Evening Class

by Maeve Binchy

  And that, of all nights, was the night he invited Constanza in. The most elegant woman that they had ever seen, with a troubled face. Of all the bloody nights of the year, Laddy would have to choose this one. When they had spent three hours in the back room going over and over the columns of figures trying not to face what was obvious, which was that they must sell the hotel. Now they would have to make small talk to some half-cracked.

  But there was no small talk. This was the angriest person they had ever met. She told them that she was married to Harry Kane, the name on the papers, the contracts, the documents. She told them that Siobhan Casey was his mistress.

  “I don’t see how that could be, you’re much better-looking,” Maggie said suddenly.

  Constanza thanked her briefly, and took out her checkbook. She gave them the name of friends whom she would like them to use in doing the work. Never for a moment did they doubt that she was sincere. She said that without them she might never have had the information and courage to do what she was about to do. Lives would change, and they must believe that the money was theirs by right and would be recovered by her when the wheels started to turn.

  “DID I DO right telling Constanza?” Laddy looked around fearfully at the three of them. He had never spoken of their business outside before. He had been afraid that they did not look welcoming when he had come in with her beside him. But now, inasmuch as he could follow it all, everything seemed to have sorted itself out marvelously. Far better than he could have hoped.

  “Yes, Laddy, you did right,” Gus said. It was very quiet, but Laddy knew that there was high praise hidden in there somehow.

  Everyone seemed to be breathing more easily. Gus and Maggie had been so tense when they were helping him with his Italian words a few hours ago. Now it seemed to have gone away, whatever the problem was.

  He must tell them how well he had done in class. “It all went great tonight. You know I was afraid I wouldn’t remember the words but I did, all of them.” He beamed around.

  Maggie nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Her eyes were very bright.

  Constanza decided to rescue the conversation. “Did you know Laddy and I were partners tonight? We were very good,” she said.

  “The elbow and the ankle and the throat?” Gus said.

  “Oh and much more, the knee and the beard,” said Constanza.

  “Il ginocchio e la barba,” Laddy cried.

  “Did you know Laddy has hopes of seeing this family in Rome?” Maggie began.

  “Oh, we all know about it, yes. And next summer when we all go to Rome we’ll certainly see them. Signora has it all under control.”

  Constanza left.

  They sat together, the three of them who would always live together, as Rose had known they would.

  FIONA

  Fiona worked in the coffee shop of a big city hospital.

  She often said it was as bad as being a nurse without any of the good bits, like making people better. She saw the pale, anxious faces of people waiting for their appointment, the visitors who had come to see someone who was not getting better, the children, troublesome and noisy, knowing that something was wrong but not sure what it was.

  From time to time nice things happened, like the man who came out crying: “I don’t have cancer, I don’t have cancer.” And he kissed Fiona and went round the room shaking people’s hands. Which was, of course, fine for him and everyone smiled at him. But some of those who smiled did have cancer, and that was something he hadn’t thought of. And some of those who did have cancer would get better, but when they saw him rejoicing over his sentence being lifted they forgot that they could get better and envied his reprieve.

  People had to pay for tea, coffee, and biscuits, but Fiona knew that you never pressed for payment if someone was upset. In fact you pressed hot sweet tea into the hands of anyone suffering from shock. She wished they didn’t have paper cups, but it would be impossible to wash cups and saucers for the numbers that passed through every day. A lot of them knew her by name and made conversation just to take their minds off whatever else they were thinking.

  Fiona was always bright and cheerful, it was what they needed. She was a small, pixie-like girl with enormous glasses that made her eyes look even bigger than ever, and she wore her hair tied back with a big bow. It was warm in the large waiting room, so Fiona wore T-shirts and a short black skirt. She had bought shirts that had the day of the week on them, and she found people liked that. “I don’t know what day it is unless I look at Fiona’s chest,” they would say. “Lucky you don’t just have January, February, March” on them, others would say. It was always a talking point, Fiona and her days of the week.

  Sometimes Fiona had happy fantasies that one of the handsome doctors would stop and look into her huge eyes and say that she was the girl he had been looking for all his life.

  But this didn’t happen. And Fiona realized that it was never likely to happen. These doctors had friends of their own, other doctors, doctors’ daughters, smart people. They wouldn’t look into the eyes of a girl wearing a T-shirt and handing out paper cups of coffee. Stop dreaming, she told herself.

  FIONA WAS TWENTY and rather disillusioned about the whole business of meeting men. She just wasn’t good at it. Look at her friends Grania and Brigid Dunne, now. They only had to go out the door and they met fellows, fellows they sometimes stayed the night with. Fiona knew this because she was often asked to be the alibi. “I’m staying with Fiona” was the great excuse.

  Fiona’s mother knew nothing of this. She would not have approved. Fiona’s mother was very firmly in the nice-girls-wait-until-they-are-married school of thought. Fiona realized that she herself had no very firm views on the matter at all. In theory she felt that if you loved a fellow and he loved you, then you should have a proper relationship with him. But since the matter had never come up, she had never been able to put the theory to the test.

