Maeve Binchy - Evening Class

'I hope you'll like him.' Grania looked suddenly very young and vulnerable.

'I'm sure he's so fabulous that I'll be sending you postcards about him myself,' said Bill with his smile of encouragement that Grania was relying on so much in a world that knew nothing of Tony O'Brien.

Bill told his parents that night that he was going to learn Italian.

Olive was very excited. 'Bill's going to Italy. Bill's going to Italy to run a bank,' she told the next-door neighbours.

They were used to Olive. 'That's great,' they said indulgently. 'Will you miss him?'

'When he goes there he'll bring us all over to Italy to stay with him,' Olive said confidently.

From his bedroom Bill heard and his heart felt heavy. His mother had thought learning Italian was a great idea. It was a beautiful language. She loved to hear the Pope speak it, and she loved the song O Sole Mio . His father had said that it was great to see a boy bettering himself all the time, and he had always known that those extra grinds for the Leaving Certificate had been an investment. His mother asked casually whether Lizzie would go to the Italian classes.

Bill had never thought of Lizzie as being disciplined or organised enough to spend two sessions of two hours each learning something. Surely she would prefer to be out with her friends laughing and drinking very expensive multi-coloured cocktails. 'She hasn't decided yet,' he said firmly. He knew how much they disapproved of Lizzie. Her one visit had not been a success. Her skirt too short, her neckline too low, her laughter too wide and non-specific and her grasp of their life so minimal.

But he had been resolute. Lizzie was the girl he loved. She was the woman he would marry in two years' time when he was twenty-five. He would hear no disparaging word about Lizzie in his home and they respected him for this. Sometimes Bill wondered about his wedding day. His parents would be so excited. His mother would talk for ages about the hat she was going to buy and perhaps buy several before settling on the right one. There would be a lot of discussion too about an outfit for Olive, something which would be discreet and yet smart. His father would discuss the timing of the wedding, hoping that it was convenient for the supermarket. He had worked in this store since he was a boy, watching it change character all the time, never realising his own worth and always fearing that change of manager might mean his walking papers. Sometimes Bill wanted to shake him and tell him that he was worth more than the rest of the employees combined, and that everyone would realise this. But his father, in his fifties without any of the qualifications and skills of young men, would never have believed him. He would remain fearful of the supermarket and grateful to it for the rest of his days.

Lizzie's family on her side of the church was always fairly vague in Bill's dream of a wedding day. She talked of her mother who lived in West Cork because she preferred it there, and her father who lived in Galway because that's where his pals were. She had a sister in the States and a brother who was working in a ski resort and hadn't come home for ages. Bill couldn't quite imagine them all gathering together.

He told Lizzie about the class. 'Would you like to learn too?' he asked hopefully.

'Whatever for?' Lizzie's infectious laughter had him laughing too although he didn't know why.

'Well, so that you could speak a bit of it if we went there, you know.'

'But don't they speak English?'

'Some of them, but wouldn't it be great to speak to them in their own language?'

'And we'd learn to do that up in a ropey old school like Mountainview?'

'It's meant to be quite a good school, they say.' He felt stung with loyalty for Grania and her father.

'It may be, but look at the place it's in. You'd need a flak jacket to get through those housing estates.'

'It's a deprived area certainly,' Bill said. 'But they're just poor, that's all.'

'Poor,' cried Lizzie. 'We're all poor, for heaven's sake, but we don't go on like they do up there.'

Bill wondered, as he so often did, about Lizzie's values. How could she compare herself with the families who lived on welfare and social security? The many households where there had never been a job? Still, it was part of her innocence. You didn't love people to change them. He had known that for a long time.

'Well I'm going to do it anyway,' he said. 'There's a bus stop right outside the school and the lessons are on Tuesdays and Thursdays.'

Lizzie turned over the little leaflet. 'I would do it to support you Bill, but honestly I just don't have the money.' Her eyes were enormous. It would be wonderful to have her sitting beside him mouthing the words, learning the language.

'I'll pay for your course,' Bill Burke said. Now he would definitely have to go to another bank and get a loan.

They were nice in the other bank and sympathetic. They had to do the same themselves, they all had to borrow elsewhere. There was no problem about setting it up.

'You can get more than that,' the helpful young bank official said, just as Bill would have said himself.

'I know, but the bit about paying it back… I seem to have so many calls each month.'

'Tell me about it,' said the boy. 'And the price of clothes is disgraceful. Anything you'd want to be seen in costs an arm and a leg-'

Bill thought of the jacket, and he thought of his parents and Olive. He'd love to give them some little end of summer treat. He got a loan exactly twice what he had gone into the bank intending to borrow.

Grania told Bill that her father was absolutely delighted about her recruiting two new members for the class. There were twenty-two already. Things were looking good and still a week to go. They had decided that even if they didn't make the full thirty they would have the first term's lessons anyway so as not to disappoint those who had enrolled, and to avoid embarrassing themselves at the very outset.

'Once it gets going there might be word of mouth,' Bill said.

'They say there's usually a great fall-off after lesson three,' Grania said. 'But let's not be downhearted. I'm going to work on my friend Fiona tonight.'

'Fiona who works in the hospital?' Bill had a feeling that Grania was match-making for him here. She always mentioned Fiona in approving terms, just after something Lizzie had done turned out to have been particularly silly or difficult.

'Yeah, you know about Fiona, I'm always talking about her Great friend of mine and Brigid's. We can always say we're staying with her when we're not, if you know what I mean.'

'I know what you mean, but do your parents?' Bill asked.

'They don't think about it, that's what parents do. They put these things to the back of their minds.'

'Is Fiona asked to cover for you often?'

'Not for me since… well since that night with Tony ages ago. You see, it was the very next day I discovered about him being such a rat and taking my father's job. Did I tell you?'

She had, many times, but Bill was very kind. 'I think you said that the timing was bad.'

'It couldn't have been worse,' Grania fumed. Tf I had known earlier I wouldn't have given him the time of day, and if it were later then I might have been so committed to him that there was no turning back.' She fumed at the unfairness of it all.

'Suppose you did decide to go back to him, would that finish your father off entirely?'

Grania looked at him sharply. Bill must be psychic to know that she had tossed and turned all last night thinking that she might approach Tony O'Brien again. He had left the ball so firmly in her court and he had sent encouraging messages in the form of postcards. In a way it was discourteous not to respond to him in some manner. But she had thought of the damage it would do to her father. He had been so sure that the post of Principal was his; he must have felt it more keenly than he had shown. 'You know I was thinking about that,' Grania said slowly. 'And I worked out that I might wait a bit, you know, until things are better in my dad's life. Then he might be able to face up to something like that.'