Maeve Binchy - Evening Class

She wrote back almost dreamily of life in Annunziata, and how she was so needed here, by the old people upstairs who relied on her. By the Leone family who fought so often and so volubly, she had to go to lunch there every Sunday to make sure they didn't kill each other. She wrote about Mario's hotel and how much it depended on tourism so everyone in the village had to pull together to get the visitors to come. Her own job was to guide tourists around and she had found a lovely place to take them on a little

° escorted walk, to a kind of ledge that looked down over the valleys and up at the mountain.

She had suggested that Mario's younger brother open a little cafe there. It was called Vista del Monte, mountain view - but didn't it sound so much more wonderful in Italian?

She expressed sympathy for her father, who now spent much of his time in hospital. How right it had been for them to sell the farm and move to Dublin. And for mother now struggling, they told her, to manage in a flat in Dublin. So often they had explained that the flat had an extra bedroom, and so often she ignored the information, only enquiring after her parents' health and wondering vaguely about the postal services, saying that she had written so regularly since 1969 and now here they were in the eighties and yet her parents had never been able to reply to a letter. Surely the only explanation was that all the letters must have gone astray.

Brenda wrote a letter of high approval.

'Good girl yourself. You have them totally confused. I'd say you'll have a letter from your mother within the month. But stick to your guns. Don't come home for her. She wouldn't write unless she had to.'

The letter came, and Signora's heart turned over at her mother's familiar writing. Yes, familiar even after all these years. She knew every word had been dictated by Helen and Rita.

It skated over twelve years of silence, of obstinate refusal to reply to the beseechings of her lonely daughter overseas. It blamed most of it on 'y°ur father's very doctrinaire attitudes to morality'. Signora smiled wanly to herself at the phrase. If she were to look at a writing pad for a hundred years, her mother could not have come up with such an expression.

In the last paragraph the letter said: 'Please come home, Nora. Come home and live with us. We will not interfere with your life but we need you, otherwise we would not ask.'

And otherwise they would not have written, Signora thought to herself. She was surprised that she did not feel more bitter, but that had all passed now. She had been through it when Brenda had written saying how they didn't care about her as a person, only as someone who would look after elderly and unbending parents.

Here in her peaceful life she could afford to feel sorry for them. Compared to what she had in life, her own family had nothing at all. She wrote gently and explained that she could not come. If they had read her letters they would realise how much she was needed here now. And that of course if they had let her know in the past that they wanted her as part of their life then she would have made plans not to get so involved in the life of this beautiful peaceful place. But of course how could she have known that they would call on her? They had never been in touch, and she was sure they would understand.

And the years went on,

Signora's hair got streaks of grey in the red. But unlike the dark women who surrounded her it didn't seem to age her. Her hair just looked bleached by the sun. Gabriella looked matronly now. She sat at the desk of the hotel, her face heavier and rounder, her eyes much more beady than when they had flashed with jealousy across the piazza . Her sons were tall and difficult, no longer the little dark-eyed angels who did whatever they were asked to do.

Probably Mario had got older too, but Signora didn't see it. He came to her room - less frequently, and often just to lie there with his arm around her.

The quilt had hardly any space on it now for more cities. Signora had put in smaller places that appealed to her.

'You should not put Giardini-Naxos there among the big places, it's only a tiny place,' Mario complained.

'No, I don't agree. When I went to Taormina I went out there on the bus, it was a lovely place… its own atmosphere, its own character, a lot of tourism. No, no, it deserves a place.' And sometimes Mario would sigh heavily as if he had too many problems. He told her his worries. His second boy was wild. He was going to New York, aged only twenty. He was too young, he would get in with all the wrong people. No good would come of it.

'He's in with all the wrong people here,' Signora said soothingly. 'Possibly in New York he will be more timid, less assured. Let him go with your blessing because he'll go anyway.'

'You are very, very wise, Signora,' he said, and lay with his head tucked companionably on her shoulder.

She didn't close her eyes, she looked at the dark ceiling and thought of the times in this room when he had told her she was foolish, the most foolish stupid woman in the world, to have followed him here. Here where there was no future for her. And the years had turned it all into wisdom. How strange the world was.

And then the daughter of Mario and Gabriella became pregnant. The boy was not at all the kind of husband they would have wanted for her, a boy from the countryside who washed pots in the kitchen of the hotel in the piazza . Mario came and cried in her room about this, his daughter, a child, a little child herself. The disgrace, the shame.

It was 1994, she told him. Even in Ireland it was no longer a disgrace and a shame. It was the way life went on. You coped with it. Perhaps the boy could come and work in Vista del Monte, expand it a little, then he would be seen to have his own place.

That was her fiftieth birthday, but Signora didn't tell Mario, she didn't tell anyone. She had embroidered herself a little cushion cover with BUON COMPLEANNO , Happy Birthday, on it. She fingered it when Mario had gone, his tears for his defiled daughter dried. 'I wonder am I really mad as I feared all those years ago?'

She watched from her window as the young Maria was married to the boy who worked in the kitchen, just as she had watched Mario and Gabriella go to the church. The bells of the campanile were still the same, ringing over the mountain like bells should ring.

Imagine being in her fifties. She didn't feel a day older than she had when she came here. She didn't have a single regret. Were there many people in this or any other place who could say the same?

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 having to work night and day in Vista del Monte. And if people 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 in 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.