Evening Class

by Maeve Binchy

  Bill had never thought of Lizzie as being disciplined or organized enough to spend two sessions of two hours each learning something. Surely she would prefer to be out with her friends laughing and drinking very expensive multicolored cocktails. “She hasn’t decided yet,” he said firmly. He knew how much they disapproved of Lizzie. Her one visit had not been a success. Her skirt too short, her neckline too low, her laughter too wide and nonspecific, and her grasp of their life so minimal.

  But he had been resolute. Lizzie was the girl he loved. She was the woman he would marry in two years time when he was twenty-five. He would hear no disparaging word about Lizzie in his home, and they respected him for this. Sometimes Bill wondered about his wedding day. His parents would be so excited. His mother would talk for ages about the hat she was going to buy and perhaps buy several before settling on the right one. There would be a lot of discussion, too, about an outfit for Olive, something that would be discreet and yet smart. His father would discuss the timing of the wedding, hoping that it was convenient for the supermarket. He had worked in this store since he was a boy, watching it change character all the time, never realizing his own worth and always fearing that change of manager might mean his walking papers. Sometimes Bill wanted to shake him and tell him that he was worth more than the rest of the employees combined, and that everyone would realize this. But his father, in his fifties, without any of the qualifications and skills of young men, would never have believed him. He would remain fearful of the supermarket and grateful to it for the rest of his days.

  Lizzie’s family on her side of the church was always fairly vague in Bill’s dream of a wedding day. She talked of her mother who lived in West Cork because she preferred it there, and her father who lived in Galway because that’s where his pals were. She had a sister in the States and a brother who was working in a ski resort and hadn’t come home for ages. Bill couldn’t quite imagine them all gathering together.

  He told Lizzie about the class. “Would you like to learn too?” he asked hopefully.

  “Whatever for?” Lizzie’s infectious laughter had him laughing, too, although he didn’t know why.

  “Well, so that you could speak a bit of it if we went there, you know.”

  “But don’t they speak English?”

  “Some of them, but wouldn’t it be great to speak to them in their own language?”

  “And we’d learn to do that up in a ropy old school like Mountainview?”

  “It’s meant to be quite a good school, they say.” He felt stung with loyalty to Grania and her father.

  “It may be, but look at the place it’s in. You’d need a flak jacket to get through those housing estates.”

  “It’s a deprived area certainly,” Bill said. “But they’re just poor, that’s all.”

  “Poor,” cried Lizzie. “We’re all poor, for heaven’s sake, but we don’t go on like they do up there.”

  Bill wondered, as he so often did, about Lizzie’s values. How could she compare herself with the families who lived on welfare and social security? The many households where there had never been a job? Still, it was part of her innocence. You didn’t love people to change them. He had known that for a long time.

  “Well, I’m going to do it anyway,” he said. “There’s a bus stop right outside the school and the lessons are on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

  Lizzie turned over the little leaflet. “I would do it to support you, Bill, but honestly I just don’t have the money.” Her eyes were enormous. It would be wonderful to have her sitting beside him mouthing the words, learning the language.

  “I’ll pay for your course,” Bill Burke said. Now he would definitely have to go to another bank and get a loan.

  They were nice in the other bank and sympathetic. They had to do the same themselves, they all had to borrow elsewhere. There was no problem about setting it up.

  “You can get more than that,” the helpful young bank official said, just as Bill would have said himself.

  “I know but the bit about paying it back…I seem to have so many calls each month.”

  “Tell me about it,” said the boy. “And the price of clothes is disgraceful. Anything you’d want to be seen in costs an arm and a leg.”

  Bill thought of the jacket, and he thought of his parents and Olive. He’d love to give them some little end-of-summer treat. He got a loan exactly twice what he had gone into the bank intending to borrow.

  GRANIA TOLD BILL that her father was absolutely delighted about her recruiting two new members for the class. There were twenty-two already. Things were looking good and still a week to go. They had decided that even if they didn’t make the full thirty they would have the first term’s lessons anyway so as not to disappoint those who had enrolled, and to avoid embarrassing themselves at the very outset.

  “Once it gets going there might be word of mouth,” Bill said.

  “They say there’s usually a great falloff after lesson three,” Grania said. “But let’s not be downhearted. I’m going to work on my friend Fiona tonight.”

  “Fiona who works in the hospital?” Bill had a feeling that Grania was matchmaking for him here. She always mentioned Fiona in approving terms, just after something Lizzie had done turned out to have been particularly silly or difficult.

  “Yeah, you know about Fiona, I’m always talking about her. Great friend of mine and Brigid’s. We can always say we’re staying with her when we’re not, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean, but do your parents?” Bill asked.

  “They don’t think about it, that’s what parents do. They put these things to the back of their minds.”

  “Is Fiona asked to cover for you often?”

  “Not for me since…well since that night with Tony ages ago. You see, it was the very next day I discovered about him being such a rat and taking my father’s job. Did I tell you?”

  She had, many times, but Bill was very kind. “I think you said that the timing was bad.”

