Evening Class by Maeve Binchy

Author:Maeve Binchy [Binchy, Maeve]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Family Life, Foreign Language Study, Italian
ISBN: 9781409105718
Google: jxpfpd_3jwQC
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2009-12-22T23:00:00+00:00

CONNIE

When Constance O'Connor was fifteen her mother stopped serving desserts at home. There were no cakes at tea, a low fat spread was on the table instead of butter, and sweets and chocolate forbidden from the house.

'You're getting a bit hippy, darling,' her mother said when Constance protested.

'All the tennis lessons, all the smart places we go, will be no use at all if you have a big bum.'

'No use for what?'

'To attract the right kind of husband,' her mother had laughed. And then, before Connie could persist, she said: 'Believe me, I know what I'm saying. I'm not saying it's fair, but it's the way things are, so if we know the rules why not play by them?'

'They might have been the rules in your day, Mother, back in the forties, but everything's changed since then.'

'Believe me,' her mother said. It was a great phrase of hers, she ordered people to believe her on this and on that. 'Nothing has changed, 19405, 19605, they still want a slim, trim wife. It looks classy. The kind of men we want, want women who look the part. Just be glad you know that and lots of your friends at school don't.'

Connie had asked her father. 'Did you marry Mother because she was slim?'

'No, I married her because she was lovely and delightful and warm and because she looked after herself. I knew someone who looked after herself would look after me, and you when you came along, and the home. It's as simple as that.'

Connie was at an expensive girls' school.

Her mother always insisted she invite her friends around to supper or for the weekend. 'That way they'll invite you and you can meet their brothers and their friends,' Mother said.

'Oh, Mother, it's idiotic. It's not like some kind of Society where we are all presented at court. I'll meet whoever I meet, that's the way it is.'

'That's not the way it is,' her mother said.

And when Connie was seventeen or eighteen she found herself going out with exactly the people her mother would have chosen for her; doctors' sons, lawyers' sons, young people whose fathers were very successful in business. Some of them were great fun, some of them were very stupid, but Connie knew it would all be all right when she went to university. Then she could really meet the kind of people she knew were out there. She could make her own friends, not just pick from the tiny circle that her mother had thought suitable.

She had registered to go to University College Dublin just before her nineteenth birthday. She had gone in and walked around the campus several times and attended a few public lectures there so that she wouldn't feel nervous when it all started in October.

But in September the unbelievable happened. Her father died. A dentist who spent a great deal of his time on the golf course, and whose successful practice had a lot to do with being a partner in his uncle's firm, should have lived for ever.

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