Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  Soon afterwards, Monty told Simon she was going to see her mother for a couple of days, was admitted into the dingy, Victorian hospital, and had his child scraped out of her body. She had spent a total of 160 guineas getting rid of the baby she wanted to have. The pain was no worse than the worst period cramps, and she put a brave face on the affair, treating it as just another adventure on the long journey to the promised land of free, true, modern love.

  Once the initial relief of not being pregnant any more had faded, she felt tired. She wanted very much to tell Cathy everything, and could hardly believe the cruelty of fate in making it impossible for her to tell either Simon or her sister, the two people who loved her most, about what she had done. Cathy was now attractively advanced in her own pregnancy, with a taut oval bulge under her maternity smocks. Her hair shone more glossily than ever, though she tied it back at the nape of her neck with a bow of navy-blue ribbon. Her complexion glowed with health and her normal air of serenity was enhanced. Monty was tortured with envy of her sister, and saw her less often because it was very painful to look at Cathy’s layette and the wicker crib decorated with ruffles of white broderie anglaise and know that her own baby no longer existed.

  The tiredness persisted; Tony the Greek always had an array of amphetamines to sell, and she started taking some speed to keep awake in the evenings. In the beginning, one little apricot tablet would keep her alert. A few weeks later, she was taking three or four of the stronger, blue tablets every night. Simon, still preoccupied with his father’s illness, hardly noticed that she was either lethargic or jittery. Swallow, however, saw that something was wrong.

  ‘Did you type this?’ she asked Monty, passing an invoice over the office. Monty looked at the address and saw that it was a meaningless jumble of letters.

  ‘Sorry, Swallow, I must have done. I’ll do it again right away.’ She rolled a sheet of paper into the battered typewriter and started to hit the keys, but her fingers would not coordinate properly. Swallow watched her.

  ‘What were you and Simon doing last night?’

  ‘Simon went to see his parents. I didn’t do much – why?’

  ‘Seen Tony the Greek lately?’

  ‘Oh c’mon, Swallow, don’t get heavy with me.’

  Swallow snorted and pushed her tousled blonde hair back with an impatient gesture. ‘I don’t know what dope you’re doing, but it’s screwing up your mind, whatever it is. I’d give it a rest, if I were you.’

  Monty knew this was good advice, and was herself concerned that her mind seemed to be falling to pieces, and her heart, instead of beating steadily, seemed to be trying to flip, flop and fly inside her chest. She decided to stop using speed, and threw all the multi-coloured amphetamine tablets in the apartment down the lavatory.

  Immediately, she crashed into the worst depression of her life. This time she was too anguished to cry. Instead she sat for hours when she was on her own, feeling abandoned and so lonely and unlovable that she wanted to die. But she was also convinced that she was too weak and ineffectual to kill herself, and so remained marooned in complete misery.

  This time Simon came to her rescue, and insisted that she tell the doctor that she was ill.

  ‘But I’m not ill,’ she protested, ‘I just feel a bit down, that’s all.’

  ‘Darling, you are ill and I’m sure the doctor can give you something,’ he insisted, holding her tenderly. ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

  ‘No, no,’ she protested, frightened that he would find out about the abortion. ‘I’ll go and see Dr Robert tomorrow darling, I promise.’ Simon’s so adorable and kind, she thought, I don’t deserve him.

  Swallow’s Dr Robert preferred consultations in the bar of the local pub, and dispensed his medicines from a large wooden chest in the back of his car. ‘The depression’s just a reaction to coming off the speed,’ he said briskly, counting out some red-and-white capsules into a container. ‘These will take care of that. Then if you’re still feeling a bit shaky, take these – Mother’s Little Helper, known as Librium in the trade.’ He tipped a handful of green and brown capsules into another bottle. ‘But don’t do any fun drugs while you’re taking these, or you’ll get some pretty weird reactions. Now what contraception are you using?’

  Monty showed him the pills she had taken when she moved into Simon’s apartment, which she had just begun to use again.

  ‘Ovulen!’ he said with disgust. ‘No wonder you went off your rocker. There’s enough in them to suppress ovulation in a sperm whale. See how you get on with these – they’ve just brought them out.’ Over the beer-stained table he tossed three green packets with another name on them.