  “It couldn’t have been worse,” Grania raged. “If I had known earlier I wouldn’t have given him the time of day, and if it were later then I might have been so committed to him that there was no turning back.” She fumed at the unfairness of it all.

  “Suppose you did decide to go back to him, would that finish your father off entirely?”

  Grania looked at him sharply. Bill must be psychic to know that she had tossed and turned all last night thinking that she might approach Tony O’Brien again. He had left the ball so firmly in her court, and he had sent encouraging messages in the form of postcards. In a way it was discourteous not to respond to him in some manner. But she had thought of the damage it would do to her father. He had been so sure that the post of principal was his; he must have felt it more keenly than he had shown. “You know, I was thinking about that,” Grania said slowly. “And I worked out that I might wait a bit, you know, until things are better in my dad’s life. Then he might be able to face up to something like that.”

  “Does he talk about things with your mother, do you think?”

  Grania shook her head. “They hardly talk at all. My mother’s only interested in the restaurant and going to see her sisters. Dad spends most of his time doing up a sort of study for himself. He’s very lonely these days, I couldn’t bear to bring anything else on him. But maybe if these evening classes are a huge success and he gets a lot of praise for that…then I could face him with the other thing. Were I to go ahead with it, of course.”

  Bill looked admiringly at Grania. Like himself she was more confident than her parents, and also like him she didn’t want to upset them. “We have so much in common,” he said suddenly. “Isn’t it a pity that we don’t fancy each other.”

  “I know, Bill.” Grania’s sigh was heartfelt. “And you’re a very good-looking guy, ’specially in that new jacket. And you’ve got lovely shiny brown hair and you’re young, you won’t be dead when I’m forty. Isn’t it awful that we couldn’t fancy eac
h other but I don’t, not even a bit.”

  “I know,” Bill said. “Neither do I, isn’t it a crying shame?”

  AS A TREAT he decided to take the family to lunch, out to the seaside. They took the train called the DART.

  “We’re darting out to the seaside,” Olive told several people on the train, and they smiled at her. Everyone smiled at Olive, she was so eager. They explained to her that DART meant Dublin Area Rapid Transit, but she didn’t take it in.

  They walked down to look at the harbor and the fishing boats. There were still summer visitors around and tourists snapping the scene. They walked through the windy main street of the little town and looked at the shops. Bill’s mother said it must be wonderful to live in a place like this.

  “When we were young anyone could have afforded a place out here,” Bill’s father said. “But it seemed very far away in those days and the better jobs were nearer the city so we didn’t come.”

  “Maybe Bill would live somewhere like this one day when he got a promotion,” his mother suggested, almost afraid to hope.

  Bill tried to see himself living in one of the new flats or the old houses here with Lizzie. What would she do all day as he commuted into Dublin City on the DART? Would she have friends out here as she had everywhere? Would they have children? She had said one boy and one girl, and then curtains. But that was a long time ago. Whenever he brought the subject up nowadays, she was much more vague. “Suppose you got pregnant now,” Bill had suggested one night. “Then we’d have to advance our plans a bit.”

  “Absolutely wrong, Bill sweetheart,” she had said. “We would have to cancel all our plans.”

  And he saw for the first time the hint of hardness behind her smile. But of course he dismissed this notion. Bill knew that Lizzie wasn’t hard. Like any woman she feared the dangers and accidents of her own body. It wasn’t fair, really, the way it was organized. Women could never be as relaxed about lovemaking, knowing it might result in something unexpected like pregnancy.

  Olive was not a good walker, and his mother wanted to visit the church anyway, so Bill and his father walked up to the Vico Road, an elegant curved road that swept the bay, which had often been compared to the Bay of Naples. A lot of the roads here had Italian names like Vico and Sorrento, and there were houses called La Scala, Milano, Ancona. People who had traveled had brought back memories of similar seaside views. Also, it was full of hills like they said the Italian coastline was.

  Bill and his father looked at the gardens and homes and admired them without envy. If Lizzie had been here, she would have said it was unfair for some people to have houses like that, with two big cars parked outside. But Bill, who worked as a bank clerk, and his father—who sliced bacon and wearing plastic gloves inserted it into little transparent bags and weighed them out at so many grams each—were able to see these properties without wanting them for themselves.

  The sun shone and they looked far down. The sea was shimmering. A few yachts were out. They sat on the wall and Bill’s father puffed a pipe.

  “Did it all turn out as you wanted when you were young?” Bill said.

  “Not all, of course, but most of it.” His father puffed away.

  “Like what bits?”

  “Well, having such a good job and keeping it in spite of everything. That was something I’d never have bet money on if I was a gambling man. And then there was your mother accepting me, and being such a marvelous wife, and making us such a great home. And then there was Olive and you, and that was a great reward to us.”

  Bill felt a strange choking sensation. His father lived in an unreal world. All these things were blessings? Things to be delighted with? An educationally subnormal daughter? A wife who could barely fry an egg and this was called making a great home? A job that they would never get anyone of his competence to do, and to do so well…

  “Dad, why am I part of the good bits?” Bill asked.

  “Come on now, you’re just asking for praise.” His father smiled at him as if the lad had been teasing him.

