Evening Class (22 page)

‘Maybe she doesn’t get on with them. It could be as simple as that.’

‘She goes to see her mother every Monday and her father twice a week up in the home. She wheels him out in his chair, one of the nurses told Suzi. She sits and reads to him under a tree and he just sits and stares ahead, even though he makes an effort to talk to the others who only come once in a blue moon.’

‘Poor Signora,’ said Fran suddenly. ‘She deserves better than that.’

‘Well she does, now that you say it, Miss Clarke,’ said Peggy Sullivan.

She had good reason to be grateful to this strange visitor, nun or not a nun. She had been a great influence on their lives. Suzi got on great with her and came home much more regularly, Jerry regarded her as his own private tutor. She had made net curtains for them and matching cushion covers. She had painted the dresser in the kitchen and planted window boxes. Her room was immaculate and neat as a new pin. Sometimes Peggy Sullivan had gone in to investigate. As one would. But Signora seemed to have acquired no more possessions than those she had when she arrived. She was an extraordinary person. It was good that they all liked her in the class.

Kathy Clarke was the youngest of her students by far. The girl was eager to learn and asked about the grammar which the others didn’t know or didn’t bother about. She was attractive, too, in that blue-eyed, dark-haired way that she had never seen in Italy. There the dark beauties all had huge brown eyes.

She wondered what Kathy would do when she left school. Sometimes she saw the girl studying in the library. She must have hopes of getting a third-level education.

‘What does your mother think you might do when you leave school?’ she asked Kathy one evening when they were all tidying up the chairs after the lesson. People stayed and chatted, no one was anxious to run away, which was good. She knew for a fact that some of them went for a drink in a pub up the hill and others for coffee. It was all as she had hoped.

‘My mother?’ Kathy seemed surprised.

‘Yes, she seems so eager and enthusiastic about everything,’ Signora said.

‘No, she doesn’t really know much about the school or what I’m doing. She doesn’t go out much, she’d have no idea what there was to do or study or anything.’

‘But she comes here to the class with you, doesn’t she, and she goes out to work in the supermarket? Mrs Sullivan where I stay says she’s the boss.’

‘Oh, that’s Fran. That’s my
sister
,’ Kathy said. ‘Don’t let her hear you said that, she’d go mad.’

Signora looked puzzled. ‘I’m so sorry, I get everything wrong.’

‘No, it’s an easy mistake.’ Kathy was anxious for the older woman not to be embarrassed. ‘Fran’s the oldest of the family, ’I’m the youngest. Of course you thought that.‘

She didn’t say anything to Fran about it. No point in making Fran go to the mirror to look for lines. Poor Signora was a bit absent-minded, and she did get a lot of things wrong. But she was so marvellous as a teacher. Everyone in the class including Bartolomeo, the one of the motorbike, loved her.

Kathy liked Bartolomeo, he had a lovely smile and he told her all about football. He asked where she went dancing and when she told him about the disco in the summer he said it was a date when it came to half term and they could go out dancing again, he’d tell her a good place.

She reported this to Harriet. ‘I knew you joined that class just for sex,’ Harriet said. And they laughed and laughed over it long after anyone else would have thought it remotely funny.

There was a bad rainstorm in October, and a leak came in the roof of the annexe where the evening class was held. With huge solidarity they all managed to cope with it by getting newspapers, and moving tables out of the way and finding a bucket in one of the cloakrooms. All the time they shouted
Che tempaccio
at each other and
Che brutto tempo
. Barry said he would wait outside in his rain gear at the bus stop and flash his lights when the bus arrived so that everyone would not get soaked to the skin.

Connie, the woman with the jewellery that Luigi said would buy a block of flats, said she could give four people a lift. They scrambled into her beautiful BMW—Guglielmo, the nice young man from the bank, his dizzy girlfriend Elizabetta, Francesca and young Caterina. They went first to Elizabetta’s flat and there was a lot of chorusing of
ciao
and
arrivederci
as the two young lovers scampered up the steps in the rain.

