Evening Class, Page 4

  Aidan wondered was it very reliable for one of his daughters to spend the night with a man who had been described by the other as a heavy date. About whom only a week ago she had raised tentative worries, whether he was reliable…sincere. Aidan didn’t voice these wonderings. He watched Nell at the phone.

  “Sure, fine, good. Do you have proper clothes to go into the bank in or will you come back here? Oh, you brought a sweater, how lucky. Righto, love, see you this evening.”

  “And how did she seem?” Aidan asked.

  “Now, Aidan, don’t start taking attitudes. We’ve always agreed that it’s much wiser that Grania should stay with Fiona in town instead of getting a dodgy lift home.”

  He nodded. None of them thought for a moment that Grania was staying with Fiona.

  “NO PROBLEMS, THEN?” Tony asked.

  “No, I told you…they treat me as a grown-up.”

  “And so do I in a different way.” He reached out for her as she sat on the edge of the bed.

  “No, Tony, I can’t possibly. We have to go to work. I have to get to the bank, you have to go to Mountainview.”

  He was pleased that she remembered the name of the place he worked. “No, they won’t mind, they’re very lax there, let the teachers do what they like most of the time.”

  She laughed at him. “No that’s not true, not even a little bit true. Get up and have a shower, I’ll put on some coffee. Where’s the machine?”

  “It’s only instant, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh that’s not classy enough for me at all I’m afraid, Mr. O’Brien,” she said, shaking her head at him in mock disapproval. “Things will have to improve round here if I am to visit again.”

  “I was hoping you’d pay a visit this evening,” he said.

  Their eyes met. There was no guile.

  “Yes, if you have real coffee,” she said.

  “Consider it done,” he said.

  Grania had toast, Tony had two cigarettes.

  “You really should cut down on those,” she said. “I could hear you wheeze all night.”

  “That was passion,” he said.

  “No, it was cigarettes.” She was firm.

  Perhaps, perhaps for this lively, bright young woman he might, he just might, be able to cut them out. It was bad enough to be so much older than her, he didn’t want to be so much wheezier as well. “I might change, you know,” he said seriously. “There are going to be a lot of changes in my life at work for one thing, but more important, now that I’ve met you I think I might have the strength to cut out a lot of the rubbishy bits.”

  “Believe me, I’ll help you,” Grania said, reaching for his hand across the table. “And you must help me too. Help me to keep my mind alert and busy. I’ve stopped reading since I left school. I want to read again.”

  “I think we should both take the day off to cement this promise,” he said, only half joking.

  “Hey, you won’t even be thinking about suggesting that next term.” She laughed.

  “Why next term?” How could she have known of his promotion? Nobody knew except the board, who had offered him the job. It was to be kept totally secret until it was announced.

  She had not meant to tell him yet about her father’s being on the staff, but somehow with all they had shared it seemed pointless to keep it secret any longer. It would have to come out sometime, and anyway, she was so proud of Dad’s new post. “Well, you’ll want to keep well in with my father, he’s going to be the principal of Mountainview.”

  “Your father’s going to be what?”

  “Principal. It’s a secret until next week but I think everyone expected it.”

  “What’s your father’s name?”

  “Dunne like mine. He’s the Latin teacher, Aidan Dunne. Remember I asked you did you know him the first time we met.”

  “You didn’t say he was your father.”

  “No, well it was a crowded place and I didn’t want to be making myself sound too babyish. And later it didn’t matter.”

  “Oh my God,” said Tony O’Brien. He didn’t look at all pleased.

  Grania bit her lip and regretted that she had ever mentioned it. “Please don’t say to him that you know, please.”

  “He told you this? That he was going to be principal?” Tony O’Brien’s face was hardly able to register the shock. “When? When did he tell you this? Was it a long time ago?”

  “He’s been talking about it for ages, but he told us last night.”

  “Last night? No, you must be mistaken, you must have misunderstood.”

  “Of course I didn’t misunderstand, we were just talking about it before I came out to meet you.”

  “And did you tell him that you were meeting me?” He looked almost wild.

  “No. Tony, what is it?”

  He held both her hands in his and spoke very slowly and carefully. “This is the most important thing I have ever said in my whole life. In my whole long life, Grania. You must never, never tell your father what you told me now. Never.”

  She laughed nervously and tried to draw her hands away. “Oh come on, you’re behaving like someone in a melodrama.”

  “It’s a bit like that, honestly.”

  “I’m never to tell my father I met you, know you, like you…what kind of relationship is that?” Her eyes blazed at him across the breakfast table.

  “No, of course we’ll tell him. But later, not a lot later, but there’s something else I have to tell him first.”

  “Tell me?” she asked.

  “I can’t. If there’s any dignity to be left anywhere in this whole world it depends on your trusting me this minute and believing I want the best, the very, very best for you.”

  “How can I believe anything if you won’t tell me what all the mystery is about?”

  “It’s about faith and trust.”

  “It’s about keeping me in the dark, that’s what it is and I hate it.”

