BOOK EXTRACT LOVE IN A DAMP CLIMATE:Relationship dilemmas, narrow escapes, happy endings and other tales from the coalface of dating in Ireland are to be found in Quentin Fottrell's first book. Here's Emily's story, quite suitable for Halloween
EMILY IS 35 AND PETITE, with jet-black hair cut into a fringe that almost covers her long eyelashes. She has a wardrobe full of empire-line dresses, which she usually teams with hoop earrings, silver eyeshadow and high heels. Jane Austen is one of her heroines, but that's a coincidence. She just likes the look.
She and her best friend, Anna, a 40-year-old office administrator, spent years in nightclubs, such as Renards and the now-defunct River Club, where lawyers were famous for their pole-dancing escapades and where a furious Anna once gave a clip on the ear to a barrister who was slumped in a drunken heap over a table, telling him: "Get up - you are a disgrace to your profession!" History doesn't recall his response.
The shiny, chrome-filled nightclubs of Dublin were their hall of mirrors. The men they met were never what they appeared to be.
Anna is a tough cookie and also a kind of older sister to Emily, the kind that sometimes gets you into trouble. For all Anna's scepticism about men, she convinced Emily to go on a blind date with a man they met only briefly at La Cave, the basement wine bar on South Anne Street in Dublin.
It was just before Halloween, and Emily's date would give her a scare at bedtime that would have made the hair on her legs stand on end if she hadn't already shaved them.
It would be the date from hell. Literally.
Having that last, fateful drink at La Cave, they got chatting to a group of oddballs, some of whom were fun, but Emily had to be up in the morning and wanted to fly the coop. Anna slipped one of them Emily's number. Just as she had many times previously, with mixed results.
"I thought he was a bit creepy," Emily said the next day.
"Give him a chance," Anna said, "and don't be so shallow. Besides, oddballs work harder for it."
The creep, whom we shall call Heston, after his favourite chef, was not so creepy after all. Not at first, anyway.
He sent her texts, such as: "Lovely Emily, how are you?"
She could get used to this.
The effusive texts kept coming. Then, one Friday night, the clincher: "Lovely Emily, I'm at a film festival all weekend, but I'd love to escape for a while."
Emily wondered if he was a writer, director, producer, actor or all of the above. How she had misjudged him. Maybe I'll give him a chance, she thought.
And she did.
They met at 6pm outside the Irish Film Institute. "It's not like it was outside the Savoy," she says. "I'm thinking arts and culture. So I rock up to the IFI and I see a big poster." Horrorthon weekend. "Then I see Heston. He is a lot taller than I expected. About six foot three. I'm five foot nothing. He is leaning against a Horrorthon poster like Lurch from The Addams Family. I'm thinking, S***!"
"I'm in a horror-movie club," Heston told her. "Do you know anyone in a horror-movie club?"
Emily did not. "I mean, this is the roughage end of the cultural food chain," she says. "I had this image of horror-movie buffs as the loners and the boners. I suggested we go to the Long Hall for a drink, somewhere public, well lit. He started telling me about the different ways the girls get murdered. So I thought the safest thing to do was to find out if he had any friends."
"I usually hang out with people from my horror-movie club," he said. He had them over for dinner to taste his Heston Blumenthal spaghetti Bolognese, which took him four days to find the ingredients for and make. "Just before I served it somebody tipped an ashtray into the pot."
Emily asked if he knew who did such a terrible thing.
"I have my suspicions," Heston said.
His face darkened.
She changed the subject.
"Let me guess what you do for a living," he said, eyeing her big hair and empire-line cleavage. "You work in retail."
Wrong.
"You're a hairdresser."
Wrong again.
This was not going well.
She told him she was a librarian and freelance archivist. She loves books. She consumes them. Pride and Prejudice, of course, is one of her favourites. As are Donna Tartt's The Secret Historyand . . . On she went. She could talk about books to anyone, even Heston.
He sat gazing at her, his face a blank. Finally, Heston took her hand. "I haven't been listening to a word you said, because I can't stop drooling over you."
Drooling? Did he say drooling?
