Evening Class

by Maeve Binchy

  Laddy went to bed with the comics she had bought him, and Rose wondered what they were all doing in the carnival now. It would be closing soon. The colored light would be switched off, the people would go to their caravans. Tripper lay beside the fire snoring gently, upstairs Laddy would have fallen asleep. Outside it was dark. Rose thought of the marriage and the one child and the ill health late in life. They should really put a stop to these kinds of sideshows. Some people were foolish enough as to believe them.

  SHE WOKE IN the dark thinking she was being suffocated. A great weight lay on top of her, she began to struggle and panic. Had the wardrobe fallen over? Had some of the roof fallen down? As she started to move and cry out a hand went across her mouth. She smelled alcohol. She realized in a moment of sick recognition that Shay Neil was in her bed, lying on top of her.

  She struggled to free her head from his hand. “Please Shay,” she whispered. “Please, Shay, don’t do this.”

  “You’ve been begging for it,” he said, still pushing at her, trying to get her legs apart.

  “Shay, I haven’t. I don’t want you to do this. Shay, leave now we’ll say no more about it.”

  “Why are you whispering then?” He spoke in a whisper too.

  “So as not to wake Laddy, frighten him.”

  “No, so that we can do it, that’s why, that’s why you don’t want him to wake.”

  “I’ll give you anything.”

  “No, it’s what I’m going to give you that we’re talking about now.” He was rough, he was heavy, he was too strong for her. She had two choices. One was to shout for Laddy to come and hit him. But did she want Laddy to see her like this, her nightdress torn, her body pinned down? The other choice was to let him get it over with. Rose made the second choice.

  NEXT MORNING SHE washed every item of bedclothes, burned her nightdress, and opened the windows of her room.

  “Shay must have come upstairs in the night,” Laddy said at breakfast.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “The statue I won for you is on the landing. He must have brought it up,” Laddy said, pleased.

  “That’s right, he must have,” Rose agreed.

  She felt bruised and sore. She would ask Shay to leave. Laddy would ask endless questions, she must get a story together that would cover it, and cover it for the neighbors too. Then a wave of anger came over her. Why should she, Rose, who was blameless in all this, have to invent excuses, explanations, cover stories? It was the most unjust thing she had ever heard in her life.

  The morning passed as so many mornings had passed for Rose. She made Laddy’s sandwiches and he went to school, to do errands for the teachers as she now realized. She collected the eggs, fed the hens. All the time the sheets and pillowcases flapped on the line, the blanket lay spread on a hedge.

  The custom had been that Shay ate bread and butter and boiled tea in his own quarters at breakfast time. After he heard the Angelus ring from the town, he washed his hands and face at the pump in the yard and came in for a meal. It wasn’t meat every day, sometimes it was soup. But there was always a bowl of big floury potatoes, a jug of water on the table, and a pot of tea afterward. Shay would take his plate and cutlery to the sink and wash it.

  It had been a fairly joyless business. Sometimes Rose had read through it; Shay had never been one for conversation. Today she prepared no lunch. When he came in, she would tell him that he must leave. But the bells of the Angelus rang and Shay did not come in. She knew he was working. She had heard the cows come in to be milked, she had seen the churns left out for the creamery to collect.

  Now she began to get frightened. Maybe he was going to attack her again. Perhaps he took the fact that she had not ordered him out this morning as encouragement. Perhaps he took the whole of last night’s passivity as encouragement, when all she was doing was trying to save Laddy from something he would not understand. That no normal sixteen-year-old would understand in relation to his own sister, but Laddy of all people.

  By two o’clock she was very uneasy. There had never been a day when Shay had not come in for his midday meal. Was he waiting for her somewhere, would he grab her and hurt her again? Well, if he did, by God this time she would defend herself. Outside the kitchen door was a pole with some curved nails in it. They used it to rake twigs and branches off the thatched roof. It was the perfect thing to have to hand. She brought it inside and sat at the kitchen table trying to plan her next move.

  He had opened the door and was in the kitchen before she realized it. She moved for the stick, but he kicked it out of her way. His face was pale and she could see his Adam’s apple moving up and down in his throat. “What I did last night should not have been done,” he said. She sat trembling. “I was very drunk. I’m not used to strong drink. It was the drink that made me do it.”

  She searched for the words that would make him leave their lives, the actual phrase of dismissal that would not goad him into attacking her again. But she found she still couldn’t speak. They were used to silences. Hours, days, weeks of her life had been spent in this kitchen with Shay Neil and no words being said, but today was different. The fear and the memory of the grunts and obscenities of last night hung between them. “I would like it if last night had not happened,” he said eventually.

  “And so would I, by God so would I,” she said. “But since it did…” Now she could say it, get him out from their place.

  “But since it did,” he said, “I don’t think I should come in and eat dinner with you anymore in your house. I’ll make my own food over beyond. That would be best from now on.”

  He seriously intended to stay on after what had happened between them. After the most intimate and frightening abuse of another human being, he thought that it could be put aside with just a minor readjustment of the meal schedule. The man must be truly mad.