  Sometimes she looked at herself in the mirror. She wasn’t bad-looking. She was possibly a little too small, and maybe it didn’t help to have to wear glasses, but people said they liked her glasses, they said she looked sweet in them. Were they patting her on the head? Did she look idiotic? It was so hard to know.

  Grania Dunne told her not to be such a fool, she looked fine. But then Grania only had half a mind on anything these days. She was so infatuated with this man who was as old as her father! Fiona couldn’t understand it. Grania had her pick of fellows, why did she go for this old, old man?

  And Brigid said that Fiona looked terrific and she had a gorgeous figure, unlike Brigid, who put on weight as soon as she ate a sandwich. Why was it then that Brigid with the chubby hips was never without a date or a partner at everything? And it wasn’t just people she met in the travel agency. Brigid said she never met a chap that you’d fancy in that line of work. There were just crowds of girls coming in booking sunshine holidays, and old women booking pilgrimages, and honeymoon couples that would make you throw up talking about somewhere Very Private. And it wasn’t a question of Grania and Brigid’s sleeping with everyone they met. That wasn’t the explanation of their popularity with men. It was a great puzzle to Fiona.

  The morning was very busy and she was rushed off her feet. There were so many tea bags and biscuit wrapping papers in her litter bin, she needed to move it. She struggled with the large plastic bag to the door. Once she got it out to the bin area, she would be fine. A young man stood up and took it from her.

  “Let me carry that,” he said. He was dark and quite handsome, apart from rather spiky hair. He had a motorcycle helmet under one arm, almost afraid to leave it out of his sight.

  She held the door open to where the bins were lined up. “Any of those would be great,” she said, and waited courteously for him to return.

  “That was very nice of you,” she said.

  “It keeps my mind off other things,” he said.

  She hoped there wasn’t something bad wrong with him, he looked so fit and young. But then
Fiona had seen the fit and the well go through her waiting room to be told bad news.

  “Well, it’s a great hospital,” she said. She didn’t even know if it was. She supposed it was all right as hospitals go, but she always said that to people to cheer them and give them hope.

  “Is it?” He sounded eager. “I just brought her here because it was nearest.”

  “Oh, it’s got a great reputation.” Fiona didn’t want to end the conversation.

  He was pointing to her chest. “Giovedì,” he said eventually.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s the Italian for Thursday,” he explained.

  “Oh is it? Do you speak Italian?”

  “No, but I go to an evening class in Italian twice a week.” He seemed very proud of this and eager and enthusiastic. She liked him and wanted to go on talking.

  “Who did you say you brought in here?” she asked. Better clear the whole thing up at the start. If it were a wife or a girlfriend, no point in getting interested.

  “My mother,” he said, his face clouding. “She’s in Emergency. I’m to wait here.”

  “Did she have an accident?”

  “Sort of.” He didn’t want to talk about it.

  Fiona went back to Italian classes. Was it hard work? Where were they held?

  “In Mountainview, the big school there.”

  Fiona was amazed. “Isn’t that a coincidence! My best friend’s father is a teacher there.” It seemed like a bond.

  “It’s a small world all right,” the boy said.

  She felt she was boring him, and there were people waiting at the counter for tea and coffee. “Thanks for helping me with the rubbish, that was very nice of you,” she said.

  “You’re very welcome.”

  “I’m sure your mother will be fine, they’re just terrific in Emergency.”

  “I’m sure she will,” he said.

  Fiona served the people and smiled at them all. Was she perhaps a very boring person? It wasn’t something you would automatically know about yourself.

  “Am I boring?” she asked Brigid that night.

  “No, you’re a scream. You should have your own television show.” Brigid was looking with no pleasure at a zip that had parted company with the skirt. “They just don’t make them properly, you know, I couldn’t be so fat that this actually burst. That’s impossible.”

  “Of course it’s impossible,” Fiona lied. Then she realized that Brigid was probably lying to her, too. “I am boring,” poor Fiona said, in a sudden moment of self-realization.

  “Fiona, you’re thin, isn’t that all anybody in the whole bloody world wants to be? Will you shut up about being boring, you were never boring until you started yammering on that you were.” Brigid had little patience with this complaint when faced with the incontrovertible evidence that she’d put on more weight.

  “I met this fellow, and he started to yawn and go away from me two minutes after he met me.” Fiona looked very upset.

  Brigid relented. “Where did you meet him?”

  “At work, his mother was in Emergency.”

  “Well, for God’s sake his mother had been knocked down or whatever. What did you expect him to do, make party conversation with you? Cop yourself on, Fiona, really and truly.”

  Fiona was only partly convinced. “He’s learning Italian up in your father’s school.”

  “Good. Thank God someone is, they were afraid they wouldn’t get enough pupils for the class; he was like a weasel all the summer,” Brigid said.

  “I blame my parents, of course. I couldn’t be anything else but boring, they don’t talk about anything. There are no subjects of discussion at home. What would I have to say after years of that?”

