Maeve Binchy - Evening Class

In a way it must have been, because here he was now only a few short years later, and he could not sit down with his wife and two daughters, the people he loved most in the world, and tell them his fears that he might not be made Principal.

He had put in so much time in that school, worked so many extra hours, involved himself in every aspect of it, and somewhere in his bones he felt that he would be" passed over.

Another man, a man almost precisely his own age, might well get the post. This was Tony O'Brien, a man who had never stayed on after hours to support a school team playing a home match, a man who had not involved himself in the restructuring of the curriculum, in the fundraising for the new building project. Tony O'Brien who smoked quite openly in the corridors of a school which was meant to be a smoke-free zone, who had his lunch in a pub, letting everyone know it was a pint and a half and a cheese sandwich. A bachelor, in no sense a family man, often seen with a girl half his age on his arm, and yet he was being suggested as a very possible candidate for head of the school.

Many things had confused Aidan in the last few years, but nothing as much as this. By any standards Tony O'Brien should not be in the running at all. Aidan ran his hands through his hair, which was thinning. Tony O'Brien of course had a huge shock of thick brown hair falling into his eyes and resting on his collar. Surely the world hadn't gone so mad that they would take this into consideration when choosing a principal?

Lots of hair good, thinning hair bad… Aidan grinned to himself. If he could laugh to himself at some of the worst bits of the paranoia maybe he could keep self-pity at bay. And he would have to laugh to himself. Somehow, there was no one else to laugh with these days.

There was a questionnaire in one of the Sunday papers, Are You Tense? Aidan filled in the answers truthfully. He scored over 75 on the scale, which he knew was high. He wasn't however quite prepared for the terse and dismissive verdict. If you scored over 70 you are in fact a clenched fist. Lighten up friend, before you explode.

They had always said that these tests were just jokes really, space fillers. That's what Aidan and Nell used to say when they emerged less well than they had hoped from a questionnaire. But this time, of course, he was on his own. He told himself that newspapers had to think of something to take up half a page, otherwise the edition would appear with great white blanks.

But still it upset him. Aidan knew that he was jumpy, that was one thing. But a clenched fist? No wonder they might think twice about him as headmaster material.

He had written his answers on a separate sheet of paper lest anyone in the family should find and read his confessional of worries and anxieties and sleeplessness.

Sundays were the days that Aidan now found hardest to bear. In the past when they were a real family, a happy family, they had gone on picnics in the summer and taken healthy, bracing walks when the weather was cold. Aidan boasted that his family would never be like those Dublin families who didn't know anywhere except the area they lived themselves.

One Sunday he would take them on a train south and they would climb Bray Head, and look into the neighbouring county of Wicklow, another Sunday they would go north to the seaside villages of Rush and Lusk and Skerries, small places each with their own character, all on the road that would eventually take them up to the Border. He had arranged day excursions to Belfast for them too, so that they would not grow up in ignorance of the other part of Ireland.

Those had been some of his happiest times, the combination of schoolteacher and father, explainer and entertainer. Daddy knew the answer to everything: where to get the bus out to CarrickfergusCastle, or the UlsterFolkMuseum, and a grand place for chips before getting on the train back home.

Aidan remembered a woman on the train telling Grania and B rigid that they were lucky little girls to have a daddy who taught them so much. They had nodded solemnly to agree with her and Nell had whispered to him that the woman obviously fancied Aidan but she wasn't going to get her hands on him. And Aidan had felt twelve feet tall and the most important man on earth.

Now on a Sunday he felt increasingly that he was hardly noticed in his home.

They had never been people for the traditional Sunday lunch, roast beef or lamb or chicken and great dishes of potatoes and vegetables, like so many other families were. Because of their outings and adventures, Sunday had been a casual day in their home. Aidan wished that there were some fixed point in it. He went to Mass. Nell sometimes came with him, but usually she was going on somewhere afterwards to meet one of her sisters or a friend from work. And of course nowadays the shops were open on Sundays, so there were plenty of places to go.

The girls never went to Mass. It was useless to talk to them. He had given up when they were seventeen. They didn't get up until lunchtime and then they made sandwiches, looked at whatever they had videoed during the week, lounged around in dressing gowns, washed their hair, their clothes, spoke on the phone to friends, asked other friends in for coffee.

They behaved as if they lived in a flat together with their mother as a pleasant, eccentric landlady who had to be humoured. Grania and Brigid contributed a very small amount of money each for bed and board, and handed it over with a bad grace as if they were being bled dry. To his knowledge they contributed nothing else to the household budget. Not a tin of biscuits, a tub of ice cream nor a carton of fabric softener ever came from their purses, but they were quick to grizzle if these things weren't readily available.

Aidan wondered how Tony O'Brien spent his Sundays.

He knew that Tony certainly didn't go to Mass, he had made that clear to the pupils when they questioned him: 'Sir, sir, do you go to Mass on Sundays?'

'Sometimes I do, when I feel in the mood for talking to God,' Tony O'Brien had said.

Aidan knew this. It had been reported gleefully by the boys and girls, who used it as ammunition against those who said they had to go every Sunday under pain of Mortal Sin.

He had been very clever; too clever, Aidan thought. He didn't deny the existence of God, instead he had made out that he was a friend of God's and friends only drop in to have a chat when they are in good form. It made Tony O'Brien have the inside track somehow while Aidan Dunne was left on the outside, no friend of the Almighty, just a time server. It was one of the many annoying and unfair things about it all.

On a Sunday Tony O'Brien probably got up late… he lived in what they called a'townhouse' nowadays, which was the equivalent of a flat. Just one big room and kitchen downstairs, and one big bedroom and bathroom upstairs. The door opened straight onto the street. He had been observed leaving in the morning accompanied by young women.

There was a time when that would have ended his career, let alone his chances of promotion - back in the 1960s teachers had been sacked for having relationships outside marriage. Not, of course, that this was right. In fact, they had all protested very strongly at the time. But still, for a man who had never committed to any woman, to parade a succession of them through his townhouse, and still be considered headmaster material, a role model for the students… that wasn't right either.

What would Tony O'Brien be doing now, at two thirty on a wet Sunday? Maybe round to lunch at one of the other teachers' houses. Aidan had never been able to ask him since they literally didn't have lunch, and Nell would reasonably have enquired why he should impose on them a man he had been denouncing for five years. He might still be entertaining a lady from last night. Tony O'Brien said he owed a great debt of gratitude to the people of China since there was an excellent takeaway only three doors away - lemon chicken, sesame toast and chilli prawns were always great with a bottle of Australian Chardonnay and the Sunday papers. Imagine, at his age, a man who could be a grandfather, entertaining girls and buying Chinese food on a Sunday.