  She spoke gently and very deliberately. She must not allow the fear to be heard in her voice. “No, Shay, I don’t think that would be enough, I really think you had better leave. It would not be easy for us to forget what happened. You should start somewhere else.”

  He looked at her in disbelief. “I can’t go,” he said.

  “You’ll find another place.”

  “I can’t go, I love you,” he said.

  “Don’t talk nonsense.” She was angry and even more frightened now. “You don’t love me or anyone. What you did had nothing to do with love.”

  “I’ve told you that was the drink, but I do love you.”

  “You’ll have to go, Shay.”

  “I can’t leave you. What is to happen to you and Laddy if I go?”

  He turned and left the kitchen.

  “WHY DIDN’T SHAY come in for his dinner?” Laddy asked on Saturday.

  “He says he prefers to have it on his own, he’s a very quiet sort of person,” Rose said.

  She had not spoken to Shay since. The work went on as it always did. A fence around the orchard had been mended. He had put a new bolt on the kitchen door, for her to fasten at night from the inside.

  TRIPPER, THE OLD collie dog, was dying.

  Laddy was very upset. He sat stroking the dog’s head and trying to administer him little sips of water on a spoon. Sometimes he would cry with his arms around the dog’s neck. “Get better, Tripper. I can’t bear to hear you breathing like this.”

  “Rose?” It was the first time that Shay had spoken to her in weeks.

  She jumped. “What?”

  “I think I should take Tripper out to the field and shoot him through the head. What do you think?” Together they looked at the wheezing dog.

  “We can’t do it without telling Laddy.” Laddy had gone to school that day with the promise that he was going to buy a small piece of steak for Tripper, it might build him up. He would call at the butcher’s on his way home. The dog would never be able to eat steak or anything, but Laddy didn’t want to believe this.

  “So will I ask him then?”

  “Do.”

&n
bsp; He turned away. That evening Laddy dug a grave for Tripper and they carried him out to the back field. Shay put the gun to the dog’s head. It was over in a second. Laddy made a small wooden cross, and the three of them stood in silence around the little mound. Shay went back to his quarters.

  “You’re very quiet, Rose,” Laddy said. “I think you loved Tripper as much as I did.”

  “Oh I did, definitely,” she said.

  But Rose was quiet because she had missed her period. Something that had never happened to her before.

  IN THE WEEK that followed, Laddy was anxious. There was something very wrong with Rose. It had to be more than just missing Tripper.

  THERE WERE THREE routes open to her in the Ireland of the fifties. She could have the child and live on in the farm, a disgraced woman, with the gossip of the parish ringing in her ears. She could sell the farm and move with Laddy to somewhere else, start a new life where nobody knew them. She could bring Shay Neil to the priest, and marry him.

  There was something wrong with all these options. She could not bear to think of her changed status after all these years, if she were to be known as the unwed mother of a child for whom no father had ever been acknowledged. Her few pleasures, like a visit to the town, a coffee in the hotel, a chat after Mass, would end. She would be a matter of speculation and someone to be pitied. Heads would shake. Laddy would be confused. But could she sell the farm and leave under such circumstances? In a way the farm belonged to all of them, her four sisters as well. Suppose they were to hear that she had taken all the proceeds and gone to live with Laddy and an illegitimate child in some rooms in Dublin? What would they feel about it?

  She married Shay Neil.

  Laddy was delighted about it all. And overjoyed to think he would be an uncle. “Will the baby call me Uncle Laddy?” he wanted to know.

  “Whatever you like,” Rose said.

  Nothing had changed much at home except that Shay slept up in Rose’s bedroom now. Rose went less often to town than she used to. Perhaps it was because she felt tired now that she was expecting the baby, or maybe she had lost interest in seeing people there. Laddy wasn’t sure. And she wrote less to her sisters, even though they wrote more to her. They had been very startled by the marriage. And the fact that there had been no big wedding breakfast as Rose had organized for them. They had come to visit and shaken Shay’s hand awkwardly. They had found no satisfactory explanations in the conversation of their normally outgoing eldest sister.

  AND THEN THE baby was born, a healthy child. Laddy was his godfather and Mrs. Nolan from the hotel his godmother. The child was baptized Augustus. They called him Gus. The smile came back to Rose’s face again as she held her son. Laddy loved the little boy and never tired of trying to entertain him. Shay was silent and uncommunicative about the baby as well as everything else. The strange household got on with their lives. Laddy went to work for Mrs. Nolan in the hotel. The grandest help she ever had, Mrs. Nolan said. Nothing was too much trouble for him, they would be lost without Laddy.

  And young Gus learned to walk and staggered around the farmyard after the chickens, and Rose stood at the door admiring him. Shay Neil was morose as ever. Sometimes at night Rose would look at him while pretending not to. He lay for long times with his eyes open. What was he thinking about? Was he happy in this marriage?

  There had been very little sexual activity involved. First, because of her pregnancy, she had been unwilling. But after the birth of Gus she had said to him very directly: “We are man and wife and putting the past behind us, we should have a normal married life.”

  “That’s right,” he had said, with no great enthusiasm at all.