  “What have you to lose by trusting me, Grania? Listen, two weeks ago we hadn’t even met, now we think we love each other. Can’t you give it just a day or two till I sort something out.” He was standing up and putting on his jacket. For a man who had said Mountainview College was a lax place where it didn’t matter what time you rolled in, Tony O’Brien seemed in a very great hurry.

  AIDAN DUNNE WAS in the staff room. He looked slightly excited, feverish even. His eyes were unnaturally bright. Was it possible that he could be suffering from some kind of delusion? Or did he suspect that his beloved daughter had been seduced by a man as old as himself but ten times as unreliable?

  “Aidan, I want to talk to you very, very urgently,” Tony O’Brien said in an undertone.

  “After school hours possibly, Tony…”

  “This very minute. Come on, we’ll go to the library.”

  “Tony, the bell will go in five minutes.”

  “To hell with the bell.” Tony half pulled, half dragged him out of the staff room.

  In the library two studious girls from Sixth Year looked up, startled.

  “Out,” Tony O’Brien said in a voice that wasn’t going to be argued with.

  One of them tried to protest. “But we’re studying here, we were looking up—”

  “Did you hear me?”

  This time she got the message and they were gone.

  “That’s no way to treat children, we’re meant to encourage them, lead them into the library, for heaven’s sake, not throw them out of it like some bouncer in these nightclubs you go to. What example is that for them to follow?”

  “We’re not here to be some example to them, we’re here to teach them. To put some information into their heads. It’s as simple as that.”

  Aidan looked at him aghast, and then he spoke. “I’ll thank you not to give me the benefit of your half-baked hungover philosophies at this time in the morning or anytime. Let me back to my classes this minute.”

  “Aidan.” Tony O’Brien’s voice had changed. “Aidan, listen to me. I’m
going to be the principal. They were going to announce it next week, but I think it’s better if I make them do it today.”

  “What, what…why do you want to do that?” Aidan felt he had had a blow in the stomach. This was too soon, he wasn’t ready for it. There was no proof. Nothing was fixed yet.

  “So that all this nonsense in your head can be knocked out of it, so that you don’t go round believing that it’s you who’s getting the job…upsetting yourself, upsetting other people…that’s why.”

  Aidan looked at Tony O’Brien. “Why are you doing this to me, Tony, why? Suppose they do give you the job, is your first response to drag me in here and start rubbing my nose in it, the fact that you…you who don’t give a tuppenny damn about Mountainview are going to get the job? Have you no dignity at all? Can’t you even wait until the board offer you the job before you start gloating? Are you so bloody confident, so eager…?”

  “Aidan, you can’t have gone on believing that it was going to be you. Did that old blatherer Walsh not tell you? They all thought he would mark your card about it, he actually said that he had told you.”

  “He said it was likely that you might get it, and I might add that he said he would be very sorry indeed if you did.”

  A child put his head around the library door and stared with amazement at the two red-faced teachers confronting each other across a table.

  Tony O’Brien let a roar that nearly lifted the child up in the air. “Get the hell out of here, you interfering young pup, and back to your classroom.”

  White-faced, the boy looked at Aidan Dunne for confirmation.

  “That’s the boy, Declan. Tell the class to open their Virgil, I’ll be along shortly.” The door closed.

  “You know all their names,” Tony O’Brien said wonderingly.

  “You hardly know any of them,” Aidan Dunne said flatly.

  “Being principal doesn’t have anything to do with being a Dale Carnegie figure, a Mister Nice Guy, you know.”

  “Evidently not,” Aidan agreed. They were much calmer now, the heat and fury had gone from both of them.

  “I’m going to need you, Aidan, to help me, if we’re going to keep this place afloat at all.”

  But Aidan was stiff, rigid with his disappointment and humiliation. “No, it’s too much to ask. I may be easygoing but I can’t do this. I couldn’t stay on here. Not now.”

  “But what will you do, in the name of God?”

  “I’m not completely washed up you know, there are places that would be glad of me, even though this one doesn’t seem to be.”

  “They rely on you here, you great fool. You’re the cornerstone of Mountainview, you know that.”

  “Not cornerstone enough to want me as principal.”

  “Do I have to spell it out for you? The job of principal is changing. They don’t want a wise preacher up in that office…they need someone with a loud voice who’s not afraid to argue with the VEC, with the Department of Education, to get the guards in here if there’s vandalism or drugs, to deal with the parents if they start bleating…”

  “I couldn’t work under you, Tony, I don’t respect you as a teacher.”

  “You don’t have to respect me as a teacher.”

  “Yes I would. You see, I couldn’t go along with the things that you would want or the things you’d ignore.”

  “Give me one example, one, now this minute. What did you think of as you were coming in the school gate…what one thing would you do as principal?”

  “I’d get the place painted, it’s dirty, shabby…”

  “Okay, snap. That’s what I’d do too.”

  “Oh you just say that.”

  “No, Aidan, I don’t bloody say that, but even better I know how I’m going to do it. You wouldn’t know where to start. I’m going to get a young fellow I know in the evening paper to come up here with a photographer and do an article called ‘Magnificent Mountainview,’ showing the peeling paint, the rusty railings, the sign with the letters missing.”