  The red-and-white capsules immediately made her feel better, but when they were finished Monty felt as if her nerves were as taut as guitar strings. She was snappy with Simon and rude to Swallow’s clients, and so she decided to take the Librium capsules to calm herself. Immediately she felt normal – at least, she thought she felt normal; it was so long since she had started taking substances which made her feel different that she could not exactly remember how it felt to be normal.

  Simon’s father was discharged from hospital and made a good recovery from his heart attack. Simon paid Monty more attention, and took the doctor’s warnings about mixing drugs so seriously that he stopped smoking marijuana himself.

  ‘If you smell it in the apartment you’ll just want some. I’m not going to lead you into temptation,’ he said, stroking her hair. ‘From now on I’m smoking straights until you’re really OK.’

  ‘But won’t you miss it?’ She wound her arms around his waist, noticing that all the meals he had eaten at his parents’home recently had made him plumper. ‘Why don’t I try to make some hash fudge? Then you can just have a little nibble now and then.’

  He agreed, and on Saturday, while Simon was out, Monty ground some grass to powder in the coffee mill and shook it into a pan of hot chocolate fudge mixture. She tipped the fragrant sludge into a tray to cool, scraped out the saucepan and licked the spoon. The taste was both bitter and sickly, and she pulled a face. She added some cream, and tasted it again; it was blander but still not very appetizing. A slug of brandy finally made the flavour acceptable. Then, with a couple of hours to kill, Monty left the fudge to set and took a taxi to Knightsbridge to cruise around the shops.

  Half an hour later she was standing in the cool marble cavern of the butcher’s department in Harrods, choosing some steak for their supper, when the smell of meat became so strong that she felt sick. Quickly she walked away into the next hall. This was the fish department: the stink of fish was so vile that Monty began to retch.

  She hurried towards the exit from the store, but felt as if the crowds of people were going to crush her. She retreated on legs that felt as if they were made of sponge, and blundered into the cheese department, where the noise of thousands of shopper’s feet clattering on the tiles was deafening. The uniformed floorwalker gave her a hostile look and Monty knew at once that he was going to arrest her for shoplifting and have her ignominiously thrown into the street. He strode towards her with a threatening expression and Monty struggled away from him through the crowds. She half-ran into the flower hall, and hid herself, trembling, behind a line of potted palms, until he had passed.

  Despite her deranged senses, part of her mind was working logically. She remembered tasting the hash fudge, licking the spoon clean two or three times. There must have been more grass in that mixture than I thought, she told herself. Now it’s reacting with the Librium. This is what Dr Robert warned me would happen.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw a pool of gleaming red liquid spreading across the floor from the archway to the meat department. It was blood. She could smell it now. Resolutely, Monty turned to face the archway and willed herself to see that there was nothing there. It’s a hallucination, she told herself. As soon as she turned back, she knew that the ghastly tide of blood was rising again and felt full of dread. Desperate to make her mind behave,
she shook her head violently.

  ‘Monty! Whatever’s the matter?’

  Feeling a colossal wave of relief, Monty flung herself into Cathy’s arms. She was safe at last. Peering into Cathy’s eyes through a chemical fog, she pleaded:

  ‘Take me away, Cathy, I don’t feel very well. I need to lie down somewhere. Please take me out of here.’

  Cathy took her firmly by the arm and they walked together out of the store and took a cab to Royal Avenue, where Monty lay down in a dim bedroom with the curtains closed until, four hours later, the effect of the drug cocktail subsided. What remained was an overpowering desire to talk.

  ‘What is it – what made you ill, Monty?’ Cathy sat heavily on the end of the bed and stroked her sister’s feet in their striped Biba pantyhose.

  ‘It was an accident,’ Monty explained. ‘I ate some dope I was using to make fudge for Simon, and it reacted with some tranquillizers the doctor gave me. Thank heaven you saw me.’ She giggled, still feeling strange. ‘I was seeing all kinds of crazy things.’

  Cathy eyed her sister with concern. ‘What did you need tranquillizers for?’

