Evening Class

by Maeve Binchy

  HE CAME BACK and sat by the television.

  “What are you watching tonight?” he asked Brigid.

  “What would you like, Daddy?” she countered.

  He must have taken this blow much worse than he believed, his naked disappointment and sense of injustice had to be showing in his face if both his daughters…

  He looked at his younger child, her freckled face and big brown eyes so dear and loved and familiar since she was a baby in the pram. She was normally so impatient with him, tonight she looked at him as if he were someone on a stretcher in a hospital corridor, with that wave of sympathy that washes over you for a complete stranger going through a very bad time.

  They sat beside each other until eleven-thirty looking at television programs that neither of them liked, but both with an air of pleasure that they were pleasing the other.

  Aidan was in bed when Nell came home at one o’clock. The light was out but he was not asleep. He heard the taxi pulling up outside the door; they paid for a cab home when she was on the late shift.

  She came into the room quietly. He could smell toothpaste and talcum powder, so she had washed in the bathroom rather than disturb him by using the handbasin in their bedroom. She had a bedside light that pointed downward at whatever book she was reading and didn’t shine in his eyes, so often he had lain there listening as she turned the pages. No words between them would ever be as interesting as the paperbacks she and her friends and sisters read, so nowadays he didn’t offer them.

  Even tonight, when his heart was like lead and he wanted to hold her in his arms and cry into her soft clean skin and tell her about Tony O’Brien, who should not be allowed to do dinner duty but who was going to get the headship because he was more upfront whatever that might mean. He would like to have told her that he was sorry she had to go in and sit in a cash desk watching rich people eat and get drunk and pay their bills, because it was better than anything else a Monday night might offer a married couple with two grown daughters. But he lay there and heard the faraway town hall clock strike the hours.

  At two o’clock Nell put down her book with a little sigh and went to sleep, as far from him on her side of the bed as if she were sleeping in the next room. When the town hall said it was four o’clock, Aidan realized that Grania would only have three hours sleep before she went to work.

  But there was nothing he could do or say. It was clearly understood that the girls lived their own lives without interrogation. He had not liked to think about it but had accepted that they had been to the Family Planning Association. They came home at the times that suited them and if they did not come home then they called at eight o’clock during breakfast to say they were all right…that they had stayed over with a girlfriend. This was the polite fiction that covered the Lord knew what. But as Nell said, it was often the actual truth, and she much preferred Grania and Brigid staying in some other girl’s flat rather than risk being driven home by a drunk or not getting a taxi in the small hours of the morning.

  Still, Aidan was relieved when he heard the hall door click and the light footsteps running up the stairs. At her age she could survive on three hours sleep. And it would be three hours more than he would have.

  His mind was racing with foolish plans. He could resign from the school as a protest. Surely he could get work in a private college, sixth-year colleges, for example, where they did intensive work. Aidan as a Latin teacher would be useful there, there were so many careers where students still needed Latin. He could appeal to the Board of Management, list the ways in which he had helped the school, the hours he had put in to see that it got its rightful place in the community, his liaising with third-level education so that they would come and give the children talks and pointers about the future, his environmental studies backed up by the wildlife garden.

  Without appearing to do so, he could let it be known that Tony O’Brien was a destructive element, that the very fact of using violence against an ex-pupil on the school premises sent the worst possible signal to those who were meant to follow his leadership. Or could he write an anonymous letter to the religious members of the board, to the pleasant open-faced priest and the rather serious nun, who might have no idea of Tony O’Brien’s loose moral code? Or could he get some of the parents to set up an action group? There were many, many things he could do.

  Or else he would accept Mr. Walsh’s view of him and become a man with a life outside the school, do up the dining room, make it his last-ditch stand against all the disappointments that life had thrown at him. His head felt as if someone had attached a lead weight to it during the night, but since he hadn’t closed his eyes he knew that this could not have happened.

  He shaved very carefully; he would not appear at school with little bits of Elastoplast on his face. He looked around his bathroom as if he had never seen it before. On every inch of available walls were prints of Venice, big shiny reproductions of Turners that he had bought when he went to the Tate Gallery. When the children were young, they used to talk of going to the Venice Room not the bathroom; now they probably didn’t see them at all, the prints were the wallpaper they almost obscured.

  He touched them and wondered would he ever go there again. He had been there twice as a young man, and then they had spent their honeymoon in Italy when he had shown Nell his Venice, his Rome, his Florence, his Siena. It had been a wonderful time, but they had never gone back. When the children were young, there hadn’t been the money or the time, and then lately…well…who would have come with him? And it would have been a statement to have gone alone. Still, in the future there might have to be statements, and surely his soul was not so dead that it would not respond to the beauty of Italy?

  Somewhere along the line they had all agreed not to talk at breakfast. And as a ceremony somehow it worked well for them. The coffee percolator was ready at eight, and the radio news switched on. A brightly colored Italian dish of grapefruit was on the table. Everyone helped themselves and prepared their own. A basket of bread was there, and an electric toaster sat on a tray with a picture of the Trevi Fountain on it. It had been a gift from Nell on his fortieth birthday. By twenty past eight Aidan and the girls had gone, all leaving their mug and plates in the dishwasher to minimize the clearing up.

