Phone rings at half past eight this morning. A well-spoken, rather angry woman says “May I speak to Caroline?”
“No. I’m afraid she’s out getting flowers. Can I take a message?”
“No. I’ll call later.”
“OK. Who shall I say is calling?”
“None of your business!” — and she hangs up.
Well, I thought, this was odd behaviour for a telemarketer. I tried 1471, and got a London number I didn’t recognise, and which wasn’t in my phone book. I thought for a little longer, and rang it back.
“Hello!”
“Hello. this is Andrew Brown. I’d like to speak to the rude person. Someone just rang me from this number and ..”
“This is Lois Stevens. I rang you. And why hasn’t Caroline written to thank me for the rose catalogue? How dare she says she doesn’t like me?”
At this, a great light shone on me. Lois is Caroline’s godmother, a retired civil servant whose behaviour, on the one occasion I was taken to meet her, was so odd and unpleasant — at one stage she shoved her hand down the front of my shirt as we sat at the dinner table, to see if I had a hairy chest — that I explained after this one visit that I was never going to see or speak to her again, have lived very happily on this basis for the last fifteen years.
“Her mother wrote to me and said that she didn’t like me and that you didn’t like me – “
“That’s because you’re so bloody rude.”
Rude! How dare you call me rude? You were unspeakably rude. When I let you out of the car you just rushed off without a word of thanks.”
“That was because I had just spent three hours in your company.”
“I think Caroline has behaved outrageously”.
I don’t think I have ever had a conversation quite like that with anyone before, at least not with anyone to whom I haven’t spoke for fifteen years. Amazing how the pleasantries just tripped off my tongue. But the odd thing was that I felt, while I was talking, entirely reasonable. Indeed, I was.