Evening Class (59 page)

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 could ever 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-centred, he realised.

‘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.

The End