Evening Class (2 page)

On a Sunday Tony O’Brien probably got up late… he lived in what they called a ‘townhouse’ nowadays, which was the equivalent of a flat. Just one big room and kitchen downstairs, and one big bedroom and bathroom upstairs. The door opened straight onto the street. He had been observed leaving in the morning accompanied by young women.

There was a time when that would have ended his career, let alone his chances of promotion—back in the 1960s teachers had been sacked for having relationships outside marriage. Not, of course, that this was right. In fact, they had all protested very strongly at the time. But still, for a man who had never committed to any woman, to parade a succession of them through his townhouse, and still be considered headmaster material, a role model for the students… that wasn’t right either.

What would Tony O’Brien be doing now, at two thirty on a wet Sunday? Maybe round to lunch at one of the other teachers’ houses. Aidan had never been able to ask him since they literally didn’t
have
lunch, and Nell would reasonably have enquired why he should impose on them a man he had been denouncing for five years. He might still be entertaining a lady from last night. Tony O’Brien said he owed a great debt of gratitude to the people of China since there was an excellent takeaway only three doors away—lemon chicken, sesame toast and chilli prawns were always great with a bottle of Australian Chardonnay and the Sunday papers. Imagine, at his age, a man who could be a grandfather, entertaining girls and buying Chinese food on a Sunday.

But then again, why not?

Aidan Dunne was a fair man. He had to admit that people had a choice in such matters. Tony O’Brien didn’t drag these women back to his townhouse by their hair. There was no law that said he should be married and bring up two distant daughters as Aidan had done. And in a way it was to the man’s credit that he wasn’t a hypocrite, he didn’t try to disguise his lifestyle.

It was just that things had changed so very much. Someone had moved the goalposts about what was acceptable and what was not, and they hadn’t consulted Aidan first.

And how would Tony spend the rest of the day?

Surely they wouldn’t go back to bed again for the afternoon? Maybe he would go for a walk or the girl would go home and Tony would play music, he often spoke of his CDs. When he had won £350 on the Match Four of the Lotto he had hired a carpenter who was working on the school extension, and paid him the money straight out to make a rack that would hold 500 CDs. Everyone had been impressed. Aidan had been jealous. Where would you get the money to buy that number of CDs? He knew for a fact that Tony O’Brien bought about three a week. When would you get the time to listen to them? And then Tony would stroll down to the pub and meet a few friends, or go to a foreign language movie with subtitles, or to a jazz club.

Maybe it was all this moving around that made him more interesting and gave him the edge on everyone else. Certainly on Aidan. Aidan’s Sundays were nothing that would interest anyone.

When he came back from late Mass around one o’clock and asked would anyone like bacon and egg, there was a chorus of disgust from his daughters: ‘God no, Daddy!’ or ‘Daddy, please don’t even mention something like that, and could you keep the kitchen door closed if you’re going to have it?’ If Nell were at home she might raise her eyes from a novel and ask ‘Why?’ Her tone was never hostile, only bewildered, as if it were the most unlikely suggestion that had ever been made. Left to herself Nell might make a salad sandwich at three.

Aidan thought back wistfully to his mother’s table, where the chat of the week took place and no one was excused without a very good reason. Of course, dismantling this had all been his own doing. Making them into free spirits who would discover the length and breadth of County Dublin and even the neighbouring counties on their one full day off. How could he have known it would lead to his being displaced and restless, wandering from the kitchen where everyone heated up their own food in a microwave, to the sitting room where there was some programme that he didn’t want to see on television, to the bedroom where it was so long since he had made love with his wife he could barely endure looking at it until it was time to go to sleep.

There was of course the dining room. The room with the heavy dark furniture that they had hardly used since they bought the house. Even if they had been people who entertained, it was too small and poky. Once or twice recently Nell had suggested casually that Aidan should make it into a study for himself. But he had resisted. He felt that if he turned it into a copy of his room at the school he might somehow lose his identity as head of this house, as father, provider and man who once believed that this was the centre of the world.

He also feared that if he made himself too much at home there then the next step would be that he should sleep there too. After all, there was a downstairs cloakroom. It would be perfectly feasible to leave the three women to roam the upstairs area.

