Evening Class (36 page)

Harry only went out for sex. He loved it. She had not been able to give it to him, it was unfair of her to deny it to him elsewhere. And she was not at all jealous of his sexual intimacy with Siobhan Casey and whoever else there might be. One of Connie’s friends had once cried and cried over a husband’s infidelity. She said that the very thought of him doing with another woman what he did with her made her sick to the point of madness. It didn’t bother Connie at all.

What she would have liked was for him to get that side of things over with outside the home and be a loving friend within it. She would have been happy to share his bedroom and his plans and hopes and dreams. Was this utterly unreasonable? It seemed a hard punishment to be cut off from everything because she wasn’t able to mate with him in a way that gave him pleasure. She had after all produced four fine children for him, and surely he could see that this rated some way in his evaluation of things.

Connie knew that some people thought she should leave Harry. Vera, for example. She didn’t say it straight out, but she hinted at it. And so had Mr Hayes in the hotel. They both assumed she stayed with him only for security. They didn’t know how well her finances were organised and that she could have left that house a woman of independent means.

So why did she stay?

Because it was better for the family. Because the children needed both parents there. Because it required so much bloody effort to change everything and there was no guarantee that she would be any happier elsewhere. And it wasn’t as if this was a
bad
life. Harry was courteous and pleasant when he was there. There was plenty to do, she had no trouble filling the hours that turned into weeks, months and years.

She visited her own mother and Harry’s parents. She still entertained the partners and their wives. She provided a home for her children’s friends. The sound of tennis balls on the court, or music from their rooms, was always in the background. The Kane household was highly regarded by the next generation because Mrs Kane didn’t fuss and Mr Kane was hardly ever there, two things people liked in their friends’ parents.

And then when Richard Kane was nineteen, the same age that Connie had been when her father died and left them bankrupt, Harry Kane came home and told them the dream was over. The company was closing the very next day with the maximum of scandal, and the minimum of resources. They would leave bad debts all over the country, people whose investments and life savings were lost. One of his partners had to be restrained from committing suicide, the other from fleeing the country.

They sat in the dining room, Connie, Richard and Veronica. The twins were away on a school trip. They sat in silence while Harry Kane laid out how bad it would be. Across seven or eight columns in the newspapers. Reporters at the door, photographers struggling to capture images of the tennis court, the luxurious lifestyle of the man who had swindled the country. There would be names of politicians who had favoured them, details of trips abroad. Big names associated once now denying any real relationship.

What had caused it? Cutting corners, taking risks, accepting people whom others had thought unreliable. Not asking questions where they should have been asked. Not noticing things that should have been noticed by more established companies.

‘Will we have to sell the house?’ Richard asked. There was a silence.

‘Will there be any money for university?’ Veronica wanted to know. Another silence.

Then Harry spoke. ‘I should say to you both now at this point that your mother always warned me that this could happen. She warned me and I didn’t listen. So when you look back on this day, remember that.’

‘Oh Dad, it doesn’t matter,’ Veronica said in exactly the same tone that Connie would have used had her own father been alive when his financial disasters emerged. She saw Harry’s eyes fill with tears.

‘It could happen to anyone,’ Richard said bravely. ‘That’s business for you.’

Connie’s heart felt glad. They had brought up generous children, not little pups expecting the world as a right. Connie realised it was time to speak. ‘As soon as your father began to tell me this bad news I asked him to wait until you could be there, I wanted us all to hear it together and react to it as a family. In a way it’s a blessing the twins aren’t here, I’ll sort them out later. What we are going to do now is leave this house, this evening. We are going to pack small suitcases, enough to do us for a week. I’ll ask Vera and Kevin to send round vans to pick us up so that any journalists already outside won’t see us leaving in our cars. We’ll put a message on the machine saying that all telephone queries are to be addressed to Siobhan Casey. I presume that’s right, Harry?’

He nodded, astounded. ‘Right.’

‘You will go to stay with my mother in the country. Nobody will know where she is or bother her. Use her phone to call your friends and tell them that it’s all going to be fine in the end, but until it dies down you’re going to be out of sight for a bit. Say you’ll be back in ten days. No story lasts that long.’ They looked at her, open-mouthed.

