Evening Class

by Maeve Binchy

  BARRY TOOK HER to a football match. Before they went, he told her which was the good team and which was the bad one. He explained the offside rule and said that the referee had been blind on some previous matches and it was hoped that his sight might have returned to him by now.

  At the match Barry met a dark, thickset man. “Howaya, Luigi, I didn’t know you followed this team.”

  Luigi couldn’t have been more pleased to meet him. “Bartolomeo, me old skin, I’ve been with these lads since time began.”

  Then they both broke into Italian, mi piace giocare a calcio. They laughed immoderately at this, and Fiona laughed too.

  “That means ‘I like to play football,’” Luigi explained.

  Fiona thought it must, but she sounded as if it was news to her. “You’re all getting on great at the Italian then?”

  “Oh sorry, Luigi, this is my friend Fiona,” Barry said.

  “Aren’t you lucky your girlfriend will go to a match. Suzi says she’d prefer to stand and watch paint dry.”

  Fiona wondered should she explain to this odd man with the Dublin accent and the Italian name that she wasn’t really Barry’s girlfriend. But she decided to let it pass. And why was he calling Barry this strange name?

  “If you’re meeting Suzi later, maybe we’d all have a drink?” Barry suggested, and Luigi thought that was the greatest idea he’d ever heard and they named a pub.

  All through the match Fiona struggled hard to understand it, and to cheer and be excited at the right time. In her heart she thought that this was great, it was what other girls did, went to matches with fellows and met other fellows and joined up with them and their girlfriends later.

  She felt terrific.

  She must just remember now the different circumstances which led to a goal kick or a corner, and which to a throw-in. And even more important, she must remember not to ask Barry about his mother and his father and the mysterious bunch of freesias.

  Suzi was gorgeous, she had red hair and she was a waitress in one of those posh places in Temple Bar.

  Fiona told her about serving coffee in the hospital. “It’s not in the same league,” she said apologetically.

  “It’s more important,” said Suzi firmly. “You’re serving people who need it, I’m just putting it in front of people who are there to be seen.”

  The men were happy to see the girls talking, so they left them to it and analyzed the match down to the bone. Then they started talking about the great trip to Italy.

  “Does Bartolomeo talk night and day about this viaggio?” Suzi wanted to know.

  “Why do you call him that?” Fiona whispered.

  “It’s his name, isn’t it?” Suzi seemed genuinely surprised.

  “Well, it’s Barry actually.”

  “Oh. Well, it’s this Signora, she’s marvelous altogether. She lives as a lodger in my mother’s house. She runs it all and she calls Lou Luigi. It’s an improvement as it happens, I sometimes call him that myself. But are you going?”

  “Going where?”

  “To Roma?” Suzi said, rolling her eyes and the letter “r.”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t really know Barry all that well yet. But if things go on well between us, I might be able to go. You never know.”

  “Start saving, it’ll be great fun. Lou wants us to get married out there or at least have it as a honeymoon.” Suzi waved her finger with a beautiful engagement ring on it.

  “That’s gorgeous,” Fiona said.

  “Yeah, it’s not real but a friend of Lou’s got some great deal on it.”

  “Imagine a honeymoon in Rome.” Fiona was wistful.

  “The only snag is that I’ll be sharing a honeymoon with fifty or sixty people,” said Suzi.

  “Then you’ll only have to entertain him at night, not in the day as well,” said Fiona.

  “Entertain him? What about me? I was expecting him to entertain me.”

  Fiona wished she hadn’t spoken, as she so often wished. Of course someone like Suzi would think that way. She’d expect this Luigi to dance attendance on her. She wouldn’t try to please him and fear she was annoying him all the time, as Fiona would. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be as confident as that. But then, if you looked like Suzi with all that gorgeous red hair, and if you worked in such a smart place, and probably had a history of fellows like Luigi giving you great rocks of rings…Fiona sighed deeply.

  Suzi looked at her sympathetically. “Was the match very boring?” she inquired.

