Evening Class

by Maeve Binchy

  “It won’t happen tonight,” he said. “Unless you want to, of course.”

  “We’ll see,” said Suzi darkly.

  THEY MET ALMOST every night after that.

  Lou wanted them to go back to the disco where they had met. He said that it was for sentimental reasons. In reality it was because he didn’t want the staff to think that he never came back again after the Incident.

  He heard all about the Incident. Apparently four men with guns had got into the van and told them to lie down. They had taken everyone’s carrier bag and left in minutes. Guns. Lou felt a bit sick in his stomach when he heard that. He had thought that Robin and his friends were still in sticks. But, of course, that was all five years ago, and the world had moved on. The manager lost his job, the system of banking the takings was changed, a huge van with barking dogs picked them up each night. You’d need an army to take that on.

  It was three weeks later when he was leaving work that he saw Robin in the car park. There was again an envelope. Again Lou pocketed it without looking.

  “Thank you very much,” he said. “Aren’t you going to see what’s in it?” Robin seemed disappointed.

  “No need to. You’ve treated me well in the past.”

  “There’s a thousand quid,” Robin said proudly.

  That was something to get excited about. Lou opened the envelope and saw the notes. “That’s absolutely terrific,” he said.

  “You’re a good man, Lou, I like you,” said Robin, and drove away.

  A thousand pounds in his pocket and the most beautiful redhead in the world waiting for him, Lou Lynch knew he was the luckiest man in the world.

  HIS ROMANCE WITH Suzi developed nicely. He was able to buy her things and take her to good places with his stash of money. But it seemed to alarm her when he pulled out twenty-pound notes.

  “Hey Lou, where do you get money like that to throw around?”

  “I work, don’t I?”

  “Yeah, and I know what they pay you in that place. That’s the third twenty you’ve split this week.”

  “Are you watching me?”

  “I like you, of course I watch you,” she said.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m hoping not to find that you’re some sort of a criminal,” she said quite directly.

  “Do I look the type?”

  “That’s not a yes or a no.”

  “And there are some questions to which there are no yes-and-no answers,” Lou said.

  “Okay, let me ask you this, are you involved in anything at the moment?”

  “No.” He spoke from the heart.

  “And do you plan to be?” There was a pause. “We don’t need it, Lou, you’ve got a job, I’ve got a job. Let’s not get caught up in something messy.” She had beautiful creamy skin and huge dark green eyes.

  “All right, I won’t get involved in anything again,” he said.

  And Suzi had the sense to let it rest there. She asked no questions about the past. The weeks went on and they saw more and more of each other, Suzi and Lou. She brought him to meet her parents one Sunday lunchtime.

  He was surprised where they lived.

  “I thought you were posher than this place,” he said.

  “I made myself seem posher to get the job in the restaurant.”

  Her father was not nearly as bad as she had said he was, he supported the right football team and he had cans of beer in the fridge.

  Her mother worked in that supermarket that Robin and his friends had done over a while back. She told them the story, and how Miss Clarke the supervisor had always thought there must be someone in the shop who had left the door open for them, but nobody knew who it was.

  Lou listened, shaking his head at it all. Robin must have people all over the city loosening bolts, parking cars in strategic places. He looked at Suzi, smiling and eager. For the first time he hoped that Robin wouldn’t contact him again.

  “THEY LIKED YOU,” Suzi said, surprised, afterward.

  “Well, why not? I’m a nice fellow,” Lou said.

  “My brother said you had a terrible frown but I told him it was a nervous tic and he was to shut up about it.”

  “It’s not a nervous tic, it’s a deliberate attempt to look important,” Lou said crossly.

  “Well, whatever it is, it was all they could find fault with so that’s something. When am I going to meet yours?”

  “Next week,” he said.

  His mother and father were alarmed that he was bringing a girl to lunch. “I suppose she’s pregnant,” his father said.

