Evening Class (12 page)

She thought of the old people in Annunziata. Small, bent often over sticks, sitting out in the square watching people go by, always smiling, often touching her skirt and looking at the embroidery. ‘
Bella, bellissima’
, they would say.

Her mother would not be like that. Her mother was a well preserved seventy-seven. She wore a brown dress and brown cardigan over it. Her hair was pulled back as it had always been into that unfashionable bun Mario had commented on all those years ago. ‘Your mother would be handsome if she let her hair be more free.’

Imagine, her mother then must have only been a little older than she was now. So hard, so set in her ways, so willing to go along with the religious line although she did not feel it in her heart. If her mother had just stood up for her things would have been different. For years Signora could have had a lifeline to home, and she might well have come back and looked after them even in the country, the small farm that they hated leaving.

But now? They were only yards away from her… she could have called out and they would have heard.

She saw Rita’s body stiffen still further in irritation and resentment as their mother scolded. ‘All right, all
right
. I’m getting in, no need to rush me. You’ll be old one day yourself, you know.’ There was no pleasure at seeing each other, no gratitude for the lift to the hospital, no shared solidarity or sympathy about going to see an old man who could no longer live at home.

This must be Rita’s day, the next one would be Helen’s, and the sisters-in-law did a small amount of the joyless transporting and minding. No wonder they wanted the madwoman back from Italy. The car drove off with the two stern figures upright in it, not talking to each other, animatedly or at all. How had she learned to love so much, Signora wondered, coming as she did from such a loveless family? It had indeed made up her mind for her. Signora walked out of the neatly landscaped gardens, her head held high. It was clear to her now. She would have no regret, no residual guilt.

The afternoon was as dispiriting as the previous one in terms of job hunting, but she refused to let it get her down. When her journeying brought her toward the River Liffey again she sought out the coffee shop where Suzi worked. The girl looked up, pleased.

‘You actually went there! My Mam told me they had got a lodger out of a clear blue sky.’

‘It’s very nice, I wanted to thank you.’

‘No, it’s not very nice, but it’ll tide you over.’

‘I can see the mountains from your bedroom.’

‘Yeah, and about twenty tons of waste earth waiting for more little boxes to be built on it.’

‘It’s just what I need, thank you again.’

‘They think you might be a nun, are you?’

‘No, no. Far from a nun, I’m afraid.’

‘Mam says you say your husband died.’

‘In a sort of a way that’s true.’

‘He sort of died… is that what you mean?’

Signora looked very calm; it was easy to see why people might mistake her for a nun. ‘No, I meant that in a sort of a way he was my husband, but I didn’t see any need to explain all that to your mother and father.’

‘No need at all, much wiser not to,’ Suzi said, and poured her a cup of coffee. ‘On the house,’ she whispered.

Signora smiled to herself, thinking that if she played her cards right she might be able to eat for nothing all around Dublin. ‘I had a free lunch in Quentin’s; I am doing well,’ she confided to Suzi.

‘That’s where I’d love to work,’ Suzi said. ‘I’d dress up in black trousers just like the waiters. I’d be the only woman apart from Ms Brennan.’

‘You know of Ms Brennan?’

‘She’s a legend,’ said Suzi. ‘I want to work with her for about three years, learn everything there is to know, then open my own place.’

Signora gave a sigh of envy. How great to think this was possible, rather than a further series of refusals as a washer-up. ‘Tell me why can’t I get a job, just an ordinary job cleaning, tidying up, anything. What’s wrong with me? Is it just that I’m too old?’

Suzi bit her lip. ‘I think it’s that you look a bit too good for the jobs you’re looking for. Like, you look a bit too smart for staying in my parents’ house, it makes people uneasy. They might think that it’s a bit odd. And they’re afraid of odd people.’

‘So what should I do, do you think?’

‘Maybe you should aim for something a bit higher up, like a receptionist or maybe… My Mam says you’ve an embroidered bedspread that would take the sight out of your eyes. Maybe you could take that to a shop and show them. You know, the right kind of shop.’

‘I wouldn’t have the confidence.’

‘If you lived with a fellow out in Italy at your age, a fellow that wasn’t your husband, you’ve all the confidence that it needs,’ said Suzi.

