Emma

Charlotte had gradually drifted away from Emma’s bed, and was now spending far more time with Josephine who had by virtue of her steadfastness and reliability displaced the more demanding Emma from primacy in her affections. Quite often these days, Charlotte and Josephine would spend their evenings together in Josephine’s pleasant one-bedroom flat amongst all the fluffy toys and cushions. She found so much more pleasure from just resting in Josephine’s arms without the demands for passionate love made on her by Maisie and, on occasion, Emma. The one who most felt put out by the consolidation of Charlotte’s emotions and her more frequent absences was Susan, who, much more often now, lost the optimism and self-confidence she carried around with her. She remained loyal to the flat, even when Charlotte was away, seduced by Maisie’s affection for her and the hope that at some stage Charlotte’s love would drift more solidly her way.

Emma was still Charlotte’s closest friend: an honorary title the two of them felt imperative to maintain although they recognised (belatedly in Charlotte’s case) that they were not to be the closest of lovers. It was in this capacity that Charlotte felt obliged to take time off work to give Emma and Maisie as much moral support as possible on the first screening for the new television program that Emma, was for the first time, to be presenter. The news of it when excitedly announced by Maisie, the co-presenter, had rather surprised Charlotte. At no stage in the throes of passion or in the depths of her relationship with Harriett or any other time had Emma ever expressed any interest in appearing in front of the screen on a regular basis. Especially not in a position which Maisie proudly boasted would involve having sex with quite a few guests and interviewees. Indeed, she had far more often expressed her deepest revulsion at the very suggestion of this. This previous attitude seemed very consistent with Emma’s reluctance to discuss her television career or even the nature of the programme she was to present.

At first, Charlotte assumed that the main attraction was the substantially increased income she’d get, but Emma didn’t even discuss what she’d do with all the money she’d be banking. It was a mystery to her why Emma should do such a thing and Maisie’s own irrepressible chat on the subject really gave no clue as to her motive. Neither did Josephine nor Susan seem to have much idea. Susan characteristically merely wondered why she’d waited so long, while Josephine’s most authoritative opinion was expressed by a shrug of her naked shoulders. Whatever the motive, Emma seemed very much more grateful to Charlotte for her expression of moral support than she’d imagined (having quite imagined that Emma would have expressly forbidden it).

The television offices were not as welcoming a place as Charlotte had imagined, when she arrived with Emma and Maisie and hurried along the corridors with them. She had chosen to go nude as that was the way that Emma always went to work, but having worked in a supportive naturist environment for so long she was quite unprepared for the lecherous stares of the men they passed by en route to where the filming was to take place. Emma found Charlotte a comfortable chair to sit in to wait in the film studio, while she and Maisie got prepared in the make-up rooms. Charlotte sighed to herself as she watched the naked body of her friend wind through the television cameras, cables and lights to catch up with Maisie who was indolently kicking the wall with her expensive trainers, the only clothes she ever wore these days.

The studio was a very cluttered space, full of mysterious equipment and men and women who were handling it. In the centre of it all, and looking bizarrely homely, was an open space in which there was a very large bed and a very voluminous sofa. Behind the furniture and the dangling recording paraphernalia was a colourful backdrop with the programme’s title

Sex and Sensibility

displayed in a restrained style at relevant points. When Maisie had originally mentioned the name Charlotte had assumed that the programme was to be a sex dramatisation of a famous Jane Austen novel, but she came to realise that the programme had pretensions to being a serious series reviewing sex issues in modern society: an identity which caused Emma to laugh in a hollow sardonic way. Charlotte sat patiently, ignoring the stares of the studio technicians by burying her head in the newspaper she’d brought along with her.

Finally, the filming was due to start, at which point the studio became less full of the technicians with tape and screwdrivers, and more full of camera operators, sound recordists and finally a group of non-technical people who sat in the much more comfortable chairs next to her. Emma sat next to her where she silently and gratefully took Charlotte’s hand in hers and gripped it tightly for as much comfort as it could give. Maisie stood to one side where she chatted idly to a boy not much older than her. Except for the three of them, everyone was fully clothed and indeed the make-up applied to Emma’s skin and face made her feel even more naked in comparison.

The object of this filming was to organise the backdrop to the credits at the beginning and end of each programme that unsurprisingly would feature the two co-presenters, Emma and Maisie, making love to each other. The entire exercise (which would take several hours) would be to film the two of them indulging in explicit sex against various backdrops, using various props and indulging in innumerable variations. The director seemed to believe that credits featuring such an intimate relationship in such full detail would somehow be sensitively appropriate to a series that sought to dispel many of the myths and misconceptions surrounding certain taboo sexual activities. Emma’s own sardonic opinion was that it would just make the programme look like every other sex programme, with just a little more pandering for the more obscure sexual predilection.

