Maeve Binchy - Evening Class

She was reading the evening paper when Harry came back downstairs with two suitcases. It was going to be a serious holiday in the Bahamas. He seemed to be both relieved and piqued at the same time that there was going to be no scene about his leaving.

She looked up and smiled at him over her glasses. 'When will I say you'll be back?' she asked.

'Say? Who do you need to say it to?'

'Well, your children for one thing, but I'm sure you'll tell them you're going, and friends or anyone from the office or the bank.'

'The office will know,' he said.

'That's fine, then I can refer them to Siobhan?' Her face was innocent.

'Siobhan's going to the Bahamas too, as you very well know.'

'So, to someone else then?'

'I wouldn't have gone at all, Connie, if you'd behaved reasonably, not like some kind of tax inspector, hedging me here and confining me there.'

'But if it's a business trip you have to go, don't you?' she said, and he went out, slamming the door. She tried to go on reading the paper. There had been too many scenes like this, where he left and she cried. It was no way to live a life.

She read an interview with a schoolmaster who was setting up an evening class in Italian up in Mountainview school, a big community school or college in a tough area. It was Jacko's area. Mr. Aidan Dunne said he thought people from the neighbourhood would be interested in learning about the life and culture of Italy as well as the language. Since the World Cup there had been a huge interest in Italy among ordinary Dubliners. They would offer a very varied programme. Connie read the piece again. It was quite possible that Jacko might enrol. And if not, she would be in his part of the forest two nights a week. There was a telephone number, she would book now before she changed her mind.

Of course Jacko hadn't signed on for the class. That kind of thing only happened in fantasy. But Connie enjoyed it. This wonderful woman, Signora, not much older than she was, had all the gifts of a born teacher. She never raised her voice, yet she had everyone's attention. She never criticised but she expected people to learn what she marked out for them.

' Constanza … I'm afraid you don't know the clock properly, you only know sono le due, sono le tre … that would be fine if it was always something o'clock-'but you have to learn half past and a quarter to.'

'I'm sorry, Signora,' Mrs. Constance Kane would say, abashed. 'I was a bit busy, I didn't get it learned.'

'Next week you will know it perfectly,' Signora would cry and Connie found herself with her fingers in her ears saying sono le sei e venti . How had it come about that she was going up to this barracks of a school miles away and sitting in a classroom with thirty strangers chanting and singing and identifying great paintings and statues and buildings, tasting Italian food and listening to Italian operas? And what's more, loving it.

She tried to tell Harry about it when he returned tanned and less acerbic from the West Indies. But he didn't show much interest.

'What's taking you up to that bloody place, you want to watch your hubcaps up there,' he said. His only comment on the whole undertaking.

Vera didn't like it either. 'It's a tough place, you're tempting fate bringing your good car up there, and God, Connie, take off that gold watch.'

'I'm not going to regard it as a ghetto, that would be patronising.'

'I don't know what has you there at all, aren't there plenty of places nearer to you where you could learn Italian if you want to?'

'I like this one, I'm always half hoping I'll meet Jacko at one of the classes,' Connie smiled mischievously.

'God Almighty, haven't you had enough trouble in one lifetime without inviting more in?' Vera said, raising her eyes to heaven. Vera had her hands full, she was still running the office for Kevin and minding her grandson as well. Deirdre had produced an enormous and gorgeous baby but had said that she didn't want to be shackled by outdated concepts of marriage and slavery.

Connie liked the other people in the class, the serious Bill Burke, Guglielmo, and his dramatic girl friend Elizabetta. He worked in the bank which had put together the rescue package for Harry and his partners, but he was too young to have known about it. And even if he had, how would he have recognised her as Constanza? The gutsy young couple of women Caterina and Francesca, hard to know if they were sisters or mother and daughter, they were good company.

There was the big, decent Lorenzo with hands the size of shovels playing the part of a guest in a restaurant, with Connie as the waitress.

Una tavola vicina alla finestra , Lorenzo would say, and Connie would move a cardboard box to where there was a drawing of a window and seat him there, waiting while Lorenzo thought up dishes he would like to order. Lorenzo learned all kinds of new dishes, like eels, goose liver and sea urchins. Signora would remonstrate and tell him to learn only the list she had provided.

'You don't understand, Signora, these people I'll be meeting in Italy, they'll be classy eaters, they wouldn't be your pizza merchants.'

Then there was the terrifying Luigi with the dark scowl and particular way of murdering the Italian language. He was someone she would never have met in the ordinary run of things, yet sometimes he was her partner, like the time they were playing doctors and nurses with pretend stethoscopes, telling each other to breathe deeply. Respiri profondamente per favore, Signora Luigi would shout, listening to one end of a rubber hose. Non mi sento bene , Connie would reply.

And gradually they were all getting less self-conscious and more united in this far-fetched dream of a holiday in Italy next summer. Connie, who could have paid for everyone in the class to take a scheduled flight, joined in the discussions of sponsorship and cost-cutting and putting down early deposits for a group charter. If they got the trip together she would certainly go.

Connie noticed that the school was improving week by week. It was getting a definite face-lift, a new coat of paint, trees planted, the school yard smartened up. The broken bicycle sheds were replaced.

'You're doing a real make-over here,' she said approvingly to the shaggy, attractive looking Principal Mr. O'Brien, who came in from time to time to give his general praise to the Italian class.

'Uphill work, Mrs. Kane, if you could put a word in for us to those financiers you and your husband meet we'd be grateful.' He knew who she was all right, there was no calling her Constanza like all the others. But he was pleasantly incurious about what she was doing there.

'They are people without hearts, Mr. O'Brien. They don't understand about schools being a country's future.'

'Tell me about it,' he sighed. 'Don't I spend half my life in bloody banks and filling in forms. I've forgotten how to teach.'

'And do you have a wife and family, Mr. O'Brien?' Connie didn't know why she had asked him such a personal question. It was out of character for her to be intrusive. In the hotel business she had learned the wisdom of listening rather than enquiring.

'No, I don't as it happens,' he said.

'Better I suppose, if you're kind of wedded to a school. I think a lot of people should never marry. My own husband is a case in point,' she said.

He raised an eyebrow. Connie realised she had gone too far for pleasant casual conversation. 'Sorry,' she laughed. 'I'm not doing the lonely wife bit, I was just stating a fact.'

'I would love to be married, that's a fact too,' he said. It was polite of him to exchange a confidence. One had been given, it was courtesy to return one. 'Problem was, I never met anyone that I wanted to marry until I was too old.'