gasping, she clung to him, moaning a little, and pressed even closer, aware of the danger but helpless against this tiding feeling weakening her mind and will.
And then they were on the rug and his hands were under her hips, lifting and holding her against the hard ridge of his body until she thought she would faint. At the last moment she had cried, ‘No... Wait!’ And when he had suddenly pulled away from him she was at first conscious of relief, then a desolate aching regret that she had not allowed him inside her.
‘I don’t think you realise the power you have over me, Kitty,’ he chided gently. ‘I’m afraid I can’t answer for another time.’
His words had both thrilled and alarmed her. While paying tribute to her sexuality he seemed at the same time to be opting out of responsibility. The message was clear. Any further lovemaking between them would be at her own risk.
Kay’s preoccupation, obsession maybe, with remaining virginal (technically at least) was something they had never discussed. From an early age, Molly had strongly impressed upon her that nice girls did not go to bed with a man until married to him.
To Kay her aunt’s view seemed more a matter of common sense, than morality.
According to Molly, once a man took that precious state of virginity ‘above rubies, above pearls’ - even at such moments her aunt couldn’t resist being theatrical - he couldn’t retain any respect for a girl. And love having died a death, Molly would briskly conclude her sermon, the poor unfortunate would be cast off like an old glove.
Kay saw some sense in what her aunt advocated, for unless it was all a huge spoilsport conspiracy to prevent women from having a bit of a fling, it could just legitimately be for their own protection. Molly’s often quoted dictum ‘The woman always suffers’ did have a ring of truth to it. Even in her own limited experience of life, Kay had seen that it was the woman who was inevitably left carrying the burden. No one could deny that in the case of the anonymous pilot versus the pregnant hostess - Kay shivered at how close that was to her own situation - the man had got off scot-free and the hostess’s name dragged in the dirt.
If she were to ‘give-in’ - she couldn’t help thinking of it in one-sided terms though she was as inflamed as Graham - she knew she would suffer such a drop in self-esteem as to be wretched, not happy ever after. She envied girls like Orla, who unless she read her wrong, could let a man do it and still be able to think well of herself afterwards.
‘I don’t care to think what could happen if you were to be so free with anyone else,’ Graham had said with a troubled look. ‘That damned ass Tully... or Cooney.’ He was unable to go on.
Kay shuddered. It was only too true. Neither pilot could resist taking such a come-on to its logical conclusion.
Sensing her distress, Graham tightened his arm about her and said in a low voice, ‘I don’t want to frighten you but you’re so sweet and desirable I can’t imagine any man being able to control himself given a similar situation. I damned well nearly didn’t myself.’
His words cut Kay to the heart. As if she would dream of behaving like this with anyone else. After all, who was it who had begged and begged until she went skinny dipping? A sense of unjustness overwhelmed her. It was so unfair! So damned unfair!
She struggled fiercely to control herself but her sobs threatened to turn into howls. I seem to do nothing but cry these days, was her mortified thought as Graham wordlessly took her in his arms and rocked her soothingly against his shoulder.
‘You’re the only one,’ she said jerkily and was swamped afresh with despair at the truth of this avowal.
‘Sweetheart, forgive me... I never meant to suggest such thing. What a brute I am. Say you forgive me.’
Gradually his protestations of remorse calmed her and Kay was able to blow her nose on the edge of the towel and meet his eyes again. As Graham stroked and petted her, appalled at her distress, his passion flared up again.
‘Darling,’ he groaned, sliding back down with her on the rug. ‘What are we to do? I want you so badly.’
In the days that followed Kay had given the whole matter of her relationship with Captain Pender a lot of thought and decided it was high time she talked to someone qualified to advise her. She bought her ticket for London and made her plans. She told Molly she was going over to do some shopping but was hardly heeded. Since Mr. Cleary had deserted her after fifteen years to go and live with his sister, Molly was taken up with her new lodger, a night club artiste by the name of Mandy Fuller.
Now as she sat in the clinic, Kay was convinced that there had to be others like herself having affairs. Pauline was going out for months with a bearded sculptor and from his description, he was mature enough to be married twice over. Sally, before her romance with Maurice ended, had flown back and forth to Amsterdam and stayed in his flat. She had told Kay how he had lent her the top half of his pyjamas when she forgot her own, which must surely have made for an inflammable situation. Florrie too, was succumbing to the advances of her musician, and wore a dreamy look when she came in from dates. And even Bunny made no secret of entertaining Lieutenant Teddy in her flat at all hours of the night. Bunny might have a low sex-drive but Teddy Canavan most certainly had not!
Apart from Kay’s friends, there were at least another dozen hostesses she regularly flew with who were in various stages of courtship and from all they let drop, shared sexually titillating experiences. Yet apparently they emerged unscathed. She was reminded of a recent Rome overnight when her co-hostess had retired to her bedroom with the First Officer leaving her to wonder if they were merely sharing a nightcap? And there had been Emer on her first
London overnight remaining on in her wet swimsuit with Captain Cooney. Had that situation been as provocative as it seemed and how far had the pair of them gone? In fact, how far did any of them go?