  “She most certainly is not, and there’ll be none of that talk when she comes to the house.”

  “What kind of things would she eat?” His mother was doubtful.

  He tried to remember what he had to eat at the Sullivans’ house. “Chicken,” he said. “She just loves a bit of chicken.” Even his mother could hardly destroy a chicken.

  “They liked you,” he said to her afterward, putting on exactly the same note of surprise as she had.

  “That’s good.” She pretended indifference, but he knew she was pleased.

  “You’re the first, you see,” he explained.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “No, I mean the first I brought home.”

  She patted him on the hand. He was very, very lucky to have met a girl like Suzi Sullivan.

  AT THE BEGINNING of September he met Robin by accident. But, of course, it wasn’t by accident. Robin was parked near his parents’ shop and just got out of the car.

  “A half pint to end the day?” Robin said, jerking his head toward the nearby pub.

  “Great,” Lou said with fake enthusiasm. He sometimes feared Robin could read minds; he hoped he couldn’t see the insincerity in Lou’s tone.

  “How are things?”

  “Great, I’ve got a smashing girl.”

  “So I see, she’s a real looker, isn’t she?”

  “Absolutely. We’re quite serious about it all.”

  Robin punched him on the arm. It was meant to be a punch of solidarity, but somehow it hurt. Lou managed not to rub where it felt bruised. “So you’ll be needing a deposit on a house soon?” Robin asked casually.

  “We’re not in any hurry with that, she’s got a grand bed-sit.”

  “But eventually of course?” Robin wasn’t taking any argument.

  “Oh yes, way down the line.” There was a silence. Did Robin know that Lou was trying to get off the hook?

  Robin spoke. “Lou, you know I always said I liked you.”

  “Yes, and I always liked you too. It was mutual. And is mutual,” Lou added hastily.

  “Considering how we met, as it were.”

  “You know the way it is, you forget how you met people.”

  “Good, good.” Robin nodded. “What I’m looking for, Lou, is a place.”

  “A place. To live in?”

  “No, no. I’ve got a place to live in, a place that our friends the Guards turn over with great regularity. They sort of regard it as part of their weekly routine, go in and search my place.”

  “It’s harassment.”

  “I know it is, they know it is. They never find anything, so they know well it’s harassment.”

  “So if they don’t find anything…?” Lou had no idea where all this was going.

  “It means that things have to be somewhere else and that’s getting increasingly difficult,” Robin said. In the past Lou had always waited. Robin would say what he wanted in time. “The kind of place I want is somewhere that there’s a lot of activity two or three times a week, a place where people wouldn’t be noticed going in and out.”

  “Like the warehouse where I work?” Lou asked nervously.

  “No, there’s proper security there.”

  “What would this place have to have, in terms of facilities?”

  “Not very much space at all, like enough for…imagine five or six cases of wine…packages about that size, in all.”

&
nbsp; “That shouldn’t be hard, Robin.”

  “I’m watched like a hawk. I’m spending weeks going round talking to everyone I know that they don’t have a file on, just to confuse them. But there’s something coming in soon, and I really do need a place.”

  Lou looked anxiously out the door of the pub in the direction of his parents’ shop.

  “I don’t think it would be possible in Ma and Da’s place.”

  “No, no, that’s not what I want at all, it’s a place with bustle, doors in and out, lots of people moving through.”

  “I’ll think,” Lou said.

  “Good, Lou. Think this week will you, and then I’ll give you the instructions. It’s very easy, no driving cars or anything.”

  “Well actually, Robin, this is something I meant to bring up, but I’m thinking of…um…well, not being involved anymore.”

  Robin’s frown was terrible to see. “Once you’re involved you’re always involved,” he said. Lou said nothing. “That’s the way it is,” Robin added.

  “I see,” said Lou, and he frowned hard in response to show how seriously he took it.

  THAT NIGHT SUZI said she wasn’t free, she had promised to help the mad old Italian woman who lived as a lodger in their house to do up an annex in Mountainview school for some evening class.

