ilama skin rug when Jake comes into the room carrying a tray. I see his eyes widen as they travel from me to my discarded clothes and back again.
“What—”
“Don’t say anything, Jake,” I say. “Come and join me. Que sera, sera.” I never quite know what that means but I remember somebody in an old movie saying it in a similar situation.
“What about the coffee?” says Jake. He kicks over his brandy glass but luckily there is nothing in it.
“Afterwards.” I stretch out an arm and notice that the rug has slipped down to my waiSt What does it matter? In the shameless ecstasy that is to come nobody is going to care about a little nudity.
“But I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Don’t worry about me. Think about yourself for a change. I don’t mind.” I lie back on the carpet and close my eyes. Soon the great, brute animal mass of the thing will be straining inside me but I am ready for it. I grit my teeth in brave anticipation. No matter what tidal waves of lustful pleasure break through my body in long shivering spasms I will not complain.
I open my eyes and Jake has not moved. “Are you sure?” he says.
“Don’t look so worried, Jake,” I tell him. “Let it all hang out.” Perhaps I could have expressed it better but at the time I am only thinking of making Jake more relaxed. The poor man is obviously going through a period of great strain as his thoughtfulness makes him resist his natural inclinations.
“I can’t,” he says.
“Don’t be silly.” Now it is my turn to seize his hand and pull him down beside me. “I want you to do it.” I could add “for medical reasons” but of course I don’t. I have already decided that my virginity will not be threatened by an association with Jake because of the therapeutic implications of the act. It is both a practical experiment and an act of mercy.
Jake lies beside me and I drink in the smell of his aftershave lotion. Now I come to think of it I remember the advertisement he did for the stuff. Sitting naked on a white horse in the middle of a forest fire—well, it might have been mist, the reproduction was not very good. And talking of reproduction—I snuggle against Jake’s neck and send down some nervous but expectant fingers to inspect the action. Having seen his loin in repose I can imagine the terrifying hugeness of the beast when gorged and ready to spring.
“I think there was something in the wine,” groans Jake. His words coincide with my discovery of what appears to be one and a half pounds of uncooked sausages down the front of his trousers. Surely—no, it is not possible. It is not possible that it is not possible. In desperation I tug down his zip and close my fingers around what seems like a couple of feet of water-logged fire hose. I wiggle it about a bit but nothing happens. The fire is well and truly out. This is terrible! Not, of course, for any purely sexual reasons but because I will be denied the opportunity of helping someone with a problem.
“Do you think it would help to settle your stomach if you had another drop of brandy?” I say.
I wish I had not said that. I do hate to see a grown man cry.
“Brewer’s droop,” says Penny. “Nobody spiked his drink. He was too sloshed that’s all. You felt all right, didn’t you?”
“I felt fine,” I say. “But I didn’t drink as much as him.”
“Exactly. It’s rotten luck but it happens all the time. You tried the kiss of life, did you?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, blushing.
“I was afraid you mightn’t.” Penny shakes her head. “I won’t go into details, I might shock you,” she sighs. “Really, I think it’s a rotten job being a man. I wouldn’t have it if you paid me. I mean, you’ve always got to come up to scratch, haven’t you? If you’re a woman you can just lie there and make a shopping list on the ceiling but a man has got to deliver the goods. If he’s drunk too much or he’s worried about the dry rot in the attic that can present the most tremendous problems. And the poor things are starved of orgasms, you know. Two or three an hour if they’re lucky—and if you’re lucky too. I go off like a fire cracker and ‘Emancipated Woman’ says that a healthy woman can have up to twenty orgasms in a minute.”
“How do they know?” I ask. “I mean, if what you say about men is true a normal woman would get through about a hundred and twenty men in ten minutes.”
“I don’t know how they worked it out,” says Penny. “I think it was a controlled experiment in the States. They fastened electrodes to a couple and told them to make love. Everything was recorded on a seismograph or something like that.”
“I don’t like the idea of that.”
“No, it must take away a bit of the glamour, mustn’t it?”
“I never knew any of this,” I say. “I mean, about orgasms and all that.”
“It’s done more harm than good if you ask me,” sniffs Penny. “A lot of men are getting very worried. It’s bad enough when they get tiddly but when they start worrying about whether they’re going to come up to scratch, that’s even worse. Some of them get so nervous they have a drink to calm themselves down and then they’re twice as badly off. In the old days they used to get on with it without a care in the world and at least you could get something out of them. Now they’re all reading Cosmopolitan and having nervous breakdowns. The only men it’s worth going out with are illiterates—or horsemen like Mark. He never reads anything except Horse and Hound, and they haven’t got on to sex yet—at least, not for humans.”
Poor Jake, I think to myself. I never realised he had so many problems. I wish I could help him with some of them but when he dropped me at the nurses home he said that he did not think he would be able to face me again. I told him to try and keep his pecker up but he started sobbing again and drove off so fast he nearly hit an ambulance.
If the course of true love is not running smoothly for me, there are others who are more fortunate. Old Mr Chapman’s sexy daughter and Jim North the ward wit seem to have struck up an understanding which began when Sonia, that is the daughter’s name, filled up Jim’s stricken fruit bowl with some grapes her old man did not fancy. From this small beginning true love blossoms until Sonia spends more time turning round and talking to Jim than she does rabbiting to her Dad. Not that he notices a lot of difference, poor old devil. He talked to an oxygen cylinder for half an hour on Monday night.
Daily contact with this breathtaking romance is denied me because I find that my name has gone up on the board for night duty. I have been dreading this moment because I fancy staying up all night less than featuring in a marathon dance contest with General Amin. It is not only staying up all night but having to sleep during the day. I can only sleep during the day if I am supposed to be working. Five minutes from Sister Tutor on how to fix up a saline drip for a perforated ulcer and I am drifting off like it is a bedtime story. But, put me in a room with sunlight streaming through the transparent curtains and tell me to sleep and I find it impossible to shut my eyes.
It is not only the daylight. Although there are special rooms provided for Night Nurses to sleep in undisturbed these are always situated above the spot where navvies test their pneumatic drills, maids practise to be the first female town crier and the plumbing makes a noise like a depth charge attack on a submarine.
On the day I am supposed to be preparing to go on night duty, I wish I had gone to a piano smashing festival rather than try and get some sleep.
I am on night duty with a nurse called Cilla Bias and it is not until I see her name written down that I wake up to the fact that her parents could have chosen better. She is far more experienced than me—and has also done a lot more nursing. We are on Fanny Utting which as the name suggests is a women’s ward.
One good thing about