“May I take a picture of the food?” Fiona asked.
“Please, please.” Signor Garaldi’s wife seemed touched.
“It’s my future mother-in-law, she’s teaching me to cook, I’d like her to see something elegant like this.”
“Is she a kind person, la suocera…the mother-in-law?” Signora Garaldi was interested.
“Yes, very kind. She was a bit unstable, she tried to commit suicide you see, because her husband was having an affair with that man’s wife. But it’s all over now. Actually I ended it. Myself personally!” Fiona’s eyes were bright with excitement and marsala wine.
“Dio mio.” Signora Garaldi had her hand to her throat. All this in Holy Catholic Ireland!
“I met her through the suicide,” Fiona continued. “She was brought to my hospital. In many ways I pulled her around, and she’s very grateful to me, so she’s teaching me high-class cooking.”
“High class,” Signora Garaldi murmured.
Lizzie passed by her eyes wide with admiration. “Che bella casa,” she said.
“Parla bene italiano,” Signora Garaldi said warmly.
“Yes, well I’ll need it when Guglielmo is appointed to an international banking post, quite possibly Rome.”
“Really, he might be sent to Rome?”
“We could choose Rome, or anywhere he wants really, but this is such a beautiful city.” Lizzie was gracious in her praise.
There was going to be a speech, people were gathered together, Laddy from the games room, Connie from the picture gallery, Barry from the car and motorbikes down in the underground garage.
While they assembled, Signora took Aidan’s arm. “You won’t believe what the Garaldis have made of this. I heard the wife explaining that someone in the group is an international surgeon who saves lives, and Elisabetta has said that Guglielmo is a famous banker contemplating settling in Rome.”
Aidan smiled. “And do they believe any of it?” he asked.
“I doubt it. For one thing Guglielmo has asked three times can he cash a check and what is today’s rate of exchange. It wouldn’t inspire huge confidence.” She smiled back at him too. Anything either of them said seemed warm or funny or full of insights.
“Nora?” he said.
“Not yet…let’s try and get the show on the road.”
The speech was warm in the extreme. Never had the Garaldis been made so welcome as in Ireland, never had they met such honesty and friendship. Today was just one more example of it. People had come to their house as strangers and would leave as friends. “Amici,” a lot of them said when he said “friends.”
“Amici sempre,” said Signor Garaldi.
Laddy’s hand was raised high in the air. He would come to this house forever. They would visit his nephew’s hotel again.
“We could have a party for you when you come to Dublin,” Connie Kane said, and at this they all nodded eagerly, promising to take part. The pictures arrived. Marvelous big pictures on elegant steps in the courtyard. Among the thousands of shots taken on this viaggio, snaps of people squinting into the sun, these would have pride of place in all the different homes over Dublin.
There were a lot of ciaos and arrivedercis and grazies, and the evening class from Mountainview were out again on the streets of Rome. It was after eleven o’clock, the crowds were beginning to have their little passeggiata, the evening stroll. Nobody felt like going home, they had been having too exciting a time.
“I’m going back to the hotel. Will I take everyone’s pictures?” Aidan said suddenly. He looked across the group, waiting for her to speak.
Signora spoke slowly. “So am I, we can carry them back for you and so if you all get drunk again you won’t lose them.”
They smiled at each other knowingly. What they had all suspected over the past year was about to happen.
They walked hand in hand until they found an open-air restaurant with strolling players. “You warned us against these,” Aidan said. “I only said they were expensive, I didn’t say they weren’t wonderful,” said Nora O’Donoghue. They sat and talked. She told him about Mario and Gabriella, and how she had lived happily in their shadow for so long.
He told her about Nell and how he could never see when and why the good times had gone from their marriage. But gone they had. They lived now like strangers under the same roof.
She told him how Mario had died first and then Gabriella, how their children wanted her to go back and help with the hotel. Alfredo had said the words she had ached to hear, that they had always thought of her as a kind of mother anyway.
He told her that he knew now Nell had been having an affair. That he had neither been shocked nor hurt by this, but just surprised. It did seem a very male response, he thought, a little arrogant and very insensitive, but that’s the way it was.
She said that she would have to meet Alfredo again and talk to him. She didn’t know yet what she was going to say.
He told her that when they got home, he would tell Nell that they would sell their house and give her half the proceeds. He didn’t know yet where he was going to live.
They went slowly back to the Hotel Francobollo. They were too old to have the where-do-we-go problem of youngsters. Yet that was exactly what they had. They couldn’t lock Laddy out of his room for the night. Nor Constanza. They looked at each other.
“Buona sera, Signor Buona Sera,” began Nora O’Donoghue. “C’è un piccolo problema…”
It wasn’t a problem for long. Signor Buona Sera was a man of the world. He found them a room with no delays and no questions asked.
THE DAYS FLEW by in Rome, and then it was just a short walk across to Termini and the train to Florence.
“Firenze,” they all chorused when they saw the name come up on the notice board at the station. They didn’t mind leaving, because they knew they were coming back. Hadn’t they all put their coins in the Trevi Fountain? And there would be so much more to see and do once they had mastered intermediate or improvers’ Italian. They hadn’t decided what to call it, but everyone was signing on.
