by Maeve Binchy
Signora told how she had lived so long in the Sicilian hills and that she could teach not just the language but perhaps something of the culture as well. Could there be a class on Italian artists and sculptors and frescoes, for example, that would be three topics, and then there could be Italian music, and opera and religious music. And then there could be wines and food, you know the fruits and vegetables and the frutti del mare, and really there was so much as well as the conversation and the holiday phrases, so much to add to the grammar and the learning of the language itself.
Her eyes were bright, she looked a younger woman than the tall person with anxious eyes who had stood at the door. Aidan heard the swelling sounds of children’s voices in the corridor. It meant that the lunch hour was nearly over. The other teachers would be in soon, the magic would end.
She seemed to understand this without his saying it. “I’m staying too long, you have work to do. But do you think we might talk of it again?”
“We get out at four o’clock. Now I sound like the children,” Aidan said.
She smiled at him. “That’s what must be wonderful about working in a school, you are always young and think like the children.”
“I wish it were always like that,” Aidan said.
“When I taught English in Annunziata I used to look at their faces and I might think…they don’t know something but when I have finished they will know it. It was a good feeling.”
He was admiring her openly now, this man struggling into his jacket to go back to the classroom. It had been a long time since Signora had felt herself admired. In Annunziata they respected her in some strange way. And, of course, Mario had loved her, there was no question of that. He had loved her with all his heart. But he had never admired her. He had come to her in the dark. He had held her body to him and he had told her his worries, but there had never been a look of admiration in his eyes.
Signora liked it, as she liked this good man struggling to share his own love of another land with the people hereabouts. His fear was that they didn’t have enough money for leisure-time education themselves to make such a study worthwhile.
“Will I wait outside the school for you?” she asked. “We could talk more then after four o’clock.”
“I wouldn’t want to keep you,” he began.
“I have nothing else to do.” She had no disguises.
“Would you care to sit in our library?” he asked.
“Very much.”
He walked her along the corridor as crowds of children shoved past them. There were always strangers in a big school like this, a new face wasn’t interesting enough to make them look twice. Except, of course, for young Jerry Sullivan, who did a double take.
“Jesus, Signora…” he said in amazement.
“Hallo, Jerry,” she said pleasantly, as if she were here in this school the whole time.
She sat in the library reading through what they had in their Italian section, mainly secondhand books obviously bought with his own money by Aidan Dunne. He was such a kind man, an enthusiast, perhaps he could help her. And she could help him. For the first time since she had come back to Ireland, Signora felt relaxed, not just holding on by her fingernails. She stretched and yawned in the summer sunshine.
Even though she was going to teach Italian, she felt sure of it, she didn’t think of Italy. She thought of Dublin, she wondered where they would find the people to attend the class. She and Mr. Dunne. She and Aidan. She pulled herself together a little. She must not be fanciful. That had been her undoing, people said. She was full of mad notions and didn’t see reality.
Two hours had passed and Aidan Dunne stood at the door of the big room. He was smiling all over his face. “I don’t have a car,” he said. “I don’t suppose you do?”
“I’ve barely my bus fare,” Signora said.
BILL
Life would have been much easier, Bill Burke thought, if only he could have been in love with Grania Dunne.
She was about his own age. She came from a normal kind of home, her father was a teacher up in Mountainview school, her mother worked in the cash desk of Quentin’s restaurant. She was good-looking and easy to talk to.
They used to grumble together about the bank sometimes, and wonder how it was that greedy, selfish people always got on well. Grania used to ask about his sister, and give him books for her. And perhaps Grania might have loved him, too, if things only had been different.
It was easy to talk about love to a good friend who understood. Bill understood when Grania told him about this very old man she just couldn’t get out of her mind even though she had tried and tried. He was as old as her own father, and smoked and wheezed and would probably be dead in a couple of years the way he went on, but she had never met anyone who attracted her so much.
She couldn’t possibly get together with him because he had lied to her and not told her that he was going to be principal of the school when he knew all along. And Grania’s father would have a stroke and drop dead if he knew that she had been seeing this Tony O’Brien and even slept with him. Once.
She had tried going out with other people, but it just hadn’t worked. She kept thinking about him and the way the lines came out from the sides of his eyes when he smiled. It was so unfair. What part of the human mind or body was so inefficient that it could make you think you loved someone so wildly unsuitable?
Bill agreed in the most heartfelt way possible. He, too, was a victim of this unsuitable streak. He loved Lizzie Duffy, the most improbable person in the world. Lizzie was a beautiful, troublesome bad debt, who had broken every rule and was still somehow allowed more credit than any customer in this or any branch.
