Evening Class

by Maeve Binchy

  “Daddy,” screamed Gus.

  Shay broke free and came at the mother and child. He still had the leg of the chair in his hand.

  “Laddy, for God’s sake,” she implored.

  Shay stopped to look at Laddy, the big boy with his face red and sweating, standing in his pajamas, uncertain, frightened.

  “Well, Lady Rose, don’t you have a fine protector here. The town simpleton in his pajamas, that’s great to see, isn’t it. The village idiot going to look after his big sister.” He looked from one to the other, taunting Laddy. “Come on then, big boy, hit me now. Hit me, Laddy, you big fat queer. Come on.” He had the chair leg with the spiky pointy bit where it had snapped, making it a dangerous weapon.

  “Hit him, Laddy,” Rose cried, and Laddy’s big fist came out and hit Shay hard across the jaw. As Shay fell his head hit the marble washstand. There was a crunching sound and his eyes were open as he lay on the floor. Rose put Gus down on the floor gently, the child had stopped crying now. The silence lasted forever.

  “I think he’s dead,” Laddy said.

  “You did what you had to do, Laddy.” Laddy looked at her in disbelief. He thought that he had done something terrible. He had hit Shay too hard, he had knocked the life out of him. Often Rose had said to him, You don’t know your own strength, Laddy, go easy with this or that. But this time there wasn’t a word said against him. He could hardly believe what had happened. He turned his face away from the staring eyes on the floor.

  Rose spoke slowly. “Now Laddy, I want you to get dressed and cycle into town and tell Dr. Kenny that poor Shay had a fall and hit his head and he’ll tell Father Maher and then they’ll drive you back here.”

  “And will I say…?”

  “You’ll say that you heard a lot of shouting and that Shay fell and that I asked you to go for the doctor.”

  “But isn’t he…I mean will Dr. Kenny be able to…?”

  “Dr. Kenny will do what he can and then he’ll close poor Shay’s eyes for him. Will you get dressed and go now, Laddy, there’s a good fellow?”

  “Will you be all right, Rose?”

  “I’ll be fine, and Gus is fine.”

  “I’m fine,” Gus said, his finger still in his mouth and holding on to Rose’s hand.

  Laddy cycled furiously through the night, the light on his bicycle bobbing up and down through the frightening shadows and shapes of the dark.

  Dr. Kenny and Father Maher put his bicycle on the roof of the doctor’s car. When they got home, Rose was very calm. She had dressed in a neat dark cardigan and skirt with a white blouse, she had combed her hair slightly over her forehead to hide the cut. The fire was burning brightly, she had built it up and burned the broken bedroom chair. It was in ashes now. No one would ever see that it had been used as a weapon.

  Her face was pale. She had a kettle ready for tea, and candles for the last sacraments. The prayers were said, Laddy and Gus joining Rose in the responses. The death certificate was written, and it was obviously by misadventure and due to intoxication.

  The women who would lay him out would be there in the morning. The sympathies that were offered and accepted were formal and perfunctory. Both the doctor and the priest knew that this was a loveless marriage of convenience, where the hired hand had made the woman of the house pregnant. Shay Neil couldn’t hold his drink, that was known.

  Dr. Kenny was not going to speculate about how Shay had fallen, nor was he going to discuss the fresh blood on her face. When the priest was busy elsewhere, the doctor took out his black bag and without waiting to be asked to do so, gave the wound a quick examination and dabbed antiseptic on it. “You’ll be fine, Rose,” he said. And she knew he wasn’t just talking about the cut on her forehead. He meant about everything.

  After the funeral Rose asked all her family back to the farm, and they sat around the table in the kitchen to a meal that she had prepared carefully. There had been only a few of Shay’s relations at the funeral, and they had not been invited back to the farm.

