Evening Class

by Maeve Binchy

  “For you, yes, but not for me.” Again her voice was very dead.

  “So did you have a row? Is that it? It’ll pass, family rows always do. Honestly, Lizzie.”

  “No, we didn’t exactly have a row.”

  “Well?”

  “I had her supper ready. It was chicken livers and a miniature of sherry, and I had the rice all ready too. I showed it to her and she laughed again.”

  “Yes, well, as I said…”

  “She wasn’t going to stay, Bill, not for supper. She said she had only called in to keep me quiet. She was going to some art gallery, some opening, some exhibition. She’d be late. She tried to push past me.”

  “Um…yes…?” Bill didn’t like this at all.

  “So, I couldn’t take it anymore.”

  “What did you do, Lizzie?” He was amazed that he could keep so calm.

  “I locked the door and threw the key out the window.”

  “You what?”

  “I said, now you have to stay and sit and talk to your daughter. I said, now you can’t get out and run away as you’ve run away from us all, all your life, from Daddy and from the rest of us.”

  “And what did she do?”

  “Oh, she got into a terrible temper and kept screaming and beating the door and saying I was cracked and like my father and you know, the usual.”

  “No, I don’t know. What else?”

  “Oh, what you’d expect.”

  “And what happened then?”

  “Well, she wore herself out, and eventually she did have supper.”

  “And was she still shouting then?”

  “No, she was just worried in case the house went on fire and we’d be burned to a crisp. That’s what she kept saying, burned to a crisp.”

  Bill’s mind was working slowly but surely. “You did let her out eventually.”

  “No I didn’t. Not at all.”

  “But she’s not still there?”

  “Yes she is.”

  “You can’t be serious, Lizzie.”

  She nodded several times. “I’m afraid I am.”

  “How did you get out?”

  “The window. When she was in the bathroom.”

  “She slept there?”

  “She had to. I slept in the chair. She had the whole bed.” Lizzie sounded defensive.

  “Let me get this straight. She came here yesterday, Tuesday at seven o’clock, and it’s now eleven o’clock at night on Wednesday and she’s still here, locked in against her will?”

  “Yes.”

  “But God Almighty, why?”

  “So that I could talk to her. She never makes time to talk to me. Never, not once.”

  “And has she talked to you? I mean now that she’s locked in?”

  “Not really, not in a satisfactory way, she just keeps giving out and saying I’m unreasonable, unstable, whatever.”

  “I don’t believe this, Lizzie, I don’t. She’s been there not only all night but all day and all tonight?” His head was reeling.

  “What else could I do? She never has a moment, always in a rush…to go somewhere else, to meet other people.”

  “But you can’t do this. You can’t lock people in and expect them to talk.”

  “I know it mightn’t have been the right thing to do. Listen, I was wondering could you come and talk to her…she doesn’t seem very reasonable.”

  “Me talk to her? Me?”

  “Well you did say you wanted to meet her, Bill. You asked several times.”

  He looked into the beautiful troubled face of the woman he loved. Of course he had wanted to meet his future mother-in-law. But not when she was locked into a bed-sitter. Not when she had been kidnapped for over thirty hours and was about to call the Guards. This was going to be a meeting that called for diplomacy like Bill Burke had never known to exist.

  He wondered how his heroes in fiction would have handled it, and knew with a great certainty that nobody would ever have put them in a position where they might have to.

  They walked up the stairs to Lizzie’s flat. No noise came from inside.

  “Could she have got out?” Bill whispered.

  “No. There’s a sort of bar under the window. She couldn’t have opened it.”

  “Would she have broken the glass?”

  “No, you don’t know my mother.”

  True, Bill thought, but he was about to get to know her under very strange circumstances indeed. “Will she be violent, rush at me or anything?”

  “No, of course not.” Lizzie was scornful of his fears.

  “Well, speak to her or something, tell her who it is.”

  “No, she’s cross with me, she’d be better with someone new.” Lizzie’s eyes were huge with fear.