THEY SETTLED IN the train, their picnics packed. The Buona Seras had left out plenty of supplies. This group had been no trouble. And imagine the unexpected romance between the two leaders. Far too old for it, of course, and it would never last when they went back to their own spouses, but still, part of the madness of a holiday.
NEXT YEAR’S viaggio they would go south from Rome not north. Signora said they must see Naples, and then they would go to Sicily to a hotel she had known when she lived there. She and Aidan Dunne had promised Alfredo. They had also agreed to tell him that Aidan’s daughter Brigid or one of her colleagues would come out and see if they could set up package holidays to his hotel.
At Signora’s insistence Aidan had telephoned his home. The conversation with Nell had been easier and shorter than he ever could have believed.
“You had to know sometime,” Nell said curtly.
“So we’ll put the house on the market when I get home and split it down the middle.”
“Right,” she said.
“Don’t you care, Nell? Doesn’t it mean anything to you, all these years?”
“They’re over, isn’t this what you’re saying?”
“I was saying we should discuss the fact that they will be over.”
“What’s there to discuss, Aidan?”
“It’s just that I didn’t want you to be getting ready for my coming home and preparing for it…and then this being a bombshell.” He was always too courteous and possibly too self-centered, he realized.
“I don’t want to upset you, but truly I don’t even know what day you are coming back,” Nell said.
THEY SAT APART from the others on the train, Aidan Dunne and Signora in a world of their own with a future to plan.
“We won’t have much money,” he said.
“I never had any money at all to speak of, it won’t bother me.” Signora spoke from the heart.
“I’ll take
all the things from the Italian room. You know, the desk, the books, and the curtains and sofa.”
“Yes, better to put back a dining room table in there, for the sale, even just borrow one.” Signora was practical.
“We could get a small flat, I’m sure, as soon as we get back.” He was anxious to show her that she wasn’t going to lose out by refusing to go back to Sicily, her only real home.
“A room would do,” Signora said.
“No, no, we must have more than a room,” he protested.
“I love you, Aidan,” she said.
And for some reason, the others were all quiet and the train wasn’t making any of its noises, so everyone heard. For a second they exchanged glances. But the decision was made. To hell with discretion. Celebration was more important. And the other passengers on the train would never know why forty people wearing badges saying Vista del Monte cheered and cheered and sang a variety of songs in English including “This Is Our Lovely Day,” and eventually ended up in a tuneless version of “Arrivederci Roma.”
And they would never understand why so many of them were wiping tears quickly away from their eyes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maeve Binchy was born and educated in Dublin. She is the bestselling author of The Return Journey, Evening Class, This Year It Will Be Different, The Glass Lake, The Copper Beech, The Lilac Bus, Circle of Friends, Silver Wedding, Firefly Summer, Echoes, Light a Penny Candle, London Transports, Scarlet Feather, Quentins, Nights of Rain and Stars, and Whitethorn Woods. She has written two plays and a telephlay that won three awards at the Prague Film Festival. She has been writing for The Irish Times since 1969 and lives with her husband, writer and broadcaster Gordon Snell, in Dublin.
Books by Maeve Binchy
WHITETHORN WOODS
NIGHTS OF RAIN AND STARS
QUENTINS
SCARLET FEATHER
TARA ROAD
THE RETURN JOURNEY
EVENING CLASS
THIS YEAR IT WILL BE DIFFERENT
ECHOES
THE GLASS LAKE
LONDON TRANSPORTS
THE COPPER BEECH
THE LILAC BUS
CIRCLE OF FRIENDS
SILVER WEDDING
FIREFLY SUMMER
LIGHT A PENNY CANDLE
THE CRITICS RAVE ABOUT
EVENING CLASS
“THE INCOMPARABLE MAEVE BINCHY PROVES THAT STORYTELLING IS ALL…with brilliant exactitude and amazing panache [she] unmasks and exposes with grace, humor, and wit the subtleties, foibles, idiosyncrasies, jealousies, and petty suspicions of contemporary Irish folk like no one else.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“I READ THIS BOOK WITHOUT CEASING…The many threads Binchy strings from one character to another trapped me without a struggle.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“EVENING CLASS IS WARM AND WISE…For my money, any story told by Maeve Binchy is worth a hearing.”
—News & Observer (Charlotte, N.C.)
“A GIFTED STORYTELLER…Inventing a dozen characters whose paths cross in the Italian class, Binchy employs a suspense atypical of so much fiction, where the reader’s delight is in being surprised.”
—The Washington Post
“HER BEST YET…MAEVE BINCHY HAS DONE IT AGAIN! Yes, she’s written another provocative, lovely novel on people in Ireland…. If the reader is a fan of Ms. Binchy, this book is a must!”
—Colfax County Press (Clarkson, Nebr.)
EVENING CLASS
A Delta Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Delacorte Press hardcover edition published February 1997
Dell mass market edition published April 1998
Delta Trade Paperback edition / June 2007
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1996 by Maeve Binchy
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96034069
Delta is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-440-33414-9
v3.0
Table of Contents
TITLE PAGE
Contents
DEDICATION
AIDAN
SIGNORA
BILL
KATHY
LOU
CONNIE
LADDY
FIONA
VIAGGIO
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BOOKS BY MAEVE BINCHY
COPYRIGHT
Maeve Binchy, Evening Class
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