  “No, it wasn’t bad. I’d never been to one before. I’m not sure if I understand offside though, do you?”

  “Jesus no. And I haven’t a notion of understanding it. You’d find yourself stuck out in the freezing cold with people bursting your eardrums if you could understand that. Meet them afterwards, that’s my motto.” Suzi knew everything.

  Fiona looked at her with undisguised admiration and envy. “How did you get to be…you know, the way you are, sure of things? Was it just because you were good-looking?”

  Suzi looked at her. This girl with the eager face and the huge glasses wasn’t having her on. She was quite sincere. “I have no idea what I look like,” Suzi said truthfully. “My father told me I looked like a slut and a whore, my mother said I looked a bit fast, places I tried to get jobs in said I wore too much makeup, fellows who wanted to go to bed with me said I looked great. How would you know what you looked like?”

  “Oh I know, I know,” Fiona agreed. Her mother said she looked silly in the T-shirts, people in the hospital loved them. Some people said her glasses were an asset—they magnified her eyes; other people asked could she not afford contact lenses. And sometimes she thought her long hair was nice and sometimes she thought it was like an overgrown schoolgirl’s.

  “So I suppose in the end I realized that I was a grown-up and that I was never going to please everyone,” Suzi explained. “And I decided to please myself, and I have good legs so I wear short skirts, but not stupid ones, and I did tone down the makeup a bit. And now that I’ve stopped worrying about it nobody seems to be giving out to me at all.”

  “Do you think I should get my hair cut?” Fiona whispered to her trustingly.

  “No I don’t, and I don’t think you should leave it long. It’s your hair and your face and you should do what you think about it, don’t take my advice or Bartolomeo’s advice or your mother’s advice, otherwise you’ll always be a child. That’s my view anyway.”

  Oh, it was so easy for the beautiful Suzi to talk like that. Fiona felt like a mouse in spectacles. A longhaired mouse. But if she got rid of the glasses and the long hair, she would just be a blinking short-haired mouse. What would make her grown up, and able to make decisions like ordinary people? Maybe something would happen, something that would make her strong.

  Barry had enjoyed the evening, he drove Fiona home on his motorbike, and as she clung to his jacket she wondered what she would say if he asked her to another match. Should she be courageous and, like Suzi, say she’d prefer to meet him afterward. Or should she figure out the offside rule with someone at work and go with him. Which was the better thing to do? If only she could choose which she wanted to do herself. But she hadn’t grown up yet like Suzi, she was someone who had no opinions.

  “It was nice to meet your friends,” she said when she got off the bike at the end of her street.

  “Next time we’ll do something that you choose,” he said. “I’ll drop in and see you tomorrow. That’s the day I’m taking my mother home.”

  “Oh, I thought she’d be home by now.” Barry had said he would ask her out when his mother had settled in at home, obviously she had thought Mrs. Healy had been discharged. Fiona had not dared to go near the ward in case of being identified as the woman who had left the freesias.

  “No. We thought she’d be well enough but she had a setback.”

  “Oh I’m sorry to hear that,” Fiona said.

  “She got it into her head that my dad had sent her flowers. And of co
urse he hadn’t, and when she realized that she had a relapse.”

  Fiona felt hot and cold at the same time. “How awful,” she said. And then in a small voice: “Why did she think he had?”

  Barry’s face was sad. He shrugged his shoulders. “Who knows. There was a bunch of flowers with her name printed on it. But the doctors think she got them for herself.”

  “Why do they think that?”

  “Because nobody else knew she was in there,” Barry said simply.

  ANOTHER NIGHT WITHOUT sleeping for Fiona. Too much had happened. The match, the rules, the meeting with Luigi and Suzi, the possibility of a trip to Italy, people thinking she was Barry’s girlfriend. The whole idea that once you grow up you know what to do and think and decide for yourself. And then the horrible, awful realization that she had set Barry’s mother back by her gift of the flowers. She had thought it would be something nice for the woman to wake up to. Instead it had made everything a thousand times worse.

