Evening Class

by Maeve Binchy

  “It was a bit like that,” Bernie agreed. “But only a bit.”

  Still, it was something, Bill thought to himself. “And what Lizzie meant when she threw away the key was that she was afraid life was passing too quickly and she wanted a chance to get to know you and talk properly, make up for all the lost time, wasn’t that it?”

  “That was it.” Lizzie nodded vigorously.

  “But God Almighty, whatever your name is…”

  “Bill,” he said helpfully.

  “Yes, well Bill, it’s not the act of a sane person to lure me here and lock me in.”

  “I didn’t lure you here. I borrowed the money from Bill to get a taxi for you. I invited you here, I bought shortbread and bacon and chicken livers and sherry. I made my bed for you to sleep in. I wanted you to stay. That wasn’t all that much, was it?”

  “But I couldn’t.” Bernie Duffy’s voice was gentler now.

  “You could have said you’d come back the next day. You just laughed. I couldn’t bear that, and then you got crosser and crosser and said awful things.”

  “I wasn’t talking normally because I wasn’t talking to a normal person. I was really shaken by you, Lizzie. You seemed to be losing your mind. Truly. You weren’t making any sense. You kept saying that the last six years you had been like a lost soul…”

  “That’s just the way it was.”

  “You were seventeen when I left. Your father wanted you to go to Galway with him, you wouldn’t…You insisted you were old enough to live in Dublin, you got a job in a dry cleaner’s, I remember. You had your own money. It was what you wanted. That was what you said.”

  “I stayed because I thought you’d come back.”

  “Back to where? Here?”

  “No, back to the house. Daddy didn’t sell it for a year, remember?”

  “I remember and then he put every penny he got for it on horses that are still running backwards somewhere on English racetracks.”

  “Why didn’t you come back, Mummy?”

  “What was there to come back to? Your father was only interested in a form book, John had gone to Switzerland, Kate had gone to New York, you were running with your crowd.”

  “I was waiting for you, Mummy.”

  “No, that’s not true, Lizzie. You can’t rewrite the whole thing. Why didn’t you write and tell me if that was the way it was?”

  There was a silence.

  “You only liked hearing from me if I was having a good time, so I told you about the good times. On postcards and letters. I told you when I went to Greece, and to Achill Island. I didn’t tell you about wanting you to come back, in case you got annoyed with me.”

  “I would have liked it a hell of a lot more than being hijacked, imprisoned…”

  “And is it nice where you are in West Cork?” Again Bill was being conversational and interested. “It always sounds a lovely place to me, the pictures you see of the coastline.”

  “It’s very special. There are a lot of free spirits there, people who have gone back to the land, people who paint, express themselves, make pottery.”

  “And do you specialize in any of the arts…er…Bernie?” He was owlish and interested, she couldn’t take offense.

  “No, not myself personally, but I have always been interested in artistic people, and places. I find myself stifled to be cooped up anywhere. That’s why this whole business…”

  Bill was anxious to head her off the subject. “And do you have a house of your own or do you live with Chester?”

  “No, heavens no.” She laughed just like her daughter laughed, a happy peal of mirth. “No, Chester is gay, he lives with Vinnie. No, no. They’re my dearest friends. They live about four miles away. No, I have a room, a sort of studio I suppose, an outbuilding it once was, off a bigger property.”

  “That sounds nice, is it near the sea?”

  “Yes, of course. Everywhere’s near the sea. It’s very charming. I love it. I’ve been there for six years now, made a real little home of it.”

  “And how do you get money to live, Bernie? Do you have a job?”

  Lizzie’s mother looked at him as if he had made a very vulgar noise. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I mean, if Lizzie’s father didn’t give you any money you have to earn a living. That’s all.” He was unrepentant.

  “It’s because he works in a bank, Mummy,” Lizzie apologized. “He’s obsessed with earning a living.”

  Suddenly it became too much for Bill. He was sitting in this house in the middle of the night trying to keep the peace between two madwomen and they thought that he was the odd one because he actually had a job and paid his bills and lived according to the rules. Well, he had had just about enough. Let them sort it out. He would go home, back to his dull house, with his sad family.

  He would never be transferred into international banking no matter how much he learned about “How are you and beautiful buildings and red carnations.” He would not try anymore to make selfish people see some good in each other. He felt an entirely unfamiliar twitching in his nose and eyes as if he were about to cry.

  There was something about his face that both women noticed at the same time. It was as if he had opted out, left them.

  “I didn’t mean to laugh at your question,” Lizzie’s mother said. “Of course I have to earn money. I do some help in the home where I have my studio, you know, cleaning, light housework, and when they have parties I help with the…well with the clearing up. I love ironing, I always have, so I do all their ironing too, and for this I don’t have to pay any rent. And of course they give me a little spending money too.”

  Lizzie looked at her mother in disbelief. This was the arty lifestyle, mixing with the great and the rich, the playboys and the glittery set who had second homes in the southwest of Ireland. Her mother was a maid.