Charlotte had often seen Emma and Maisie making love, and indeed on occasion she’d even been persuaded to film them together on the home video-recorder, but it was quite a different matter to see the two of them flood-lit under such an intimidating array of bright lights surrounded by men and women she’d never seen before, occasionally taking instruction from prompts flashed to her on auto cues. The exercise seemed to be rather bereft of intimacy despite the quite obvious fact that the two lovers were enmeshed in their lovemaking now as least as much as at any other time. Of the two of them, it was clearly Emma who was the most anxious and nervous, with Maisie taking the upper hand in directing her older lover’s attentions. And it was Maisie indeed who was first to make use of the dildo provided and use that to enter Emma’s cunt while a studio cameraman positioned himself on the stage to get a close view of the action while the girl pushed her slim figure backwards and forwards between Emma’s legs.

After a while, perhaps nearly half an hour, Emma became rather less nervous in her rôle and Charlotte herself breathed more easily as her lovemaking became much more relaxed. There was a more comfortable flow of her movements, becoming more like that of Maisie’s, culminating after a few minutes in the first of the many orgasms of the session. These orgasms to which Charlotte was now rather accustomed at home, where it forever punctuated the mass of female lovemaking, seemed to excite the previously morose director who started making notes in a hard-backed notebook.

Eventually, the two girls had exhausted all the possibilities of location, prop and activity that were offered to them, and the session came to an anticlimactic end with the technicians dispersing, Emma rushing off to the make-up room and Maisie chatted idly to the director and some of those around him. Charlotte was relieved for Maisie’s sake that she hadn’t resorted to her more violent sexual behaviour and the two came out with only the bruises of prolonged grinding groins and the accidental scratches of finger-nails.

Charlotte sat waiting for Emma wondering not just how the hours of videotape would be edited down to the two or three minutes of credits for which they were filmed, but how much Emma’s new career would change her. She felt convinced that having such public sex for the first time was akin to when she’d lost her virginity. Now that this barrier was broached she would deal in a different world of references. She also wondered how Emma really felt about her experience. She clearly enjoyed making love to Maisie (her love for the girl was clearly both deep and sincere) but how much pleasure, if any, did she get from making love for the camera? And in turn for an audience of innumerable people she’d never known and would never meet.

It was inevitable for a programme with presenters like Emma and Maisie such as

Sex and Sensibility

that the first edition should feature an interview with Delia Cook. As one of the researchers commented when given the brief to organise the interview, it was not so much an interview with Delia Cook as “yet another interview”. The principal difference in this interview, Emma was not so pleased to find out was that not only would there be sex between her and the stout authoress, but her beloved co-presenter would be expected to indulge in sex with one or other of the Delia Cook’s children. However, having been a keen researcher for so many years, she prepared herself for the interview by re-reading

The Intimate Youth

amongst all the other literature that she was given.

Part of her homework was to watch videos of previous interviews Delia Cook had given so to examine her previous sexual activities on the screen. Except for her relative bulk, her interviewee was quite the same as any sex star ever interviewed with the same unlikely stamina and predilection for all sex. To meet her in the flesh, however, was quite different as Emma was to find when she, Maisie and a small film crew arrived at the authoress’s very grand house in the outer suburbs of the city.

The Delia Cook who opened the door to her naked guests was naked herself with the complete tan of someone who rarely rests partly dressed in the sun. Other than that, she seemed much more an ordinary person than Emma expected. She certainly couldn’t be described as particularly beautiful. Away from the glare of the camera she seemed to have lost much of her charisma. She invited the two girls and the two members of the film crew into her very homely living room, chatting all the time about their journey there and the weather. In the same room, sitting on an armchair, wearing a tee-shirt and shorts was a young girl a couple of years older than Maisie whom Emma immediately recognised as Jennifer from the photographs in Delia Cook’s book. She didn’t jump up when everyone came in, but looked at the crew with some curiosity while fiddling with a piece of squidgy plastic in her hands.

“Say hello to these people, Jenny,” ordered Delia Cook kindly. “You don’t want them to think you’re rude.” The girl sullenly greeted them and returned her eyes to her lump of plastic. “You must forgive my daughter,” the mother continued to everyone. “She’s actually quite thrilled. She’ll never have been on television in such a starring rôle before. Indeed, before your fabulous new show there just weren’t any programmes which would be willing to film her in any kind of action. And don’t worry, Emma dear, I’ve heard about your tastes. Neither my husband or son have been invited into this film session; although my son in particular was ever so keen to get to know the lovely Maisie that much better!”

