Maeve Binchy - Evening Class

'Do all the neighbours know?'

'Some of them maybe, they've forgotten I imagine.'

'And who was my father? Who was my real father?'

'Dad is your real father in that he brought you up and looked after both of us.'

'You know what I mean.'

'He was a boy who was at a posh school and his parents didn't want him to marry me.'

'Why do you say was? Is he dead?'

'No he's not dead, but he's not part of our lives.'

'He's not part of your life, he might be part of mine.'

'I don't think that's a good idea.'

'It doesn't matter what you think. Wherever he is, he's still my father. I have a right to know him, to meet him, to tell him I'm Kathy and that I exist because of him.'

'Please have some tea. Or let me have some anyway.'

'I'm not stopping you.' Her eyes were cold.

Fran knew she needed more tact and diplomacy than had ever been called on in work. Even the time when one of the director's children, there on a holiday job, was found pilfering. This was vastly more important.

'I'll tell you every single thing you want to know. Everything,' she said, in as calm a voice as she could manage. 'And if Dad comes in in the middle of it I suggest we move up to your room.'

Kathy's room was much bigger than Fran's. It had the desk, the bookshelf, the hand basin that had been put in lovingly by the plumber in the house years ago.

'You did it all from guilt, didn't you, the nice room, the buying my uniform and the extra pocket money and even the Italian classes. You paid for it all because you were so guilty about me.'

'I have never had a day's guilt about you in my life,' Fran said calmly. She sounded so sure that she stopped Kathy in the slightly hysterical tone she was taking. 'No, I have felt sad for you sometimes, because you work so hard and I hoped I would be able to give you everything to start you off well. I worked hard so that I could always provide a good living for you. I've saved a little every single week in a building society, not much but enough to give you independence. I have loved you every day of my life, and honestly it got kind of blurred whether you were my sister or my daughter. You're just Kathy to me and I want the very, very best for you. I work long and hard to get it and I think about it all the time. So I assure you whatever I feel I don't feel guilty.'

Tears came into Kathy's eyes. Fran reached her hand over tentatively and patted the hand that clutched the mug of tea.

Kathy said, 'I know, I shouldn't have said that. I got a shock, you see.'

'No, no it's all right. Ask me anything.'

'What's his name?'

'Paul. Paul Malone.'

'Kathy Malone?' she said wonderingly.

'No, Kathy Clarke.'

'And how old was he then?'

'Sixteen. I was fifteen and a half.'

'When I think of all the bossy advice you gave me about sex and how I listened.'

'Look back on what I said, you'll find that I didn't preach what I didn't practise.'

'So you loved him, this Paul Malone?' Kathy's voice was very scornful.

'Yes, very much. Very much indeed. I was young but I thought I knew what love was and so did he, so I won't dismiss it and say it was nonsense. It wasn't.'

'And where did you meet him?'

'At a pop concert. We got on so well then I used to sneak out to

I

meet him from school sometimes and we'd go to the pictures, and he was meant to be having extra lessons so he could skip that. And it was a wonderful happy time.'

'And then?'

'And then I realised I was pregnant, and Paul told his mother and father and I told Mam and Dad and all hell broke out everywhere.'

'Did anyone talk about getting married?'

'No, nobody talked about it. I thought about it a lot up in the room that's your room now. I used to dream that one day Paul would come to the door with a bunch of flowers and say that as soon as I was sixteen we would marry.'

'But it didn't happen, obviously?'

'No, it didn't.'

'And why did he not want to stay around and support you even if you didn't marry?'

'That was part of the deal.'

'Deal?'

'Yes. His parents said that since this was an unlikely partnership and that there was no future in it, it might be kindest for everyone to cut all ties. That's what they said. Cut all ties or maybe sever all ties.'

'Were they awful?'

'I don't know, I'd never met them until then, any more than Paul had met Mam and Dad'

'So the deal was that he was to get away with it, father a child and never see her again.'

'They gave four thousand pounds, Kathy, it was a lot of money then.'

'They bought you off!'

'No, we didn't think it was like that. I put two thousand in a building society for you. It's grown a lot as well as what I added myself, and we gave the other two thousand pounds to Mam and Dad because they would be bringing you up.'

'And did Paul Malone think that was fair? To give four thousand pounds to get rid of me?'

'He didn't know you. He listened to his parents, they told him sixteen was too young to be a father, he had a career ahead of him, it was a mistake, he must honour his commitment to me. That's the way they saw it.'

'And did he have a career?'

'Yes, he's an accountant.'

'My father the accountant,' Kathy said.

'He married and he has children now, his own family.'

'You mean he has other children?' Kathy's chin was in the air.

'Yes, that's right. Two, I believe.'

'How do you know?'

'There was an article about him in a magazine not long ago, you know, lifestyles of the rich and famous, that is.'

'But he's not famous.'

'His wife is, he married Marianne Hayes.' Fran waited to see the effect this would have.

'My father is married to one of the richest women in Ireland?'

'Yes.'

'And he gave a measly four thousand pounds to get rid of me.'

'That's not the point. He wasn't married to her then.'

Tt is the point. He's rich now, he should give something.'

'You have enough, Kathy, we have everything we want.'

'No, of course I haven't everything I want, and neither do you,' Kathy said, and suddenly the tears that were waiting came and she cried and cried, while Fran, whom she had thought for sixteen years was her sister, stroked her head and her wet cheeks and her neck with all the love a mother could give.

The next morning at breakfast Joe Clarke had a hangover.

'Will you give me a can of cold Coca Cola from the fridge, Kathy, like a good girl? I've a bugger of a job to do today out in Killiney, and the van will be here for me any minute.'

'You're nearer to the fridge than I am,' Kathy said.

'Are you giving me cheek?' he asked.

'No, I'm just stating a fact.'

'Well, no child of mine is going to be stating facts in that tone of voice, let me tell you,' he said, face flushed with anger.

'I'm not a child of yours,' Kathy said coldly.

They didn't even look up startled, her grandparents. These old people she had thought of as her mother and father. The woman went on reading the magazine and smoking, the man grumbled. 'I'm as good as any other goddamn father you ever had or will have. Go on, child, give me the Coke now to save me getting up, will you.'

And Kathy realised that they weren't in the business of secrecy or pretending. Like Fran, they had assumed she knew the state of affairs. She looked across at Fran standing with a rigid back looking out the window.

'All right, Dad,' she said, and got him the can and a glass to pour it into,

'There's a good girl,' he said, smiling at her as he always did. For , him nothing had changed.

'What would you do if you discovered you weren't your parents' child?' Kathy asked Harriet at school.

'I'd be delighted, I tell you that.'

'Why?'

'Because then I won't grow up to have an awful chin like my mother and my grandmother, and I wouldn't have to listen to Daddy droning on and on about getting enough points in the Leaving.' Harriet's father, a teacher, had great hopes that she would be a doctor. Harriet wanted to own a night club.