  Bill was in control of himself again. “It must be very satisfying,” he said. “Means you can have the best of both worlds, a nice place to live, independence and no real worries about how to put food on the table.”

  She searched his face for sarcasm, but did not find any. “That’s right,” Bernie Duffy said eventually. “That’s the way it is.”

  Bill thought he must speak before Lizzie blurted out something that would start them off again. “Perhaps sometime when the weather gets finer Lizzie and I could come down and see you there. It would be a real treat for me. We could come on the bus, and change at Cork City.” Eager, boyish, and planning it as if this was a social call long overdue.

  “And, are you two…I mean, are you Lizzie’s boyfriend?”

  “Yes, we are going to get married when we are twenty-five, two years time. We hope to get a job in Italy so we are both learning Italian at night.”

  “Yes, she told me that amongst all the other ramblings,” Bernie said.

  “That we were getting married?” Bill was pleased.

  “No, that she was learning Italian. I thought it was more madness.”

  There seemed little more to be said. Bill stood up as if he were a normal guest taking his leave of a normal evening. “Bernie, as you may have noticed it’s very late now. There won’t be more buses running, and it might be difficult to find your friends even if there were buses. So I suggest that you stay here tonight, at your own wish, of course, with the key in the door. And then tomorrow when you’ve both had a good rest, you and Lizzie, say good-bye to each other nice and peaceably and I probably won’t see you until next summer when it would be lovely if we could come and see you in West Cork.”

  “Don’t go,” Bernie begged. “Don’t go. She’s nice and quiet while you’re here but the moment you are out the door she’ll be ranting and raving and saying she was abandoned.”

  “No, no. It won’t be a bit like that now.” He spoke with conviction. “Lizzie, could you give your mother the key? Now Bernie, you keep that and then you know you can come and go as you please.”

  “How will you get home, Bill?” Lizzie asked.

 
He looked at her in surprise. She never usually asked or seemed to care that he had to walk three miles when he left her at night.

  “I’ll walk, it’s a fine starry night,” he said. They were both looking at him. He felt an urge to say something more, to make the peaceful moment last. “At Italian class last night Signora taught us a bit about the weather, how to say it’s been a great summer. E stata una magnifica estate.”

  “That’s nice,” Lizzie said. “È stata una magnifica estate.” She repeated it perfectly.

  “Hey, you got it in one, the rest of us had to keep saying it over.” Bill was impressed.

  “She always had a great memory, even as a little girl. You said a thing once and Elizabeth would remember it always.” Bernie looked at her daughter with something like pride.

  On the way home Bill felt quite lighthearted. A lot of the obstacles that had seemed huge were less enormous now. He didn’t need to fear some classy mother in West Cork who would regard a lowly bank clerk as too humble for her daughter. He didn’t have to worry anymore that he might be too dull for Lizzie. She wanted safety and love and a base, and he could give her all of those things. There would, of course, be problems ahead. Lizzie would not find it easy to live on a budget. She would never change in her attitude to spending and wanting things now. All he had to do was try to make it happen somehow within reason. And to head her toward work. If her dizzy mother actually earned a living doing other people’s ironing and cleaning, then perhaps Lizzie’s own goalposts might move.

  Attitudes might change.

  They might even go to Galway and visit her father sometime. Let her know that she was already part of a family, she didn’t have to pretend and wish. And that soon she would be part of his family.

  Bill Burke walked on through the night as other people drove by in cars or hailed taxis. He had no envy for any of them. He was a lucky man. So all right, he had people who needed him. And people who relied on him. But that was fine. That meant he was just that sort of person, and maybe in the years to come his son would be sorry for him and pity him as Bill pitied his own father. But it wouldn’t matter. It would only mean that the boy wouldn’t understand. That was all.

  KATHY

  Kathy Clarke was one of the hardest-working girls in Mountainview. She frowned with concentration in class, she puzzled things out, she hung back and asked questions. In the staff room they often made good-natured fun of her. “Doing a Kathy Clarke” meant screwing up your eyes at a notice on the bulletin board trying to understand it.

  She was a tall, awkward girl, her navy school skirt a bit too long, none of the pierced ears and cheap jewelry of her classmates. Not really bright but determined to do well. Almost too determined. Every year they had parent-teacher meetings. Nobody could really remember who came to ask about Kathy.

  “Her father’s a plumber,” Aidan Dunne said once. “He came and put in the cloakroom for us, great job he made of it too, but of course it had to be paid for in cash. Didn’t tell me till the end…nearly passed out when he saw the checkbook.”

  “I remember her mother never took the cigarette out of her mouth during the whole chat,” said Helen the Irish teacher. “She kept saying what good will all this do her, will it earn her a living.”

  “That’s what they all say.” Tony O’Brien the principal-elect was resigned. “You’re surely not expecting them to talk about the sheer intellectual stimulation of studying for its own sake.”

  “She has a big sister who comes too,” someone else remembered. “She’s the manageress in the supermarket. I think she’s the only one who understands about poor Kathy.”

