about seven-eighths.
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Fiances 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 fiance 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 fiancees given them by their fiancees, 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.
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Bachelors can mostly be divided into the following categories:
GAY BACHELORS (See Fairies and Airmen)
ELIGIBLE BACHELORS
They have three address books, and an ejector seat for getting girls out of their flats in the morning. They never have any free evenings because they are constantly being asked out to dinner by designing mums or married women for their divorced girl friends.
MOTHER’S BOYS
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They wear scarves, berets, long macintoshes, galoshes and often work for the White Fish Authority. They always wash apples before they eat them and suffer from hypochondria. When they say they have relations all the time, they don’t mean sexual ones, only that they live at home with their mother and sisters.
They have hot milk with skin on it before they go to bed, and read the Lesson on Sunday. People often say they need the love of a good woman, but what they need is the love of a really bad woman to get them off the hook.
They wear camel-hair dressing gowns and grey striped pyjamas. Penalty for pulling the cord is disillusionment.
MARRIED MEN
Married men mostly chat up girls to bolster their self-respect and prove they haven’t lost their touch. They are more likely to flash photographs of their children at you than anything else. Although they may claim they’re unhappily married and carry on something shocking at parties, they seldom leave their wives for other men.
The confirmed adulterer usually operates from a position of strength: “I’m very much in love with Jennifer, you know. I wouldn’t do anything to endanger my marriage, and little Gideon and Samantha mean everything to me.”
When you ask if his wife ever gets up to tricks, knowing from the gripevine that she does, he shakes his head smugly and says: “Oh no, Jennifer never looks at another man.” (Presumably she does it with her eyes shut.)
I think married people should only have affaires with other married people who know the rules (a sort of: “If you don’t leave scratch marks on my back, I won’t leave scratch marks on yours”), keep the same hours and are batting from the same position of strength and weakness. There is a freemasonry about married people: they seem to feel it doesn’t matter how much they hurt the single person they got entangled with, as long as nothing is allowed to endanger the married state.
But as with older men, it gives a girl terrific kudos in the typing pool to say she’s having an affaire with a married man—everyone imagines he looks like Mr Rochester. And the hours are good too. She’ll have most evenings and all weekends free, including Easter and Christmas, to run another man.
Younger married men often have their trousers done up with a nappy pin, and black rings under their eyes, not from making love all night but from teething babies. Wedding rings are worn by men who marry foreign girls or who think other people might think they were not attractive enough to get anyone.
Married men of course vary enormously. Some are so henpecked they’re absolutely covered in beak-marks, and a burglar alarm goes off if another woman so much as shakes hands with them. Others have what are called adultery toleration pacts, which means they can go off and sleep with whom they like, as long as they tell their wives all about it afterwards. It is all a question of wife-styles.
DIVORCED MEN
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W. S. GILBERT.
It always amazes me how vitriolic divorced people are to each other. One girl friend of mine came back from work to find her drawing room piled high with dusty books. Her ex-husband had arrived and taken all the bookshelves away because he’d put them up in the first place.
Another wife stripped her house of all its possessions and moved in with her lover. Three days later there was a knock on the door: it was a special delivery of 400 gallons of water.
