Evening Class

by Maeve Binchy

  Her enthusiasm was so genuine, he couldn’t keep cold and stiff. “It is a bit of a dream, but then I’ve always been a stupid sort of dreamer, Grania.”

  “I inherited it from you then.”

  “No, I don’t think you did.”

  “Not in this artistic way, I couldn’t make a room like this in a million years. But I do have my dreams, yes.”

  “They’re not proper dreams, Grania. Truly they’re not.”

  “I tell you this, Dad, I never loved anyone before, apart from you and Mam, and to be honest, you more. No, I want to say this because you might not let me talk again. Now I know what love is about. It’s wanting the best for someone else, it’s wanting them to be happier than you are, isn’t that it?”

  “Yes.” He spoke in a very dead voice.

  “You felt that for Mam once, didn’t you? I mean, you probably still do.”

  “I think it changes as you get older.”

  “But I won’t have much time for it to get older. You and Mam have had nearly twenty-five years, Tony’ll be dead and buried in twenty-five years time. He smokes and drinks and is hopeless. You know that. If I get a good ten years I’ll be lucky.”

  “Grania, you could do so much better.”

  “You couldn’t do better than to be loved by the person you love, Dad. I know that, you know that.”

  “He’s not reliable.”

  “I rely on him absolutely, Dad. I would trust him with my life.”

  “Wait until he leaves you with a fatherless child. You’ll remember these words then.”

  “More than anything else on earth I would love to have his child.”

  “Well, go ahead. Nothing’s going to stop you.”

  Grania bent and examined the flowers on the little table. “You buy these for yourself, Dad?”

  “Who else do you think would buy them for me?”

  There were tears in her eyes. “I’d buy them for you if you’d let me, I’d come here and sit with you, and if I had your grandchild I would bring him or her here.”

  “You’re telling me you’re pregnant, is that it?”

  “No, that’s not it. I’m in control of whether I will be or not, and I won’t until I know the child would be welcomed by everyone.”

  “That could be a long wait,” he said. But she noticed that this time there were tears in his eyes too.

  “Dad,” she said, and it was hard to say which of them moved first toward the other until their arms were around each other and their tears were lost in each other’s shoulders.

  BRIGID AND FIONA went to the pictures.

  “Have you been to bed with him yet?”

  “No, but there’s no rush, it’s all going according to plan,” Fiona said.

  “Longest plan since time began,” Brigid grumbled.

  “No, believe me, I know what I’m doing.”

  “I’m glad someone does,” Brigid said. “Dad and Grania have gone all emotional on us. Grania’s sitting in Dad’s room talking to him as if a cross word had never been said between them.”

  “Isn’t that good?”

  “Yes, it’s good, of course it’s good, but it’s a mystery,” Brigid complained.

  “And what does your mother say about it?”

  “Nothing. That’s another mystery. I used to think that we were the dullest, most ordinary family in the western world. Now I think I live in a madhouse. I used to think that you were the odd one, Fiona. But there you are, the little pet of the house, learning to be a gourmet chef from the mother and planning to bed the son. How did it all happen?”

  Brigid hated mysteries and being confused by things. She sounded very disgruntled indeed.

  THE COOKERY CLASSES were a great success. Sometimes Barry’s father was there. Tall and dark and watchful. He looked a lot younger than his wife, but then his mind was not so troubled. He worked in a big nurseries and vegetable farm delivering produce and flowers to restaurants and hotels around the city. He was perfectly pleasant to Fiona but not enthusiastic. He was not curious about her, and he gave the impression of someone passing through rather than someone who lived there.

  Sometimes Barry came back from his own Italian class and ate the results of their cooking, but Fiona said he shouldn’t hurry back specially. It was too late for eating anyway, and he liked talking to the people afterward. She would take the bus home herself. After all, they would meet on other nights.

  Bit by bit she began to hear the story of the great Infidelity. She tried not to listen at first. “Don’t tell me all this, Mrs. Healy, please, you’ll wish you hadn’t when you’re all nice and friendly with Mr. Healy again and then you’ll be sorry.”