  He didn’t give his wife a bad life, Aidan thought to himself. He had lived up to the promises he had made. It wasn’t an elegant house, but it had radiators and appliances and he paid for the windows to be cleaned three times a year, the carpet to be steamed every two years, and the house painted on the outside every three years.

  Stop thinking in this ridiculous petty clerk way, Aidan warned himself, and forcing a smile on his face began his exit.

  “Nice evening last night, Grania?” he asked.

  “Yeah, okay.” There was no sign of the hesitant confidences of last night. No wondering about whether people were sincere or not.

  “Good, good.” He nodded. “Was it busy in the restaurant?” he asked Nell.

  “Fair for a Monday night, you know, nothing spectacular,” she said. She spoke perfectly pleasantly but as if to a stranger she had met on a bus.

  Aidan took up his briefcase and left for school. His mistress, Mountainview College. What a fanciful idea. She certainly didn’t have the allures of a lover to him this morning.

  He stood for a moment at the gates of the school yard, scene of the disgraceful and brutal fight between Tony O’Brien and that boy, whose ribs were broken and who needed stitches over his eye and in his lower lip. The yard was untidy with litter blowing in the early morning breezes. The bicycle shed needed to be painted, the bikes were not properly stacked. Outside the gates the bus stop was open and exposed to the winds. If Bus Eireann would not provide a proper bus shelter for the children who waited there after school, then the Vocational Education Committee should do so, and if they refused, a parents’ committee would raise the funds. These were the kinds of things Aidan Dunne had intended to do when he was principal. Things that would never b
e done now.

  He nodded gruffly to the children who saluted him, instead of addressing them all by name, which was his usual way, and he walked into the staff room to find no one there except Tony O’Brien mixing a headache seltzer in a glass.

  “I’m getting too old for these nights,” he confided to Aidan.

  Aidan longed to ask him why he didn’t just cut them out, but that would be counterproductive. He must make no false stupid moves, in fact no moves at all until he had worked out what his plan was to be. He must continue in his bland, good-natured way.

  “I suppose all work and no play…” he began.

  But Tony O’Brien was in no mood to hear platitudes. “I think forty-five is a sort of watershed. It’s half of ninety after all, it’s telling you something. Not that some of us listen.” He drained the glass and smacked his lips.

  “Was it worth it, I mean the late night?”

  “Who knows if it’s ever worth it, Aidan. I met a nice little girl, but what’s the good of that when you have to face the Fourth Years.” He shook his head like a dog coming out of the sea trying to get rid of the water. And this man was going to run Mountainview College for the next twenty years while poor old Mr. Dunne was expected to sit by and let it happen. Tony O’Brien gave him a heavy clap on the shoulder. “Still, ave atque vale as you Latinists say. I have to be getting on, only four hours and three minutes before I stand with that healing pint in my hand.”

  Aidan would not have thought that Tony O’Brien would know the Latin words for hallo and good-bye. He himself had never used any Latin phrases in the staff room, aware that many of his colleagues might not have studied it and fearing to show off in front of them. It just showed you must never underestimate the enemy.

  The day passed as days always pass, whether you have a hangover like Tony O’Brien, or a heavy heart like Aidan Dunne, and the next passed, and the next. Aidan still had settled on no definite plan of action. He could never find the right moment to tell them at home that his hopes of being principal had been misplaced. In fact, he thought it would be easier to say nothing until the decision was announced, let it appear a surprise to everyone.

  And he had not forgotten his plans to make himself a room. He sold the dining table and chairs and bought the little desk. When his wife worked in Quentin’s restaurant and his daughters went out on their dates, he sat and planned it for himself. Gradually he assembled little bits of his dream: secondhand picture frames, a low table for near the window, a big cheap sofa that fitted the space exactly. And one day he would get loose covers, something in gold or yellow, a sunny color, and he would get a square of carpet that would be a splash of some other color, orange, purple, something with life and vigor.

  They weren’t very interested at home, so he didn’t tell them his plans. In a way he felt that his wife and daughters thought it was yet another harmless little interest for him, like the projects in Transition Year and his long struggle to get a few meters of wildlife garden up and running in Mountainview.

  “ANY WORD OF the big job above in the school?” Nell asked unexpectedly one evening when the four of them were seated around the kitchen table.

  He felt his heart lurch at the lie. “Not a whisper. But they’ll be voting next week, that’s for sure.” He seemed calm and unruffled.

  “You’re bound to get it. Old Walsh loves the ground you walk on,” Nell said.

  “He doesn’t have a vote, as it happens, so that’s no use to me.” Aidan gave a nervous little laugh.

  “Surely you’ll get it, Daddy?” Brigid said.

  “You never know, people want different things in principals. I’m sort of slow and steady, but that mightn’t be what’s needed these days.” He spread out his hands in a gesture to show that it was all beyond him but wouldn’t matter very much either way.

  “But who would they have if they didn’t have you?” Grania wanted to know.

  “Wouldn’t I be doing the horoscope column if I knew that? An outsider maybe, someone inside that we hadn’t reckoned on…” He sounded good-natured and full of fair play. The job would go to the best man or woman. It was as simple as that.

