Evening Class

by Maeve Binchy

  And, of course, she had been right in her predictions. Maria was married to the man who was not worthy of her and her family, but the loss was made up by the boy’s having to work night and day in Vista del Monte. If people might have gossiped about it, it was only for a few days.

  And their second son, the boy who was wild, went to New York, and the news was that he was as good as gold. He was working in his cousin’s trattoria and saving money every week for the day when he would buy his own place back home on the island of Sicily.

  SIGNORA ALWAYS SLEPT with her window on the square slightly open, so she was one of the first to hear the news when the brothers of Gabriella, thickset men, middle-aged now, came running from their cars. First she heard them wake the dottore in his house. Signora stood in the shadows of her shutter and watched. There had been an accident, that much was obvious.

  She peered to see what had happened. Please God may it not be one of their children. They had already had too many problems with that family.

  And then she saw the solid figure of Gabriella on the doorstep, in her nightdress, with a shawl around her shoulders. Her hands were to her face and the sky was rent apart by her cries.

  “Mario, Mario…”

  The sound went up into the mountains around Annunziata and down into the valleys.

  And the sound went into Signora’s bedroom, and chilled her heart as she watched them lift the body out of the car.

  She didn’t know how long she stood there, like stone. But soon, as the square filled up in the moonlight with his family and neighbors and friends, she found herself among them, the tears flowing unchecked. She saw his face with the bloodstains and the bruising. He had been driving home from a village not far away. He had missed a corner. The car had turned over many times.

  She knew she must touch his face. Nothing would ever settle down in the world unless she touched him, kissed him even as his sisters and children and wife were doing. She moved toward him, unaware of anyone looking at her, forgetful entirely of the years of secrecy and covering up.

  When she was quite near him, she felt hands reaching out to her and keen bodies in the crowd pulled her back. Signora Leone, her friends the pottery makers Paolo and Gianna, and, strange as it seemed even afterward, two of the brothers of Gabriella. They just moved her away, back from where the eyes of Annunziata would see her naked grief and the memories of the village would store yet one more amazing happening, the night when the Signora irlandese broke down and admitted in public her love for the man who ran the hotel.

  She was in houses that night where she had never been before, and people gave her strong brandy to drink and someone stroked her hand. Outside the walls of these houses she could hear the wailing and the prayers, and sometimes she stood to go and stand at her rightful place by his body, but always gentle hands held her back.

  On the day of his funeral, pale and calm she sat at her window, her head bowed as they carried his coffin out from the hotel and across the square to the church with the frescoes and ceramics. The bell was one lonely, mournful sound. Nobody looked up at her window. Nobody saw the tears fall down her face and splash onto the embroidery that lay in her lap.

  And after that they all assumed that she should now be leaving, that it was time for her to go home.

  Little by little she realized it. Signora Leone would say: “Before you go back you must come once with me to the great passion procession in my hometown Trapani…you will be able to tell the people back in Ireland about it all.”

  And Paolo and Gianna gave her a big plate they had made specially for her return. “You can put on it all the fruits that are grown in Ireland and the plate will remind you of your time in Annunziata.” They seemed to think that this is what she would do.

  But Signora had no home to go to, she didn’t want to move. She was in her fifties, she had lived here since before she was thirty. This is where she would die. One day the churchbell here would ring for her funeral, too, she had money to pay for it all ready in a little carved wooden box.

  So she took no notice of the hints that were getting heavier, and the advice that was trembling on lips waiting to be given.

  Not until Gabriella came to see her.

  Gabriella crossed the square in her dark mourning clothes. Her face looked old, as if it was set in lines of grief and sorrow. She had never come to Signora’s rooms before. She knocked on the door as if she had been expected. Signora fussed to make her guest welcome, offering her a little fruit juice and water, a biscuit from the tin. Then she sat and waited.

  Gabriella walked around the two small rooms. She fingered the coverlet on the bed with all its intricately woven place names.

  “It’s exquisite, Signora,” she said.

  “You are too kind, Signora Gabriella.”

  Then there was a long silence.

  “Will you go back soon to your country?” Gabriella asked eventually.

  “There is nobody for me to go back to,” Signora said simply.

  “But there is nobody here, nobody that you should want to stay for. Not now.” Gabriella was equally direct.

  Signora nodded as if to agree. “But in Ireland, Signora Gabriella, there is nobody at all. I came here when I was a young girl, now I am a woman, middle-aged, about to approach the beginning of old age. I thought I would stay here.” Their eyes met.

  “You do not have friends here, not a real life, Signora.”

  “I have more than I have in Ireland.”

  “You could pick up a life again in Ireland. Your friends there, your family, would be happy to see you return.”

  “Do you want me to go away from here, Signora Gabriella?” The question was very straight. She just wanted to know.

  “He always said you would go if he were to die. He said you would go back to your people and leave me here with my people to mourn my husband.”

  Signora looked at her in amazement. Mario had made this promise on her behalf, without any guarantee. “Did he say that I had agreed to do this?”