  “No I won’t, you’re my friend. Chop those a lot finer, Fiona. You don’t want great lumps in it. You have to hear. You have to know what Barry’s father is like.”

  Everything had been fine until two years ago. Well, you know, fine in a manner of speaking. His hours had always been difficult, she had lived with that. Sometimes up for the four-thirty run in the morning, sometimes working late at night. But there had been time off. Grand time in the middle of the day sometimes. She could remember when they had gone to the cinema for the two o’clock show, and then had tea and buns afterward and she was the envy of every other woman around. None of them ever went to the pictures in the daylight with their husbands. And he had never wanted her to work in the old days. He had said that he brought in plenty for the two of them and the child. She should keep the home nice and cook for them and be there when he got time off. That way they could have a good life.

  But two years ago it had all changed. He had met someone and started having an affair.

  “You can’t be sure, Mrs. Healy,” Fiona said as she weighed out the raisins and sultanas for the fruitcake. “It could be anything, you know, like pressure at work, or the traffic getting worse, you know the way everyone’s giving out about rush hour.”

  “There’s no rush hour at four a.m. when he comes home.” Her face was grim.

  “But isn’t it these awful hours?”

  “I checked with the company, he works twenty-eight hours a week. He’s out of here nearly twice that much.”

  “The traveling to and fro?” Fiona said desperately.

  “He’s about ten minutes from work,” Barry’s mother said.

  “He might just want a bit of space.”

  “He has that all right, he sleeps in the spare room.”

  “Maybe not to wake you?”

  “Maybe not to be near me.”

  “And if she exists who do you think she is?” Fiona spoke in a whisper.

  “I don’t know but I’ll find out.”

  “Would it be someone at work, do you think?”

  “No, I know all of them. There’s no one likely there. But it’s someone he met through work though, and that could be half of Dublin.”

  It was very distressing to listen to her. All that unhappiness, and according to Barry it was all in her mind.

  “Does she talk to you at all about it?” Barry asked Fiona.

  Fiona thought there was a sort of sacredness about the conversations over the floured boards and the bubbling casseroles, over cups of coffee after the cooking when Fiona would sit on the sofa and the huge, half-blind Cascarino would lie purring on her lap.

  “A bit here and there, not much,” she lied.

  Nessa Healy thought that Fiona was her friend, it wasn’t the action of a friend to repeat conversations back.

  Barry and Fiona saw a lot of each other. They went to football matches and to the cinema, and as the weather got nicer they went on the motorbike out to Wicklow or Kildare and saw places that Fiona had never been.

  He had not asked her to come on the trip to Rome, the viaggio, as they kept calling it. Fiona hoped that at some stage soon he would and so she had applied for a passport just in case.

  Sometimes they went out in a foursome with Suzi and Luigi, who had invited them to their wedding in Dublin the middle of June. Suzi said
that, mercifully, the idea of a Roman wedding had been abandoned. Her parents said no, Luigi’s parents said no, and all their friends who weren’t in the Italian class said they were off their skulls. So it would be a Roman honeymoon instead.

  “Are you learning any Italian yourself?” Fiona inquired.

  “No. If they want to talk to me they have to speak my language,” said Suzi, the confident, handsome girl who would have expected Eskimos to learn her language if she were passing the North Pole.

  Then there was the big fund-raising party. The Italian class, all thirty of them, were to provide the food. Drink was being sponsored by various liquor stores and the supermarket. Somebody knew a group that would play free in return for their picture in the local paper. Each pupil was expected to invite at least five people who would pay £5 a head for the party. That would raise £750 for the viaggio and then there would be a huge raffle. The prizes were enormous, and that might raise another £150 or even more. The travel agency was bringing the price down all the time. The accommodation had been booked in a pensione in Rome. There would be the trip to Florence, staying overnight at a hostel, and on to Siena before they went back to Rome.

