Maeve Binchy - Evening Class

Her face was white. She stood up and walked to the door. 'Very high and mighty. Go on, leave rather than talk it out. Go down to your friend Vera and talk about the pure badness of men. Maybe it was Vera you should have moved in with in the first place. Could be that it was a woman you needed to get you going?'

She hadn't intended to do it, but she hit him right across the face. It was because he was shouting about Vera in her own house, when Vera and Kevin had rescued them, asked no questions. Harry didn't seem like a person any more, he was like an animal that had turned wild.

Her rings drew blood from his cheek, a long smear of red. And to her surprise she felt no shock at the blood, no shame at what she had done.

She closed the door and went downstairs. At the kitchen table they had obviously heard the shouting from above, possibly even the words he had been saying. Connie, who had been so calm and in control during the previous hours, looked around the little group. There was Deirdre, Vera's handsome dark-eyed daughter, who worked in a fashion boutique, and Charlie, who had joined the family business of painting and decorating.

And between Kevin and Vera in front of a bottle of whiskey was Jacko. Jacko with a collar wide open and red wild eyes. Jacko who had been crying and drinking and hadn't finished doing either. She realised in seconds that he had lost every penny in her husband's investment company. Her first boyfriend, who had loved her simply and without complication, who had stood outside the church the day she was marrying Harry in the hope that she wouldn't go through with it, he sat now at his friends' kitchen table, bankrupt. How had all this happened, Connie wondered, as she stood there with her hand at her throat for what seemed an age?

She couldn't stay in this room. She couldn't go back upstairs to where Harry waited like a raging lion with further abuse and self-disgust. She couldn't go outside into the real world, she would never be able to do that again and look people in the eye. Did people attract bad luck and encourage others to behave badly? She thought that the statistics against someone having both a father and a husband who lost everything must be enormous unless you decided that it was something in your own personality that drew you to exactly the same kind of weakness in the second as you had known in the first.

She remembered suddenly the open-faced friendly psychiatrist asking all those questions about her father. Could there have been anything in it? She thought she had been there a long time but they didn't seem to have moved, so perhaps it had only been a couple of seconds.

Then Jacko spoke. His voice was slurred. 'I hope you're satisfied now,' he said.

The others were silent.

In a voice that was clear and steady as always, Connie spoke. 'No, Jacko, this is an odd thing to say, but I have never been satisfied, not in my whole life.' Her eyes seemed far away. 'I may have had twenty years of money, which should have made me happy. Truthfully, it didn't. I've been lonely and acting a part for most of my adult life. Anyway, that's no help to you now.'

'No, it's not.' His face was mutinous. He was still handsome and eager. His marriage had failed, she knew from Vera, and his wife had taken the boy he cared about.

His business had been everything to him. And now that was gone. 'You'll get it all back,' she said.

'Oh yes?' His laugh sounded more like a bark.

'Yes, there is money there.'

'I bet there is, in Jersey or the Cayman Islands or maybe in the wife's name,' Jacko sneered.

'Quite a lot of it is in the wife's name, as it happens,' she said.

Vera and Kevin looked at her open-mouthed. Jacko couldn't take it in.

'So I got lucky by being an old boyfriend of the wife, is that what you're telling me?' He didn't know whether to believe it was a lifeline or throw it back in her face.

'I suppose I'm telling you that a lot of people got lucky because of the wife. If he's sane enough in the morning, I'll get him to the bank before his press conference.'

'If it's yours why don't you keep it?' Jacko asked.

'Because I'm not, despite what you might think, a total shit. Vera, can I sleep somewhere else, like on the couch in the television room?'

Vera came in with her and handed her a rug. 'You're the strongest woman I ever met,' Vera said.

'You're the best friend anyone ever had,' said Connie.

Would it have been good to have loved Vera? To have lived together for years with flower gardens, and maybe a small crafts business to show for their commitment. She smiled wanly at the thought.

'What has you laughing in the middle of all this?' Vera asked.

'Remind me to tell you one day, you'll never believe it,' said Connie as she kicked off her shoes and lay down on the couch.

Amazingly she slept, and only woke to the sound of a cup and saucer rattling. It was Harry, pale-faced with a long dark red scar standing out from his cheek. She had forgotten that particular part of last night.

'I brought you coffee,' he said.

'Thank you.' She made no move to take it.

'I'm so desperately sorry.'

'Yes.'

'I am so sorry. Jesus, Connie, I just went mad last night. All I ever wanted was to be somebody and I nearly was and then I blew it.' He had dressed carefully and shaved around the wound on his face. He was up and ready for the longest day he would ever have to live through. She looked at him as if she had never seen him before, as the people who saw him on television would see him, all the strangers who had lost their savings, and the people who had come across him in business deals or at social gatherings. A handsome hungry man, all he wanted was to be somebody and he didn't care how he got there.

Then she saw he was crying.

'I need you desperately, Connie. You've been acting all your life with me, could you just act for a little bit longer and pretend you have forgiven me? Please, Connie, I need you. You're the only one who can help me.' He laid his face with the livid scar on her knees, and he sobbed like a child.

She couldn't really remember the day. It was like trying to put together the pieces of a horror movie that you have covered your eyes for, or a nightmare that won't go away. There was some of it set in the lawyer's office, where the terms of the trust she had set up for her children's education were explained to him. The money had been well invested. There was plenty. The rest had been equally well placed for her. Constance Kane was a very wealthy woman. She could see the scorn that the solicitor had for her husband. He hardly bothered to disguise it. Her father's old friend T. P. Murphy was there, silent and more silver-haired than ever. His face was set in a grim line. There was an accountant and an investment manager. They spoke in front of the great Harry Kane as they would before a common swindler. In their eyes this is what he was. This time yesterday morning, Connie reflected, those people would have treated her husband with respect. How quickly things changed in business.

Then they went to the bank. Never were bankers more surprised to see funds appear from nowhere. Connie and Harry sat silently while their advisers told the bank that not one penny of this need be recovered, and that it was being given only if the bank promised a package to rescue the investors.

By midday they had a deal. Harry's partners were summoned and ordered to remain silent during the press conference at Hayes

Hotel. It was agreed that neither of the partners' wives would attend. They watched it together on a television set in one of the hotel bedrooms. Connie's name was not mentioned. It was just stated that emergency funds had been put aside against just such a contingency.

By the one o'clock news the morning papers' headlines were obsolete. One of the journalists asked Harry Kane about the wound on his face. Was it a creditor?