Evening Class

by Maeve Binchy

  He watched Aidan Dunne hold the gate and even stroke it lovingly. He was a good teacher and a good man. He was worth the sacrifice about the evening classes. All the bloody work that lay ahead, the fights with this committee and that board, and the lying promises that the classes would be self-financing when everyone knew there wasn’t a chance that they would be.

  He sighed deeply and hoped that Aidan would handle it right at home. Otherwise, his own future with Grania Dunne, the first girl to whom he could even consider a real commitment, would be a very rocky future indeed.

  “I HAVE VERY good news,” Aidan said at supper.

  He told them about the evening classes, the pilot scheme, the annex, the funds at his disposal, and how he would have Italian language and culture.

  His enthusiasm was catching. They asked him questions. Would he have walls to put up pictures, posters, maps? Would these things remain up all week? What kinds of experts should he invite to lecture? Would there be Italian cookery? And arias from operas as well?

  “Won’t you find this a lot of extra work as well as being principal?” Nell asked.

  “Oh no, I’m doing it instead of being principal,” he explained eagerly, and he looked at their faces. Nobody missed a beat, it seemed to them a perfectly reasonable alternative. And oddly it began more and more to seem that way to him too. Maybe that crazy old Tony O’Brien was more intelligent than people gave him credit for. They talked on like a real family. What numbers would they need? Should it be more conversational Italian suitable for holidays? Or something more ambitious? The dishes were pushed aside on the table as Aidan made notes.

  Later, much later it seemed, Brigid asked: “Who will become principal now if you’re not going to do it?”

  “Oh a man called Tony O’Brien, the geography teacher, a good fellow. He’ll do all right for Mountainview.”

  “I knew it wouldn’t be a woman,” Nell said, sniffing.

  “Now there were two women I believe in the running, but they gave it to the right person,” Aidan said. He poured them another glass of wine from the bottle he had bought to celebrate his good news. Soon he would move into his room; he was going to measure it tonight for the shelves. One of the teachers at school did carpentry in his spare time, he would build the bookshelves and little racks for Italian plates.

  They didn’t notice Grania getting up quietly and leaving the room.

  HE SAT IN the sitting room and waited. She would have to come, just to tell him how much she hated him. That if nothing else. The doorbell rang and she stood there, eyes red from weeping.

  “I bought a coffee machine,” he said. “And some fine ground Colombian blend. Was that right?”

  She walked into the room. Young but not confident, not anymore. “You are such a bastard, such a terrible deceitful bastard.”

  “No, I’m not.” His voice was very quiet. “I am an honorable man. You must believe me.”

  “Why should I believe the daylight from you? You were laughing all the time at me, laughing at my father, even at the notion of a coffee percolator. Well, laugh as much as you like. I came to tell you that you are the lowest of the low, and I hope you are the worst I meet. I hope I have a very long life and that I meet hundreds and hundreds of people and that this is the very worst that will ever happen to me, to trust someone who doesn’t give a damn about people’s feelings. If there is a God then please, please God let this be the very lowest I ever meet.” Her hurt was so great, he didn’t even dare to stretch out a hand to her.

  “This morning I didn’t know you were Aidan Dunne’s daughter. This morning I didn’t know that Aidan thought he was getting the headship,” he began.

  “You could have told me, you could have told me,” she cried.

  Suddenly he was very tired. It had been a long day. He spoke quietly. “No I could not have told you. I could not have said ‘Your father’s got it wrong, actually it’s yours truly who is getting the job.’ If there was loyalty involved, mine was to him, my duty was to make sure he didn’t make a fool of himself, didn’t set himself up for disappointment, and that he got what was rightfully his…a new position of power and authority.”

  “Oh I see.” Her voice was scornful. “Give him the evening classes, a little pat on the head.”

  Tony O’Brien’s voice was cold. “Well, of course, if that’s the way you see it I can’t hope to change your mind. If you don’t see it for what it is, a breakthrough, a challenge, possibly the beginning of something that will change people’s lives, most of all your father’s life, then I’m sorry. Sorry and surprised. I thought you would have been more understanding.”

  “I’m not in your classroom, Mr. O’Brien, sir. I’m not fooled by this shaking-your-head-more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger bit. You made a fool of my father and me.”

  “How did I do that?”

  “He doesn’t know that you slept with his daughter, heard of his hopes and ran in and took his job. That’s how.”

  “And have you told him all these things to make him feel better?”

  “You know I haven’t. But the sleeping-with-his-daughter bit isn’t important. If ever there was a one-night stand that was it.”

  “I hope you’ll change your mind, Grania. I am very very fond of you, and attracted to you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “No, not ‘Yeah.’ It’s true what I say. Odd as it may seem to you it’s not your age and your looks that appeal to me. I have had many young attractive girlfriends and should I want company I feel sure I could find more. But you are different. If you walk out on me I’ll have lost something very important. You can believe it or not as you will, but very truthfully that’s what I feel.”

