Evening Class

by Maeve Binchy

  Her children didn’t notice. Connie was just Mother, marvelous and always here when you wanted her. She seemed happy in herself and meeting her friends.

  Richard qualified as an accountant, and Mr. Hayes got him a splendid position with his son-in-law’s firm. Mr. Hayes’ beloved only daughter, Marianne, had married a handsome and very charming man called Paul Malone. The Hayes money and his own personality had helped him high up a ladder. Richard was happy there.

  Veronica was racing through her medical studies. She was thinking of specializing in psychiatry, she said, most of people’s troubles were in their heads and in their past.

  The twins had finally separated in identity, one to go to art college one to join the civil service. Their big house was still in Connie’s name. It had not been necessary to sell it when the money was being raised for the rescue package. Connie’s solicitors kept pressuring her to draw up another formal document with similar provisions to the original arrangement, guaranteeing her part of the profits, but she was loath to do it.

  “That was all years ago when I needed to assure the children’s future,” she said.

  “Strictly speaking, it should be done again. If there was a problem a court would almost certainly decide for you within the spirit of the law, but…”

  “What sort of problem could there be now?” Connie had asked.

  The solicitor, who had often seen Mr. Kane dining in Quentin’s with a woman who was not Mrs. Kane, was tight-lipped. “I would much prefer it done,” he said.

  “All right, but not with big dramas and humiliating him. The past is the past.”

  “It will be done with the minimum of drama, Mrs. Kane,” the solicitor said.

  And it was. Papers were sent to Harry’s office to be signed. There were no confrontations. His face was hard the day he signed them. She knew him so well and could read his moods. He wouldn’t tell her straight out, he would somehow try to punish her for it.

  “I’ll be away for a few days,” he said that evening. No explanation, no pretense. She was preparing their supper, but she knew he wasn’t going to stay and share it. Still, old habits die hard. Connie was used to pretending everything was fine even when it was not. She went on tossing the tomato-and-fennel salad carefully, as if it were something that required a huge amount of care and concentration.

  “Will that be tiring?” she asked, careful not to ask where and why and with whom.

  “Not really.” His voice was brittle. “I decided to combine it with a few days rest as well.”

  “That will be good,” she said.

  “It’s in the Bahamas,” he said. The silence hung between them.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “No objection? I mean you don’t consider it our special place or anything?” She didn’t answer but went to take the warm bacon flan from the oven. “Still, of course, you’ll have all your investments, your handcuffs, your share of everything, your rights, to console you when I’m away.” He was so angry he could hardly speak.

  Only a few short years ago he had cried to her on his knees with gratitude, said that he didn’t deserve her, sworn that she would never know another lonely hour. Now he was white-lipped with rage that she continued to protect her investment after it had been shown to be only too necessary.

  “You know that’s only a formality,” she said.

  His face had turned to a sneer. “As this business trip I’m going on is a formality,” he said. He went upstairs to pack.

  She realized he was going to Siobhan’s flat tonight, they would leave tomorrow. She sat down and ate her supper. She was used to eating supper alone. It was a late summer evening, she could hear the birds in the garden, the muffled sound of cars out on the road beyond their high garden walls. There were a dozen places she could go this evening if she wanted to.

  What she would like to do was meet Jacko and go to the pictures. Just stand in O’Connell Street looking at what was on and arguing with him over which film they would choose. But it was such a ludicrous notion. He had been right, there was nothing left to say now. It would be playing games going up to the working-class estate where he lived and hooting the horn of the BMW outside his house. Only fools thought they might have been happier if they had taken a different turning and wasted a lifetime regretting it. She might not have been at all happier if she had married Jacko, she would possibly have hated being in bed with him too. But somehow it might have been less lonely.

  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 neighborhood 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 program. Connie read the piece again. It was quite possible that Jacko might enroll. 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 criticized, 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 barrack 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 patronizing.”

  “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 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 girlfriend Elisabetta. He worked in the bank that 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 recognized 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 vicino 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, such as 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 makeover 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 inquiring.

  “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 realized 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.”

  “You’re not too old now, surely?”

  “I am, because it’s the wrong person—she’s a child. She’s Mr. Dunne’s child, actually,” he said, nodding his head back at the school, where Aidan Dunne and Signora were saying good night to the members of the class.

  “And does she love you?”

  “I hope so, I think so, but I’m wrong for her, far too old. I’m so wrong for her. And there are other problems.”

  “What does Mr. Dunne think?”

  “He doesn’t know, Mrs. Kane.”

  She let out a deep breath. “I see what you mean about there being problems,” she said. “I’ll leave you to try and sort them out.”

