Evening Class (49 page)

‘You can’t be sure, Mrs Healy,’ Fiona said as she weighed out the raisins and sultanas for the fruit cake. ‘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 travelling 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 as 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 enquired.

‘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 off licences and the supermarket. Somebody knew a group which would play free in return for their picture in the local paper. Each pupil was expected to invite at last 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
pensions
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 works 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 neighbour. 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 alia siriliana
was one of the most mouth-watering 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 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 realised 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 and 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 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 Crania said that tizz was a good world 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 colours done?’ Mrs Healy asked.

‘Your colours?’

‘Yes. You go to a consultant and they tell you what shades suit you and what drain the colour 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 hair stylist’s 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 here by knowing a hairdressing school.

And as the weeks went on Mrs Healy stopped wearing brown but dug out all her pale-coloured clothes and wore nice dark-coloured scarves with them. Her hair was coloured 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 any time Fiona was in the house.

But it didn’t look as if the colours 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. There must be people who lived with a lie for ever. 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?’

‘He thought about the nice sum clicking up on his meter, that’s what he thought.’

‘And what happened?’

‘Well, the van went off and turned into the lane behind Quentin’s.’ She paused. She didn’t
look
very upset. Fiona had often seen Mrs Healy more strained, more stressed than this. What could she have seen on this extraordinary mission?

‘And then?’

‘Well, then we waited. I mean he waited, and the taxi driver and I waited. And a woman came out. I couldn’t see her, it was so dark. And she got straight into the van as if she knew it was going to be there, and they took off so quickly that we lost them.’

Fiona felt vastly relieved. But Mrs Healy was practical. ‘We won’t lose them next Wednesday,’ she said determinedly.

Fiona had been very unsuccessful in trying to head off this second excursion. ‘Would you look at the cost of it? You could get a lovely new check skirt for what you pay the taxi-driver.’

‘It’s my housekeeping money, Fiona. I’ll spend what I save on what gives me pleasure.’

‘But suppose he sees you, suppose you’re discovered.’

‘I’m not the one that’s doing anything wrong, I’m just going out for a drive in a taxi.’

‘But what if you do see her? What difference will it make?’

‘I’ll know what she’s like, the woman he
thinks
he loves.’ And her voice sounded so sure that Dan Healy only thought he loved another that Fiona’s blood ran chill.

‘Doesn’t your mother work in Quentin’s?’ Fiona asked Brigid.

‘Yeah, she does. Why?’

‘Would she know people who work there at night, like waitresses, young ones?’

‘I suppose she would, she’s been there long enough. Why?’

‘If I were to give you a name would you be able to ask her about them, like without saying why you were asking?’

‘I might, why?’