Lizzie loved Bill too. Or said she did, or thought she did. She said she had never met anyone so serious and owlish and honorable and silly in her whole life. And, indeed, compared to Lizzie’s other friends, he was all of these things. Most of them just laughed at nothing and had very little interest in getting or keeping jobs, but a huge interest in travel and having fun. It was idiotic loving Lizzie.
But Bill and Grania told each other seriously over coffee that if life was all about loving suitable people, then it would be both very easy and very dull.
Lizzie never asked about Bill’s big sister, Olive. She had met her, of course, once when she came to visit. Olive was slow, that was all, just slow. She didn’t have any disease or illness that had a name. She was twenty-five and she behaved as if she were eight. A very nice eager eight.
Once you knew this there was no problem with Olive. She would tell you stories from books like any eight-year-old, she would be enthusiastic about things she had seen on television. Sometimes she was loud and awkward, and because Olive was big she knocked things over. But there were never any scenes or moods with Olive, she was interested in everything and everyone and thought that there was nobody on earth like her family. “My mother makes the best cakes in the world,” she would tell people, and Bill’s mother, who had never done more than decorate a bought sponge cake, would smile proudly. “My father runs the big supermarket,” Olive said, and her father, who worked at the bacon counter there, smiled indulgently.
“My brother Bill’s a bank manager” was the one that got a wry smile from Bill, and indeed Grania, when he told her. “That’ll be the day,” he said.
“You don’t want it, it will only show you’ve given in, compromised,” Grania said encouragingly.
Lizzie shared Olive’s view. “You must rise high in banking,” she said to Bill often. “I can only marry a successful man, and when we are twenty-five and get married you’ll have to be well on your way to the top.”
Even though it was said with Lizzie’s wonderful sparkling laugh showing all her tiny white teeth, and a toss of the legendary blond curls, Bill knew that Lizzie meant it. She said she could never marry a failure; it would be so cruel, because she would just drag them both down. But she would seriously consider marrying Bill in two years time when they were both a quarter of a ce
ntury old, because she would be getting past her sell-by date then and it would be time to settle down.
Lizzie had been refused a loan because she had not repaid the first one, her Visa card had been withdrawn and Bill had seen letters go out to her saying: “Unless you lodge by five o’clock tomorrow the bank will have no option…” But somehow the bank always found an option. Lizzie would arrive tearful on some occasions, brimming with confidence and a new job on others. She never went under. And always she was entirely unrepentant.
“Oh for heaven’s sake, Bill, banks don’t have a heart or a soul. They only want to make money and not to risk losing money. They are the enemy.”
“They’re not my enemy,” Bill said. “They’re my employers.”
“Lizzie don’t,” he would say despairingly as she would order another bottle of wine. Because he knew that she didn’t have the money to pay for it, he would have to, and it was becoming increasingly difficult. He wanted to contribute at home; his salary was so much better than his father’s wages, and they had sacrificed a lot to give him the kind of start he had got. But with Lizzie it was impossible to save. Bill had wanted to buy a new jacket, but it was out of the question. He wished Lizzie would stop talking about a holiday, there literally wasn’t the money for one. And how was he meant to put aside the money to be wealthy at the age of twenty-five so that he and Lizzie could get married?
Bill was hoping it would be a warm summer. Lizzie might just about tolerate staying in Ireland if the sun shone. But if it was overcast and all her friends were talking about this Greek island, that Greek island, and how cheap it was to live in Turkey for a month, then she would become very restless indeed. Bill could not get a loan from the bank he worked in. It was a diamond-hard rule. But of course it was always possible elsewhere. Possible and highly undesirable. He wondered if he was a mean man. He thought not, but then who really knew what they were like themselves.
“I suppose we are only what other people think we are,” he said to Grania at coffee.
“I don’t think so, that would mean we might be acting the whole time,” she said.
“Do I look like an owl?” he asked.
“Of course not.” Grania sighed. She had been through this before.
“It’s not even as if I wore glasses,” Bill complained. “I suppose I have a round face and sort of straight hair.”
“Owls don’t have hair at all, they have feathers,” Grania said.
This only served to confuse Bill further. “Then what makes them think I’m like one?” he said.
There was a lecture that evening at the bank on opportunities. Grania and Bill sat together. They heard of courses and schemes, and how the bank wanted the staff to specialize in different areas, and how the world was open to bright young men and women with a command of languages and different skills and training. The salary working abroad would, of course, be greater since it would include an overseas allowance. The opportunities would present themselves in a year and interested staff were advised to prepare themselves well in advance since the competition would be keen.