The talk aspect of the interview was to actually occupy rather less than a quarter of the half-hour programme, but Delia’s replies to Emma and Maisie’s questions were very full and practised, providing detailed accounts of the sexual adventures she and her family had had, peppered with very homely and sensible advice regarding the less glamorous health and safety aspects of the practices she advocated. Emma was pleased to see that Maisie asked her questions with a maturity and confidence which made her seem much older than she was. She was just as capable as Emma to elaborate on her questions and to ask other questions that led on naturally from previous ones. It seemed such a shame, Emma reflected, that so many of Maisie’s questions and answers would end up on the cutting room floor.

As part of the interview, and as a kind of novelty item to signpost the kind of serious and sensible series

Sex and Sensibility

was to be, Delia Cook gave advice to Emma and Maisie about certain sexual behaviour appropriate to a couple such as them. She positioned the two lovers physically with her podgy hands and demonstrated in great detail, to Emma, the camera crew and ultimately millions of viewers, aspects of Maisie’s vagina that few would suspect and that Emma had uncritically enjoyed. In the process, Delia squeezed and stroked and tweaked it in a way that she clearly found very stimulating. Then with what seemed practised grace, Delia guided the activity into much more physical love-making.

The transition from aural to sexual intercourse had clearly taken the film crew by surprise, as they anxiously jostled into the appropriate positions with the appropriate selection of camera and audio equipment, as Emma started licking around the exterior of Maisie’s cunt, allowing almost all her tongue on occasion to delve inside its opening. Then Delia herself joined in, taking control of both Maisie’s clitoris and Emma’s anus as it stuck out behind her.

“Come on, Jenny!” her mother cajoled her daughter who with very no more prompting pulled off her tee-shirt to reveal by the small bush of fluffy hair underneath that she’d already taken off her knickers. She paraded self-consciously in front of the inquisitive glare of the camera, before joining her mother and Emma in stimulating Maisie’s crotch. She was a little older than the photographs in Delia Cook’s book, and consequently had a more mature body, with prominent breasts and the suggestion that she might not remain slim all her life. She soon directed her lips away from Maisie’s crotch, following Emma’s busy tongue into her mouth and soon the two of them were making love separately from Delia and Maisie.

Throughout the rest of the lovemaking in this interview, Emma got the distinct impression that it was Delia who was actually directing the activity rather than herself, the supposed presenter and interviewer. It was Delia who ensured that Emma had explicit sex with her daughter - including anal and vaginal penetration with vegetables and dildos. It was she who persuaded Jennifer to have more sex with Maisie and rather less with Emma (which she seemed to prefer). It was she who sensed Emma’s discomfort in the role of sex interviewer to ensure that she was allowed to escape from the constant gaze of the camera and sit with Delia or Maisie to watch the activity from a distance.

It was also she who, when Emma and Maisie felt exhausted with the lovemaking, persuaded the camera crew to accompany her daughter and herself to another room where they could film more sex , only this time with the male members of the Cook family. She had clearly assessed Emma as someone who didn’t particularly enjoy the sight and suggestion of male sexuality. She had also realised that although Maisie was one who would be quite enthusiastic about being fucked by her son, Kevin, or her husband, it would be an activity which would be more likely to upset Emma. She had also realised that it was best to allow

Sex and Sensibility

to film exactly what they wanted.

Emma and Maisie were left lying in a heap of sweaty naked flesh on the Cooks’ large pale blue carpet, gasping and panting with exhaustion. Droplets of salty sweat dripped off Emma’s eyebrows onto her cheeks to join a more general flow towards her mouth where she could still taste Jennifer’s vaginal juices and her mother’s saliva. She looked around at Maisie, who had stood up and was now nosing around the living room: looking at the homely framed pictures, the naked statuary and country-side scenes. And more particularly at the selection of juvenile compact discs that Jennifer had stacked by the stereo system.

“Just listen to that!” laughed Maisie pointing to the ceiling from above which passionate lovemaking could be heard. There was the thud and rattle of beds accompanied by guttural cries from both men and women. “They just don’t know how to stop!”

“No, they don’t,” admitted Emma, who, always the pragmatist, was already considering how they would edit the quite considerable material that would have been filmed today and if this meant postponing the planned item on novel Cuban birth control methods.