  He grinned at her, grateful that she asked no more. “Your husband is a madman to be married to his business,” he said.

  “Thank you, Mr. O’Brien.” She got into her car and drove home. Since joining this class she was learning the most extraordinary things about people.

  That amazing girl with the curls, Elisabetta, had told her that Guglielmo was going to manage a bank in Italy next year when he had a command of the language, the glowering Luigi had asked her would an ordinary person know if someone was wearing a ring worth twelve grand. Aidan Dunne had asked her did she know where you could buy brightly colored secondhand carpets. Bartolomeo wanted to know if she had ever come across people who attempted suicide and did they always try it again. It was just for a friend, he had said several times. Caterina, who was either the sister or the daughter of Francesca, impossible to know, had said that she had lunch in Quentin’s one day and the artichokes were terrific. Lorenzo kept telling her that the family he was going to stay with in Italy were so rich that he hoped he wouldn’t disgrace himself. And now Mr. O’Brien said that he was having an affair with Mr. Dunne’s daughter.

  A couple of months back she had known none of these people or their lives.

  When it rained, she would give people a lift home, but she didn’t do it regularly in case she became an unofficial taxi service. But she had a soft spot for Lorenzo, who had to take two buses to get back to his nephew’s hotel. This was where he lived and worked as an odd-job man and night porter. Everyone else went home to bed or television or to the pub or a cafe after class. But Lorenzo went back to work. He had said that the lift had made all the difference in the world, so Connie made sure she drove him.

  His real name was Laddy, she learned. But they all called each other their Italian names, it made it easier in class. Laddy had been invited by some Italians to come and visit them in Rome. He was a big, simple, cheerful man of around sixty who found nothing odd about being driven back to his hotel porter’s job by a woman in a top-of-the-range car.

  Sometimes he talked of his nephew, Gus, his sister’s boy, a lad who had worked every hour God sent, and now there was every possibility he would lose his hotel.

  There had been a scare a while back, an insurance and investment company that had failed. But at the last moment hadn’t it all come right and they were all to get their money after all. Lorenzo’s sister was in the hospice at the time, and it nearly broke her heart. But God had been good, she lived long enough to know that her only son, Gus, would not be bankrupt. She died happy after that. Connie bit her lip as the story was being told. These were the people that Harry would have walked out on.

  So what was the new problem? she wondered. Well, it was all part of the old problem. The company that had been in trouble and that had honored its debts in the end had made them all reinvest, a very large sum. It was as if to thank the company for having stood by them when it hadn’t needed to. Lorenzo’s understanding of it was vague, but his concern was enormous. Gus was at the end of his tether, he had been down every avenue. The hotel needed improvement, the health authorities had said that it could well be a fire hazard, there were no resources left. Everything that
he could have called on was gone in this new investment, and there was no way he could cash it in. Apparently there was some law in the Bahamas that you needed an unholy amount of advance notice before you could get at it.

  Connie pulled the car into the side of the road when she heard this.

  “Could you tell me about it again please, Lorenzo.” Her face was white.

  “I’m no financial expert myself, Constanza.”

  “Can I talk to your nephew? Please.”

  “He mightn’t like my telling his business…” Lorenzo was almost sorry he had confided in this kind woman.

  “Please, Lorenzo.”

  During the conversation with the worried Gus, Connie had to ask for a brandy. The story was so squalid, so shabby. For the last five years since their investment had been saved, Gus and presumably many, many others like him had been persuaded to invest in two entirely separate companies based in Freeport and Nassau.

  With tears in her eyes Connie read that the directors were Harold Kane and Siobhan Casey. Gus and Lorenzo looked at her, uncomprehending. First she took out her checkbook and wrote Gus a very substantial check, then she gave them the address of builders and decorators who were good friends of hers and would do an expert job. She wrote the name of an electrical firm as well, but suggested that they did not use her name in this context.

  “But why are you doing all this, Constanza?” Gus was totally bewildered.

  Connie pointed at the names on the stationery. “That man is my husband, that woman is his mistress. I have turned a blind eye to their affair for years. I don’t care that he sleeps with her, but by God I do care that he has used my money to defraud decent people.” She knew she must look mad and wild-eyed to them.

  Gus spoke gently. “I can’t take this money, Mrs. Kane, I can’t. It’s far too much.”

  “See you Tuesday, Lorenzo,” she said, and she was gone.

  SO MANY THURSDAY nights when she had let herself into the house she had hoped he would be at home and he so rarely was. Tonight was no exception. It was late, but she telephoned her father’s old friend the barrister T. P. Murphy. Then the solicitor. She fixed a meeting for the following morning. There were no apologies or recriminations. It was eleven o’clock at night when they had finished talking to her.