‘A half truth in argument, like a half brick, carries better.’ Stephen Leacock
I was in my late twenties. I had published some short stories but no first novel yet. I had no girlfriend either. One afternoon the phone rang in the flat I shared with a Dutch cameraman and I answered it.
‘Are you Carlo Gébler?’ The speaker was a young Dubliner, her voice breathy and lovely.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve read some of your stories,’ she said. Her name was Olivia, she added.
No sooner had I got her name but an image of Olivia was cast up before my mind’s eye. She was a Celtic Charlotte Rampling, tall and willowy and sensitive and lonely like me.
Olivia explained she was calling on behalf of the London branch of the graduate society of an Irish university. She was the new secretary.
‘We meet every month,’ she said. She mentioned an Irish Centre in north London. ‘We always have a speaker,’ she continued. ‘Usually from sport or business. But I want to broaden things so I wondered, would you read a story?’ Of course I would. Anything for you, Olivia, I thought. But lest I appeared eager, I asked about the evening. ‘There’ll be a bit of society business first and then you read for half an hour, say. Then everyone will pile into the bar. And we’ll pay you too.’ She mentioned a modest sum.
It was a done deal. I noted the time, place and date in my diary. We said goodbye.
Time passed, and finally what I had recklessly come to consider as the evening of my date with Olivia arrived. I dressed carefully. Assuming all the males at the meeting would be Price-Waterhouse trainees in suits, I opted for the conventionally unconventional look of leather jacket and red tie. This would impress her.
Then I went to the street and I eased myself into my car, in those days a very fogeyish 1962 Morris Oxford saloon. To avoid being seen behind the wheel I parked some way from the centre and walked the last quarter mile. The venue was a sixties monstrosity with posters of shamrocks in the windows. The bar was decorated with shillelaghs and rank with the smell of old Guinness. I hardly noticed or cared. I had eyes only for O. But striding across the vomit-crusted carpet, I was appalled to see that the figure gliding towards me with shining knees and bobbed hair, was less than five foot high. It couldn’t be, could it?
‘You must be Carlo,’ said the throaty voice. Oh yes, it was Olivia.
My mouth opened but no words came out. This was because an incredible act of fantasy reassignment was underway in the brain. Instead of the willowy woman of my dreams, Olivia had turned out to be an Audrey Hepburn lookalike.
Could I like her? I asked. Oh, you bet! came the reply.
‘Yes, I am,’ I said, beaming. That was the moment when I noticed a man lurking behind, tall and gangling and bespectacled. He was, I immediately guessed, the boyfriend, a figure I had typically not included when, over the preceding weeks, I had imagined this evening.
‘This is Declan,’ said Olivia, embracing the etiolated love object. ‘He’s also the society president.’ I shook my rival’s hand.
The next part of the evening was a blur. I had a drink and made small talk. The room filled as fifty members showed up, mainly lusty men and girls from the west of Ireland. Among these was the society’s treasurer, a lantern-jawed behemoth called Keith. As we were introduced I couldn’t help noticing that Keith refused to acknowledge either Olivia or Declan and that no sooner had he finished shaking my hand but he darted off.
‘My ex,’ whispered Olivia.
Of course, ex-boyfriends hadn’t been part of my picture of the evening any more than boyfriends had.
‘Oh, right,’ I said grimly.
We adjourned to the Limerick Lounge. I sat at the back. The members sat in rows with their backs to me. The committee, Olivia, Declan, Keith and two or three others, sat behind a table at the front facing us. Olivia had said there’d be a few minutes of business and then she’d call me down. I leafed through the manuscript of the story I had brought to read. It was about an incident in the west of Ireland in my childhood.
The meeting opened. Declan said something. Keith sniped viciously at him. Members hissed. Declan called for calm, adding, ‘It’s nobody’s business but ours.’ What must have happened, I now realized, was that her loveliness had only recently switched from Keith to Declan. The two love rivals had murder in their hearts, feelings shared by several members on the floor.
The rhetoric got nastier. I tried to slide away but Olivia caught my eye and signalled the end of this ordeal was imminent. I bolted for the door but she ran down and stopped me before I could leave. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity but was actually an hour of procedural hideousness, I stood. I sensed, correctly, no one wanted to hear me. Panic surged in my gut. Instead of going to the front I blurted out the first sentence to the backs of the heads before me.
Well, now I’d started, I thought, I’d best continue. I remembered the advice of my speech teacher. When reading aloud, pick someone in the audience and read to them. If they’re captivated, so will everyone else be.
There was no difficulty deciding to whom to read from among the members of the committee facing me. I locked my sights on Olivia and read on. She did not disappoint. Her liquid eyes looked back at me, full of attention and interest.
I was winning, I thought. I could win them round. I could make them listen.
Pride, as we know, comes before a fall. In the crowd, I could feel a change in mood. Something was going on. At first I couldn’t tell what it was or where it was happening. Then I saw. Keith had silently moved his seat back from the committee table to a place his rival couldn’t see him and he was now, dumb-show fashion, satirically re-enacting intercourse between the diminutive Olivia and the stringy Declan. This involved some ugly finger work. Suddenly, alerted by the tittering, Declan twigged. He turned and, realizing he’d been mocked and by whom, he picked up the glass in front of him, and threw its contents in Keith’s face. The sodden treasurer smirked and muttered, ‘You eejit.’
I broke off from the story and said, ‘Do you want me to finish?’
‘Not really,’ said one voice.
‘No we fucking don’t,’ said another.
A third was making mock farting noises.
For a second I contemplated saying something nasty, and then running out, hopefully with Olivia in tow. But she was holding Declan’s hand while giving Keith, who was wiping his face with a handkerchief, the finger. No, clearly discretion was the better part of valour here. I stuffed the manuscript of the story into my pocket and fled through the doors, across the bar and out into the street.
I never did get paid.