Evening Class (19 page)

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 any more 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 south-west 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 were 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 goodbye 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.
È 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 light-hearted. 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 any more 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 to try and make it happen somehow within reason. And to head her towards work. If her dizzy mother actually earned a living doing other people’s ironing and cleaning, then perhaps Lizzie’s own goal posts 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 staffroom 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 jewellery 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 cheque book.’

‘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 joky 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 realised what an exhausting job it was running a school like Mountainview, the parent-teacher meetings and Open Nights were only two 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 wasn’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 that 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 which 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 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 really 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 theatre, 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.

‘Dad never says thank you when you bring him home beer from the supermarket. He never brings you home a present.’

‘He’s not the worst,’ Fran said. ‘It’s not a great life with your head stuck down pipes and round S bends all the time.’

‘Will you get married, do you think?’ Kathy asked her once, anxiously.

‘I’ll wait until you’re a grown up then I’ll put my mind to it.’ Fran laughed when she said it.

‘But won’t you be too old?’

‘Not at all. By the time you’re twenty I’ll only be thirty-six, in my prime,’ she assured her sister.

‘I thought you were going to marry Ken,’ Kathy had said.

‘Yes, well I didn’t. And he went to America, so he’s out of the picture.’ Fran was brisk.

Ken had worked in the supermarket too and was very go-ahead. Mam and Dad said that he and Fran were sure to make a go of it. Kathy had been very relieved when Ken had left the picture.

At the summer parent-teacher meeting Kathy’s father wasn’t able to go. He said he had to work late that night.