Evening Class by Maeve Binchy, Kate Binchy Page A

silent. They looked at each other for a while. Then he spoke. ‘Your father asked me to come and meet the family but I said we should wait until September. I said to him that September was a long way away and who knows what could have happened by then.’ She shrugged. ‘I wasn’t thinking of myself, actually I was thinking of you. Either you’ll still be full of scorn and anger about me, and you can be out the day I call. Or maybe we will love each other fully and truly and know that all that happened here today was just some spectacularly bad timing.’
    She said nothing.
    ‘So September it is,’ he said.
    ‘Right.’ She turned to go.
    ‘I’ll leave it to you to contact me, Grania. I’ll be here, I’d love to see you again. We don’t have to be lovers if you don’t want to be. If you were a one-night stand I’d be happy to see you go. If I didn’t feel the way I do I’d think that maybe it was all too complicated and it would be for the best that we end it now. But I’ll be here, hoping you come back.’
    Her face was still hard and upset. ‘Ringing first, of course, to make sure you haven’t company, as you put it,’ she said.
    ‘I won’t have company until you come back,’ he said.
    She held out her hand. ‘I don’t think I’ll be back,’ she said.
    ‘No, well, let’s agree never say never.’ His grin was good-natured. He stood at the doorway as she walked down the road, her hands in the pockets of her jacket, her head down. She was lonely and lost. He wanted to run and swoop her back to him, but it was too soon.
    And yet he had done what he had to do. There could have been no future for them at all if he had sat down behind Aidan’s back and told the man’s daughter what he didn’t know himself. He wondered what a betting man would give as odds on her ever coming back to him. Fifty-fifty he decided.
    Which were much more hopeful odds than anyone would get on whether the evening classes would succeed. That was a bet that no sane person would take. They were doomed before they even began.

    SIGNORA

    For years, yes years, when Nora O’Donoghue had lived in Sicily, she had received no letter at all from home. She used to look hopefully at il postino as he came up the little street under the hot blue sky. But there was never a letter from Ireland, even though she wrote regularly on the first of every month to tell them how she was getting on. She had bought carbon paper; it was another thing hard to describe and translate in the shop where they sold writing paper and pencils and envelopes. But Nora needed to know what she had told them already, so that she would not contradict herself when she wrote. Since the whole life she described was a lie, she might as well make it the same lie. They would never reply but they would read the letters. They would pass them from one to the other with heavy sighs, raised eyebrows and deep shakes of the head. Poor stupid headstrong Nora who couldn’t see what a fool she had made of herself, wouldn’t cut her losses and come back home.
    ‘There was no reasoning with her,’ her mother would say.
    ‘The girl was beyond help and showed no remorse,’ would be her father’s view. He was a very religious man, and in his eyes the sin of having loved Mario outside marriage was greater far than having followed him out to the remote village of Annunziata even when he had said he wouldn’t marry her.
    If she had known that they wouldn’t get in touch at all she would have pretended that she and Mario were married. At least her old father would have slept easier in his bed and not feared so much the thought of meeting God and explaining the Mortal Sin of his daughter’s adultery.
    But then she would not have been able to do that, because Mario had insisted on being upfront with them.
    ‘I would love to marry your daughter,’ he had said, with his big dark eyes looking from her father to her mother, backwards and forwards. ‘But sadly, sadly it is not