And they made a list of the designers and fashion shops where really top market embroidery might find a home. As she watched Suzi sucking the pencil to think of more places to write down, Signora felt a huge fantasy flood over her. Maybe some day she might bring this lovely girl back with her to Annunziata, say that she was her niece, they had the same red hair. She could show the people there she had a life in Ireland and let the Irish know she was a person of importance in Italy. But it was only a dream, and there was Suzi talking about her hair.

‘I have this friend who works in a real posh place cutting hair and they need guinea pigs on training nights. Why don’t you’go down there? You’ll get a great styling for only two pounds. It costs you twenty - thirty times that if you go for real.’

Could people really pay £60 to have their hair cut? The world had gone mad. Mario had always loved her long hair. Mario was dead. He had sent her a message telling her go back to Ireland, he would expect her to cut her hair if it was necessary to do so. ‘Where is this place?’ Signora asked, and took down the address.

‘Jimmy, she’s cut her hair,’ whispered Peggy Sullivan.

Jimmy was listening to an in-depth interview with a soccer manager. ‘Yeah, great,’ he said.

‘No honestly, she’s not what she pretends, I saw her coming in. You wouldn’t know her, she looks twenty years younger.’

‘Good, good.’ Jimmy raised the volume a bit, but Peggy took the control and turned it down.

‘Have some respect. We’re taking the woman’s money, we don’t have to deafen her as well.’

‘All right, but hush talking,’

Peggy sat brooding. This Signora as she called herself was very odd altogether. No one could be as simple as she was and survive. No one with that little money could get a haircut that must have cost a fortune. Peggy hated mysteries and this was a very deep mystery indeed.

‘You’ll have to forgive me if I take my bedspread with me today. I didn’t want you to think I was taking away all the furnishings or anything,’ Signora explained to them at their breakfast next morning. ‘You see, I think people are a bit confused by me. I have to show them that I can do
some
kind of work. I got my hair cut in a place that needed people to experiment on. Do you think it makes me look more ordinary?’

‘It’s very nice indeed, Signora,’ said Jimmy Sullivan.

‘It looks most expensive, certainly.’ Peggy approved.

‘Is it dyed?’ asked Jerry with interest.

‘No, it’s got henna in it, but they said it was an unusual colour already, like a wild animal,’ Signora said, not at all offended by Jerry’s question or the verdict of the young hairdressers.

It was pleasing that everyone liked her work so much and admired the intricate stitching and the imaginative mingling of place names with flowers. But there were no jobs. They said they would keep her name on file and were surprised by the address, as if they thought she would live somewhere more elegant. It was a day of refusals like other days but somehow they seemed to be given with more respect and less bewilderment. Dress designers, boutiques and two theatre companies looked at her handiwork with genuine interest. Suzi had been right that she should aim high.

Could she dare try to be a guide or a teacher as she had been so confidently for half her adult life in a Sicilian village?

She got into the habit of talking to Jerry in the evenings.

He would come and knock on her door. ‘Are you busy, Mrs Signora?’

‘No, come in, Jerry. It’s nice to have company.’

‘You could always come downstairs, you know. They wouldn’t mind.’

‘No, no. I rented a room from your parents, I want them to like having me here in the house not living on top of them.’

‘What are you doing, Mrs Signora?’

‘I’m making little baby dresses for a boutique. They told me they would take four. They have to be good because I spent some of my savings on the material so I can’t afford for them not to take them.’

‘Are you poor, Mrs Signora?’

‘Not really, but I don’t have much money.’ It seemed quite a natural, reasonable answer. It satisfied Jerry totally. ‘Why don’t you bring your homework up here, Jerry?’ she suggested. ‘Then you could be company for me and I could give you a hand if you needed it.’

They sat together all through the month of May, chatting easily. Jerry advised her to make five baby dresses and pretend she thought they ordered five. It had been great advice, they took all five and wanted more.

Signora showed huge interest in Jerry’s homework. ‘Read me that poem again, let’s see what does it mean?’

‘It’s only an old poem, Mrs Signora.’

‘I know but it must mean
something
. Let’s think.’ Together they would recite: ‘Nine bean rows will I have there’. ‘I wonder why he wanted nine?’