  Monty said nothing, but the truth was burning in her head like a fire behind a door. ‘Come on,’ Cathy persisted. ‘You can tell me, whatever it is. It’s OK.’

  Monty took a deep breath and started to speak, avoiding her sister’s eyes. ‘I got pregnant, Cathy, and I got rid of it; I had to, Simon’s father was ill and he was under so much strain I couldn’t bear to add to his problems and Rosanna said that if we got married he’d be dead to his family.’

  ‘But why ever didn’t you tell me?’ Cathy’s voice was full of wholehearted sympathy.

  ‘I couldn’t, Cathy – how could I? You’d have disapproved, I know you would.’

  ‘No I wouldn’t, you know I wouldn’t. Oh, poor Monty, how awful for you. And I was chattering on about my baby – you must have felt terrible.’

  Monty felt tears forming in her eyes. ‘I thought it would be all over, and I wouldn’t feel anything, like having a tooth out, that’s all. I didn’t realize I’d feel so bad.’

  Because she herself was carrying a child, Cathy knew exactly how powerful were the emotions which her sister had tried to deny.

  Monty looked closely at her sister, noticing that the bloom of pregnancy had faded a little and there were violet shadows under her eyes. Monty blinked to make sure of what she was seeing: under the serene sweep of her black eyebrows, Cathy’s deep eye-sockets were tinted an unattractive yellowish green, and there were dark red contusions around her slightly swollen eyes. Saying nothing, Monty touched her sister’s bruised face.

  ‘Did Charlie do that?’

  Cathy nodded. ‘We had a row. It was my fault, I provoked him.’

  Monty’s broad upper lip curled momentarily with contempt but she checked herself from criticizing her sister’s husband and simply reached forward to hug Cathy.

  ‘Life isn’t too great for either of us, is it?’

  ‘Things aren’t how I expected them to be,’ Cathy admitted.

  ‘The worst thing was not being able to tell you,’ Monty said. ‘I felt as if having to keep the secret was pushing you away, somehow.’

  ‘Well, don’t do it again,’ Cathy said, with mock primness. ‘No more secrets in this family.’

  They spent a few more hours with each other, feeling immeasurably secure just because they were together. When Monty left she kissed her sister warmly, and said, ‘You’ve always got a home with us, you know, if anything … happened.’ She walked backwards down the street, seeing Cathy, a rotund but still graceful figure in cornflower blue, waving from the doorway.

  For a month the only drugs Monty took were her contraceptive pills. Then she started to smoke hash again. She felt happier than she had done for some time, but not as happy as when she had first moved in with Simon. He was just as loving, kind and fascinating, but the joy was gone. Monty waited, confident that the magic would return, but the weeks went by and gradually Simon seemed to drift away from her. The secret of her abortion was dividing them, just as it had temporarily separated her from Cathy.

  Instead of seeing Simon as the most perfect person in the universe, Monty began to criticize him. ‘If you really want to be a musician you should do it,’ she said to him one day. ‘Just go in and chuck your job. Quit. Go for broke. Then you’ll have to be a success.’ She felt obscurely unhappy when he did exactly what she said, and a few days later attached himself to a group of boys whose second-rate band occasionally opened evenings at the Speakeasy, one of the clubs they frequented.

  ‘They’re pathetic,’ she said, ‘they’re only hanging round you because they know you’ve got money and connections.’

  ‘Well, that’s as good a reason as any,’ Simon replied. ‘At least, they’re smart enough to know what I can be useful for, instead of writing me off as some rich kid amusing himself with a guitar.’

  There were four of them: Rick the singer, who also played lead guitar, Cy and Pete on rhythm and bass, and a drummer whom Monty disliked most of all.

  ‘He smells,’ she complained, ‘and he’s out of time.’

  ‘All he needs is more rehearsals,’ Simon told her.

  ‘All he needs is a lobotomy,’ Monty rejoined. Before long they all agreed with her.

