Lifestyle Choices

‘You do love me?

‘I really love you. I’m crazy about you. Come on, please.’

‘You really love me?’

‘Don’t keep saying that. Come on. Please, please, Catherine.’

‘You can’t. You shouldn’t —’

‘Come on. Don’t talk. Please come on.’

The seduction may be a thing of the past. But the thing itself lingers on. The present is usually bursting with one damn thing after another, whichever way a woman turns. Or rather, with the same damn thing over and over, as Edna Ferber once said. So if a girl’s going to be propositioned up hill and down dale, she should expect it to be a thing of beauty, if not a joy for ever.

Every woman should stick to this requirement as her bottom line, so to speak, no matter how unpromising the material she’s working with. I saw a girl at a fabulous summer ball in an ancient Oxford college, half-sitting, half-lying on a flight of worm-eaten and none too clean oak stairs. Her escort, one of those titled chimpanzees in which the university abounds, was fighting his way through the froth and frou-frou of her ball-gown to crawl all over her. She retained her perfect finishing-school composure in this compromising public situation, but her well-bred tones were repeatedly to be heard insisting:

You might ask me nicely. You might say please.

Asking nicely isn’t just a matter of saying please, naturally. Reduce it all to ps aad qs and what you finish up with is wham-bam-thankyou-ma’am. It’s more to do with an approach that is subtle, graceful, stylish. One where the base intentions are not sticking out like a well-known pair of royal ears. One which believes that if a girl’s worth doing, she’s worth doing well.

It helps a lot if the chap has a poetical turn in him. All women have a secret longing to be wooed in verse. You can adore any man who quotes poetry to you — just as long as he isn’t pretending to be the author of the tender phrases of Shakespeare and Keats that he’s murmuring into your receptive shell-like. So here are some handy poetical propositions for the man who wants to take his act upmarket. My favourite is a sprightly little `to the woods’ ballad from the sixteenth century by Christopher Marlowe:

Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove

That valleys, groves and hills and fields, Woods or steepy mountains yields.

And I will make thee beds of roses And a thousand fragrant posies,

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle

Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.

A belt of straw and ivy buds,

With coral clasps and amber studs,

And if these pleasures thee may move, Come live with me and be my love.

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing For thy delight each May morning.

If such delights thy mind may move Come live with me and be my love.

Now there you are — fresh as a daisy and coming up roses is the question every woman is waiting to be asked. Especially on a hot summer day. One hopeful urban pastoralist discovered for himself the value of this approach. Coming home from work on the 143 bus to Islington he sat opposite a flower-like girl in white, who was obviously wilting under the combined effects of a long London day and a steaming midsummer. He caught her eye and whispered:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows.

He had to stop there as he couldn’t remember the next bit, even for the midsummer night’s dream in white. But it had worked its magic. She said, ‘I’ve waited all my life for this to happen to me!’ They hot-footed it out of town together that moment, and were in each other’s arms on the nearest available woodland bank before it even occurred to them to ask each other’s names.

Mother Nature, in all her moods, is a winner in this context. She is always on the side of lovers, and if you’ve never made mad passionate love in a forest, up a mountain, beside a lake, beneath the trees, you haven’t lived — and what’s stopping you? But Nature and her elements are not the absolute prerequisites for a proposition poetical. One poet, Giles Farnaby, asked his lady to imagine the perfectly unpoetical subject of a ’silly flea’. He then suggested slyly:

Were I a flea in bed, I would not bite you, But search some other way for to delight you.

Oooooh yes. Well, a lover can bite a little bit — just so long as it doesn’t really hurt . . .

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