  “No, I mean it, why are you pleased with me?”

  “Who could ask for a better son? Look at the way you take us all out for a day’s trip today with your hard-earned money and you contribute to the house plenty, and you’re so good to your sister.”

  “Everyone loves Olive.”

  “Yes they do, but you are especially good to her. Your mother and I have no fears and worries. We know that in the fullness of time when we’ve gone to Glasnevin cemetery, you’ll look after Olive.”

  Bill heard himself speak in a tone he didn’t recognize as his own. “Ah, don’t you know Olive will always be looked after. You would never worry about a thing like that, would you?”

  “I know there are plenty of homes and institutions, but we know that you’d never send Olive off to a place like that.”

  And as they sat in the sun with the sea shimmering below a little breeze came up and blew around them and it went straight into Bill Burke’s heart. He realized what he had never faced in his twenty-three years of living. He knew now that Olive was his problem, not just theirs. That his big simple sister was his for life. When he and Lizzie married in two years time, when he went abroad with Lizzie to live, when their two children were born, Olive would be part of their family.

  His father and mother might live for another twenty years. Olive would only be forty-five then, with the mind of a child. He felt very cold indeed.

  “Come on, Dad, Mam will have said three rosaries in the church and they’ll be in the pub waiting for us.”

  And indeed there they were, Olive’s big face shining to see her brother come in.

  “That’s Bill, the bank manager,” she said.

  And everyone in the pub smiled. As they would always smile at Olive once they didn’t have to take her on for life.

  BILL WENT UP to Mountainview to register for the Italian lesson. He realized with a heavy heart how lucky he had been that his father had saved money to send him to a smaller and better school. In Bill’s school there were proper games pitches, and the parents had paid a so-called voluntary subscription to maintain some of the frills and extras that would never be known in Mountainview.

  He looked at the shabby paint and the ugly bicycle shed. Few boys who went to school here would find it easy to get into the bank as he had done. Or was he just being snobbish? Perhaps things had changed. Perhaps he was guiltier than others because he was trying to keep a system going in his mind. It was something he could talk to Grania about. Her father taught here, after all.

  It was not something he could talk to Lizzie about.

  Lizzie had become excited about the lessons. “I’m telling everyone that we’ll be speaking Italian shortly.” She laughed happily. For an instant she reminded him of Olive. The same innocent belief that once you mentioned something, that was it, it had happened, and you were somehow in command. But who could compare the beautiful feckless, wild-eyed Lizzie to poor Olive, the lumpen, slow, smiling sister that would be his forevermore?

  Part of Bill hoped that Lizzie would change her mind about the lessons. That would be a few pounds saved anyway. He was beginning to feel panicky about the amount of his salary that was promised in debts before he took home anything at all at the end of the month. His new jacket gave him pleasure but not that much pleasure. Possibly it had been a foolish extravagance that he would live to regret.

  “What a beautiful jacket, is it pure wool?” asked the woman at the desk. She was old, of course, over fifty. But she had a nice smile and she felt the sleeve just above his wrist.

  “Yes it is,” Bill said. “Light wool, but apparently you pay for the cut. That’s what I was told.”

  “Of course you do. It’s Italian isn’t it?” Her voice was Irish but slightly accented, as if she had lived abroad. She seemed genuinely interested. Was she the teacher? Bill had been told that they were going to have a real Italian. Was this the first cutback?

  “Are you the teacher?” he ask
ed. He hadn’t parted with his money yet. Possibly this was not the week to hand over fees from Lizzie and himself. Suppose it was a cheapskate kind of thing. Wouldn’t that have been typical? Just to throw his money away foolishly without checking.

  “Yes indeed. I am Signora. I lived twenty-six years in Italy, in Sicilia. I still think in Italian and dream in it. I hope that I will be able to share all this with you and the others who come to the class.”

  Now it was going to be harder still to back out. Bill wished he wasn’t such a Mister Nice Guy. There were people in the bank who would know exactly how to get out of this situation. The sharks, he and Grania called them.

  Thinking of Grania reminded him of her father. “Do you have enough numbers to make the class workable?” he asked. Perhaps this could be his out. Maybe the class would never take place.

  But Signora’s face was alive with enthusiasm. “Sì sì, we have been so fortunate. People from far and near have heard about it. How did you hear, Signor Burke?”

  “In the bank,” he said.

  “The bank.” Signora’s pleasure was so great, he didn’t want to puncture it. “Imagine, they know of us in the bank.”

  “Will I be able to learn bank terms do you think?” He leaned across the table, his eyes seeking reassurance in her face.

  “What kind exactly?”

  “You know, the words we use in banking…” But Bill was vague, he didn’t know the terms he might use in banking in Italy one day.

  “You can write them down for me and I could look them up for you,” Signora explained. “But to be very truthful the course will not concentrate on banking terms. It will be more about the language and the feel of Italy. I want to make you love it and know it a little so that when you go there it will be like going home to a friend.”

  “That will be great,” Bill said, and handed over the money for Lizzie and himself.

  “Martedì,” Signora said.

  “I beg your pardon?”