  “God, wouldn’t it be a great life if the only worries we had were about them working too hard and frowning too much with concentration,” said Tony O’Brien, who as principal-elect had many more trying problems on his desk every day. And not only on his desk.

  In his life of moving on from one woman to another there had been very few women he had wanted to stay with, and now that it had finally happened and he had met one, there was this goddamned complication. She was the daughter of poor Aidan Dunne, who had thought that he was going to be principal. The misunderstanding and the confusions would have done credit to a Victorian melodrama.

  Now young Grania Dunne wouldn’t see him because she accused him of having humiliated her father. It was farfetched and wrong, but the girl believed it. He had left the decision to her, saying for the first time in his life that he would remain unattached waiting until she came back to him. He sent her jokey postcards to let her know that he was still there, but there was no response. Perhaps he was stupid to go on hoping. He knew how many other fish there were in the sea, and he had never been short of female fishes in his life.

  But somehow none of them had the appeal of this bright, eager girl with the dancing eyes and the energy and quick response that made him feel genuinely young again. She hadn’t thought he was too old for her, not that night she had stayed. The night before he knew who she was and that her father had expected the job that could never be his.

  The last thing Tony O’Brien had expected as principal of Mountainview was that he would live a near monastic life at home. It was doing him no harm, early nights, less clubbing, less drinking. In fact he was even trying to cut down on his smoking in case she came back. At least he didn’t smoke in the mornings now. He didn’t reach out of the bed, eyes closed, hands searching for the packet, he managed to wait till break and have his first drag of the day in the privacy of his own office with a coffee. That was an advance. He wondered should he send her a card with a picture of a cigarette on it saying Not still smoking, but then she might think he was totally cured, which he was far from being. It was absurd how much of his thoughts she took up.

  And he had never realized what an exhausting job it was running a school like Mountainview, the parent-teacher meetings and Open Nights were only one of the many things that cried out for his being there.

  He had little time left to worry about the Kathy Clarkes of this world. She would leave school, get some kind of a job; maybe her sister might get her into the supermarket. She would never get third-level education. There wasn’t the background, there weren’t the brains. She would survive.

  NONE OF THEM knew what Kathy Clarke’s home life was like. If they thought at all, they might have assumed it was one of the houses on the big sprawling estate with too much television and fast food and too little peace and quiet, too many children and not enough money coming in. That would be the normal picture. They could not know that Kathy’s bedroom had a built-in desk and a little library of books. Her elder sister, Fran, sat there every evening until homework was finished. In winter there was a gas heater with portable cylinders of bottled gas that Fran bought at a discount in the supermarket.

  Kathy’s parents laughed at the extravagance, all the other children had done their homework at the kitchen table and hadn’t it been fine. But Fran said it had not been fine. She had left school at fifteen with no qualifications, it had taken her years to build her way up to a position of seniority, and there were still huge gaps in her education. The boys had barely scraped by, two working in England and one a roadie with a pop group. It was as if Fran had a mission to get Kathy to make more of herself than the rest of the family.

  Sometimes Kathy felt she was letting Fran down. “You see I’m not really very bright, Fran. Things don’t come to me like they do to some of them in the class. You wouldn’t believe how quick Harriet is.”

  “Well, her father’s a teacher, why wouldn’t she be bright?” Fran sniffed.

  “Yes, this is what I mean, Fran. You’re so good to me. When you should be dancing you give time to me hearing my homework, and I’m so afraid I’ll fail all my exams and be a disgrace to you after all your work.”

  “I don’t want to go dancing,” Fran would sigh.

  “But you’re still young enough surely to go to discos?” Kathy was sixteen, the baby of the family, Fran was thirty-two, the eldest. She re
ally should be married now with a home of her own like all her friends were, and yet Kathy never wanted Fran to leave. The house would be unthinkable without her. Their mam was out a lot in town, getting things done was what it was called. In fact it was playing slot machines.

  There would have been very few comforts in this house if Fran were not there to provide them. Orange juice for breakfast, and a hot meal in the evening. It was Fran who bought Kathy’s school uniform and who taught the girl to polish her shoes and to wash her blouses and underwear every night. She would have learned nothing like this from her mother.

  Fran explained the facts of life to her and bought her the first packet of Tampax. Fran said that it was better to wait until you found someone you liked a lot to have sex with, rather than having it with anyone just because it was expected.

  “Did you find someone you liked a lot to have it with?” the fourteen-year-old Kathy had asked with interest.

  But Fran had an answer for that one too. “I’ve always thought it best not to talk about it, you know the magic sort of goes out of it once you start speaking about it,” she said, and that was that.

  Fran took her to the theater, to plays in the Abbey, the Gate, and the Project. She brought her up and down Grafton Street and through the smart shops as well. “We must learn to do everything with an air of confidence,” Fran said. “That’s the whole trick, we mustn’t look humble and apologetic as if we hadn’t a right to be here.”

  There was never a word of criticism from Fran about their parents. Sometimes Kathy complained: “Mam takes you for granted, Fran, you bought her a lovely new cooker and she still never makes anything in it.”

  “Ah, she’s all right,” Fran would say.