Maeve Binchy - Evening Class

'Could be.' Gus was very fond of the big kind man who looked after him so well.

None of them ever talked about the night of the accident. Sometimes Rose wondered how much Gus remembered. He had been six, old enough to have taken it all in. But he didn't appear to have nightmares as a child and later on he could listen to talk about his father without looking awkward. He did not, however, ask many questions about what his father had been like, which was significant. Most boys would surely have wanted to know. Possibly Gus knew enough.

The hotel where Laddy worked was owned by an elderly couple. They told Laddy that they would soon retire, and he became very agitated. This had been his home now for years. It coincided with Gus meeting the girl of his dreams, a bright sparky girl called

Maggie, a trained chef with Northern Ireland wit and confidence. She was ideal for him in Rose's mind; she would give him all the support he needed.

'I always thought I'd be jealous when Gus found himself a proper girl but it's not so, I'm delighted for him.'

'And I always thought I'd have some wee bat out of hell as a mother-in-law and I got you,' Maggie said.

All they needed now was a hotel job together. Even to buy a small run-down place and build it up.

'Couldn't you buy my hotel?' Laddy suggested. It would be exactly what they wanted, but of course they couldn't afford it.

'If you give me a room in it to live in, I'll give you the money,' Rose said.

What better could she do with what she had saved and the proceeds of her Dublin flat when she sold it? It would be a home for Laddy and Gus, a start in business for the young couple. A place to rest her limbs when this ill health that had been foretold finally came. She knew it was sinful and even stupid to believe in fortune tellers, but that whole day, the day of Gypsy Ella, was still very clear in her mind.

It had been, after all, the day that Shay had raped her.

It was not easy to get business at the start. They spent a lot of time studying the accounts. They were paying out more than was coming in.

Laddy understood that business was not good. 'I can carry more coal upstairs,' he said, anxious to help.

'Not much use, Laddy, when we've no one to light fires for.' Maggie was very kind to her husband's Uncle Laddy. She always made him feel important.

'Could we go out in the street, Rose, and I would wear a sandwich board with the name of the hotel and you could give people leaflets?' He was so eager to help.

'No, Laddy. This is Gus and Maggie's hotel. They'll come up with ideas, they'll get it going. Soon it will be very busy, as many guests as they can handle.'

And eventually it was.

The young couple worked at it night and day. They built up a clientele of faithful visitors. They attracted people from the North, the word of mouth spread. And whenever they had a foreign visitor from the continent Maggie would give them a card saying: 'We have friends who speak French, German, Italian'.

It was true. They knew a German bookbinder, a French teacher in a boys' school and an Italian who ran a chip shop. When they needed translation these people were immediately found on the telephone to interpret for them.

Gus and Maggie had two children, angelic little girls, and Rose thought herself one of the happiest women in Ireland. She would take her little granddaughters to feed the ducks in St Stephen's Green on a sunny morning.

One of the hotel guests asked Laddy was there a snooker hall nearby, and Laddy, eager to please, found one.

'Have a game with me,' said the man, a lonely businessman from Birmingham.

'I'm afraid I don't play, sir.' Laddy was apologetic.

'I'll show you,' the man said.

And then it happened. The fortune teller's forecast came true. Laddy had a natural eye for the game. The man from Birmingham didn't believe he had never played before. He learned the order, yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, black. He potted them all easily and stylishly. People gathered to watch.

Laddy was the sportsman that had been foretold for him.

He never wagered money on a game. Other people bet on him, but he worked too hard for his wages and they all needed them, Rose, Gus, Maggie and the little girls. But he won competitions and he had his picture in the paper. And he was invited to join a club. He was a minor snooker celebrity.

Rose watched all this with delight. Her brother a person of importance at last. She didn't even need to ask her son to look after Laddy when she was gone. She knew it wasn't necessary. Laddy would live with Gus and Maggie until the end. She made a scrapbook of his snooker triumphs, and together they would read it.

'Would Shay have been proud of all this, do you think?' Laddy asked one evening. He was a middle aged man now and he had hardly ever spoken of the dead Shay Neil. The man he had killed that night with a violent blow.

Rose was startled. She spoke slowly. 'I think he might have been pleased. But you know, with him it was very hard to know what he thought. He said very little, who knows what he was thinking in his head.'

'Why did you marry him, Rose?'

'To make a home for us all,' she said simply.

As an explanation it seemed to satisfy Laddy. He had never given any more thought to marriage himself, or women, as far as Rose knew. He must have had sexual desires and needs like any man but they were never acknowledged in any way. And nowadays the snooker seemed a perfectly adequate substitute. So by the time Rose realised that the women's trouble she complained of meant hysterectomy and then that hysterectomy hadn't solved the problem, she was a woman with no worries about the future.

The doctor was not accustomed to people taking a diagnosis and sentence like this so calmly.

'We'll make sure that there's as little pain as possible,' he said.

'Oh, I know you will. Now, what I'd really like is to go to a hospice, if that's possible.'

'You have a very loving family who would want to nurse you,' the doctor said.

'True, but they have a hotel to run. I'd much prefer not to be there, just because they would give me too much time. Please, Doctor, I'll be no trouble up in the hospice, I'll help all I can.'

'I don't doubt that,' he said blowing his nose hard.

Rose had her moments of rage and anger like anyone else. But they were not shared with her family or her fellow patients in the hospice. The hours that she spend brooding on the unfair hand that had been dealt to her were short compared to the time spent planning for the months that were left.

When the family came to visit they got hardly any information about pain and nausea, but a lot of detail about the place she was in and the work it was doing. The hospice was a happy place, open to ideas and receptive to anything new. This is what she wanted them to channel their energy into, not to bringing her sweets or bed jackets. Something practical, something that would help. That's what Rose wanted from her family.

So they set about organising it.

Laddy got them a second-hand snooker table and gave lessons, and Gus came with Maggie to do cookery demonstrations. And the months passed easily and happily. Even though Rose was very thin now and her step was slower she said she was in no pain, and she wanted no sympathy, only company and enthusiasm. At least her mind was fine, she said.

It was too fine for Gus and Maggie, they couldn't hide from her the catastrophe that happened to them. They had insured and invested with a company that had gone bankrupt. They would lose the hotel, their hopes and dreams and future. Perhaps there was a hope that they could keep it from Rose. Maybe she could die without knowing what had happened to them. After all, she was so frail now that they could not take her back home to the hotel, as they had been able to do in the early months, for a Sunday lunch with her grandchildren. The only thing they could save from the disaster was the fact that Rose might not know how her investment in them had been lost.