  Barry was drumming up his five for the party.

  “I’d like you to come, Dad,” he said. “It means a lot to me, and remember Mam and I always went to your work outings.”

  “I’m not sure I’ll be free, Son. But if I am I’ll be there, I can’t say fairer than that.”

  And Barry would have Fiona, his mother, a fellow from work, and a next-door neighbor. Fiona was going to ask her friends Grania and Brigid, but they were going already because of their father. And Suzi was going with Luigi. It would be a great night.

  The cookery lessons continued. Fiona and Barry’s mother were going to make a very exotic dessert for the party, it was called cannoli. Full of fruit and nuts and ricotta cheese in pastry and deep-fried.

  “Are you sure that’s not one of the pastas?” Barry asked anxiously.

  No, the women assured him, that was cannelloni. He knew nothing. They asked him to check with Signora. Signora said that cannoli alla siciliana was one of the most mouthwatering dishes in the world, she couldn’t wait to taste it.

  The confidences continued to be exchanged between Fiona and Nessa Healy as they cooked. Fiona said that she really did like Barry a lot, he was a generous, kind person, but she didn’t want to rush him because she didn’t think he was ready to settle down.

  And Barry’s mother told Fiona that she couldn’t give up on her husband. There was a time she might have been able to say he didn’t love her, and let him go to whoever it was that he did love. But not now.

  “And why is that?” Fiona wanted to know.

  “When I was in hospital that time, when I was a bit foolish you know, he brought me flowers. A man doesn’t do that unless he cares. He brought a bunch of freesias in and left them for me. For all his blustering and all his saying that it wasn’t him and that he’s not going to be railroaded into things, he does care, Fiona. That’s what I’m holding on to.”

  And Fiona sat, her eyes enormous behind her glasses and her hands floury. And cursed herself to the pit of hell and back for having been so stupid. She knew that if she spoke it would have to be at that very minute, and she did consider it.

  But when she looked at Nessa Healy’s face and saw all the life and hope in it, she realized what a problem she had. How could she tell this woman that she, the girl who worked selling coffee in the hospital waiting room, had delivered the bloody freesias? She, Fiona, who wasn’t even meant to know about the suicide attempt. It had never been discussed. Whatever Fiona was going to attempt in order to try to undo the harm she had managed to create, it could not involve taking all this hope and life away. She would find some other way.

  Some other way, Fiona said to herself desperately, as the days went by and the woman who might one day be her mother-in-law told how love could never be dead if someone sent a bunch of flowers.

  Suzi would know what to do, but Fiona would not ask her, not in a million years. Suzi might well tell Luigi, and Luigi would tell his old pal Bartolomeo, as he insisted on calling Barry. And anyway, Suzi would despise her, and Fiona didn’t want that.

  Brigid and Grania Dunne would be of no use in a situation like this. They’d just say that Fiona was reverting to her old ways and getting into a tizz about nothing. There was an old teacher at school who used that word. Don’t get in a tizz, girls, she would cry, and they would have to stuff their fists down their throats to stop laughing. But later on Brigid and Grania said that “tizz” was a good word for Fiona’s temperament, sort of fussy and dizzy and troubled. She couldn’t let them know how frightening and upsetting the tizz was this time because they would say it was all her own fault. And, of course, it undoubtedly was.

  “YOU ARE FOND of me, Fiona?” Mrs. Healy asked after they had made a lemon meringue pie.

  “Very fond,” Fiona said eagerly.

  “And you’d tell me the truth?”

  “Oh, yes.” Fiona’s voice was a squeak at this stage. She waited for the blow to fall. Somehow the flowers had been traced back to her. Maybe it was all for the best.

  “Do you think I should get my colors done?” Mrs. Healy asked.

  “Your colors?”

  “Yes. You go to a consultant and they tell you what shades suit you and what drain the color from your face. It’s quite scientific apparently.”

  Fiona struggled for speech. “And how much does it cost?” she asked eventually.