‘And yes of course you’ll both go to university, and the twins. And we will probably sell this house but not immediately, not at the whim of any bank.’

‘But won’t we have to pay what’s owing?’ Richard asked. ‘This house doesn’t belong to your father,’ Connie said simply.

‘But even if it’s yours, wouldn’t you have to… ?’

‘No, it’s not mine. It was long ago bought by another company of which I am a director.’

‘Oh Dad, aren’t you clever!’ Richard said.

There was a moment. ‘Yes, your father is an extremely clever businessman, and when he makes a bargain he keeps it. He won’t want people to be out of pocket, so I feel sure that we won’t end up as villains out of all this. But for the moment it’s going to be quite hard, so we’re going to need all the courage and faith we can gather.’

And then the evening became a blur of gathering things and making phone calls. They moved out of the house unseen in the back of decorators’ vans.

A white-faced Vera and Kevin welcomed them both into their home. There was no small chat to be made, no sympathy to be offered or received, so they went straight to the room that had been prepared for them, the best guest room with its large double bed. A plate of cold supper and a flask of hot soup had been left out for them.

‘See you tomorrow,’ Vera said.

‘How do people know exactly what to say?’ Harry asked.

‘I suppose they wonder what they’d like themselves.’ Connie poured him a small mug of soup. He shook his head. ‘Take it, Harry. You may need it tomorrow.’

‘Does Kevin have all his insurance tied up with us?’

‘No, none of it,’ Connie spoke calmly.

‘How’s that?’

‘I asked them not to, just in case.’

‘What am I going to do, Connie?’

‘You’re going to face it. Say it failed, you didn’t want it to happen, you’re going to stay in the country and work at whatever you can.’

‘They’ll tear me to pieces.’

‘Only for a while. Then it will be the next story.’

‘And you?’

‘I’ll go back to work.’

‘But what about the money all those lawyers salted away for you?’

‘I’ll keep as much as I need to get the children sorted, then I’ll put the rest back in to pay the people who lost their savings.’

‘God, you’re not doing the Christian martyr bit on top of everything else?’

‘What would you suggest I do with what is after all my money, Harry?’ Her eyes were hard.

‘Keep it. Thank your lucky stars that you saved it, don’t plough it back in.’

‘You don’t mean that. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.’

‘I mean it. This is business, it’s not a gentleman’s cricket match. That’s the whole point of having a limited company, they can only get what’s in it. You took your bit out, what in God’s name was the point if you’re going to throw it back in again?’

‘Tomorrow,’ she said.

‘Take that prissy po-faced look off you, Connie, and be normal for once in your whole goddamned life. Stop acting for five minutes and let’s have less of the pious crap about giving the poor investors back their money. They knew what they were doing like anyone knows. Like your father knew what he was doing when he put your university fees on some horse that’s still running.’

Her face was white. She stood up and walked to the door. ‘Very high and mighty. Go on, leave rather than talk it out. Go down to your friend Vera and talk about the pure badness of men. Maybe it was Vera you should have moved in with in the first place. Could be that it was a woman you needed to get you going?’

She hadn’t intended to do it, but she hit him right across the face. It was because he was shouting about Vera in her own house, when Vera and Kevin had rescued them, asked no questions. Harry didn’t seem like a person any more, he was like an animal that had turned wild.

Her rings drew blood from his cheek, a long smear of red. And to her surprise she felt no shock at the blood, no shame at what she had done.

She closed the door and went downstairs. At the kitchen table they had obviously heard the shouting from above, possibly even the words he had been saying. Connie, who had been so calm and in control during the previous hours, looked around the little group. There was Deirdre, Vera’s handsome dark-eyed daughter, who worked in a fashion boutique, and Charlie, who had joined the family business of painting and decorating.