  Fiona was very pale and tired-looking when she went in to work. She had taken the wrong day from her pile of T-shirts. She created great confusion. People kept saying that they thought it was Friday and other people told her that she must have got dressed in the dark. One woman who saw Monday on Fiona’s chest left before her appointment because she thought she had got the wrong day. Fiona went to the cloakroom and turned her shirt back to front. She just made sure that nobody saw her from the back.

  Barry came in around lunchtime. “Miss Clarke the supervisor let me have a couple of hours off, she’s really nice. She’s in the Italian class too, I call her Francesca there and Miss Clarke at work, it’s a scream,” he said.

  Fiona was beginning to think that half of Dublin was in this class masquerading under false names. But she had more on her mind than to feel envious of all these people who were playing childish games up in that tough school in Mountainview. She must find out about his mother without appearing to ask.

  “Everything all right?”

  “No it’s not, as it happens. My mother doesn’t want to come home and she’s not bad enough for them to keep here, so they’ll have to get her referred to a mental home.” He looked very bleak and sad.

  “That’s bad, Barry,” she said, her face tired with lack of sleep and anxiety.

  “Yes, well, I’ll have to cope somehow. I just wanted to say, that you know, I said we’d have another outing and you could choose what we did…?”

  Fiona began to panic, she hadn’t dared to choose yet. God, he wasn’t going to ask her now on top of everything else.

  “I haven’t exactly made up my mind what…”

  “No, I mean, we may have to put it off a bit, but it’s not that I’m going out with anyone else, or don’t want to or anything…” He was stammering his eagerness.

  Fiona realized that he did like her. About three quarters of the weight on her heart lifted. “Oh no, for heaven’s sake I understand, whenever things have sorted themselves out, well I’ll hear from you then.” Her smile was enormous, the people waiting for their tea and coffee were ignored.

  Barry smiled just as broadly and left.

  FIONA LEARNED THE rules for offside in soccer, but she couldn’t understand how you could make sure there were always two people between you and the goal. No one gave her a satisfactory answer.

  SHE RANG HER friend Brigid Dunne.

  Brigid’s father answered the phone. “Oh yes. I’m glad to have an opportunity of talking to you, Fiona. I’m afraid I was rather discourteous to you when you were in our house last. Please forgive me.”

  “That’s fine, Mr. Dunne. You were upset.”

  “Yes, I was very upset and still am. But it’s no excuse for behaving badly to a guest. Please accept my apologies.”

  “No, maybe I shouldn’t have been there.”

  “I’ll get Brigid for you,” he said.

  Brigid was in great form. She had lost a kilo in weight, she had found a fantastic jacket that made you look positively angular, and she was going on a free trip to Prague. No awful nude beaches there showing people up for what they were.

  “And how’s Grania getting on?”

  “I haven’t an idea.”

  “You mean you haven’t been to see her?” Fiona was shocked.

  “Hey, that’s a good idea. Let’s go up to Adultery Mews and see her tonight. We might meet the geriatric as well.”

  “Shush, don’t call it that. Your father might hear.”

  “That’s what he calls it, it’s his expression.” Brigid was unrepentant.

  They fixed a place to meet. It would be a laugh anyway, Brigid thought. Fiona wanted to know if Grania had survived.

  Grania opened the door. She wore jeans and a long black sweater. She looked amazed to see them. “I don’t believe it,” she said, delighted. “Come in. Tony, the first sign of an olive branch has come to the door.”

  He came out smiling, good-looking, but very old. Fiona wondered how could Grania see her future with this man.

  “My sister, Brigid, and our friend, Fiona.”

  “Come in, you couldn’t have come at a better time. I wanted to open a bottle of wine. Grania said we were drinking too much, which meant that I was drinking too much…so now we have to.” He led them into a room filled with books, tapes and CDs. There was some Greek music on the player.

  “Is that the Zorba dance?” Fiona asked.

  “No, but it’s the same composer. Do you like Theodorakis?” His eyes lit up at the thought that he might have found someone who liked his era of music.