  “Oh, I have the money,” Mrs. Healy said.

  “Well, I’m not much good at these things but I have a very smart friend, I’ll ask her. She’ll know if it’s a good idea or not.”

  “Thanks, Fiona,” said Mrs. Healy, who must be about forty-five and who looked seventy-five and still thought her husband loved her, because of Fiona.

  SUZI SAID THAT it was a brilliant idea. “When are you going?” she asked.

  Fiona didn’t have the courage to admit that she hadn’t been talking about herself. She was also a little upset that Suzi felt she needed advice. But she was trying so hard to be grown up these days and not to dither that she said firmly yes, it had been something she was thinking of.

  Nessa Healy was pleased with this news. “Do you know another thing I think we should do?” Mrs. Healy said confidingly. “I think we should go to an expensive hairstylist and have a whole new look.”

  Fiona felt faint. All the money she had been saving so painstakingly for the viaggio, if she ever went on it, would trickle away on these huge improvements that she and Barry’s mother were about to embark on.

  Fortunately, Suzi saved the day by knowing a hairdressing school.

  And as the weeks went on Mrs. Healy stopped wearing brown and dug out all her pale-colored clothes and wore nice dark-colored scarves with them. Her hair was colored and cut short, and she looked fifty instead of seventy-five.

  Fiona had her dark, shiny hair cut very short and thick, dead straight with a fringe, and everyone said she looked terrific. She wore bright reds and yellows, and one or two of the house surgeons said flirtatious things to her, which she just laughed at good-naturedly instead of thinking that they might be going to marry her, as she might have done in the old days.

  And Barry’s father stayed at home a little more, but not a lot more, and seemed perfectly pleasant anytime Fiona was in the house.

  But it didn’t look as if the colors or the new hairstyle were going to win him back to the way things had been before the Affair began two years ago.

  “YOU’RE VERY GOOD to my mother, she looks terrific,” Barry said.

  “And what about me, don’t I look terrific too?”

  “You always looked terrific. But listen, never let her know that I told you about the suicide. She often asks me to swear that I never told you. She’d hate to lose your respect, that’s what it is.”

  Fiona swallowed when he said this. She could never tell Barry either. T
here must be people who lived with a lie forever. It was quite possible. It wasn’t even that important a lie, it was just that it had led to such false hopes.

  Nothing prepared Fiona for the revelation that came as they were separating eggs and beating the whites for a meringue topping.

  “I’ve discovered where she works.”

  “Who?”

  “The woman. Dan’s woman, the mistress.” Mrs. Healy spoke with satisfaction, as if of a detection job well done.

  “And where is it?” Did this all mean that Barry’s poor mother would get another attack of nerves and try to kill herself again? Fiona’s face was anxious.

  “In one of the smartest restaurants in Dublin, it would seem. Quentin’s no less. Have you heard of it?”

  “Yes, you often see it in the papers,” poor Fiona said.

  “And you might see it in the papers again,” said the older woman darkly.

  She couldn’t mean she was going to go there to Quentin’s restaurant and make a scene. Could she?

  “And are you sure that’s where she is? I mean, how do you know exactly, Mrs. Healy?”

  “I followed him,” she said triumphantly.

  “You followed him?”

  “He went out in his van last night. He often does on a Wednesday. Stays in and watches television and then after twelve he says he has to go and do late-night work. I know it’s a lie, I’ve always known that about Wednesday—there’s no night work, and anyway he’s all dressed up, brushing his teeth, clean shirt. The lot.”

  “But how did you follow him, Mrs. Healy? Didn’t he go out in his van?”

  “Indeed he did. But I had a taxi waiting, with its lights off, and away we went.”

  “A taxi waiting all that time? Until he was ready to go out?” The sheer, mad extravagance of it stunned Fiona more than the act itself.

  “No, I knew it would be about midnight so I booked it for fifteen minutes earlier just in case. Then I got in and followed him.”

  “And merciful Lord, Mrs. Healy, what did the taxi driver think?”