Emily rapidly started yawning.
But he was on to her. He was crushed. "You don't want to go out with me, do you? I thought we'd catch a late movie at the Horrorthon: For Your Height Only."
Emily is five foot two in heels. And there was a short person in the title role.
She left.
On Halloween night, three days later, she received her final text from Heston. It read: "Be careful if you go out tonight, because the pretty girls always get murdered first."
Emily went back to dating men who were good-looking, a must for her, with impeccable manners . . . on the first couple of dates at least.
The farmer was a case in point. She and Anna were having drinks outside Kehoes, on South Anne Street, when Emily overheard the farmer's conversation.
"I'll go and try my chances with that blonde," he said.
As he passed by, Emily said: "Good luck!"
"You've chatted me up," he said. "I'm staying here."
Paddy was all man: meaty arms, veins protruding from workouts, a handsome face, thick brown curls, a tan. He was like a Calvin Klein model with a Cork accent.
"I've dated some cute men," Emily says, "but the farmer was the dog's b****x."
They went back to Emily's house, near Baggot Street. But she did not sleep with him on the first date. Everything was going well. This would be the first of many dates. There were, however, signs that all was not as it should be. She tried to ignore them.
A voluptuous female nude hangs over her fireplace. Paddy looked up at it and said: "She must be Irish, because look at the shanks on her!"
And that was how it would continue. They walked down Grafton Street and Paddy said: "Look at the size of her ass." Every woman should be like a hanger, according to Paddy. No woman could be too thin.
"He invited me to Cork for the weekend," Emily says. "I bought a pair of pink floral wellington boots in Avoca for the occasion. I was so excited."
On the Friday night he made carrot-and- celery salad. They walked the land of his country estate. His family lived in the main house. They were staying in one of the gate lodges. She could move from Dublin for this. She could be mistress of his domain.
She learned that Paddy was very set in his ways. He didn't like eating in public. "Don't expect me to bring you to restaurants, because I won't bring you," he told her. "I don't do texting, either," Paddy said. "You can text me, but don't expect me to text you back."
Emily kept filing away the warning signs, just as she did when she double-parked. More parking tickets in an already crowded glove compartment.
And after they retired that Friday night? How was it? "Amazing!" Emily says.
On the Saturday afternoon there was farm work to be done. Paddy gave more of his opinions about women and the way they might look at you.
"All Irish women are fat and not a bit stylish," he said. Emily tried to fly the flag for the sisterhood. But all they did was bicker.
"I had to go out and count the heifers," she says. "Every time I went near one they went 'Urrr!' with disapproval. The heifers were so mean to me. I thought, why can't the heifers be nice to me? Even they don't like me. The heifers wanted Paddy for themselves. Women are always so hard on other women."
That night they ate another salad - this time broccoli and celery - and drank a bottle of wine. Maybe it was the heifers outside, still mooing loudly, making heard their disapproval that their master had a female guest, but there was little body contact or warmth and even less conversation.
Paddy finally asked: "Are we getting divorced?"
Divorced? They weren't even married.
Emily was surprised. She knew things weren't going well, but, well, he was so hot.
"We obviously don't get along," he said.
For the first time in her life Emily lost it with a man. "Why did you let me drink the wine if you knew you wanted to break up? Now I'm stuck here for the night in this . . . in this . . . in this housing estate!"
It was a country estate. Not a housing estate. But she wanted to hit him where it hurt.
It was a storm that would have silenced the heifers as well as the lambs. They were quiet by now. Emily reckons they had shimmied up to the house, had their ears to the wall, listening.
She lay in bed waiting for first light, texting Anna the whole story. At 6am her Jilly Cooper idyll was all over. There was nothing more to say. Without a word she got dressed and packed her pink wellingtons from Avoca into her Audrey Hepburn overnight bag.
She trudged across the gravel in her heels, got into her car and left, leaving the Calvin Klein farmer standing in his jockeys in the doorway. She did not look back. But as she rumbled down the driveway to the main gates she beeped her horn at the triumphant heifers on the way out.
Love in a Damp Climateby Quentin Fottrell, Currach Press, €14.99