  Rose had a proposition to make. The place had no happy associations for her now, she and Gus and Laddy would like to sell it and live in Dublin. She had discussed it with an estate agent and had been given a realistic idea of what it would sell for. Did any of them have any objection to the place being sold? Would any of them like to live in it? No, none of them wanted to live there, and yes, they were all enthusiastic and happy for Rose to sell the farm.

  “Good.” She was brisk.

  Were there any keepsakes or mementos they might like to take?

  “Now?” They were surprised at the speed.

  “Yes, today.”

  She was going to put the house on the market the next day.

  GUS SETTLED IN a Dublin school, and Laddy, armed with a glowing reference from Mrs. Nolan, got a job as a porter in a small hotel. He was soon regarded as part of the family and invited to live in. This suited everyone. And the years passed peacefully enough.

  ROSE TOOK UP nursing again. Gus did well at school and went into a hotel management course. Rose was still a presentable woman in her forties, she could have her chances of marrying again in Dublin. The widower of a woman she had nursed seemed very interested in her, but Rose was firm. One loveless marriage behind her was enough. She wouldn’t join again unless it was someone she really loved. She didn’t mind missing out on love, because she didn’t really think she had. Most people didn’t have anything nearly as good as Gus and Laddy in their lives.

  Gus loved his work, he was prepared to do the longest hours and the hardest jobs to learn the hotel business. Laddy had always taken the boy to football matches and boxing matches. He remembered the fortune-teller. “Maybe she meant I was going to be interested in sports,” he told Gus. “Maybe she didn’t mean good at it, more involved in it.”

  “Could be.” Gus was very fond of the big, kind man who looked after him so well.

  NONE OF THEM ever talked about the night of the accident. Sometimes Rose wondered how much Gus remembered. He had been six, old enough to have taken it all in. But he didn’t appear to have nightmares as a child and later on he could listen to talk about his father without looking awkward. He did not, however, ask many questions about what his father had been like, which was significant. Most boys would surely have wanted to know. Possibly Gus knew enough.

  THE HOTEL WHERE Laddy worked was owned by an elderly couple. They told Laddy that they would soon retire, and he became very agitated. This had been his home now for years. It coincided with Gus’s meeting the girl of his dreams, a bright, sparky girl called Maggie, a trained chef with Northern Ireland wit and confidence. She was ideal for him in Rose’s mind, she would give him all the support he needed.

  “I always thought I’d be jealous when Gus found himself a proper girl, but it’s not so, I’m delighted for him.”

  “And I always thought I’d have some wee bat out of hell as a mother-in-law and I got you,” Maggie said.

  All they needed now was a hotel job together. Even buy a small run-down place and build it up.

  “Couldn’t you buy my hotel?” Laddy suggested. It would be exactly what they wanted but, of course, they couldn’t afford it.

  “If you give me a room in it to live in, I’ll give you the money,” Rose said.

  What better could she do with what she had saved and the proceeds of her Dublin flat when she sold it? It would be a home for Laddy and Gus, a start in business for the young couple. A place to rest her limbs when this ill health that had been foretold finally came. She knew it was sinful and even stupid to believe in fortune-tellers, but that whole day, the day of Gypsy Ella, was still very clear in her mind.

  It had been, after all, the day that Shay had raped her.

  IT WAS NOT easy to get business at the start. They spent a lot of time studying the accounts. They were paying out more than was coming in.

  Laddy understood that business was not good. “I can carry more coal upstairs,” he said, anxious to help.

 
; “Not much use, Laddy, when we’ve no one to light fires for.” Maggie was very kind to her husband’s uncle Laddy. She always made him feel important.

  “Could we go out on the street, Rose, and I would wear a sandwich board with the name of the hotel and you could give people leaflets?” He was so eager to help.

  “No, Laddy. This is Gus and Maggie’s hotel. They’ll come up with ideas, they’ll get it going. Soon it will be very busy, as many guests as they can handle.”

  And eventually it was.

  The young couple worked at it night and day. They built up a clientele of faithful visitors. They attracted people from the North, the word of mouth spread. And whenever they had a foreign visitor from the Continent, Maggie would give them a card saying We have friends who speak French, German, Italian.