  This time she was silent. They looked at each other for a while. Then he spoke. “Your father asked me to come and meet the family but I said we should wait until September. I said to him that September was a long way away and who knows what could have happened by then.” She shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking of myself, actually, I was thinking of you. Either you’ll still be full of scorn and anger about me, and you can be out the day I call. Or maybe we will love each other fully and truly and know that all that happened here today was just some spectacularly bad timing.”

  She said nothing.

  “So September it is,” he said.

  “Right.” She turned to go.

  “I’ll leave it to you to contact me, Grania. I’ll be here, I’d love to see you again. We don’t have to be lovers if you don’t want to be. If you were a one-night stand I’d be happy to see you go. If I didn’t feel the way I do I’d think that maybe it was all too complicated and it would be for the best that we end it now. But I’ll be here, hoping you come back.”

  Her face was still hard and upset. “Ringing first, of course, to make sure you haven’t ‘company,’ as you put it,” she said.

  “I won’t have company until you come back,” he said.

  She held out her hand. “I don’t think I’ll be back,” she said.

  “No, well, let’s agree never say never.” His grin was good-natured. He stood at the doorway as she walked down the road, her hands in the pockets of her jacket, her head down. She was lonely and lost. He wanted to run and swoop her back to him, but it was too soon.

  And yet he had done what he had to do. There could have been no future for them at all if he had sat down behind Aidan’s back and told the man’s daughter what he didn’t know himself. He wondered what a betting man would give as odds about her ever coming back to him. Fifty-fifty he decided.

  Which were much more hopeful odds than anyone would get on whether the evening classes would succeed. That was a bet that no sane person would take. They were doomed before they even began.

  SIGNORA

  For years, yes years, when Nora O’Donoghue lived in Sicily, she had received no letter at all from home.

  She used to look hopefully at il postino as he came up the little street under the hot blue sky. But there was never a letter from Ireland, even though
she wrote regularly on the first of every month to tell them how she was getting on. She had bought carbon paper; it was another thing hard to describe and translate in the shop where they sold writing paper and pencils and envelopes. But Nora needed to know what she had told them already, so that she would not contradict herself when she wrote. Since the whole life she described was a lie, she might as well make it the same lie. They would never reply, but they would read the letters. They would pass them from one to the other with heavy sighs, raised eyebrows, and deep shakes of the head. Poor stupid, headstrong Nora who couldn’t see what a fool she had made of herself, wouldn’t cut her losses and come back home.

  “There was no reasoning with her,” her mother would say.

  “The girl was beyond help and showed no remorse” would be her father’s view. He was a very religious man, and in his eyes the sin of having loved Mario outside marriage was far greater than having followed him out to the remote village of Annunziata even when he had said he wouldn’t marry her.

  If she had known that they wouldn’t get in touch at all, she would have pretended that she and Mario were married. At least her old father would have slept easier in his bed and not feared so much the thought of meeting God and explaining the mortal sin of his daughter’s adultery.

  But then she would not have been able to do that because Mario had insisted on being upfront with them.

  “I would love to marry your daughter,” he had said, with his big dark eyes looking from her father to her mother backward and forward. “But sadly, sadly it is not possible. My family want me very much to marry Gabriella and her family also want the marriage. We are Sicilians; we can’t disobey what our families want. I’m sure it is very much the same in Ireland.” He had pleaded for an understanding, a tolerance and almost a pat on the head.

  He had lived with their daughter for two years in London. They had come over to confront him. He had been, in his own mind, admirably truthful and fair. What more could they want of him?

  Well, they wanted him gone from her life, for one thing.

  They wanted Nora to come back to Ireland and hope and pray that no one would ever know of this unfortunate episode in her life, or her marriage chances, which were already slim, would be further lessened.

  She tried to make allowances for them. It was 1969, but then they did live in a one-horse town; they even thought coming up to Dublin was an ordeal. What had they made of their visit to London to see their daughter living in sin, and then accept the news that she would follow this man to Sicily?

  The answer was they had gone into complete shock and did not reply to her letters.

  She could forgive them. Yes, part of her really did forgive them, but she could never forgive her two sisters and two brothers. They were young; they must have understood love, though to look at the people they had married you might wonder. But they had all grown up together, struggled to get out of the lonely, remote little town where they lived. They had shared the anxiety of their mother’s hysterectomy, their father’s fall on the ice that had left him frail. They had always consulted each other about the future, about what would happen if either Mam or Dad were left alone. Neither could manage. They had all agreed that the little farm would be sold and the money used to keep whoever it was that was left alive in a flat in Dublin somewhere adjacent to them all.

  Nora realized that her having decamped to Sicily didn’t suit that long-term plan at all. It reduced the help force by more than twenty percent. Since Nora wasn’t married the others would have assumed that she might take sole charge of a parent. She had reduced the help force by one hundred percent. Possibly that was why she never heard from them. She assumed that they would write and tell her if either Mam or Dad was very ill, or even had died.

