Evening Class (3 page)

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 practising Catholic. He has the morals of a tom cat. 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 short-handed, 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 blonde 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 Crania 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 programmes 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 second-hand shop, one of those marvellous desks with a flap that came down and you sat and wrote on it like people were meant to do. And he would fresh flowers in the room because he liked their beauty and he didn’t mind 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 which they never saw. Maybe he could get a windowseat 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 any more. He would have to realise 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 any more. He could put up pictures 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 centre light gave it no shadows, no mystery.

There was a knock on the door. His blonde 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.

He came back and sat by the television.

‘What are you watching tonight?’ he asked Brigid.

‘What would you like, Daddy?’ she countered.

He must have taken this blow much worse than he believed, his naked disappointment and sense of injustice had to be showing in his face if both his daughters…

He looked at his younger child, her freckled face and big brown eyes so dear and loved and familiar since she was a baby in the pram. Normally so impatient with him, tonight she looked at him as if he were someone on a stretcher in a hospital corridor, with that wave of sympathy that washes over you for a complete stranger going through a very bad time.

They sat beside each other until 11.30 pm, looking at television programmes that neither of them liked, but both with an air of pleasure that they were pleasing the other.

Aidan was in bed when Nell came home at one o’clock. The light was out but he was not asleep. He heard the taxi pulling up outside the door; they paid for a cab home when she was on the late shift.

She came into the room quietly. He could smell toothpaste and talcum powder, so she had washed in the bathroom rather than disturb him by using the hand basin in their bedroom. She had a bedside light which pointed downwards at whatever book she was reading and didn’t shine in his eyes, so often he had lain there listening as she turned the pages. No words between them would ever be as interesting as the paperbacks she and her friends and sisters read, so nowadays he didn’t offer them.

Even tonight when his heart was like lead and he wanted to hold her in his arms and cry into her soft clean skin and tell her about Tony O’Brien who should not be allowed to do dinner duty but who was going to get the headship because he was more upfront, whatever that might mean. He would have liked to tell her that he was sorry that she had to go in and sit in a cash desk watching rich people eat and get drunk and pay their bills because it was better than anything else a Monday night might offer a married couple with two grown daughters. But he lay there and heard the faraway town hall clock strike the hours.

At two o’clock Nell put down her book with a little sigh and went to sleep, as far from him on her side of the bed as if she were sleeping in the next room. When the town hall said it was four o’clock Aidan realised that Grania would only have three hours’ sleep before she went to work.

But there was nothing he could do or say. It was clearly understood that the girls lived their own lives without interrogation. He had not liked to think about it but had accepted that they had been to the Family Planning Association. They came home at the times that suited them and if they did
not
come home then they called at eight o’clock during breakfast to say they were all right, that they had stayed over with a girl friend. This was the polite fiction that covered the Lord knew what. But as Nell said, it was often the actual truth, and she much preferred Grania and Brigid staying in some other girl’s flat rather than risking being driven home by a drunk, or not getting a taxi in the small hours of the morning.

Still, Aidan was relieved when he heard the hall door click and the light footsteps running up the stairs. At her age she could survive on three hours’ sleep. And it would be three hours more than he would have.

His mind was racing with foolish plans. He could resign from the school as a protest. Surely he could get work in a private college, Sixth Year Colleges, for example, where they did intensive work. Aidan as a Latin teacher would be useful there, there were so many careers where students still needed Latin. He could appeal to the Board of Management, list the ways in which he had helped the school, the hours he had put in to see that it got its rightful place in the community, his liaising with Third Level education so that they would come and give the children talks and pointers about the future, his environmental studies backed up by the wildlife garden.

Without appearing to do so, he could let it be known that Tony O’Brien was a destructive element, that the very fact of using violence against an ex-pupil on the school premises sent the worst possible signal to those who were meant to follow his leadership. Or could he write an anonymous letter to the religious members of the Board, to the pleasant open-faced priest and the rather serious nun, who might have no idea of Tony O’Brien’s loose moral code? Or could he get some of the parents to set up an action group? There were many, many things he could do.

Or else he would accept Mr Walsh’s view of him and become a man with a life outside the school, do up the dining room, make it his last-ditch stand against all the disappointments that life had thrown at him. His head felt as if someone had attached a lead weight to it during the night, but since he hadn’t closed his eyes he knew that this could not have happened.

He shaved very carefully; he would not appear at school with little bits of Elastoplast on his face. He looked around his bathroom as if he had never seen it before. On every inch of available wall were prints of Venice, big shiny reproductions of Turners that he had bought when he went to the Tate Gallery. When the children were young they used to talk of going to the Venice Room not the bathroom; now they probably didn’t see them at all, they were literally the wallpaper that they almost obscured.

He touched them and wondered would he ever go there again. He had been there twice as a young man, and then they had spent their honeymoon in Italy, where he had shown Nell his Venice, his Rome, his Florence, his Siena. It had been a wonderful time, but they had never gone back. When the children were young there hadn’t been the money or the time, and then lately… well… who would have come with him ? And it would have been a statement to have gone alone. Still, in the future there might have to be statements, and surely his soul was not so dead that it would not respond to the beauty of Italy?

Somewhere along the line they had all agreed not to talk at breakfast. And as a ceremony somehow it worked well for them. The coffee percolator was ready at eight, and the radio news switched on. A brightly coloured Italian dish of grapefruit was on the table. Everyone helped themselves and prepared their own. A basket of bread was there and an electric toaster sat on a tray with a picture of the Trevi Fountain on it. It had been a gift from Nell on his fortieth birthday. By twenty past eight Aidan and the girls had gone, each of them leaving their mug and plates in the dishwasher to minimise the clearing up.

He didn’t give his wife a bad life, Aidan thought to himself. He had lived up to the promises he had made. It wasn’t an elegant house but it had radiators and appliances and he paid for the windows to be cleaned three times a year, the carpet to be steamed every two years, and the house painted on the outside every three years.

Stop thinking in this ridiculous petty-clerk way, Aidan warned himself, and forcing a smile on his face began his exit. ‘Nice evening last night, Grania?’ he asked.