  Bill squared his shoulders. “Um, Mrs. Duffy, my name is Bill Burke, I work in the bank,” he said. It produced no response. “Mrs. Duffy are you all right? Can I have your assurance that you are calm and in good health?”

  “Why should I be either calm or in good health? My certifiably insane daughter has imprisoned me in here and this is something she will regret every day, every hour from now until the end of her life.” The voice sounded very angry, but strong.

  “Well, Mrs. Duffy, if you just stand back from the door I will come in and explain this to you.”

  “Are you a friend of Elizabeth’s?”

  “Yes, a very good friend. In fact I am very fond of her.”

  “Then you must be insane too,” said the voice.

  Lizzie raised her eyes. “See what I mean,” she whispered.

  “Mrs. Duffy, I think we can discuss this much better face-to-face. I am coming in now so please stand well away.”

  “You are not coming in. I have put a chair under the door handle in case she was going to bring back some other drug addicts or criminals like you. I am staying here until somebody comes to rescue me.”

  “I have come to rescue you,” Bill said desperately.

  “You can turn the key all you like, you won’t get in.”

  It was true, Bill found. She had indeed barricaded herself in.

  “The window?” he asked Lizzie.

  “It’s a bit of a climb but I’ll show you.”

  Bill looked alarmed. “I meant you to go in the window.”

  “I can’t, Bill, you’ve heard her. She’s like a raging bull. She’d kill me.”

  “Well, what will she do to me, suppose I did get in? She thinks I’m a drug addict.”

  Lizzie’s lip trembled. “You said you’d help me,” she said in a small voice.

  “Show me the window,” said Bill. It was a bit of a climb and when he got there he saw the pole that Lizzie had wedged under the top part of the window. He eased it out, opened the window, and pulled the curtain back. A blond woman in her forties, with a mascara-stained face, saw him just as he got in and ran at him with a chair.

  “Stay away from me, get off, you useless little thug,” she cried.

  “Mummy, Mummy,” Lizzie shouted from outside the door.

  “Mrs. Duffy, please, please.” Bill took up the lid of the bread bin to defend himself. “Mrs. Duffy, I’ve come to let you out. Look, here’s the key. Please, please put the chair down.”

  He did indeed seem to be offering her a key, her eyes appeared to relax slightly. She put down the chair and watched him warily.

  “Just let me open the door, and Lizzie can come in and we can all discuss this calmly,” he said, moving toward the door.

  But Lizzie’s mother had picked up the kitchen chair again. “Get away from that door. Who knows what kind of a gang there is? I’ve told Lizzie I have no money, I have no credit cards…it’s useless kidnapping me. No one will pay a ransom. You’ve really picked the wrong woman.” Her lip was trembling, she looked so like her daughter that Bill felt the familiar protective attitude sweeping over him.

  “It’s only Lizzie outside, there’s no gang. It’s all a misunderstanding.” His voice was calming.

  “You can say
that again. Locked in here with that lunatic girl since last night and then she goes off and leaves me here, all on my own, wondering what’s next in the door, and you come in the window with a bread bin coming at me.”

  “No, no, I just picked that up when you picked up the chair. Look, I’ll put it down now.” His voice was having a great effect. She seemed ready to talk reason. She put the red kitchen chair down and sat on it, exhausted, frightened, and unsure what to do next.

  Bill began to breathe normally. He decided to let the moment last rather than introduce any new elements into it like opening the door. They looked at each other warily.

  Then there was a cry from outside. “Mummy? Bill? What’s happening? Why aren’t you talking, shouting?”

  “We’re resting,” Bill called. As an explanation he wondered was it adequate.

  But Lizzie seemed to think so. “Okay,” she said from outside.

  “Is she on some kind of drugs?” her mother asked.

  “No. Heavens no, not at all.”

  “Well, what was it all about? All this locking me in, saying she wanted to talk and then not talking any sense.”

  “I think she misses you,” Bill said slowly.