  But then sometimes she didn’t know if they would do that. She seemed so remote to them, as if she herself had died already. So she relied on a friend, a good, kind friend called Brenda, who had worked with her in the hotel business. Brenda called from time to time to visit the O’Donoghues. It was not difficult for Brenda to shake her head with them over the foolishness of their daughter Nora. Brenda had spent days and nights trying to persuade, cajole, warn, and threaten Nora about how unwise was her plan to follow Mario to his village of Annunziata and face the collective rage of two families.

  Brenda would be welcome in that house because nobody knew she kept in touch and told the emigrant what was happening back home. So it was through Brenda that Nora learned of new nieces and nephews, of the outbuilding on the farmhouse, of the sale of three acres, and the small trailer that was now attached to the back of the family car. Brenda wrote and told her how they watched television a lot, and had been given a microwave oven for Christmas by their children. Well, by the children they acknowledged.

  Brenda did try to make them write. She had said she was sure Nora would love to hear from them; it must be lonely for her out there. But they had laughed and said: “Oh, no, it wasn’t at all lonely for Lady Nora, who was having a fine time in Annunziata, living the life of Riley with the whole place probably gossiping about her and ruining the reputation of all Irishwomen in front of these people.”

  Brenda was married to a man that they had both laughed at years back, a man called Pillow Case, for some reason they had all forgotten. They had no children and they both worked in a restaurant now. Patrick, as she now called Pillow Case, was the chef and Brenda was the manageress. The owner lived mainly abroad and was content to leave it to them. She wrote that it was as good as having your own place without the financial worries. She seemed content, but then perhaps she wasn’t telling the truth either.

  Nora certainly never told Brenda about how it had turned out; the years of living in a place smaller than the village she had come from in Ireland and loving the man who lived across the little piazza, a man who could come to visit her only with huge subterfuge, and as the years went on he made less and less effort to try to find the opportunities.

  Nora wrote about the beautiful village of Annunziata and its white buildings where everyone had little black wrought-iron balconies and filled them with pots of geraniums or busy lizzies, but not just one or two pots like at home, whole clusters of them. And how there was a gate outside the village where you could stand and look down on the valley. And the church had some lovely ceramics that visitors were coming to visit more and more.

  Mario and Gabriella ran the local hotel and they did lunches now for visitors and it was very successful. Everyone in Annunziata was pleased because it meant that other people, like wonderful Signora Leone who sold postcards and little pictures of the church, and Nora’s great friends Paolo and Gianna, who made little pottery dishes and jugs with Annunziata written on them, made some money. And people sold oranges and flowers from baskets. And even she, Nora, benefited from the tourists since as well as making her lace-trimmed handkerchiefs and table runners for sale, she also gave little guided tours for English-speaking visitors. She took them round the church and told of its history, and pointed out the places in the valley where there had been battles and possibly Roman settlements and certainly centuries of adventure.

  She never found it necessary to tell Brenda about Mario and Gabriella’s children, five of them in all, with big dark eyes looking at her suspiciously with sullen downcast glances from across the piazza. Too young to know who she was and why she was hated and feared, too knowing to think she was just another neighbor and friend.

  Since Brenda and Pillow Case didn’t have any children of their own, they wouldn’t be interested in these handsome, unsmiling Sicilian children who looked across from the steps of their family hotel at the little room where Signora sat sewing and surveying all that passed by.

  That’s what they called her in Annunziata, just Signora. She had said she was a widow when she arrived. It was so like her own name Nora anyway, she felt she had been meant to be called that always.

  And even had there been anyone who truly loved her and cared about her life, how hard it
would have been to try to explain what her life was like in this village. A place she would have scorned if it were back in Ireland, no cinema, no dance hall, no supermarket, the local bus irregular and the journeys when it did arrive positively endless.

  But here she loved every stone of the place because it was where Mario lived and worked and sang in his hotel, and eventually raised his sons and daughters, and smiled up at her as she sat sewing in her window. She would nod at him graciously, not noticing as the years went by. And the passionate years in London that ended in 1969 were long forgotten by everyone except Mario and Signora.

  Of course, Mario must have remembered them with love and longing and regret as she did, otherwise why would he have stolen into her bed some nights using the key that she had made for him. Creeping across the dark square when his wife was asleep. She knew never to expect him on a night there was a moon. Too many other eyes might have seen a figure crossing the piazza and known that Mario was wandering from the wife to the foreign woman, the strange foreign woman with the big wild eyes and long red hair.

  Occasionally Signora asked herself was there any possibility that she could be mad, which was what her family at home thought and was almost certainly the view of the citizens of Annunziata.

  OTHER WOMEN WOULD surely have let him go, cried over the loss of his love and got on with their lives. She had only been twenty-four back in 1969 and she lived through her thirties, sewing and smiling and speaking Italian, but never in public to the man she loved. All that time in London when he had begged her to learn his language, telling her how beautiful it was, she had learned hardly a word, telling him that he was the one who must learn English so they could open a twelve-bedroom hotel in Ireland and make their fortune. And all the time Mario had laughed and told her that she was his redheaded principessa, the loveliest girl in the world.