Free The Hearts and Lives of Men by Fay Weldon Page A

side. Just, for the former, a toad which got injected with your urine and laid eggs and died forty-eight hours later if you were pregnant, and laid eggs and survived if you weren’t, and for the latter an illegal operation which you, like the toad, had to be lucky, or very rich, to survive.
    But of course the mere fact of worrying could so upset your cycle you never knew where you were. Oh, reader, what days! But at least then the penalty for untoward sex was a new life and not, as it can be now, a disagreeable and disgraceful death.
    Another month and Helen could not disguise from herself the fact that she was in fact and in truth pregnant, and that she didn’t want to be, and that she didn’t want Clifford to know, let alone his parents, and that to go to doctors (two were required) for a legal abortion would require more lies about how damaging to her health and sanity pregnancy would be than she—so sane and healthy—could sustain, and that she couldn’t tell her friends because she couldn’t trust them not to gossip, and her father would kill her if he knew and her mother simply commit suicide—around and around the thought flew in Helen’s head, and there was no one she could turn to for help and advice, until she thought of Angie.
    Now, reader, you may think this is no more than Helen deserved, to turn for help to a woman who bore her nothing but malice, however good—and she was very good—at disguising it Angie had so far been: giving little dinners for the handsome young couple, chatting away to Helen on the phone, recommending hairdressers and so on—but I do beg you to feel as forgiving as you can about Helen and this initial rejecting of her newly conceived child, our beloved Nell.
    Helen was young and this was her first child. She had no idea, as established mothers have, of what she would be throwing away, losing along with the bathwater. It is easier for the childless woman to contemplate the termination of a pregnancy, than for those who already have children. So, please, continue to bear with Helen. Forgive her. She will learn better with the years, I promise you.

GOING TO ANGIE FOR HELP
    H ELEN ROSE OUT OF her snowy white bed one morning, holding her pale, smooth stomach, which was in inner turmoil, and telephoned Angie.
    “Angie,” she said, “please come over. I have to talk to someone.
    Angie came over. Angie walked up the stairs and into the bedroom where she had spent four memorable if actually rather unsatisfactory nights with Clifford, in all their eleven months together. Well, not exactly together, but in the promise of—eventually—together, or so she had assumed.
    “So, what’s the matter?” Angie asked, and noticed, for Helen was feeling too ill to so much as fasten her brown silk nightie properly, that Helen’s white, full breasts were fuller than ever, almost too full, and felt for once rather proud of the chic discretion of her own, and quite confident that, if she managed this right, Clifford would eventually be hers.
    Helen didn’t reply. Helen flung herself back upon the fur bedspread and lay crumpled and disheveled but still beautiful, and wept instead of speaking.
    “It can only be one thing,” said Angie. “You’re pregnant. You don’t want to be. And you don’t dare tell Clifford.”
    Helen did not attempt to deny it. Angie was wearing red hot-pants, and Helen did not even have the spirit to marvel at Angie’s nerve, considering her legs, in so doing. Presently words formed out of tears.
    “I can’t have a baby,” wept Helen. “Not now. I’m too young. I wouldn’t know what to do with one.”
    “What any sensible person does with babies,” said Angie, “is hand them over to nannies.”
    And this, of course, in the world in which Angie moved, was just what mothers did. But for all that Helen was only twenty-two and (as we have seen) as selfish and irresponsible as any other pretty, willful girl of her age, she at least knew better than Angie in this