  “She’ll be missing me a lot more from now on in,” said Mrs. Duffy.

  Bill looked at her, trying to take her in. She was young and slim, she looked a different generation to his own mother. She wore a floaty kind of caftan dress, with some glass beads around the neckline. It was the kind of thing you saw in pictures of New Age people, but she didn’t have open sandals or long, flowing hair. Her curls were like Lizzie’s, but with little streaks of gray. Apart from her tear-stained face she could have been going to a party. Which was of course what she had been doing when she was waylaid.

  “I think she was sorry that you had grown a bit apart,” Bill said. There was a snort from the figure in the caftan. “Well, you know, you live so far away and everything.”

  “Not far enough I tell you. All I did was ask the girl to come out and meet me for a quick drink and she insists on coming to the station in a taxi, and bringing me here. I said, well only for a little while because we had to go to Chester’s opening…where Chester thinks I am now is beyond worrying about.”

  “Who is Chester?”

  “He’s a friend, for God’s sake, a friend, one of the people who lives near where I live, he’s an artist. We all came up, no one will know what happened to me.”

  “Won’t they think of looking for you here…in your daughter’s house?”

  “No, of course not, why would they?”

  “They know you have a daughter in Dublin?”

  “Yes, well maybe. They know I have three children but I don’t bleat on and on about them, they wouldn’t know where Elizabeth lived or anything.”

  “But your other friends, your real friends?”

  “These are my real friends,” she snapped.

  “Are you all right in there?” Lizzie called.

  “Leave it for a bit, Lizzie,” Bill said.

  “By God you’re going to pay for this, Elizabeth,” her mother called.

  “Where are they staying…your friends?”

  “I don’t know, that’s the whole bloody problem, we said we’d see how it went at the opening and maybe if Harry was there we might all go to Harry’s. He lives in a big barn, we once stayed there before. Or if all else failed Chester would know some marvelous little B and B’s for half nothing.”

  “And will Chester have called the Guards, do you think?”

  “Why on earth should he have done that?”

  “To see what had happened to you.”

  “The Guards?”

  “Well, if he was expecting you and you had disappeared.”

  “He’ll think I just drifted off with someone at the exhibition. He might even think I hadn’t bothered to come up at all. That’s what’s so bloody maddening about it all.”

  Bill let out a sigh of relief. Lizzie’s mother was a floater and a drifter. There would not be a full-scale alert looking for her. No Garda cars would cruise by, eyes out for a blonde in a caftan. Lizzie would not spend the rest of the night in a Garda station in a cell.

  “Will we let her in, do you think?” He managed to make it appear that they were together in this.

  “Will she go on with all that stuff about never talking and never relating and running away?”

  “No, I’ll see to it that she doesn’t, believe me.”

  “Very well. But don’t expect me to be all sunshine and light after this trick she’s pulled.”

  “No, you have every right to be upset.” He moved past her to the door. And there was Lizzie cowering outside in the dark corridor. “Ah, Lizzie,” Bill said in the voice you would use if you found an unexpected but delightful guest on your doorstep. “Come in, won’t you. And perhaps you could make us all a cup of tea.”

  Lizzie scuttled by him into the kitchen, avoiding the eye of her mother.

  “Wait until your father hears about this carry-on,” her mother said.

  “Mrs. Duffy, do you take your tea with milk and sugar?” Bill interrupted.

  “Neither, thank you.”

  “Just black for Mrs. Duffy,” Bill called, as if he were giving a command to the staff. He moved around the tiny flat tidying things up, straightening the counterpane on the bed, picking up objects from the floor, as if establishing normality in a place that had temporarily abandoned it. Soon they were sitting, an unlikely threesome, drinking mugs of tea.

  “I bought a tin of shortbread,” Lizzie said proudly, taking out a tartan-colored box.

  “They cost a fortune,” Bill said, aghast.

  “I wanted to have something for my mother’s visit.”