‘He was only an old poet, Mrs Signora. I don’t suppose he knew what he wanted.’

‘“And live alone in the bee loud glade.” Imagine that, Jerry. He only wanted to hear the sound of the bees around him, he didn’t want the noise of the city.’

‘He was old, of course,’ Jerry explained.

‘Who was?’

‘Yeats, you know, who wrote the poem.’

Little by little she made him interested in everything.

She pretended her own memory was bad. As she sewed she asked him to say it to her over and over. So Jerry Sullivan learned his poetry, wrote his essays, attempted his maths. The only thing he was remotely interested in was Geography. It had to do with a teacher, Mr O’Brien. He was a great fellow apparently. Mr O’Brien used to teach about river beds and soil strata and erosion and a rake of things, but he always expected you to know it. The other teachers didn’t expect you to, that was the difference.

‘He’s going to be the Head, you know, next year,’ Jerry explained.

‘Oh. And are people in Mountainview school pleased about that?’

‘Yeah, I think so. Old Walsh was a terrible bollocks.’

She looked at him vaguely, as if she didn’t understand the word. It worked every time.

‘Mr Walsh, the old fellow who’s Head at the moment, he’s not good at all.’

‘Ah, I see.’

Jerry’s language had improved beyond all recognition, Suzi reported to Signora. And what was more some teacher at school had said that his work had taken a turn for the better as well. ‘It’s they should be paying you,’ Suzi said. ‘You’re like a private governess. Isn’t it a pity you couldn’t get a job teaching.’

‘Your mother’s asking me to tea on Thursday so that I can meet you,’ Signora said. ‘I think Jerry’s teacher is calling then too. She probably wanted a bit of support.’

‘He’s a real ladies’ man, Tony O’Brien is. I’ve heard a tale or two about him, you’d want to watch yourself there, Signora. With your smart new hairdo and all, he could have his way with you.’

‘I’m not ever going to be interested in a man again.’ She spoke simply.

‘Oh, I said that after the second-last fellow, but suddenly the interest came back.’

The tea party began awkwardly.

Peggy Sullivan was not a natural hostess, so Signora took over the conversation, gently, almost dreamily talking about all the changes in Ireland she noticed and most of them were for the better. ‘The schools are all so bright and cheerful nowadays, and Jerry tells me of the great projects you do in Geography class. We had nothing like that when I was at school.’

And after that everything thawed. Peggy Sullivan had seen the visit of the schoolteacher as a possible list of complaints against her son. She hadn’t hoped that her daughter and Signora would get on so well. Or that Jerry would actually tell Mr O’Brien that he was doing a project on place names, trying to find out why all the streets around here were called what they were. Jimmy came home in the middle of it all, and Signora explained that Jerry was lucky to have a father who knew the city so well, he was better than any map.

They talked like a normal family. More polite than many Tony O’Brien had visited. He had always thought young Jerry Sullivan was part of the group for whom there was no hope. But this odd, unsettling woman who seemed to have taken over the household obviously had a good effect on the kid too.

‘You must have loved Italy to stay there so long.’

‘I did, very, very much.’

‘I’ve never been there myself, but a colleague of mine above in the school, Aidan Dunne, now he’d live, sleep and breathe Italy to you if you let him.’

‘Mr Dunne, he teaches Latin,’ Jerry said in a glum voice.

‘Latin? You could learn Latin, Jerry.’ Signora’s eyes lit up.

‘Oh it’s only for brainy people, ones going on to University to be lawyers and doctors and things.’

‘No, it’s not.’ Signora and Tony O’Brien spoke at the same time.

‘Please…’ he motioned her to speak.

‘Well, I wish I had learned Latin because it’s sort of the root of all other languages, like French and Italian and Spanish. If you know the Latin word you know where everything comes from.’ She spoke enthusiastically.

Tony O’Brien said: ‘God, you really should meet Aidan Dunne, that’s what he’s been saying for years. I like kids to learn it because it’s logical. Like doing a crossword, trains them to think, and there’s no problem with an accent.’

When the teacher had gone they all talked together eagerly. Signora knew that Suzi would come home a little more regularly now, and wouldn’t have to avoid her father. Somehow fences had been mended.