  “He said it was what would happen. And that if I, Gabriella, were to die, he told me that he would not marry you, because it would cause a scandal and my name would be lessened. They would think that always he had wanted to marry you.”

  “And did this please you?”

  “No, these things didn’t please me, Signora. I didn’t want to think of Mario dead, or of my being dead. We are young people. But I suppose it gave me the dignity that I need. I didn’t need to fear you. You would not stay on here against the tradition of the place and share in the mourning for the man who was gone.”

  The sounds of the square went on outside, meat deliveries to the hotel, a van of clay supplies being carried into the pottery shop, children coming home from school laughing and calling to each other. Dogs barking, and somewhere birds singing too. Mario had told her about dignity and tradition and how important they were to him and his family.

  It was as if he were speaking to her now from the grave. He was sending her a message, asking her to go home.

  She spoke very slowly. “I think at the end of the month, Signora Gabriella. That is when I will go back to Ireland.”

  The other woman’s eyes were full with gratitude and relief. She reached out both her hands and took Signora’s. “I am sure you will be much happier, much more at peace,” she said.

  “Yes, yes,” Signora said slowly, letting the words hang there in the warm afternoon air.

  “Sì sì…veramente.”

  SHE ONLY BARELY had the money for the fare. Somehow her friends knew this.

  Signora Leone came and pressed the bundles of lire into her hand. “Please, Signora. Please. It’s thanks to you I have such a good living, please take it.”

  It was the same with Paolo and Gianna. Their pottery business would not have got started if it had not been for Signora. “Regard it as a tiny commission.”

  And the old couple who owned the room where she had lived most of her adult life. They said she had improve
d the property so well, she deserved some compensation.

  On the day that the bus came to take her with her belongings to the town with the airport, Gabriella came out on her steps. She didn’t speak and neither did Signora, but they bowed to each other. Their faces were grave and respectful. Some of those who watched the little scene knew what was being said. They knew that one woman was thanking the other with all her heart in a way that could never be put into words, and wishing her good fortune in whatever lay ahead.

  IT WAS LOUD and crowded in the city, and the airport was full of noise and bustle, not the happy, easy bustle of Annunziata but people rushing without meeting each other’s gaze. It would be like this in Dublin, too, when she got back there, but Signora decided not to think about it.

  She had made no plans, she would just do what seemed the right thing to do when she got there. No point in wasting her journey planning what could not be planned. She had told no one that she was coming. Not her family, not even Brenda. She would find a room and look after herself as she had always done, and then she would work out what to do next.

  On the plane she began talking to a boy. He was about ten, the age of Mario and Gabriella’s youngest son, Enrico. Automatically she spoke to him in Italian but he looked away confused.

  Signora looked out the window. She would never know what would happen to Enrico, or his brother in New York, or his sister married to the kitchen help and up in Vista del Monte. She would not know who came to live in her rooms. And whoever it was would never know of her long years there, and why she had spent them.

  It was like swimming out to sea and not knowing what would happen where you had left and what was going to happen where you would arrive.

  She changed planes in London. She had no wish to spend any time there. Not to visit the old haunts where she had lived with Mario in a different life. Not to look up people long forgotten, and places only barely remembered. No, she would go on to Dublin. To whatever lay ahead.

  IT HAD ALL changed so much. The place was much, much bigger than she remembered. There were flights arriving from all over the world. When she had left, most of the big international flights had gone in and out of Shannon Airport. She hadn’t known that things would be so different. Like the road in from the airport. When she had left, the bus had wound its way out through housing estates, now it came in on a motorway with flowers planted on each side. Heavens, how Ireland was keeping up with the times!

  An American woman on the bus asked her where she was staying.

  “I’m not absolutely sure,” Signora explained. “I’ll find somewhere.”

  “Are you a native or a visitor?”

  “I came from here a long time ago,” Signora said.

  “Same as me…looking for ancestors.” The American woman was pleased. She was giving a week to find her roots, she thought that should be long enough.

  “Oh definitely,” Signora said, realizing how hard it was to find instantly the right response in English. She had been about to say certo. How affected it would sound breaking into Italian, they would think she was showing off. She must watch for it.

  Signora got out of her bus and walked up the quays beside the Liffey to O’Connell Bridge. All around her there were young people, tall, confident, laughing, in groups. She remembered reading somewhere about this youthful population, half the country under the age of twenty-four, was it?

  She hadn’t expected to see such proof of it. And they were dressed brightly too. Before she had gone to England to work, Dublin had been a gray and drab place. A lot of the buildings had been cleaned, there were smart cars, expensive cars in the busy traffic lanes. She remembered more bicycles and secondhand cars. The shops were bright and opened up. Her eye caught the magazines, girls with big bosoms, surely these had been banned when she was last here or was she living in some kind of cloud-cuckoo-land?

  For some reason she kept walking down the Liffey after O’Connell Bridge. It was almost as if she were following the crowd, and there she found Temple Bar. It was like the Left Bank in Paris, when once she had gone there so many years ago with Mario for a long weekend. Cobbled streets, outdoor cafes, each place full of young people calling to each other and waving at those they knew.

