I want to tell you a story that was passed on to me - in all its intimate detail - by a good friend. Male, of course.
He was in the midst of one of those empty periods we all go through from time to time.
A former torrid and, at times, quite overwhelming relationship had suddenly come to an end. She went off to some exotic spot half a world away and, contrary to her declared intentions, stayed there. He was neither so young nor so inexperienced that, despite her denials, he couldn't guess what had happened.
Already, that was several months ago.
No new relationship had blossomed. He was the spare man who is said to be so very much in demand but who, in fact, is rarely needed for anything that will do him much good.
After some months - even some weeks - of abstinence, "much good" can mean only that some comfort, some understanding will be offered to ease his sexual deprivation.
Not that the average male is constantly preoccupied.
This friend of mine - I will call him Jack - was busy by day as well as into the evenings and much of the night during the working week. By the time he called it a day, he was so healthily exhausted that he wanted only to fall into bed, there simply to sleep to renew his forces for the tasks next day.
But there were times when he was more relaxed, especially at weekends.
Then he felt the emptiness of his emotional life.
He had no one to talk to intimately.
He had no one to embrace.
Above all, he had no one to make love to - or, more earthily, as he took pains to explain to me, though, since we are both robust males, he had no need to, he had no one to fuck. Jack used the now familiar four-letter word that summed up his need inelegantly but exactly.
He felt himself to be getting old. The line of his lips was becoming lean and hard. The lips themselves were turning inwards so that they almost completely disappeared from view.
So he thought, anyway, as he shaved and was forced to look at himself every morning or - very occasionally - as he prepared to go out at night.
He didn't like what was happening to him - not one bit.
Though it didn't happen often, there were rare occasions when he was needed as a "spare man." To such a request to perform socially, he sometimes responded.
Sometimes he didn't respond at all - or not positively.
It depended who the hostess was. He could tell fairly accurately what sort of group any particular hostess would assemble and whether he'd be less depressed by staying away than by attending.
For this particular party, he was called early in the week for a dinner-dance to be held on the Saturday.
He accepted immediately. He liked the hostess and her husband was a very old friend. He knew she'd assemble a group of attractive couples, who would always predominate, but that, somewhere in the group, there'd be an unattached - and presentable - female for him. Perhaps more than one, although then there'd be other unattached males.
When he turned up at eight, he found that there were six couples, five of whom he knew and a single unattached female.
He knew her slightly.
They'd met a few years before.
She had been then, Jack said, in her later teens. She gave him a lift to a party, at which she did not stay. They exchanged a few pleasantries. Nothing more.
Then, a few weeks before the Saturday dinner-dance, Jack went with a small group to see - again - a performance of "The Sound of Music."
"It's always stirred the romance in me," Jack told me.
Not lust.
It's much too pure, too sweet, he said, to arouse anything but the most virtuous of romantic feelings.
He wanted, afterwards, he said, "to kiss a girl's hand."
That was all.
Perhaps sweep elegantly around the dance floor with her in an old-time waltz.
Then, "Kiss the hand" again and bid her "Auf wiedersehen."
After the performance, he accepted an invitation from a couple to an after-theatre drink at their home.
He was there half an hour or so and was just about to leave when suddenly, from a back room, she appeared.
She was not dressed romantically - nothing like those who peopled "The Sound of Music" - or sexily.
"I've been working," she said.
She was dressed in jeans, with an unrevealing top.
She was, she would have said, dressed in a way not to provoke - in a way to kill rather than excite any passionate feelings.
But she'd done it with care.
She probably had, as she said, been "working."
But, when she stopped, she took time to prepare herself to make her entrance.
She was a model of carefully studied negligence.
As she took the few steps across the room before sitting down, she wobbled her bottom appealingly.
"You noticed that?" I asked Jack.
Jack laughed. "I'm human - and male. When a beautiful girl moves like that, I look. I can see her now. I still feel excited when I think how she looked - how she walked - that night."
"But you were in Sound-of-Music mode. You were romantic. You wanted to sing songs, kiss hands..."
"Not after she walked in."
"So she wanted to excite you."
"Why do you say that?"
"A woman never does that undeliberately, unwittingly, without meaning to..."
"But we were a group. She didn't necessarily mean to excite me. It could have been one of the others in the group."
"True. That can be a woman's dilemma. If she excites at all, she probably excites more than one. Is that what she wants? If she doesn't, how can she send a message that he - and he alone - will receive?"
"She can't. Not when there's a group."
"Can't she? Can't she rely on his good sense? Can't she hope that he'll be observing the others in the group and conclude that the message must be for him?"
"And if he doesn't?"
"She'll have to think again. She'll wonder whether her choice - her tentative choice - was wise - was well-made."
"So she doesn't try a second time?"
I hesitated.
"It all depends. On how powerful a message she intended to send the first time. On how distinctive a message she sees it to have been in the circumstances - the composition of the group, the openings for him to respond and so on. She might have to leave it to him to respond on a later, more favourable and more auspicious occasion. She's baited the hook. It's for him to take it; but he'd better be fairly quick and perceptive or she'll angle elsewhere."
"You make it all sound very scientific and professional. Do women reason like that when they're planning their more intimate behaviour?"
"It's instinctive. They don't take a course in it. No lectures or seminars - not for the more talented anyway. It's a mating consciousness they're born with."
