Evening Class Read Online Free PDF Page B

When his wife worked in Quentin’s restaurant and his daughters went out on their dates, he sat and planned it for himself. Gradually he assembled little bits of his dream: second-hand picture frames, a low table for near the window, a big cheap sofa that fitted the space exactly. And one day he would get loose covers, something in gold or yellow, a sunny colour, and he would get a square of carpet that would be a splash of some other colour, orange, purple, something with life and vigour.
    They weren’t very interested at home so he didn’t tell them his plans. In a way he felt that his wife and daughters thought it was yet another harmless little interest for him, like the projects in Transition Year and his long struggle to get a few metres of wildlife garden up and running in Mountainview.
    ‘Any word of the big job above in the school?’ Nell asked unexpectedly one evening when the four of them were seated around the kitchen table.
    He felt his heart lurch at the lie. ‘Not a whisper. But they’ll be voting next week, that’s for sure.’ He seemed calm and unruffled.
    ‘You’re bound to get it. Old Walsh loves the ground you walk on,’ Nell said.
    ‘He doesn’t have a vote, as it happens, so that’s no use to me.’ Aidan gave a nervous little laugh.
    ‘Surely you’ll get it, Daddy?’ Brigid said.
    ‘You never know, people want different things in Principals. I’m sort of slow and steady, but that mightn’t be what’s needed these days.’ He spread out his hands in a gesture to show that it was all beyond him but wouldn’t matter very much either way.
    ‘But who would they have if they didn’t have you?’ Grania wanted to know.
    ‘Wouldn’t I be doing the horoscope column if I knew that? An outsider maybe, someone inside that we hadn’t reckoned on…’ He sounded good-natured and full of fair play. The job would go to the best man or woman. It was as simple as that.
    ‘But you don’t think they’ll pass you over?’ Nell said.
    There was something that he hated in her tone. It was a kind of disbelief that he could possibly let this one slip. It was the phrase ‘passed over’, so dismissive, so hurtful. But she didn’t know, she couldn’t guess, that it had already happened.
    Aidan willed his smile to look confident. ‘Passed over? Me? Never!’ he cried.
    ‘That’s more like it, Daddy,’ said Grania, before going upstairs to spend further time in the bathroom where she possibly never saw any more the beautiful images of Venice on the wall, only her face in the mirror and her anxieties that it should look well for whatever outing was planned tonight.

    It was their sixth date. Grania knew now that he definitely wasn’t married. She had asked him enough questions to have tripped him up. Every night so far he had wanted her to come back to his place for coffee. Every night so far she had said no. But tonight could be different. She really liked him. He knew so much about things, and he was far more interesting than people of her own age. He wasn’t one of those middle-aged ravers who pretended they were twenty years younger.
    There was only one problem. Tony worked at Dad’s school. She had asked him the very first time she met him whether he knew an Aidan Dunne, but hadn’t said he was her father. It seemed an ageist sort of thing to say, putting herself in a different generation. And there were loads of Dunnes around the place, it wasn’t as if Tony would make the connection. There wasn’t any point in mentioning it to Dad, not yet anyway, not until it developed into anything if it did. And if it were the real thing then everything else like him working in the same place as Dad would fall into place, and Grania made a silly face at herself in the mirror and thought that maybe Tony would have to be even nicer than ever to her if she was going to be the Principal’s daughter.
    Tony sat in the bar and dragged deep on his cigarette. This was one thing he was going to have to