  “Why do you have to do that?” Lou grumbled. He had wanted to go to the pictures and then for some chips and then back to bed with Suzi in her little bed-sitter. He did not want to be on his own thinking about the fact that once you were involved, you could never get uninvolved again.

  “Come with me,” Suzi suggested, “that’ll make it quicker.”

  Lou said he would, and they went to this annex attached to the school but slightly separate from it. It had an entrance hall, a big classroom, two lavatories, and a small kitchen space. In the hall there was a storeroom with a few boxes in it. Empty boxes.

  “What are all these?” he asked.

  “We’re trying to tidy up the place so it looks more festive and not so much like a rubbish dump for when the classes start,” said the deranged woman they called Signora. Harmless but very odd, and some most peculiar-colored hair, like a piebald mare.

  “Should we throw out the boxes?” Suzi suggested.

  Slowly Lou spoke. “Why don’t I just tidy them up and leave them in a neat stack in there. You’d never know when you might need a few boxes.”

  “For Italian classes?” Suzi said in disbelief.

  But at this moment Signora interrupted. “No, he’s right. We could use them to be tables when we are learning the section on what to order in an Italian restaurant, they could be counters in the shops, or a car at the garage.” Her face seemed radiant at all the uses there would be for boxes.

  Lou looked at her with amazement. She was obviously missing her marbles, but at this moment he loved her. “Good woman, Signora,” he said, and tidied the boxes into neat piles.

  HE COULDN’T CONTACT Robin, but he wasn’t surprised to get a phone call at work.

  “Don’t want to come and see you, the toy soldiers are going mad with excitement these days. I can’t move without five of them padding after me.”

  “I found somewhere,” said Lou.

  “I knew you would, Lou.”

  Lou told him where it was, and about the activity every Tuesday and Thursday, thirty people.

  “Fantastic,” Robin said. “Have you enrolled?”

  “For what?”

  “For the class, of course.”

  “Oh Jesus, Robin, I scarcely speak English, what would I be doing learning Italian?”

  “I’m relying on you,” said Robin, and he hung up.

  There was an envelope waiting for him at home that night. It contained five hundred pounds and a note. “Incidental expenses for language learning.” He had been serious.

  “YOU’RE GOING TO do what?”

  “Well, you’re the one who said I should better myself, Suzi. Why not?”

  “When I said better yourself, I meant smarten yourself up, get a better-paid job. I didn’t mean go mad and learn a foreign language.” Suzi was astounded. “Lou, you have to be off your head. It costs a fair amount. Poor Signora is afraid that it will be too dear for people, and suddenly out of the blue, you decide to take it up. I can’t take it in.”

  Lou frowned a mighty frown. “Life would be very dull if we all understood everyone,” he said.

  And Suzi said that it would be a lot easier to get on with.

  Lou went to the first Italian lesson as a condemned man walks to Death Row. His years in the classroom had not been glorious. Now he would face further humiliation. But it had been surprisingly enjoyable. First the mad Signora asked them all their names and gave them ridiculous pieces of colored cardboard to write them on, but they had to write Italianized versions.

  Lou became Luigi. In a way he liked it. It was important.

  “Mi chiamo Luigi,” he would say and frown at people, and they seemed impressed.

  They were an odd bunch, a woman dripping in jewelry that no one in their sane senses would have worn to Mountainview school, and driving a BMW. Lou hoped that Robin’s friends wouldn’t steal the BMW. The woman who drove it was nice, as it happened, and she had sad eyes.

  There was a very nice old fellow, a hotel porter called Laddy, though he had Lorenzo written on his badge, a mother and daughter, a real dizzy blonde called Elisabetta who had a serious boyfriend with a collar and tie, and dozens of others that you’d never expect to find at a class like this. Perhaps they wouldn’t think it odd that he was there. They might not even question it for a moment why he was there.