He must never do that, he must fight to keep his place in the family as he was fighting to keep his presence in the minds of the Board of Management, the men and women who would choose the next Principal of Mountainview College.

His mother had never understood why the school wasn’t called Saint something college. That’s what all schools were called. It was hard to explain to her that things were different now, a changed setup, but he kept reassuring her that there were both a priest and a nun on the Board of Management. They didn’t make all the decisions but they were there to give a voice to the role the religious had played in Irish education over the years.

Aidan’s mother had sniffed. Things had come to a strange state when priests and nuns were meant to be pleased that they had a place on the Board instead of running it like God intended. In vain Aidan had tried to explain about the fall in vocations. Even secondary schools ostensibly run by religious orders had in the nineties only a very few religious in teaching positions. The numbers just weren’t there.

Nell had heard him arguing the situation with his mother once and had suggested that he save his breath. ‘Tell her they still run it, Aidan. It makes for an easier life. And of course in a way they do. People are afraid of them.’ It irritated him greatly when Nell spoke like this. Nell had no reason to fear the power of the Catholic Church. She had attended its services for as long as it had suited her, had abandoned confession and any of the Pope’s teachings on contraception at an early stage. Why should she pretend that it had been a burden that lay heavily on her? But he didn’t fight her on this. He was calm and accepting as in so many things. She had no time for his mother; no hostility, but no interest in her at all.

Sometimes his mother wondered when she would get invited for dinner and Aidan had to say that the way things were they were in a state of flux, but once they got organised…

He had been saying this for over two decades and as an excuse it had worn thin. And it wasn’t fair to fault Nell over this. It wasn’t as if she was constantly inviting her own mother around or anything. His mother had been asked to any family celebration in hotels, of course. But it wasn’t the same. And it had been so long since there was anything to celebrate. Except, of course, the hope that he would be made Principal.

‘Did you have a good weekend?’ Tony O’Brien asked him in the staffroom.

Aidan looked at him, surprised. It was so long since anyone had enquired. ‘Quiet, you know,’ Aidan said.

‘Oh well, lucky you. I was at a party last night and I’m suffering after it. Still, only three and a half hours till the good old re-hydrating lunchtime pint,’ Tony groaned.

‘Aren’t you marvellous, the stamina I mean.’ Aidan hoped the bitterness and criticism were not too obvious in his voice.

‘Not at all, I’m far too long in the tooth for this, but I don’t have the consolations of wife and family like all the rest of you do.’ Tony’s smile was warm. If you didn’t know him and his lifestyle you’d have believed that he was genuinely wistful, Aidan thought to himself.

They walked together along the corridors of Mountainview College, the place his mother would like to have been called Saint Kevin’s or even more particularly Saint Anthony’s. Anthony was the saint who found lost things, and his mother had increasing calls on him as she got older. He found her glasses a dozen times a day. The least that people could do was thank him by naming the local school after him. Still, when her son was Principal… she lived in hope.

The children ran past them, some of them chorusing ‘good morning’, others looking sullenly away. Aidan Dunne knew them all, and their parents. And remembered many of their elder brothers and sisters. Tony O’Brien knew hardly any of them. It was so unfair.

‘I met someone who knew you last night,’ Tony O’Brien said suddenly.

‘At a party? I doubt that,’ Aidan smiled.

‘No, definitely she did. When I told her I taught here she asked did I know you.’

‘And who was she?’ Aidan was interested in spite of himself.

‘I never got her name. Nice girl.’

‘An ex-pupil possibly?’

‘No, then she’d have known me.’

‘A mystery indeed,’ Aidan said, and watched as Tony O’Brien went into Fifth Year.

The silence that fell immediately was beyond explanation. Why did they respect him so much, fear to be caught talking, behaving badly? Tony O’Brien didn’t remember their names, for heaven’s sake. He barely marked their work, he lost not an hour’s sleep over their examination results. Basically he didn’t care about them very much. And yet they sought his approval. Aidan couldn’t understand it. In sixteen-year-old boys and girls.

