She took a deep breath. She couldn’t believe she was actually in the position of having to do this. She remembered a girl in her year at school who fell pregnant at sixteen. At least, that was the rumour when she left school so suddenly in the middle of term. The child must be around eight by now. What pity she’d felt towards the girl. And how determined – and arrogant, she admitted now – she’d been that it wouldn’t happen to herself.

‘Have you filled in the forms?’ The nurse was back.

‘Yes.’ She handed the clipboard over and the nurse put it aside. Sylvia sat in silence as the nurse took her blood pressure, and winced as a needle went into her vein to draw blood.

‘I want you to know you can change your mind at any time up until you take the first medication.’ The nurse stared at her, unsmiling. Sylvia nodded again, thought how happy her mother would be to become a grandmother again. A baby niece or nephew for her sister’s brood.

‘I’m sure,’ she mumbled. She wondered if it would be a serious, thoughtful child, like she’d been, or happy-go-lucky, like Jim.

‘You’ll need to come back for a second appointment tomorrow,’ the nurse was saying but her words had gone fuzzy, as though she was hearing them under water. She felt dizzy, nauseous. She could do this. She had every right to do this. She could erase this accidental conception and carry on down the path she intended. That’s what she should do. But sitting there on the crisp white sheets of the clinic, she understood with a flash of clarity that for reasons unfathomable to her right then and there, she wasn’t going to.

PART TWO

‘In prehistoric times cave-women needed cave-men with their superior muscles to move large stones, kill hairy beasts and carry heavy loads. But nowadays with the help of modern electronics a dainty manicured finger could launch a space-craft. It’s still nice to have a man in the kitchen to open a pickle jar now and again, but it isn’t an absolute necessity.’

From the book Making Friends with the Opposite Sex by Californian scientist Mrs Emily Coleman (Cressrelles, 1974), quoted in an article in the Liverpool Echo, 1976

APRIL 1976 London, UK

SYLVIA

It had felt natural to say yes to Jim when he’d asked her to marry him one warm summer’s afternoon on a picnic blanket overlooking the Brittany coast. It was at the end of a three-week road trip around France following her year in Paris. They’d come out of the year apart unscathed; they were still together, still in love, so when he asked her – quite unexpectedly to Sylvia’s mind – it felt natural to say yes. And that was it, they were engaged. But she never thought they’d end up tying the knot quite in this way.