  “Oh will you shut up, Fiona, you’re not boring, and nobody’s parents have anything to say. Mine haven’t had a conversation for years. Dad goes into his room after supper and stays there all night. I’m surprised he doesn’t sleep there. Sits at his little desk, touches the books and the Italian plates and the pictures on the wall. In the sunny evenings he sits on the sofa in the window just looking ahead of him. How’s that for dull?”

  “What would I say if I ever saw him again?” Fiona asked.

  “My father?”

  “No, the fellow with the spiky hair.”

  “God, I suppose you could ask him how his mother was. Do I have to go in and sit beside you as if you were a puppet, saying speak now, nod now?”

  “It mightn’t be a bad idea…Does your father have an Italian dictionary?”

  “He must have about twenty, why?”

  “I want to look up the days of the week,” Fiona explained, as if it should have been obvious.

  “I WAS UP seeing the Dunne family tonight,” Fiona said at home.

  “That’s nice,” her mother said.

  “Wouldn’t want to see too much of them, not to appear to live in the house,” her father warned.

  Fiona wondered what he could mean. She hadn’t been there in weeks. If only her parents knew how often the Dunne girls claimed to be staying overnight in this house! Now that would really cause them problems.

  “Would you say Brigid Dunne is pretty?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, it’s hard to say,” her mother said.

  Her father was reading his paper.

  “But is it hard to say, suppose you saw her would you say that’s a good-looking girl?”

  “I’d have to think about it,” said Fiona’s mother.

  THAT NIGHT IN bed Fiona thought about it over and over.

  How did Grania and Brigid Dunne get to be so confident and sure of things? They had the same kind of home, they went to the same school. Yet Grania was as brave as a lion. She had been having an affair with a man, an old, old man, for ages now. On off, on off, but it was the real thing. She was going to tell her father and mother about it, say that she was going to move in with him and even get married.

  The really terrible thing was that he was Mr. Dunne’s boss. And Mr. Dunne didn’t like him. Grania didn’t know whether she should pretend to begin the affair now so as to give her father time to get accustomed to it, or tell him the truth. The old man said people should be told the truth straight out, that they were often more courageous than you thought.

  But Grania and Brigid had their doubts.

  Brigid had her doubts anyway. He was so terribly old. “You’ll be a widow in no time,” she had said.

  “I’ll be a rich widow, that’s why we’re getting married. I’ll have his pension.” Grania had laughed.

  “You’ll want other fellows, you’ll go off and be unfaithful to him and he’ll come after you and find you in someone’s bed and do a double slaying.” Brigid looked almost enthusiastic at the prospect.

  “No, I never really wanted anyone before. When it happens you’ll all know.” Grania looked unbearably smug about it.

  Fiona and Brigid raised their eyes to heaven over it all. True love was a very exhausting and excluding thing to have to watch from the sidelines. But Brigid wasn’t always on the sidelines. She had plenty of offers.

  Fiona lay in the dark and thought of the nice boy with the spiky hair who had smiled so warmly at her. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be the kind of girl who could get a boy like that to fancy her.

  IT WAS OVER a week before she saw him again.

  “How’s your mother?” Fiona asked him.

  “How did you know about her?” He seemed annoyed, and worried that she had made the inquiry. So much for Brigid’s great suggestion.

  “When you were here last week you helped me carry out the rubbish bag and you told me your mother was in Emergency.”

  His face cleared. “Yes of course, I’m sorry. Well, she’s not great actually, she did it again.”

  “Got knocked down?”

  “No, took an overdose.”

  “Oh, I’m very, very sorry.” She sounded very sincere.

  “I know you are.”

  There was a silence. Then
she pointed to her T-shirt. “Venerdì,” she said proudly. “Is that how you pronounce it?”

  “Yes it is.” He said it in a more Italian way and she repeated it.

  “Are you learning Italian too then?” he asked with interest.

  Fiona spoke without thinking. “No, I just learned the days of the week in case I met you again,” she said. Her face got red and she wanted to die that moment beside the coffee and tea machines.

  “My name’s Barry,” he said. “Would you like to come to the pictures tonight?”

  Barry and Fiona met in O’Connell Street and looked at the cinema queues.

  “What would you like?” he asked.

  “No, what would you like?”

  “I don’t mind, honestly.”

  “Neither do I.” Did Fiona see a look of impatience crossing his face. “Perhaps the one with the shortest queue,” she suggested.

  “But that’s martial arts,” he protested.

  “That’s fine,” she said foolishly.

  “You like martial arts?” He was unbelieving.

  “Do you like them?” she countered.

  As a date it wasn’t a great success so far. They went to a film that neither of them enjoyed. Then came the problem of what to do next.

  “Would you like pizza?” he offered.

  Fiona nodded eagerly. “That would be great.”

  “Or would you prefer to go to a pub?”

  “Well, I’d like that, too.”

  “Let’s have a pizza,” he said, in the tone of a man who knew that if any decision was ever going to be made, it would have to be made by him.