  “I never said I was coming to visit, that was all your idea. Some idea it was too.”

  “Still, they’re in a tin,” Bill said. “They could last for a long time.”

  “Are you soft in the head?” Lizzie’s mother suddenly asked Bill.

  “I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”

  “Talking about biscuits at a time like this. I thought you were meant to be the one in charge.”

  “Well, isn’t it better than screaming and talking about needing and relating and all the things you said you didn’t want talked about?” Bill was stung with the unfairness of it.

  “No it’s not, it’s insane if you ask me. You’re just as mad as she is. I’ve got myself into a lunatic asylum.”

  Her eyes darted to the door, and he saw her grip bag beside it. Would she make a run for it? Would that perhaps be for the best? Or had they gone so far into this that they had better see it through to the end. Let Lizzie tell her mother what was wrong, let her mother accept or deny all this. His father had always said that they should wait and see. It seemed a poor philosophy to Bill. What were you waiting for? What would you see? But his father seemed pleased with the end product, so perhaps it had its merits.

  Lizzie munched the biscuit. “These are beautiful,” she said. “Full of butter, you can tell.” She was so endearing, like a small child. Could her mother not see that in her too?

  Bill looked from one to the other. He hoped he wasn’t imagining that the mother’s face seemed to be softening a little.

  “It’s quite hard, Lizzie, in ways, a woman alone,” she began.

  “But you didn’t have to be alone, Mummy, you could have had us all with you, Daddy and me and John and Kate.”

  “I couldn’t live in a house like that, trapped all day waiting for a man to come home with the wages. And then your father often didn’t come home with the wages, he went to the betting shop with them. Like he does still over in Galway.”

  “You didn’t have to go.”

  “I had to go because otherwise I would have killed somebody, him, you, myself. Sometimes it’s safer to go and get a bit of air to breathe.”

  “When did you go?” Bill asked conversationally, as if he were inquiring about the times of trains.

  �
�Don’t you know, don’t you know every detail of the wicked witch who ran away abandoning everyone?”

  “No I don’t, actually. I didn’t even know you had ever gone until this moment. I thought you and Mr. Duffy had separated amicably and that all your children had scattered. It seemed very grown up and what families should do.”

  “What do you mean what families should do?” Lizzie’s mother looked at him suspiciously.

  “Well you see, I live at home with my mother and father and I have a handicapped sister, and honestly I can’t ever see any way of not being there or nearby anyway, so I thought what Lizzie’s family had was very free…and I kind of envied it.” He was so transparently honest. Nobody could put on an act like that.

  “You could just get up and go,” Lizzie’s mother suggested.

  “I suppose so, but I wouldn’t feel easy about it.”

  “You’ve only one life.” They were both ignoring Lizzie now.

  “Yes that’s it. I suppose, if we had more than one then I wouldn’t feel so guilty.”

  Lizzie tried to get back into the conversation. “You never write, you never stay in touch.”

  “What’s there to write about, Lizzie? You don’t know my friends. I don’t know yours. I don’t know John’s or Kate’s. I still love you and want the best for you even though we don’t see each other all the time.” She stopped, almost surprised at herself that she had said this much.

  Lizzie was not convinced. “You couldn’t love us, otherwise you’d come to see us. You wouldn’t laugh at me and this place I live in, and laugh at the idea of staying with me, not if you loved us.”

  “I think what Mrs. Duffy means…” Bill began.

  “Oh, for Jesus sake call me Bernie.” Bill was so taken aback, he forgot his sentence. “Go on, you were saying what I meant was…what do I mean?”

  “I think you mean that Lizzie is very important to you, but you have sort of drifted away a bit, what with West Cork being so far from here…and that last night was a bad time to stay because your friend Chester was having an art exhibition, and you wanted to be there in time to give him moral support. Was it something like that?” He looked from one to the other with his round face creased in anxiety. Please may she have meant something like this, and not have meant that she was going for the Guards or that she was never going to see Lizzie as long as she lived.