  “But you don’t think they’ll pass you over?” Nell said.

  There was something that he hated in her tone. It was a kind of disbelief that he could possibly let this one slip. It was the phrase “passed over,” so dismissive, so hurtful. But she didn’t know, she couldn’t guess, that it had already happened.

  Aidan willed his smile to look confident. “Passed over? Me? Never!” he cried.

  “That’s more like it, Daddy,” said Grania, before going upstairs to spend further time in the bathroom, where she possibly never saw anymore the beautiful images of Venice on the wall, only her face in the mirror and her anxieties that it should look good for whatever outing was planned tonight.

  It was their sixth date. Grania knew now that he definitely wasn’t married. She had asked him enough questions to have tripped him up. Every night so far he had wanted her to come back to his place for coffee. Every night so far she had said no. But tonight could be different. She really liked him. He knew so much about things, and he was far more interesting than people of her own age. He wasn’t one of those middle-aged ravers who pretended they were twenty years younger.

  There was only one problem. Tony worked at Dad’s school. She had asked him on the very first time she met him whether he knew an Aidan Dunne, but hadn’t said he was her father. It seemed an ageist sort of thing to say, putting herself in a different generation. And there were loads of Dunnes around the place, it wasn’t as if Tony would make the connection. There wasn’t any point in mentioning it to Dad, not yet anyway, not until it developed into anything, if it did. And if it were the real thing, then everything else like him working in the same school as Dad would fall into place, and Grania made a silly face at herself in the mirror and thought that maybe Tony would have to be even nicer than ever to her if she was going to be the principal’s daughter.

  Tony sat in the bar and dragged deep on his cigarette. This was one thing he was going to have to cut down on when he was principal. There really couldn’t be any more smoking on the premises. And probably fewer pints at lunchtime. It hadn’t been actually spelled out, but it had been hinted at. Heavily. But that was it. Not a huge price to pay for a good job. And they weren’t going to ask about his social life. It might still be Holy Catholic Ireland, but it was the 1990s after all.

  And by extraordinary timing he had just met a girl who really did hold his attention, and might well be around for more than a few weeks duration. A bright, lively girl called Grania, worked in the bank. Sharp as anything, but not at all hard or tough. She was warm and generous in her outlook. They didn’t come in that kind of package often. She was twenty-one, which was, of course, a problem. Less than half his age, but she wouldn’t always be that. When he was sixty she’d be thirty-five, which was half of seventy when you came to think of it. She’d be catching up all the time.

  She hadn’t come back to the town house with him, but she had been very frank. It wasn’t because she was afraid of sex, it was just that she wasn’t ready for it with him yet, that was all, and if they were to get along together, then they must respect each other and not one of them force the other. He had agreed with her, that seemed perfectly fair. And for once it did. Normally he would have regarded such a response as a challenge, but not with Grania. He was quite ready to wait. And she had assured him that she wasn’t going to play games.

  He saw her come into the bar and he felt lighter and happier than he had for a long time. He wasn’t going to play games either. “You look lovely,” he said. “Thank you for dressing up for me, I appreciate it.”

  “You’re worth it,” she said simply.

  They drank together, like people who had always known each other, interrupting, laughing, eager to hear what the other would say.

  “There are lots of things we could do this evening…” Tony O’Brien said. “There’s a New Orle
ans evening, you know, Creole food and jazz in one of the hotels, or there was this movie we were talking about last night…or I could cook for you at home. Show you what a great chef I am.”

  Grania laughed. “Am I to believe that you’ll be making me wontons and Peking duck? You see, I remember that you said you had a neighboring Chinese restaurant.”

  “No, if you come home with me I’ll cook for you myself. To show you how much it means to me. I won’t just get menu A or menu B, good and all as they may be.” Tony O’Brien had not spoken so directly for a long time.

  “I’d love to come home with you, Tony,” Grania said very simply, without a hint of playing games.

  AIDAN SLEPT IN fits and starts. And then near dawn he felt wide awake and clearheaded. All he had was the doddering word of a retiring principal, a man fussed and confused by the way the world was going. The vote had not been taken, there was nothing to be depressed about, no excuses to make, action to take, career to abandon. Today would be a much, much better day now that he was clear about all this.

  He would speak to Mr. Walsh, the present principal, and ask him briefly and directly if his remarks of some days ago had any substance and intent, or if they were mere speculation. After all, as a nonvoting member he might also have been a nonlistening member to their deliberations. He would be brief, Aidan told himself. That was his weakness, a tendency to go on at too great a length. But yet he would be crystal clear. What was it that the poet Horace said? Horace had a word for every occasion. Brevis esse laboro / Obscurus fio. Yes, that was it, the more I struggle to be brief, the more unintelligible I become. In the kitchen Brigid and Nell exchanged glances and shrugs when they heard him whistling. He wasn’t a very good whistler, but nobody could remember when he had last even attempted it.

  Just after eight o’clock the phone rang.

  “Three guesses,” Brigid said, reaching for more toast.

  “She’s very reliable, you both are,” Nell said, and went to answer it.