I know this is perhaps not the place to say anything about club women, but dash it all, they do try my patience. For instance, most mornings I come into the club’s senior reading room accompanied by my eager mind and still-full lips. I nod to a few raised heads acknowledging my arrival, then plunge into the waiting newspapers from around the world that the club flunkies have laid out on the large wooden table that dominates the room.
However what also dominates our home of homes of late is a group of women right in the middle of the room who gaze at each male entrant with a distinct look of disgust. To canter in to your own club and then be made to feel like night soil is beyond the pale.
Do they have nothing else to do but pass judgment on every unsuspecting male? This has led to a lot of muttering on the male side of things, I can tell you. More than a few men have started to shout remarks at the harridans, such as “Ho” and “I say” etc., with a great deal of emotion too, as we are not without our defences.
To be fair this might have started at a party a few months back, when a chap we all know got into his cups and started to tell the truth to his wife and a few of her friends. Many of us elderly types could have told him that the one thing that can upset a solid marriage is the bald truth. No one actually wants to hear it, especially after all these years. But no, Harry Henry-Hangnail went ahead and blew the top off a long, quiet, and effective peace treaty.
After 14 gin and tonics, he turned to his wife of 40 years and wondered aloud why she dressed the way she did now, not as she once did when he was mad about her. The room went silent. This was the moment he dreadfully misread the temperature of said room and blundered on. “I mean to say, and I am sure the Major will back me up on this,” he said as I suddenly felt sick, “you seem to have gone from movie-star gorgeous to camp-commandant yuck.”
His wife started weeping after knocking him senseless and a Berlin Wall of females surrounded her, with several giving me a withering look, especially my own wife, and I had done nothing. I do admit when asked for advice by Henry to saying I thought a quiet chat with his spouse might go a long way to helping the situation, but not this, a party with her friends and him drunk to boot. In fact I had stressed that the wife in question must be approached in a roundabout way, never in a full frontal attack, so to speak. And yet here we were.
Several of us helped Henry home and put him in the garden shed as we felt all would not go well for him if his wife found him in the dangerous mood she was in. We thoughtfully covered him with moss and a few tubers to make sure no harm would come to him.
When we returned to the party there was a distinct chill in the air as if we had all pulled a clanger instead of just Henry. The frisson started with me of all people, just because I was mentioned by the dipsomaniac.
“Not fair!” I shouted as several shrimp on crackers hit me.
However now looking over at the club women I thought maybe Henry had a point, as drunks sometimes do. These women who had once been giggling girls with freckles and dimples, all the weaponry to thrill our once-young bodies, had been covered up and put away for the duration. Attractive bosoms had suddenly became fixed shelves behind rows of done-up buttons. “Come-hither” smiles are now hidden in thick foundation and too much powder. Sensible shoes and thick stockings put paid to any lust we once had.
I know we are no catch ourselves, but at least I entered my Kitty’s life in grey flannels and blazer and still wear them today. We have just grown old. Our wives have given up on what made our hearts beat faster, a female softness we liked to touch, not a lacquer-coated surface we bounce back from with a bruise. Give us back that lovely marshmallow tactility and sensuality. Oh boy!
So stop staring at us out of a misplaced sense of disgust, and please try to be like you were. We will not notice that you have grown old like us.
I rest my case.
Copyright Christopher Dalton 2015
[email protected]
Leave a Reply