“Are you going to apply for any course?” Bill asked.
Grania looked troubled. “There are ways I want to, because it might get me out of here, get me away from chances of seeing Tony O’Brien. But then I don’t want to be thinking about him in some other part of the world. What’s the point of that? I might as well be miserable here where I know what he’s up to than in some far-off place where I don’t.”
“And he wants you back?” Bill had heard the story many times.
“Yes, he sends me a postcard every week to the bank. Look, here’s this week’s one.” Grania took out a picture of a coffee plantation. On the back were three words: Still waiting, Tony.
“He doesn’t say very much,” Bill complained.
“No, but it’s a kind of series,” Grania explained. “There was one that said ‘Still brewing,’ and another that said ‘Still hoping.’ It’s a message that he’s leaving it all up to me.”
“Is it a code?” Bill was bewildered.
“It’s a reference to the fact that I said I wouldn’t go back to him unless he bought a proper coffee percolator.”
“And he did?”
“Yes, of course he did, Bill. But that wasn’t the point.”
“Women are very complicated.” Bill sighed.
“No they’re not. They’re perfectly ordinary and straightforward. Not necessarily little Miss Retail Therapy that you’ve got yourself involved with, but most of us are.”
Grania thought that Lizzie was hopeless. Bill thought that Grania should go back to this old man and have coffee and bed and whatever else he was sending messages about, because she sure as hell wasn’t enjoying life without him.
The lecture had started Bill thinking. Suppose he were to get a posting abroad. Suppose he actually did succeed in being chosen as one of the experimental task force going to a European capital as part of the expansion process. Imagine the difference it would make. He would be earning real money for the first time in his life. He would have freedom. He need not spend the evenings at home playing with Olive and telling his parents choice bits of the day that would show him in a successful light.
Lizzie might come and live with him in Paris or Rome or Madrid, they could have a little flat, and sleep together every night rather than his just going to her place and then coming home again afterward…a habit that Lizzie found screamingly funny and quite suitable since she didn’t get up until just before noon and it was nice not to be wakened by someone leaving to go to something as extraordinary as the bank.
He began to look at brochures about intensive language courses. They were very expensive. The language laboratory ones were out of the question. He didn’t have time or energy for them either. A day in the bank took it out of him, he felt tired in the evening and not able to concentrate. And since the whole point was to make enough money to build a life for Lizzie, he must not risk losing her by absenting himself from her and her crowd of friends.
Not for the first time he wished that he loved a different kind of person. But it was like measles, wasn’t it. Once you got love, it was there. You had to wait to get cured of it or it worked itself out someday. As usual he consulted his friend Grania, and for once she had something specific to offer, rather than what he felt was a vague threat that he was on a helter-skelter to hell by loving Lizzie.
“My father is starting an evening class in Italian up in his school,” she said. “It begins in September and they’re looking far and wide for pupils.”
“Would it be any good?”
“I don’t know. I’m meant to be drumming up a bit of business for it.” Grania was always so honest. It was one of the many things he liked about her. She wouldn’t pretend. “At least it’s cheap,” she said. “They’ve put as much money as they can into it and unless he gets thirty pupils the class will fall on its face. I couldn’t bear that for my father.”
“Are you signing up then?”
“No, he said that would be humiliating for him. If his whole family had to join, it would look pathetic.”
“I suppose it would. But would it be any help at all in banking? Do you think it would have the terms and the technical kinds of phrases?”
“I doubt that, but they’d have hallo and good-bye and how’s your father. And I suppose if you were out in Italy you’d have to be able to say all that to people like we do here.”
“Yes.” Bill was doubtful.
“Jesus, Bill, what technical phrases do you and I use here every day, except debit and credit, I bet she’d teach you those.”
“Who?”
“The one he’s hired. A real Italian, he calls her Signora. He says she’s great altogether.”
“And when does the class start?”
“September fifth, if they have the numbers.”
“And do you have to pay the whole year in advance?”
“Only the term. I’ll get you a leaflet. If you were goi
ng to do it then you might as well do it there, Bill. You’d be keeping my poor old father sane.”
“And will I see Tony, the one who writes all these long, passionate letters?” Bill asked.
“God, don’t mention Tony, you’re only told this in great secrecy.” Grania sounded worried.
He patted her hand. “I’m only having a bit of fun with you, of course I know it’s a secret. But I’ll have a look at him if I see him, and tell you what I think.”
“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 neighbors.
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.