  For two weeks he questioned it himself, then he heard from Robin. Some boxes would be coming in on Tuesday, just around seven-thirty when the classroom was filling up. Maybe he could see to it that they got into the store cupboard in the hall.

  He didn’t know the man in the anorak. He just looked out for the van. There were so many people arriving, parking bikes, motorbikes, the dame with the BMW, two women with a Toyota Starlet…the van didn’t cause any stir.

  There were four boxes, they were in in a flash, the van and the man in the anorak were gone.

  On Thursday he had the four boxes ready to be pulled out quickly. The whole thing was done in seconds. Lou had made himself teacher’s pet by helping with the boxes. Sometimes they covered them with red crepe paper and put cutlery on them.

  “Quanto costa il piatto del giorno?” Signora would ask, and they would all repeat it over and over until they could ask for any damn thing and lift knives and say “Ecco il coltello!”

  Babyish it might have been, but Lou liked it, he even saw himself and Suzi going to Italy one day and he would order her a bicchiere di vino rosso as quick as look at her.

  Once Signora lifted a heavy box, one of the consignment.

  Lou felt his heart turn over, but he spoke quickly. “Listen, Signora, will you let me lift those for you, it’s the empty ones we want.”

  “But what’s in it, this is so heavy.”

  “Could you be up to them in a school? Come on, here we are. What are they going to be today?”

  “They are doing hotels, alberghi. Albergo di prima categoria, di seconda categoria.”

  Lou was pleased that he understood these things. “Maybe I wasn’t just thick at school,” he told Suzi. “Maybe I was just badly taught.”

  “Could be,” Suzi said. She was preoccupied. There had been some trouble with Jerry; her mam and dad had been called to see the headmaster. They said it sounded serious. And just after he had been getting on so well and doing so well since Signora had come to the house, and actually doing his homework and everything. It couldn’t have been stealing, or anything. They had been very mysterious up at the school.

  ONE OF THE nice things about working in a cafe was listening to people’s conversations. Suzi said that she could write a book about Dublin just from the bits of overheard conversation.

  People were talking about sec
ret weekends, and plans for further dalliances, and cheating on their income tax. And incredible scandal about politicians and journalists and television personalities…maybe none of it true, but all of it hair-raising. But it was often the most ordinary conversations that were the most fascinating. A girl of sixteen determined to get pregnant so that she could leave home and get a council flat, a couple who made fake I.D. cards explaining the economics of buying a good laminator. Lou hoped that Robin and his friends would never use this cafe to discuss their plans. But then it was a bit up-market for them, he was probably in the clear as regards this.

  Suzi would spend a lot of time clearing a nearby table when people were saying interesting things. A middle-aged man and his daughter came in, good-looking blond girl with a bank uniform. The man was craggy and had longish hair, hard to know what he did, maybe a journalist or a poet. They seemed to have had a row. Suzi hovered nearby.

  “I’m only agreeing to meet you because it’s a half hour off work and I’d love a cup of good coffee compared to that dishwater we get in the canteen,” the girl said.

  “There’s a new and beautiful percolator with four different kinds of coffee waiting for you anytime you would like to call,” he said. He didn’t sound like a father, he sounded more like a lover. But he was so old. Suzi kept shining up the table so that she could hear more.

  “You mean you’ve used it?”

  “I keep practicing, waiting for the day you’ll come back and I can make you Blue Mountain or Costa Rica.”

  “You’ll have a long wait,” said the girl.

  “Please, can’t we talk?” He was begging. He was quite a handsome old man, Suzi admitted.

  “We are talking, Tony.”

  “I think I love you,” he said.

  “No you don’t, you just love the memory of me and you can’t bear that I don’t just troop back there like all the others.”

  “There are no others now.” There was a silence. “I never said I loved anyone before.”

  “You didn’t say you loved me, you only said you thought you loved me. It’s different.”