She sighed. It was a subject no one ever talked openly about but it would seem as though they were all playing with fire. Not for the first time Kay wished she had someone she could confide in. Once she would have sworn that that person would be Sally but since training they seemed to have drifted apart. Anyway, censorious in their discussions about men and sex, Sally often exhibited scorn at the foolishness of hostesses who gave all for love. What she would think of Kay, about to do the same, wasn’t difficult to imagine.
The two women opposite were called and went off together making Kay wonder if they shared a similar problem, or if one was there to give the other moral support. She smiled wryly. She could have done with a bit of moral support herself.
Did a person have to be actually married, she wondered, to get more than just advice? If so, she decided to say she was heavily engaged to a very demanding man. She moved her mother’s gold and ruby ring to her engagement finger, and felt a sudden guilty twinge. Somehow up to this it hadn’t seemed wrong to love Graham despite the fact he belonged to another, but now to be deliberately planning to make herself sexually available to him struck her as not sensible and modern after all but the kind of behaviour she had always scorned in the past as cheap and scheming.
To give all for love at the moment of ecstasy was romantic, even noble, so Kay had always believed, but now this calculated plotting became suddenly repellent to her. She blushed at the thought of what Molly would say if she could see her. Or Dave! Somehow unbidden, he came into her mind, causing her an even deeper blush of agitation. She half rose in her seat with some notion of escaping while she could, only to find her way barred by the white-coated receptionist.
‘Doctor will see you now, Miss Fagan.’
Kay had forgotten she had used Bunny’s name to cover her traces. She got slowly to her feet and followed the woman into a little room off the hall where she answered the questions put to her by the nurse in halting, embarrassed gulps. Supposing any of this ever got out, she thought, breaking out in a sweat as the fleshy hand jotted down all the clinical details of her life. Measles, whooping cough - then advancing to the more intimate - when was your last period and the last time you made love?
Questions over, the nurse picked up the pink and grey plastic model and casually snapped it in two revealing that it represented the female reproductive organ and vaginal entrance. A few jerky movements had it back together again and next it was the turn of the rubbery thing in bright, chewing gum pink to be forced up the grey tunnel.
Kay stared in fascinated horror as the nurse squeezed the rubber efficiently up and down the vaginal entrance, capping the cone at the top every time, while keeping up a running commentary - Kay had difficulty taking this in - about some kind of gel which effectively killed off sperm.
‘Here you are. Try it yourself. But you’ll find it easier if you try it on the model first,’ the nurse advised.
Mother of God! She surely wasn’t expecting her to poke that thing into herself! Unconsciously Kay tightened her legs feeling a little faint. She had never even used tampons and wouldn’t have known what to do with one if it was the only thing between herself and the great flood. She shuddered. If anything was ever calculated to put her off sex for life, it was this clinical monkeying about with what her cousin Sam would call her precious parts.
‘Isn’t there some kind of tablet you can give me?’ she asked desperately.
Apart from anything else she would have to be no longer a virgin to use what the nurse was advocating. In her eagerness to be thought a sophisticate, Kay had omitted to state that in her busy sex life with her demanding lover he had not as yet deflowered her. What too about the flipping first time, she couldn’t help wondering as she remembered the posters outside.
‘Yes... there is the Pill,’ the nurse answered. ‘We’ll see what the doctor has to say about that.’
The doctor, another woman, agreed to give Kay six months supply of the magic pill with instructions to come back if she had any problems. Beyond asking a few questions about whether or not there was any family history of cardiovascular disease, she had probed no further. ‘Be sure to use an alternative reliable method for the first month,’ was her last somewhat bewildering remark.
Clutching her loot Kay escaped and headed for the tube station, convinced that everyone must know that a time bomb she carried. She took her seat in the train feeling mentally exhausted. So far so good, she thought. But she realised the hardest part was yet to come. It was one thing to flout convention, another to put the whole thing to use.
When she returned home Kay looked in her bedroom for a safe place to hide the contraceptive. Six months supply was bulky enough and she soon rejected the dressing-table and the other obvious places as too dangerous. There was no knowing when her aunt might come rummaging for face cream, or when Peg would take it into her head to embark on one of her erratic clean ups.
Suddenly she hit upon the brilliant idea of hiding them in Graham’s furry white bear. Pendy doubled as a nightdress case and it seemed fitting that he should be guardian of his master’s pleasure. It was a task not unworthy of Cerberus, Kay decided with a delighted grin, and lest a rustling Pendy might attract attention, she took the precaution of wrapping the packet in a shortie nightie. Then, satisfied that the very slight swelling of the waistless body was the only indication of the hidden treasure, she gently laid him back on her pillow, and went cheerfully along to Florrie’s room to give her an edited version of her trip to London.