  It was true. They knew a German bookbinder, a French teacher in a boys’ school, and an Italian who ran a chip shop. When they needed translation, these people were immediately found on the telephone to interpret for them.

  Gus and Maggie had two children, angelic little girls, and Rose thought herself one of the happiest women in Ireland. She would take her little granddaughters to feed the ducks in Stephen’s Green on a sunny morning.

  ONE OF THE hotel guests asked Laddy was there a snooker hall nearby, and Laddy, eager to please, found one.

  “Have a game with me,” said the man, a lonely businessman from Birmingham.

  “I’m afraid I don’t play, sir.” Laddy was apologetic.

  “I’ll show you,” the man said.

  And then it happened. The fortune-teller’s forecast came true. Laddy had a natural eye for the game. The man from Birmingham didn’t believe he had never played before. He learned the order: yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, black. He potted them all easily and stylishly. People gathered to watch.

  Laddy was the sportsman that had been foretold for him.

  HE NEVER WAGERED money on a game. Other people bet on him, but he worked too hard for his wages and they all needed them, Rose, Gus, Maggie, and the little girls. But he won competitions and he had his picture in the paper. And he was invited to join a club. He was a minor snooker celebrity.

  Rose watched all this with delight. Her brother, a person of importance at last. She didn’t even need to ask her son to look after Laddy when she was gone. She knew it wasn’t necessary. Laddy would live with Gus and Maggie until the end. She made a scrapbook of his snooker triumphs, and together they would read it.

  “Would Shay have been proud of all this, do you think?” Laddy asked one evening. He was a middle-aged man now, and he had hardly ever spoken of the dead Shay Neil. The man he had killed that night with a violent blow.

  Rose was startled. She spoke slowly. “I think he might have been pleased. But you know, with him it was very hard to know what he thought. He said very little, who knows what he was thinking in his head.”

  “Why did you marry him, Rose?”

  “To make a home for us all,” she said simply.

  As an explanation it seemed to satisfy Laddy. He had never given any more thought to marriage himself or women, as far as Rose knew. He must have had sexual desires and needs like any man, but they were never acknowledged in any way. And nowadays the snooker seemed a perfectly adequate substitute. So by the time Rose realized that the women’s trouble she complained of meant hysterectomy and then that hysterectomy hadn’t solved the problem, she was a woman with no worries about the future.

  The doctor was not accustomed to people taking a diagnosis and sentence like this so calmly.

  “We’ll make sure that there’s as little pain as possible,” he said.

  “Oh, I know you will. Now, what I’d really like is to go to a hospice, if that’s possible.”

  “You have a very loving family who would want to nurse you,” the doctor said.

  “True, but they have a hotel to run. I’d much prefer not to be there just because they would give me too much time. Please, Doctor, I’ll be no trouble up in the hospice, I’ll help all I can.”

  “I don’t doubt that,” he said, blowing his nose hard.

  Rose had her moments of rage and anger like anyone else. But they were not shared with her family or her fellow patients in the hospice. The hours that she spent brooding on the unfair hand that had been dealt to her were short compared to the time spent planning for the months that were left.

  When the family came to visit, they got hardly any information about pain and nausea but a lot of detail about the place she was in and the work it was doing. The hospice was a happy place, open to ideas and receptive to anything new. This is what she wanted them to channel their energy into, not to bringing her sweets or bed jackets. Something practical, something that would help. That’s what Rose wanted from her family.

  So they set about organizing it.

  Laddy got them a secondhand snooker table and gave lessons, and Gus came with Maggie to do cookery demonstrations. And the months passed easily and happily. Even though Rose was very thin now and her step was slower, she said she was in no pain and she wanted no sympathy, only company and enthusiasm. At least her mind was fine, she said.