  “You’d never humiliate the place like that?”

  “It wouldn’t be humiliation. The day after the article appears I’ll have the board agree to a huge refurbishing job. We can announce details of it, say it was all on line and that local sponsors are going to take part…list who is going to do what…you know, garden centers, paint shops, that wrought-iron place for the school sign…I’ve a list as long as my arm.”

  Aidan looked down at his hands. He knew that he himself could not have set up something like this, a plan that was sure to work. This time next year Mountainview would have a face-lift, one that he would never have been able to organize. It left him more bereft than ever. “I couldn’t stay, Tony. I’d feel so humbled, passed over.”

  “But no one here thought you were going to get it.”

  “I thought it.” He said it simply.

  “Well then, the humiliation that you speak of is only in your mind.”

  “And my family, of course…they think it is in the bag for me…they’re waiting to celebrate.”

  There was a lump in Tony O’Brien’s throat. He knew this was true. This man’s glowing daughter was so proud of her father’s new post. But there was no time for sentiment, only action.

  “Then give them something to celebrate.”

  “Like what, for example?”

  “Suppose there was no race to be principal. Suppose you could have some position in the school, bring in something new…set up something…what would you like to do?”

  “Look, I know you mean well, Tony, and I’m grateful to you for it, but I’m not into let’s pretend at the moment.”

  “I’m the principal, can’t you get that into your head? I can do what I like, there’s no let’s pretend about it. I want you on my side. I want you to be enthusiastic, not a Moaning Minnie. Tell me what you’d do, for God’s sake, man…if you were given the go-ahead.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t want it because it’s not got much to do with the school, but I think we should have evening classes.”

  “What?”

  “There, I knew you wouldn’t want it.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t want it. What kind of evening classes?”

  The two men talked on in the library, and oddly, their classrooms were curiously quiet. Normally the noise level of any room left without a teacher could reach a very high decibel level indeed. But the two studious girls who had been thrown out of the library by Mr. O’Brien had scuttled to their classroom with news of their eviction and of Mr. O’Brien’s face. It was agreed that the geography teacher was on the warpath and it was probably better to keep things fairly low until he arrived. They had all seen him in a temper at some stage, and it wasn’t something you’d want to bring on yourselves.

  Declan, who had been instructed to tell his class to get out their Virgil, spoke in low tones. “I think they were arm-wrestling,” he said. “They were purple in the face, both of them, and Mr. Dunne spoke as if there was a knife held in his back.”

  They looked at him, round-faced. Declan was not a boy with much imagination, it must be true. They got out their Virgils obediently. They didn’t study them or translate them or anything, that had not been part of the instructions, but every child in the class had an open copy of the Aeneid Book IV ready, and they looked at the door fearfully in case Mr. Dunne should come staggering in with blood coming down his shoulder blades.

  The announcement was made that afternoon. It was in two parts.

  A pilot scheme for adult education classes would begin in September under the supervision of Mr. Aidan Dunne. The present principal, Mr. John Walsh, having reached retirement age, would now stand down and his post would be filled by Mr. Anthony O’Brien.

  IN THE STAFF room there seemed to be as many congratulations for Aidan as for Tony. Two bottles of sparkling wine were opened, and people’s health was drunk from mugs.

  Imagine, evening classes. The subject had been brought up before but always to be knocked down. It was the w
rong area, too much competition from other adult education centers, trouble heating the school, the business of keeping on the caretaker after hours, the whole notion of classes being self-funding. How had it happened now?

  “Apparently Aidan persuaded them,” Tony O’Brien said, pouring more fizzy drink into the school mugs.

  It was time to go home.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Aidan said to his new principal.

  “We made a deal. You got what you wanted, you are to go straight home to your wife and family and present it as that. Because this is what you want. You don’t want all the shit of fighting with people morning, noon, and night, which is what being the principal is about. Just remember that, present it to them as it is.”

  “Can I ask you something, Tony? Why does it matter to you one way or the other how I present things to my family?”

  “Simple. I need you, I told you that. But I need you as a happy, successful man. If you present yourself in this old self-pitying I-was-passed-over role, then you’ll begin to believe it all over again.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “And they’ll be pleased for you that you have got what you really wanted all along.”

  As Aidan walked out the school gate he paused for a moment and felt its peeling paint and looked at the rusting locks. Tony was right, he wouldn’t have known where to begin on a project like this. Then he looked at the annex where he and Tony had decided the evening classes should be held. It had its own entrance, they wouldn’t have to trek through the whole school. It had cloakrooms and two big classrooms. It would be ideal.

  Tony was an odd guy, there were no two ways about it. He had even suggested to him that he come home and meet the family, but Tony had said not yet. Wait until September when the new term began, he had insisted.

  Who knew what would have happened by September.

  Those were his words. As odd as two left shoes, but quite possibly the best thing that could happen to Mountainview.

  INSIDE THE BUILDING Tony O’Brien inhaled deeply. He would smoke in his own office from now on, but never outside it.