You always heard that women were meant to like men who treated them hard. He felt a flicker of relief that Nell had never crossed Tony O’Brien’s path. Then it was followed by another flicker, a sense of recognition that somehow Nell had left him long ago.

Aidan Dunne went into the Fourth Years and stood at the door for three minutes until they gradually came to a sort of silence for him.

He thought that Mr Walsh, the old Principal, may have passed by behind him in the corridor. But he may have imagined it. You always imagined that the Principal was passing by when your class was in disorder. It was something every single teacher he ever met admitted to. Aidan knew that it was a trivial worry. The Principal admired him far too much to care if the Fourth Years were a bit noisier than usual. Aidan was the most responsible teacher in Mountainview. Everyone knew that.

That was the afternoon that Mr Walsh called him into the Principal’s office. He was a man whose retirement could not come quickly enough. Today for the first time there was no small talk.

‘You and I feel the same about a lot of things, Aidan.’

‘I hope so, Mr Walsh.’

‘Yes, we look at the world from the same viewpoint But it’s not enough.’

‘I don’t know exactly what you mean?’ And Aidan spoke only the truth. Was this a philosophical discussion? Was it a warning? A reprimand?

‘It’s the system, you see. The way they run things. The Principal doesn’t have a vote. Sits there like a bloody eunuch, that’s what it amounts to.’

‘A vote?’ Aidan thought he knew where this was going, but decided to pretend not to.

It had been a wrong calculation. It only annoyed the Principal. ‘Come on, man, you know what I’m talking about. The job, the job, man.’

‘Well, yes.’ Aidan now felt foolish.

‘I’m a non-voting member of the Board of Management. I don’t have a say. If I did you’d be in this job in September. I’d give you a few bits of advice about taking no nonsense from those louts in Fourth Year. But I still think you’re the man with the values, and the sense of what’s right for a school.’

‘Thank you, Mr Walsh, that’s very good to know.’

‘Man, will you listen to me before you mouth these things… there’s nothing to thank me for. I can’t
do
anything for you, that’s what I’m trying to tell you, Aidan.’ The elder man looked at him despairingly as if Aidan were some very slow-learning child in First Year.

The look was not unlike the way Nell looked at him sometimes, Aidan realised with a great feeling of sadness. He had been teaching other people’s children since he was twenty-two years of age, over twenty-six years now, yet he did not know how to respond to a man who was trying hard to help him; he had only managed to annoy him.

The Principal was looking at him intently. For all that Aidan knew Mr Walsh might be able to read his thoughts, recognise the realisation that had just sunk into Aidan’s brain. ‘Come on now, pull yourself together. Don’t look so stricken. I might be wrong, I could have it all wrong. I’m an old horse going out to grass, and I suppose I just wanted to cover myself in case it didn’t go in your favour.’

Aidan could see that the Principal deeply regretted having spoken at all. ‘No, no. I greatly appreciate it, I mean you are very good to tell me where you stand in all this… I mean…’ Aidan’s voice trickled away.

‘It wouldn’t be the end of the world you know… suppose you didn’t get it.’

‘No no, absolutely not.’

‘I mean, you’re a family man, many compensations. Lots of life going on at home, not wedded to this place like I was for so long.’ Mr Walsh had been a widower for many years, his only son visited him but rarely.

‘Utterly right, just as you say,’ Aidan said.

‘But?’ the older man looked kind, approachable.

Aidan spoke slowly. ‘You’re right, it’s not the end of the world, but I suppose I thought… I hoped that it might be a new beginning, liven everything up in my own life. I wouldn’t mind the extra hours, I never did. I spend a lot of hours here already. In a way I am a bit like you, you know, wedded to Mountainview.’

‘I know you are.’ Mr Walsh was gentle.

‘I never found any of it a chore. I like my classes and particularly the Transition Year when you can bring them out of themselves a bit, get to know them, let them think. And I even like the parent teacher evenings which everyone else hates, because I can remember all the kids and… I suppose I like it all except for the politics of it, the sort of jostling for position bit.’ Aidan stopped suddenly. He was afraid there would be a break in his voice, and also he realised that
his
jostling hadn’t worked.