  Rose had found to her surprise that he did not revolt or frighten her. It did not bring up memories of that night of violence. In fact it was the only time they seemed to be in any way close. He was a complicated, withdrawn man. Conversation would never be easy with him, on any subject.

  They never had alcohol at home, apart from the half bottle of whiskey on the top shelf in the kitchen to be used in an emergency or for soaking cotton wool if someone had a toothache. The drunkenness of that one night was never mentioned between them. The events had such a strange nightmarish quality that Rose had put them far from her mind as possible. She didn’t even pause to rationalize that they had resulted in the birth of her beloved Gus, the child that had brought her more happiness than she would ever have believed possible.

  So she was entirely unprepared to face a drunken, violent Shay when he came home from a fair almost incapable of speech. Slurred and maddened by her criticism of him, he took his belt from his trousers and beat her. The beating seemed to excite him and he forced himself on her in exactly the same way as the night she had managed to put out of her mind. Every memory came rushing back, the disgust and the terror. And even though she was familiar with his body now and had welcomed it to her own, this was something horrifying. She lay there bruised and with a cut lip.

  “And you can’t come the high-and-mighty lady tomorrow telling me to pack my bags and go. Not this time. Not now that I’m married in,” he said. And turned over to fall asleep.

  “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO you, Rose?” Laddy was concerned.

  “I fell out of bed, half asleep, and I hit my head against the bedside table,” she said.

  “Will I ask the doctor to come out to you when I’m in town?” Laddy had never seen a bruise like it.

  “No, Laddy, it’s fine,” she said, and joined the ranks of women who accept violence because it’s easier than standing up to it.

  ROSE HAD HOPED for another child, a sister for little Gus, but it didn’t happen. How strange that a pregnancy could result from one night of rape and not from months of what was called normal married life.

  MRS. NOLAN OF the hotel said to Dr. Kenny that it was strange how often Rose seemed to fall and hurt herself.

  “I know, I’ve seen her.”

  “She says she’s got clumsy, but I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know either, Mrs. Nolan, but what can I do?” He had lived long enough to notice that a lot of women claimed they had got clumsy and had fallen over.

  And the strange coincidence was that it often happened after the Fair Day or the market had been in town. If Dr. Kenny had his way, alcohol would be barred from fairs. But then who listened to an old country doctor who picked up the pieces and was rarely if ever told the truth about what had happened?

  LADDY FANCIED GIRLS, but he was no good with them. He told Rose that he’d love to have slicked-down hair and wear pointed shoes, then the girls would love him. She bought him pointed shoes and tried to grease his hair. But it didn’t work.

  “Do you think I’ll ever get married, Rose?” he asked her one evening. Shay was in another town buying stock. Gus was asleep, excited because tomorrow he would start school. It was just Rose and Laddy by the fire, as so often in the past.

  “I don’t know, Laddy, I really never expected to, but you remember that fortune-teller we went to years ago, she said I’d be married within the year and I was. I certainly didn’t expect that, and that I’d have a child and love him, and I didn’t think that would happen. She said to you that you’d be in a job meeting people and you are in the hotel. And that you’d travel across the water and be good at sport, so all that is ahead of you.” She smiled at him brightly, reminding him of all the good things, glossing over what was left out, deliberately not mentioning that Gypsy Ella had forecast ill health for Rose, but not yet.

  WHEN IT HAPPENED, it happened very unexpectedly. There was no fair, there would be no drinking, none of those large whiskies thrown back in the company of men who were more jovial and who were made merry by drink. She didn’t fear his return that night, which was why it was such a shock to see him drunk, his eyes blurring, not focusing, his mouth drooping at one side.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” he began.

  “I’m not looking at you at all,” she said.

  “Yes you are, yes you b
loody are.”

  “Did you get any heifers?”

  “I’ll give you heifers,” he said, taking off his belt.

  “No, Shay, no. I’m having a conversation with you, I’m not saying a word against you. No.” Tonight she screamed rather than speaking in the demented pleading whisper to prevent her brother and her son knowing what was happening.

  The scream seemed to excite him more. “You are a slut,” he said. “A coarse slut. You can’t get enough of it, that’s always been your problem even before you were a married woman. You are disgusting.” He raised the belt and brought it down first on her shoulders, then on her head.

  At the same time his trousers fell to the floor and he ripped at her nightdress. She moved to get the bedroom chair to protect herself, but he got there first and, raising the chair, he broke it on the edge of the bed and came at her with it raised aloft.

  “Don’t Shay, in the name of God don’t do this.” She didn’t care who heard. Behind him at the door she saw the small frightened figure of Gus, his hand in his mouth with terror, and behind him was Laddy. Wakened by the screams, both of them transfixed by the scene in front of them. Before she could stop herself, Rose cried, “Help, Laddy, help me.” And then she saw Shay being pulled back, Laddy’s huge arm around his neck restraining him.

  Gus was screaming in terror. Rose gathered her torn nightdress and, uncaring about the blood flowing down her forehead, ran to pick her son up in her arms.

  “He’s not himself,” she said to Laddy. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing, we’ll have to lock him in somewhere.”