  Nobody had told her Dublin was like this. But then would Brenda, married to Pillow Case and working in a much more settled kind of place, have even visited these streets?

  Her sisters and their hard-up husbands, her two brothers and their inert wives…they were not people who’d have discovered Temple Bar. If they knew of it, then it would be surely only to shake their heads.

  Signora thought it was wonderful. It was a whole new world, she couldn’t get enough of it. Eventually she sat down to have a coffee.

  A girl of about eighteen with long red hair, like her own many years ago, served her coffee. She thought Signora was a foreigner.

  “What country are you from?” she asked in slow English, mouthing the words.

  “Sicilia, in Italia,” Signora said.

  “Beautiful country but I tell you I’m not going there again until I can speak the language though.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Well, I’d want to know what the fellows are saying, I mean you wouldn’t know what you were letting yourself in for if you didn’t know what they were saying.”

  “I didn’t speak any Italian when I went there, and I sure didn’t know what I was letting myself in for,” Signora said. “But you know it worked out all right…no, more than all right. It was wonderful.”

  “How long did you stay for?”

  “A long time. Twenty-six years.” Her voice sounded wondering.

  The girl, who wasn’t born when she had set out on this adventure, looked at her in amazement. “You stayed all that time, you must have loved it.”

  “Oh, I did, I did.”

  “And when did you come back?”

  “Today,” Signora said.

  She sighed heavily and wondered had she imagined that the girl looked at her slightly differently, as if she had somehow revealed herself to be a little strange. Signora knew she must watch that she didn’t let people think that. No letting Italian phrases fall, no sighing, no saying strange, disconnected things.

  The girl was about to move away.

  “Excuse me, this seems a very nice part of Dublin. Is this the kind of place I could rent a room, do you think?” Now the girl knew she was odd. Perhaps people didn’t call them rooms anymore. Should she have said apartment? flat? place to stay? “Just somewhere simple,” Signora said.

  She listened glumly as she learned that this was one of the most fashionable parts of town; everyone wanted to live here. There were penthouse apartments, pop stars had bought hotels, business people had invested in town houses. The place was coming down with restaurants. It was the last word now.

  “I see.” Signora did see something, she saw she had a lot to learn about the city she had returned to. “And please could you tell me where would be a place that would be good value to stay, somewhere that hadn’t become the last word?”

  The girl shook her head of long, dark red hair. It was hard to know. She seemed to be trying to work out whether Signora had any money at all, whether she would have to work for her keep, how long she would perch in wherever she landed.

  Signora decided to help her. “I have enough money for bed and breakfast for a week, but then I’ll have to find a cheap place and maybe somewhere I could do some jobs…maybe mind children.”

  The girl was doubtful. “They usually want young ones to mind kids,” she said.

  “Or maybe over a restaurant and work in it?”

  “No, I wouldn’t get your hopes up over that, honestly…we all want those kinds of places. They’re very hard to get.”

  She was nice, the girl. Her face was pitying, of course, but Signora would have to get used to a lot of that in what lay ahead. She decided to be brisk to hide her messiness, anything to make her acceptable and not to appear like a doddery old ba
g lady.

  “Is that your name there on your apron? Suzi?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid my mother was a Suzi Quatro fan.” She saw the blank look. “The singer, you know? She was big years ago, maybe not in Italy.”

  “I’m sure she was, it’s just that I wasn’t listening then. Now, Suzi, I can’t take up your day with all my problems, but if you could give me just half a minute I’d love you to tell me what area would be a nice cheap one where I should start looking.”

  Suzi listed off the names of places that used to be small areas, suburbs if not exactly villages, well outside the city when Signora was young, but now apparently they were big, sprawling working-class estates. Half the people there would take someone in to rent a room if their kids had left home maybe. As long as it was cash. It wouldn’t be wise to mention that she herself was badly off. Be fairly secretive about things, they liked that.

  “You’re very good to me, Suzi. How do you know all about things like this at your age?”

  “Well, that’s where I grew up, I know the scene.”

  Signora knew she must not tire the patience of this nice child. She reached for her purse to get out the money for the coffee.

  “Thank you very much for your help…I do appreciate it. And if I do get settled I’ll come in and give you a little gift.”

  She saw Suzi pause and bite her lip as if to decide something.

  “What’s your name?” Suzi asked.

  “Now I know this sounds funny but my name is Signora. It’s not that I’m trying to be formal, but that’s what they called me and what I like to be called.”

  “Are you serious about not minding what kind of a place it is?”

  “Absolutely serious.” Her face was honest. It was quite clear that Signora couldn’t understand people who cared about their possessions.

  “Listen. I don’t get on with my family myself, so I don’t live at home anymore. And only a couple of weeks ago they were talking about trying to get someone to take my room. It’s empty, and they could well do with a few pounds a week, it would have to be cash you know and you’d have to say you were a friend in case anyone asked…because of income tax.”