  It was too fine for Gus and Maggie, they couldn’t hide from her the catastrophe that happened to them. They had insured and invested with a company that had gone bankrupt. They would lose the hotel, their hopes and dreams and future. Perhaps there was a hope that they could keep it from Rose. Maybe she could die without knowing what had happened to them. After all, she was so frail now that they could not take her back home to the hotel, as they had been able to do in the early months, for a Sunday lunch with her grandchildren. The only thing they could save from the disaster was the fact that Rose might not know how her investment in them had been lost.

  But they could not hide it.

  “You have to tell me what it is,” she said to Gus and Maggie. “You cannot leave this room without telling me what’s happening. I only have weeks left of my life, you won’t let me spend them in torment, trying to work out what it is. Letting me imagine it even worse than it is.”

  “What would be the worst thing that you might think it is?” Maggie asked.

  “That there’s something wrong with one of the children?” They shook their heads “Or with either of you? Or Laddy? Some illness?” Again they said no. “Well, we can face anything else,” she said, her thin face smiling and her eyes burning brightly out at them.

  They told her the story. How it was in the papers that the assets were gone. There was nothing left in the funds to meet the calls that were being made. Then the plausible man Harry Kane had said on television that nobody would lose their investment, the banks would rescue them, but people still feared they would. Nothing was clear.

  Tears poured down Rose’s face. Gypsy Ella had never told her this. She cursed herself for believing the fortune-teller in the beginning. She cursed Harry Kane and all belonging to him for his greed and theft. They had never seen her so angry.

  “I knew we shouldn’t have told you,” Gus said dismally.

  “No, of course you had to tell me. And swear you’ll tell me every single thing that happens from now on. If you tell me that it’s fine and it isn’t, I’ll know, and I’ll never forgive you.”

  “I’ll show you every page of the paperwork, Mam,” he said.

  “And if he doesn’t, I will,” Maggie promised.

  “And Mam, suppose it does go down you know, and we have to get another job, you know we’ll take Laddy with us.”

  “Of course she knows that,” said Maggie scornfully.

  AND AS THE days passed they brought her letters from the bank. And there did seem to be a rescue package. Their investment had been shaken but not lost. She read the small print carefully to make sure there was nothing she had missed.

  “Does Laddy understand how near we came to losing everything?” she asked.

  “He understands at a level of his own,” said Maggie, and with a great rush of relief Rose realized that whatever hap
pened when she was gone, Laddy would be in safe, understanding hands.

  SHE DIED PEACEFULLY.

  SHE NEVER KNEW that a woman called Siobhan Casey would call to the hotel and explain that a substantial reinvestment would now be called for, to make up for the hotel’s having been rescued. Miss Casey pointed out that in similar circumstances when a limited company had failed, investors had not been recompensed, and that the money payable to the Neils for their hotel had come from the personal finances of Mr. Kane, who was now being supported in his new venture by all those whose businesses he had saved.

  There was an element of secrecy about it, which was called confidentiality. The paperwork looked impressive, but it was requested that it should not be put through the books in the normal way. It was a gentleman’s agreement, nothing for the accountants to be involved in.

  At first the amount suggested was not a large amount, but then it increased. Gus and Maggie worried about it. But they had been pulled out of the fire when they assumed everything was gone. Perhaps in the swings and roundabouts of business this was accepted practice. Miss Casey spoke of her associates in a slightly respectful tone, as if these were people of immense power, people it might be foolish to cross.

  Gus knew that if his mother were alive, she would be against it. This made him worry about why he was being so naive as to go ahead with it. They told Laddy nothing. They just made economies. They couldn’t get a new boiler when they needed one, and they didn’t replace the hall carpet, they bought a cheap rug instead to cover the worn bit. But Laddy realized that something was wrong and it worried him. It couldn’t be that they didn’t have enough business, the customers were coming in thick and fast. But the Hearty Irish Breakfasts weren’t as hearty as they used to be, and Maggie said there was no need for Laddy to go to the market for fresh flowers anymore, they were too dear. And when one of the waitresses left, she wasn’t replaced.