And then it was on to the Clarkes’ house. Fran in front gave directions. This was not the kind of territory that would be familiar to Connie. When they got there Fran saw her mother putting out the dustbin, a cigarette still in her mouth despite the rain that would fall on it and make it soggy, the same scuffed slippers and sloppy housecoat that she wore all the time. She then felt ashamed of herself for feeling ashamed of her mother. Just because she was getting a lift in a smart car didn’t mean that she should change all her values. Her mother had had a hard life and had been generous and understanding when it was needed.

‘There’s Mam getting drenched. Wouldn’t the bins have done in the morning?’ Fran said.

‘
Che tempaccio, che tempaccio
,’ Kathy said dramatically.

‘Go on, Caterina. Your Granny’s holding the door open for you,’ Connie said.

‘That’s my mother,’ Kathy said.

There was so much rain, so much confusion of banging doors and clattering dustbins nobody seemed to take much notice.

Inside the house Mrs Clarke was looking with surprise and disgust at her wet cigarette. ‘I got drowned waiting for you to come in from that limousine.’

‘God, let’s have a cup of tea,’ said Fran, running to the kettle.

Kathy sat down suddenly at the kitchen table.

‘
Due tazze di te
,’ Fran said in her best Italian. ‘Come on, Kathy.
Con latte? Con zucchero?’

‘You know I don’t take milk and sugar.’ Kathy’s voice was remote. She looked very pale. Mrs Clarke said there was no point in a person staying up if this is all you were to hear, she was going off to her bed and to tell that husband of hers when and if he ever came in from the pub not to be leaving any frying pan to clean up in the morning.

She was gone, complaining, coughing and creaking up the stairs.

‘What is it, Kathy?’

Kathy looked at her. ‘Are you my mother, Fran?’ she asked.

There was a silence in the kitchen. They could hear the flushing of the lavatory upstairs and the rain falling on the concrete outside.

‘Why do you ask this now?’

‘I want to know. Are you or aren’t you?’

‘You know I am, Kathy.’ A long silence.

‘No, I didn’t know. Not until now.’ Fran came towards her, reaching out. ‘No, go away from me. I don’t want you to touch me.’

‘Kathy you knew, you felt it, it didn’t need to be said, I thought you knew.’

‘Does everyone else know?’

‘What do you mean everyone else? The people who need to, know.
You
know how much I love you, how I’d do everything on earth for you and get you the best that I could get.’

‘Except a father and a home and a name.’

‘You have a name, you have a home, you have another father and mother in Mam and Dad.’

‘No I haven’t. I’m a bastard that you had and never told me about.’

‘There’s no such word as bastard, as you well know. There’s no such thing any more as an illegitimate child. And you were legally part of this household since the day you were born. This is your home.’

‘How could you…’ Kathy began.

‘Kathy, what are you saying—that I should have given you away to strangers for adoption, that I should have waited until you were eighteen before I got to know you and only then if you sought me out?’

‘And all of these years letting me think that Mam was my mother. I can’t believe it.’ Kathy shook her head as if to clear it, to take this new and frightening idea out of her mind.

‘Mam was a mother to you and to me. She welcomed you from the day she knew about you. She said won’t it be grand to have another baby round here. That’s what she said and it was. And, Kathy, I thought you knew.’

‘How would I have known? We both called Mam and Dad Mam and Dad. People said you were my sister and that Matt and Joe and Sean were my brothers. How was I to know?’

‘Well, it wasn’t a big thing. We were all together in the house, you were only seven years younger than Joe, it was the natural way to do things.’

‘Do all the neighbours know?’

‘Some of them maybe, they’ve forgotten I imagine.’

‘And who was my father? Who was my real father?’

‘Dad is your real father in that he brought you up and looked after both of us.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘He was a boy who was at a posh school and his parents didn’t want him to marry me.’

‘Why do you say was? Is he dead?’

‘No he’s not dead, but he’s not part of our lives.’

‘He’s not part of your life, he might be part of mine.’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

‘It doesn’t matter what you think. Wherever he is, he’s still my father. I have a right to know him, to meet him, to tell him I’m Kathy and that I exist because of him.’

‘Please have some tea. Or let me have some anyway.’

‘I’m not stopping you.’ Her eyes were cold.

