Maeve Binchy - Evening Class

'We can't do it without telling Laddy.' Laddy had gone to school that day with the promise that he was going to buy a small piece of steak for Tripper, it might build him up. He would call at the butcher's on his way home. The dog would never be able to eat steak or anything, but Laddy didn't want to believe this.

'So will I ask him then?'

'Do.'

He turned away. That evening Laddy dug a grave for Tripper and they carried him out to the back field. Shay put the gun to the dog's head. It was over in a second. Laddy made a small wooden cross, and the three of them stood in silence around the little mound. Shay went back to his quarters.

'You're very quiet, Rose,' Laddy said. 'I think you loved Tripper as much as I did.'

'Oh I did, definitely,' she said.

But Rose was quiet because she had missed her period. Something that had never happened to her before.

In the week that followed Laddy was anxious. There was something very wrong with Rose. It had to be more than just missing Tripper.

There were three routes open to her in Ireland of the fifties. She could have the child and live on in the farm, a disgraced woman, with the gossip of the parish ringing in her years. She could sell the farm and move with Laddy to somewhere else, start a new life where nobody knew them. She could bring Shay Neil to the priest, and marry him.

There was something wrong with all these options. She could not bear to think of her changed status after all these years, if she were to be known as the unwed mother of a child for whom no father had ever been acknowledged. Her few pleasures like a visit to the town, a coffee in the hotel, a chat after Mass, would end. She would be a matter of speculation and someone to be pitied. Heads would shake. Laddy would be confused. But could she sell the farm and leave under such circumstances? In a way the farm belonged to all of them, her four sisters as well. Suppose they were to hear that she had taken all the proceeds and gone to live with Laddy and an illegitimate child in some rooms in Dublin? What would they feel about it?

She married Shay Neil.

Laddy was delighted about it all. And overjoyed to think he would be an uncle. 'Will the baby call me Uncle Laddy?' he wanted to know.

'Whatever you like,' Rose said.

Nothing had changed much at home except that Shay slept up in Rose's bedroom now. Rose went less often to town than she used to. Perhaps it was because she felt tired now that she was expecting the baby, or maybe she had lost interest in seeing people there. Laddy wasn't sure. And she wrote less to her sisters even though they wrote more to her. They had been very startled by the marriage. And the fact that there had been no big wedding breakfast as Rose had organised for them. They had come to visit and shaken Shay's hand awkwardly. They had found no satisfactory explanations in the conversation of their normally outgoing eldest sister.

And then the baby was born, a healthy child. Laddy was his godfather and Mrs. Nolan from the hotel his godmother. The child was baptised Augustus. They called him Gus. The smile came back to Rose's face again as she held her son. Laddy loved the little boy and never tired of trying to entertain him. Shay was silent and uncommunicative about the baby as well as everything else. The strange household got on with their lives. Laddy went to work for Mrs. Nolan in the hotel. The grandest help she ever had, Mrs. Nolan said. Nothing was too much trouble for him, they would be lost without Laddy.

And young Gus learned to walk and staggered around the farmyard after the chickens, and Rose stood at the door admiring him. Shay Neil was morose as ever. Sometimes at night Rose would look at him while pretending not to. He lay for long times with his eyes open. What was he thinking about.? Was he happy in this marriage?

There had been very little sexual activity involved. Firstly she had been unwilling because of her pregnancy. But after the birth of Gus she had said to him very directly: 'We are man and wife and putting the past behind us, we should have a normal married life.'

'That's right,' he had said, with no great enthusiasm at all.

Rose had found to her surprise that he did not revolt or frighten her. It did not bring up memories of that night of violence. In fact it was the only time they seemed to be in any way close. He was a complicated, withdrawn man. Conversation would never be easy with him, on any subject.

They never had alcohol at home, apart from the half bottle of whiskey on the top shelf in the kitchen to be used in an emergency or for soaking cotton wool if someone had a toothache. The drunkenness of that one night was never mentioned between them. The events had such a strange nightmarish quality that Rose had put them as far from her mind as possible. She didn't even pause to rationalise that they had resulted in the birth of her beloved Gus, the child that had brought her more happiness than she would ever have believed possible.

So she was entirely unprepared to face a drunken, violent Shay when he came home from a Fair almost incapable of speech. Slurred and maddened by her criticism of him he took his belt from his trousers and beat her. The beating seemed to excite him and he forced himself on her in exactly the same way as the night she had managed to put out of her mind. Every memory came rushing back, the disgust and the terror. And even though she was familiar with his body now and had welcomed it to her own this was something horrifying. She lay there bruised and with a cut lip.

'And you can't come the high and mighty lady tomorrow telling me to pack my bags and go. Not this time. Not now that I'm married in,' he said. And turned over to fall asleep.

'Whatever happened to you, Rose?' Laddy was concerned.

'I fell out of bed, half asleep and I hit my head against the bedside table,' she said

'Will I ask the doctor to come out to you when I'm in town?' Laddy had never seen a bruise like it.

'No Laddy, it's fine,' she said, and joined the ranks of women who accept violence because it's easier than standing up to it.

Rose had hoped for another child, a sister for little Gus, but it didn't happen. How strange that a pregnancy could result from one night of rape and not from months of what was called normal married life.

Mrs. Nolan of the hotel said to Doctor Kenny that it was strange how often Rose seemed to fall and hurt herself.

'I know, I've seen her.'

'She says she's got clumsy, but I don't know.'

'I don't know either, Mrs. Nolan, but what can I do?' He had lived long enough to notice that a lot of women claimed they had got clumsy and had fallen over.

And the strange coincidence was that it often happened after the Fair Day or the market had been in town. If Doctor Kenny had his way alcohol would be barred from fairs. But then, who listened to an old country doctor who picked up the pieces and was rarely if ever told the truth about what happened?

Laddy fancied girls but he was no good with them. He told Rose that he'd love to have slicked-down hair and wear pointed shoes, then the girls would love him. She bought him pointed shoes and tried to grease his hair. But it didn't work.

'Do you think I'll ever get married, Rose?' he asked her one evening. Shay was in another town buying stock. Gus was asleep, excited because tomorrow he would start school. It was just Rose and Laddy by the fire, as so often in the past.

'I don't know, Laddy, I really never expected to, but you remember that fortune teller we went to years ago, she said I'd be married within the year and I was. I certainly didn't expect that, and that I'd have a child and love him, and I didn't think that would happen. She said to you that you'd be in a job meeting people and you are in the hotel. And that you'd travel across the water and be good at sport, so all that is ahead of you.' She smiled at him brightly reminding him of all the good things, glossing over what was left out, deliberately not mentioning that Gypsy Ella had forecast ill health for Rose, but not yet.