PAINTERS
Painters dress well, and have very nice handwriting. But don’t be fooled by that line about only seeing you as a beautiful form not as a sexual object. It’s the easiest way I know to get a woman to remove her clothes.
I think on the whole those involved in the arts make the best lovers, for they have more imagination, more ability to cater for your fantasies, and a bigger repertoire. Most of them have a kind of feline, slightly feminine mind—pure heaven from start to fetish. But don’t expect fidelity. Art has very little to do with morals.
ADVERTISING MEN
Most of their time is spent making presentations or discussing whether they should insert their eight-inch single column more than three times a week. They dress very well, if somewhat uniformly—navy blue suit, pink shirt—and are generally doused in free sample scent. When you meet them at parties, they say: “Actually I’m in advertising,” in a very apologetic way, because au fond they feel they ought to get out and do something worth-while like writing unprofitably, or painting unsellably. Nearly all of them have unsold novels in their bottom drawers and most of them live in Fulham. They have hearts with natural breaks in them.
Stages of Man
NOW LEAVING THE professions we move on to some of the stages of man.
YOUTHS (See Schoolboys or Students)
“But of course there’s nothing wrong with you, Adrian darling—I just can’t stand red hair …”
In my youth, youths used to breathe heavily, say thank you three times if you gave them a cigarette, open the matchbox upside down so that the matches cascaded onto the floor, and finally knock over the ashtray.
Today youths are extremely cool, have lean and hungry pelvises and hip measurements in single figures. They often marry at seventeen and refer to their father-in-law as ‘baby’. They don’t talk if they don’t feel like it, but this is probably because in the places they frequent, the music is so loud as to make conversation impossible. They wear clothes, which disconcert their elders, including tight jeans to emphasise a bulging crotch. They spend most of their time strumming on guitars or trendy-looking girls who look as though they’ve just crawled out from underneath a rolling stone. Secretly these girls will worry about tight jeans making a man impotent.
STUDENTS (See Airmen)
OLDER MEN
Peter Pan and Trendy.
It has always seemed unfair to me that no one bats an eyelid if a man goes out with a girl thirty years younger than he is, but everyone starts prophesying doom and desertion if a woman shacks up with a man even three years younger than herself. A woman left by her husband when she is forty either faces living alone or has to break up someone else’s marriage if she’s going to get married again, whereas a forty-year-old divorced man can have a ball with any dolly he chooses.
As a result the world is now full of seventy-year-old ravers, locks clustering over the collars of their shirts, sideboards laddering their artificially tanned cheeks, and fifty-year-old ton-up boys, forcing themselves into tight jeans, brushing their thinning hair forward, and touching up the grey roots of their jet-black Viva Zapata moustaches. In the evening they wear sawn-off kaftans to hide their pot bellies.
In an attempt to keep up, they exhaust themselves going on vegetarian diets, giving up drink, and dancing all night in discothèques, then going round with grey faces saying they feel twenty years younger. In trying to be Peter Pan, they look more like petered-out pansies.
They also embrace all the phoney mysticism that surrounds smoking pot, and at parties they can be seen going furtively into back rooms and tearing cigarettes apart. Later they gaze into young girls’ eyes and say: “My dear, you’ve made an old man very hippy.”
Dolly birds like them—because it gives them kudos in the typing pool to be going out with an older man. Older men can also take them to trendy restaurants younger men can’t afford, and are said to be ‘experienced’ sexually. (I shudder to think what rubbish is dished up in the name of experience.) They also take them occasionally for dirty weekends at a Truss House in Hernia Bay.
FIANCÉS
Fiancés are out of date and not getting it. If pressed they will say: “My fiancée and I have slept together all night in the same bed, but we haven’t actually slept together.” Fiancées never give their fiancés their all—only about seven-eighths.
“Oh for heaven’s sake, Harriet …”
Fiancés have soft curly hair, pink faces from permanently blushing at their predicament, starry eyes, and a mosaic of scarlet lipstick on their downy cheeks from having been embraced by so many new aunts-in-law.
They also manage to appear vacant and engaged at the same time by having a far away abstracted expression on their faces. People naturally assume they are dreaming of the moment when they and their betrothed will be one flesh; actually they are completely shell-shocked by all the talk about soft furnishing and wedding-present lists.
Caught off guard, they have a trapped expression.
As one fiancé said, just before his wedding: “I feel as though I’m going into hospital for a major operation and all the anaesthetists are on strike.”
On their desks they have photographs of their fiancées given them by their fiancées, looking mistily soppy in pearls.
BACHELORS
Bachelors begin at thirty-six. Up till this age they are regarded as single men. Most of them are very tidy, smell of mothballs, and have an obsessional old maid’s fix about one of their ashtrays being moved an inch to the right. Because they are not married, or living with a woman, they don’t feel the need to bath very often. Occasionally they have a shower after cricket and pinch their married friends’ towels. They can be recognised by their white underpants. (Married men have pale blue or pink-streaked underpants, because one of their wife’s scarves has run in the washing machine.)
Bachelors dread Christmas because they’ve got so many god-children to remember, and have a very high threshold of boredom through enduring so many grisly evenings with awful girls thrust on them by their married friends.
By way of revenge, they spend a great deal of time sponging off their married friends, turning up for lunch on Sunday and not leaving until the Epilogue, and knocking their disgusting pipes out on the carpet so that they get a chance to look up the wife’s skirt when she bends over to sweep up the mess.
They also get wildly irritated by their friends’ children, cast venomous glances at a two-year-old, and say: “Isn’t it time he went to prep school?”
A married man often rings up his bachelor friend and after a lot of humming and hawing asks if he can borrow the flat to ‘change in’ that afternoon. When the bachelor gets home in the evening, he often finds various bits of female underclothing, and his bed has been far more tidily made than he left it that morning.
Married friends are also inclined to turn up with whisky bottles, having been locked out by their wives, and spend all night berating the matrimonial state.
It is hardly surprising that although a lot of bachelors would like to get married, they cannot bring themselves to take the plunge—like bathing on Christmas Day.