Fran knew she needed more tact and diplomacy than had ever been called on in work. Even the time when one of the director’s children, there on a holiday job, was found pilfering. This was vastly more important.

‘I’ll tell you every single thing you want to know. Everything,’ she said, in as calm a voice as she could manage. ‘And if Dad comes in in the middle of it I suggest we move up to your room.’

Kathy’s room was much bigger than Fran’s. It had the desk, the bookshelf, the hand basin that had been put in lovingly by the plumber in the house years ago.

‘You did it all from guilt, didn’t you, the nice room, the buying my uniform and the extra pocket money and even the Italian classes. You paid for it all because you were so guilty about me.’

‘I have never had a day’s guilt about you in my life,’ Fran said calmly. She sounded so sure that she stopped Kathy in the slightly hysterical tone she was taking. ‘No, I have felt sad for you sometimes, because you work so hard and I hoped I would be able to give you everything to start you off well. I worked hard so that I could always provide a good living for you. I’ve saved a little every single week in a building society, not much but enough to give you independence. I have loved you every day of my life, and honestly it got kind of blurred whether you were my sister or my daughter. You’re just Kathy to me and I want the very, very best for you. I work long and hard to get it and I think about it all the time. So I assure you whatever I feel I don’t feel guilty.’

Tears came into Kathy’s eyes. Fran reached her hand over tentatively and patted the hand that clutched the mug of tea. Kathy said, ‘I know, I shouldn’t have said that. I got a shock, you see.’

‘No, no it’s all right. Ask me anything.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Paul. Paul Malone.’

‘Kathy Malone?’ she said wonderingly.

‘No, Kathy Clarke.’

‘And how old was he then?’

‘Sixteen. I was fifteen and a half.’

‘When I think of all the bossy advice you gave me about sex and how I listened.’

‘Look back on what I said, you’ll find that I didn’t preach what I didn’t practise.’

‘So you loved him, this Paul Malone?’ Kathy’s voice was very scornful.

‘Yes, very much. Very much indeed. I was young but I thought I knew what love was and so did he, so I won’t dismiss it and say it was nonsense. It wasn’t.’

‘And where did you meet him?’

‘At a pop concert. We got on so well then I used to sneak out to meet him from school sometimes and we’d go to the pictures, and he was meant to be having extra lessons so he could skip that. And it was a wonderful happy time.’

‘And then?’

‘And then I realised I was pregnant, and Paul told his mother and father and I told Mam and Dad and all hell broke out everywhere.’

‘Did anyone talk about getting married?’

‘No, nobody talked about it. I thought about it a lot up in the room that’s your room now. I used to dream that one day Paul would come to the door with a bunch of flowers and say that as soon as I was sixteen we would marry.’

‘But it didn’t happen, obviously?’

‘No, it didn’t.’

‘And why did he not want to stay around and support you even if you didn’t marry?’

‘That was part of the deal.’

‘Deal?’

‘Yes. His parents said that since this was an unlikely partnership and that there was no future in it, it might be kindest for everyone to cut all ties. That’s what they said. Cut all ties or maybe sever all ties.’

‘Were they awful?’

‘I don’t know, I’d never met them until then, any more than Paul had met Mam and Dad’

‘So the deal was that he was to get away with it, father a child and never see her again.’

‘They gave four thousand pounds, Kathy, it was a lot of money then.’

‘They bought you off!’

‘No, we didn’t think it was like that. I put two thousand in a building society for you. It’s grown a lot as well as what I added myself, and we gave the other two thousand pounds to Mam and Dad because they would be bringing you up.’

‘And did Paul Malone think that was fair? To give four thousand pounds to get rid of me?’

‘He didn’t know you. He listened to his parents, they told him sixteen was too young to be a father, he had a career ahead of him, it was a mistake, he must honour his commitment to me. That’s the way they saw it.’

‘And did he have a career?’

‘Yes, he’s an accountant.’

‘My father the accountant,’ Kathy said.

‘He married and he has children now, his own family.’

‘You mean he has other children?’ Kathy’s chin was in the air.

‘Yes, that’s right. Two, I believe.’

‘How do you know?’

‘There was an article about him in a magazine not long ago, you know, lifestyles of the rich and famous, that is.’