by Maeve Binchy
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 center 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 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 the way 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 teaching 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 organized…
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 staff room.
Aidan looked at him surprised. It was so long since anyone had inquired. “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 rehydrating lunchtime pint,” Tony groaned.
“Aren’t you marvelous, 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 elderly 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 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 quick 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 nonvoting 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 realized with a great feeling of sadness. He had been t
eaching 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, recognize the realization 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 favor.”
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…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 liked 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 realized that his jostling hadn’t worked.
Mr. Walsh was silent.
Outside the room were the noises of a school at four-thirty in the afternoon. In the distance the sounds of bicycle bells shrilling, doors banging, voices shouting as they ran for the buses in each direction. Soon the sound of the cleaners with their buckets and mops, and the hum of the electric polisher, would be heard. It was so familiar, so safe. And until this moment Aidan had thought that there was a very sporting chance that this would be his.
“I suppose it’s Tony O’Brien,” he said in a defeated tone.
“He seems to be the one they want. Nothing definite yet, not till next week, but that’s where their thinking lies.”
“I wonder why.” Aidan felt almost dizzy with jealousy and confusion.
“Oh search me, Aidan. The man’s not even a practicing Catholic. He has the morals of a tomcat. He doesn’t love the place, care about it like we do, but they think he’s the man for the times that are in it. Tough ways of dealing with tough problems.”
“Like beating an eighteen-year-old boy nearly senseless,” Aidan said.
“Well, they all think that the boy was a drug dealer, and he certainly didn’t come anywhere near the school again.”
“You can’t run a place like that,” Aidan said.
“You wouldn’t and I wouldn’t but our day is over.”
“You’re sixty-five, with respect, Mr. Walsh. I am only forty-eight, I didn’t think my day was over.”
“And it needn’t be, Aidan. That’s what I’m telling you. You’ve got a lovely wife and daughters, a life out there. You should build on all that. Don’t let Mountainview become like a mistress to you.”
“You’re very kind and I appreciate what you say. No, I’m not just mouthing words. Truly I do appreciate being warned in advance, makes me look less foolish.” And he left the room with a very straight back.
AT HOME HE found Nell in her black dress and yellow scarf, the uniform she wore for work in the restaurant.
“But you don’t work Monday night,” he cried in dismay.
“They were shorthanded, and I thought why not, there’s nothing on television,” she said. Then possibly she saw his face. “There’s a nice bit of steak in the fridge,” she said. “And some of Saturday’s potatoes…they’d be grand fried up with an onion. Right?”
“Right,” he said. He wouldn’t have told her anyway. Maybe it was better that Nell was going out. “Are the girls home?” he asked.
“Grania’s taken possession of the bathroom. Heavy date tonight, apparently.”
“Anyone we know?” He didn’t know why he said it. He could see her irritation.
“How would it be anyone we know?”
“Remember when they were toddlers and we knew all their friends?” Aidan said.
“Yes, and remember too when they kept us awake all night roaring and bawling. I’ll be off now.”
“Fine, take care.” His voice was flat.
“Are you all right, Aidan?”
“Would it matter all that much if I were or I weren’t?”
“What kind of an answer is that? There’s very little point in asking you a civil question if this is all the response I get.”
“I mean it. Does it matter?”
“Not if you’re going to put on this self-pitying thing. We’re all tired, Aidan, life’s hard for everyone. Why do you think you’re the only one with problems?”
“What problems do you have? You never tell me.”
“And as sure as hell I’m not going to tell you now with three minutes before the bus.”
She was gone.
He made a cup of instant coffee and sat down at the kitchen table. Brigid came in. She was dark-haired, freckled like he was but fortunately less square. Her elder sister had Nell’s blond good looks.
“Daddy, it’s not fair, she’s been in the bathroom for nearly an hour. She was home at five-thirty and she went in at six and now it’s nearly seven. Daddy, tell her to get out and let me in.”
“No,” he said quietly.
“What do you mean no?” Brigid was startled.
What would he usually have said? Something bland, trying to keep the peace, reminding her there was a shower in the downstairs cloakroom. But tonight he hadn’t the energy to placate them. Let them fight, he would make no effort to stop them.
“You’re grown-up women, sort out the bathroom between you,” he said, and walked out with his coffee into the dining room, closing the door behind him.
He sat still for a while and looked around him. It seemed to signify all that was wrong with the life they lived. There were no happy family meals around this big bleak table. Friends and extended family never drew up those dark chairs to talk animatedly.
When Grania and Brigid brought friends home, they took them up to their bedrooms or giggled with Nell in the kitchen. Aidan was left in the sitting room looking at television programs that he didn’t want to see. Wouldn’t it be better if he had his own little place, somewhere he could feel at peace?
He had seen a desk that he would love in a secondhand shop, one of those marvelous desks with a flap that came down and you sat and wrote on it as people were meant to do. And he would have fresh flowers in the room because he liked their beauty and he didn’t mind about changing the water every day, which Nell said was a bore.
And there was a nice light that came in the window here during the daytime, a soft light that they never saw. Maybe he could get a window seat or sofa and put it there, and get big drapey curtains. And he could sit and read, and invite friends in, well, whoever there was, because he knew now there would be no life for him from the family anymore. He would have to realize this and stop hoping that things would change.
He could have a wall with books on it, and maybe tapes until he got a CD player. Or maybe he would never get a CD player, he didn’t have to try to compete with Tony O’Brien anymore. He could put up p
ictures on the wall, frescoes from Florence, or those heads, those graceful necks and heads of Leonardo da Vinci. And he could play arias to himself, and read articles in magazines about the great operas. Mr. Walsh thought he had a life. It was time for him to get this life. His other life was over. He would not be married to Mountainview from now on. He sat warming his hands on the coffee cup. This room would need more heating, but that could be seen to. And it would need some lamps, the harsh center light gave it no shadows, no mystery.
There was a knock on the door. His blond daughter, Grania, stood there, dressed for her date. “Are you all right, Daddy?” she asked. “Brigid said you were a bit odd, I was wondering if you were sick.”
“No, I’m fine,” he said. But his voice seemed to come from far away. If it seemed far to him it must be very far to Grania; he forced a smile. “Are you going somewhere nice?” he asked.
She was relieved to see him more himself. “I don’t know. I met a gorgeous fellow, but listen I’ll tell you about it sometime.” Her face was soft, kinder than it had been for a long while.
“Tell me now,” he said.
She shuffled. “No, I can’t yet, I have to see how we get on. If there’s anything to tell, you’ll be the first to know.”
He felt unbearably sad. This girl whose hand he had held for so long, who used to laugh at his jokes and think he knew everything, and she could hardly wait to get away. “That’s fine,” he said.
“Don’t sit in here, Daddy. It’s cold and lonely.”
He wanted to say it was cold and lonely everywhere, but he didn’t. “Enjoy your night,” he said.