  “Who?” said Fiona, and the smile fell sadly.

  “It’s very plush.” Brigid looked around in grudging admiration.

  “Isn’t it? Tony got all these shelves made, same man who did the shelves for Dad. How is he?” Grania really wanted to know.

  “Oh, you know, the same.” Brigid was no help.

  “Is he still ranting and raving?”

  “No, more sighing and groaning.”

  “And Mam?”

  “You know Mam, hardly notices you’re gone.”

  “Thanks, you know how to make someone feel wanted.”

  “I’m only telling you the truth.”

  Fiona was trying to talk to the old man so that he wouldn’t hear all this intimate detail about the Dunne family. But he probably knew it all already.

  Tony poured them a glass of wine each. “I’m delighted to see you girls, but I have a bit of business up in the school to attend to, and you’ll want a chat, so I’ll leave you at it.”

  “You don’t have to go, love.” Grania called him “love” quite unselfconsciously.

  “I know I don’t have to, but I will.” He turned to Brigid. “And if you’re talking to your father, tell him…well…tell him…” Brigid looked at him expectantly. But the words didn’t come easily to Tony O’Brien. “Tell him…she’s fine,” he said gruffly, and left.

  “Well,” said Brigid. “What do you make of that?”

  “He’s desperately upset,” said Grania. “You see, Dad doesn’t speak to him at school, just walks out if he comes in, and it’s hard for him there. And it’s hard for me here not being able to go home.”

  “Can you not go home?” Fiona asked.

  “Not really, there’d be a scene, and the no-daughter-of-mine speech all over again.”

  “I don’t know, he’s quietened down a bit,” Brigid said. “Maybe he’d only moan and groan for the first few visits, after that he might be normal again.”

  “I hate him saying things about Tony.” Grania looked doubtful.

  “Bringing up his lurid past, do you mean?” Brigid asked.

  “Yeah, but then I had a bit of a past too. If I was as old as he is I’d hope to have a very substantial past. It’s just that I haven’t been around long enough.”

  “Aren’t you lucky to have a past?” Fiona was wistful.

  “Oh shut up, Fiona. You’re as thin as a rake, you must have a past to beat the band,” said Brigid.

 
“I’ve never slept with anyone, made love, done it,” Fiona blurted out.

  The Dunne sisters looked at her with interest.

  “You must have,” Brigid said.

  “Why must I have? I’d have remembered it if I did. I didn’t, that’s it.”

  “Why not?” Grania asked.

  “I don’t know. Either people were drunk or awful or it was the wrong place, or by the time I had decided I would it was too late. You know me.” She sounded full of self-pity and regret. Grania and Brigid seemed at a loss for words. “But I’d like to now,” Fiona said eagerly.

  “Pity we let the stud of all time out, he could have obliged,” Brigid said, jerking her head toward the door that Tony O’Brien had closed behind him.

  “I want you to know that I don’t find that even remotely funny,” Grania said.

  “Nor do I,” said Fiona disapprovingly. “I wasn’t thinking of doing it with just anybody, it’s someone I’m in love with.”

  “Oh well, excuse me,” Brigid said huffily.

  Grania poured another glass of wine for them. “Let’s not fight,” she said.

  “Who’s fighting?” Brigid asked, stretching out her glass.

  “Remember when we were at school we used to have truth or dare?”

  “You always took dare,” Fiona remembered.

  “But tonight let’s do truth.”

  “What should I do, the two of you tell me.”

  “You should go home and see Dad. He does miss you,” Brigid said.

  “You should talk about other things like the bank and politics and the evening class he runs, not things that would remind him of…er…Tony, until he gets more used to it,” Fiona said.

  “And Mam? Does she really not care?”

  “No, I only said that to annoy you. But you know she’s got something on her mind, maybe it’s work or the menopause, you’re not the big issue there like you are for Dad.”

  “That’s fair enough,” Grania said. “Now, let’s do Brigid.”

  “I think Brigid should zip up her mouth about being fat,” Fiona said.