  ‘I’ll put the word out,’ Rick said with finality. ‘There’s a couple of blokes I know might be interested.’ He was a slim, square-shouldered kid with thick brown hair that bounced in tight ringlets to his shoulders. Monty rather liked him. Although he was no older than she was, he had a sinewy maturity which made Simon appear callow and over-privileged in comparison. ‘’Ullo, darlin’, ’ow’re yer doin’’ was Rick’s standard greeting, an amiable exaggeration of his rough accent.

  Before long they were approached by a man called Nasher who played with a jazz-oriented group from Newcastle which had been struggling round the circuit of small clubs and pubs that now lay ahead of them. Nasher was in his late twenties, with a square jaw and a face whose expression seldom changed.

  ‘If I joined you, we’d be the best fuckin’rock’n’roll band in the world,’ he announced in his sing-song Tyneside accent.

  ‘I like a modest bloke, myself,’ Rick approved.

  ‘There’ll be A & R men coming out of the woodwork to sign us,’ Nasher told him.

  ‘And besides,’ Pete, always the practical one, scraped a thumbnail down his two-days’growth of stubble, ‘your lead singer’s wrecking himself on speed. He’ll be a basket case in six months. You want a clean-living mob like us.’

  ‘We aim to make a lot of bread and stay alive long enough to count it.’ Cy gave the group his most satanic leer. With his lank black hair and hollow cheeks he already looked like a zombie, although his peculiar green eyes gleamed with vitality.

  Nasher joined them. Simon bought him a new drum kit for £70; and spent almost £1,000 on clothes and stage equipment, including two amplifiers that were bigger than anything a band of their modest stature had ever used before.

  ‘What are we going to call ourselves, then?’ Nasher demanded one evening. Now, instead of going to a smart nightclub every night, Monty and Simon spent their evenings in pubs with the band, mostly the corner pub on the ragged fringes of Chelsea near the house where Rick, Cy and Pete lived.

  ‘What’s wrong with the name we’ve got, the Beat Machine?’ Simon distributed the brimming beers around the ringmarked table with care.

  ‘Don’t like it.’ Nasher looked meaningfully over the rim of his glass. He had the most experience as a working musician, and his word carried weight.

  ‘Nah – we’ve gone off it, ’ n’ all.’ Cy and Rick, friends since childhood, always voted together on band policy.

  ‘We’re a different outfit now we’ve got Nasher – and Simon. When people book us they ought to know it’s not the same old Beat Machine, but something better.’ Pete handled the bookings. He was the one with a job; he was a clerk in a big engineering company and ha
d access to a telephone.

  ‘Yeah, you’re right, we need a new name.’ Simon took a small sip from his pint. Beer was not to his taste, but to drink anything else would have been unthinkable. Beer was what the boys drank, so Simon drank it too. ‘How about Raw Silk?’

  ‘How about a smack in the kisser?’ Cy bared his grey teeth with contempt.

  ‘Atomic Yo-Yo?’ Monty put in, claiming the chick’s privilege to be dumb.

  ‘Atomic’s nice, I like Atomic.’ Pete nodded.

  ‘Atomic Pigeon?’

  ‘Atomic Rain?’

  ‘How about the Fall Out?’

  ‘Atomic Fireball?’

  ‘Maybe something like the Explosion?’ Simon was almost bouncing in his seat with enthusiasm.

  ‘Shaddup, Simon,’ Rick told him kindly. ‘We got the balls, you got the juice, remember?’

  ‘Juice.’ Cy’s speckled eyes glittered.

  ‘I like it,’ Nasher considered, his head on one side. ‘A little bit rude, short, look great on the van.’

  ‘And on a poster,’ said Pete.

  ‘Right, that’s it. The Juice.’ Rick looked round the table and saw agreement. He raised his glass. ‘God bless her and all who sail in her.’

  ‘One more thing.’ Nasher put his empty glass down with satisfaction. ‘We ain’t got a van.’ This was important. They needed a van to take their mountain of new equipment on the road. All eyes were on Simon.

  ‘I’ll buy a van,’ he promised, ‘and we can find someone to do one of those far-out paint jobs on it.’ Since his legacy had been spent at a rate which was beginning to alarm him, Simon decided to sell his Aston Martin in order to buy the van. It was more of a gesture towards thrift than anything else, since more than half his grandmother’s money still lay untouched in the bank.