And between Kevin and Vera in front of a bottle of whiskey was Jacko. Jacko with a collar wide open and red wild eyes. Jacko who had been crying and drinking and hadn’t finished doing either. She realised in seconds that he had lost every penny in her husband’s investment company. Her first boyfriend, who had loved her simply and without complication, who had stood outside the church the day she was marrying Harry in the hope that she wouldn’t go through with it, he sat now at his friends’ kitchen table, bankrupt. How had all this happened, Connie wondered, as she stood there with her hand at her throat for what seemed an age?

She couldn’t stay in this room. She couldn’t go back upstairs to where Harry waited like a raging lion with further abuse and self-disgust. She couldn’t go outside into the real world, she would never be able to do that again and look people in the eye. Did people attract bad luck and encourage others to behave badly? She thought that the statistics against someone having both a father and a husband who lost everything must be enormous unless you decided that it was something in your own personality that drew you to exactly the same kind of weakness in the second as you had known in the first.

She remembered suddenly the open-faced friendly psychiatrist asking all those questions about her father. Could there have been anything in it? She thought she had been there a long time but they didn’t seem to have moved, so perhaps it had only been a couple of seconds.

Then Jacko spoke. His voice was slurred. ‘I hope you’re satisfied now,’ he said.

The others were silent.

In a voice that was clear and steady as always, Connie spoke. ‘No, Jacko, this is an odd thing to say, but I have never been satisfied, not in my whole life.’ Her eyes seemed far away. ‘I may have had twenty years of money, which should have made me happy. Truthfully, it didn’t. I’ve been lonely and acting a part for most of my adult life. Anyway, that’s no help to you now.’

‘No, it’s not.’ His face was mutinous. He was still handsome and eager. His marriage had failed, she knew from Vera, and his wife had taken the boy he cared about.

His business had been everything to him. And now that was gone. ‘You’ll get it all back,’ she said.

‘Oh yes?’ His laugh sounded more like a bark.

‘Yes, there
is
money there.’

‘I bet there is, in Jersey or the Cayman Islands or maybe in the wife’s name,’ Jacko sneered.

‘Quite a lot of it
is
in the wife’s name, as it happens,’ she said.

Vera and Kevin looked at her open-mouthed. Jacko couldn’t take it in.

‘So I got lucky by being an old boyfriend of the wife, is that what you’re telling me?’ He didn’t know whether to believe it was a lifeline or throw it back in her face.

‘I suppose I’m telling you that a lot of people got lucky because of the wife. If he’s sane enough in the morning, I’ll get him to the bank before his press conference.’

‘If it’s yours why don’t you keep it?’ Jacko asked.

‘Because I’m not, despite what you might think, a total shit. Vera, can I sleep somewhere else, like on the couch in the television room?’

Vera came in with her and handed her a rug. ‘You’re the strongest woman I ever met,’ Vera said.

‘You’re the best friend anyone ever had,’ said Connie.

Would it have been good to have loved Vera? To have lived together for years with flower gardens, and maybe a small crafts business to show for their commitment. She smiled wanly at the thought.

‘What has you laughing in the middle of all this?’ Vera asked.

‘Remind me to tell you one day, you’ll never believe it,’ said Connie as she kicked off her shoes and lay down on the couch.

Amazingly she slept, and only woke to the sound of a cup and saucer rattling. It was Harry, pale-faced with a long dark red scar standing out from his cheek. She had forgotten that particular part of last night.

‘I brought you coffee,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’ She made no move to take it.

‘I’m so desperately sorry.’

‘Yes.’

‘I am so sorry. Jesus, Connie, I just went mad last night. All I ever wanted was to be somebody and I nearly was and then I blew it.’ He had dressed carefully and shaved around the wound on his face. He was up and ready for the longest day he would ever have to live through. She looked at him as if she had never seen him before, as the people who saw him on television would see him, all the strangers who had lost their savings, and the people who had come across him in business deals or at social gatherings. A handsome hungry man, all he wanted was to be somebody and he didn’t care how he got there.

Then she saw he was crying.

‘I need you desperately, Connie. You’ve been acting all your life with me, could you just act for a little bit longer and pretend you have forgiven me? Please, Connie, I need you. You’re the only one who can help me.’ He laid his face with the livid scar on her knees, and he sobbed like a child.