Free Evening Class by Maeve Binchy, Kate Binchy Page A

Sunday and cooked pasta Norma, with aubergines and tomatoes. ‘Do you know why it’s called pasta Norma, Signora?’
    ‘No, Signora Leone. I’m afraid I don’t.’
    ‘Because it’s so good it is reaching the same height of perfection as the opera Norma by Bellini.’
    ‘Who was, of course, Sicilian,’ Signora finished proudly. They patted her hand. She knew so much about their country, their village. Who could fail to be delighted with her?
    Paolo and Gianna, who had the little pottery shop, made her a special jug. They had written Signora d’Irlanda on it. And they put a little piece of gauze over it with beads at the edge. It was to keep her water fresh at night. No flies could get in, or dust in the hot summers. People came in and did little jobs for the old couple whose house she lived in, so that Signora would not have to worry about earning her rent. And, bathed in all this friendship and indeed love, she became well and strong again. And she knew she was loved here even if she wasn’t loved back home in Dublin, where the letters were written with greater frequency, wanting to know her plans.
    She wrote back almost dreamily of life in Annunziata, and how she was so needed here, by the old people upstairs who relied on her. By the Leone family who fought so often and so volubly, she had to go to lunch there every Sunday to make sure they didn’t kill each other. She wrote about Mario’s hotel and how much it depended on tourism so everyone in the village had to pull together to get the visitors to come. Her own job was to guide tourists around and she had found a lovely place to take them on a little escorted walk, to a kind of ledge that looked down over the valleys and up at the mountain.
    She had suggested that Mario’s younger brother open a little cafe there. It was called Vista del Monte, mountain view—but didn’t it sound so much more wonderful in Italian?
    She expressed sympathy for her father, who now spent much of his time in hospital. How right it had been for them to sell the farm and move to Dublin. And for mother now struggling, they told her, to manage in a flat in Dublin. So often they had explained that the flat had an extra bedroom, and so often she ignored the information, only enquiring after her parents’ health and wondering vaguely about the postal services, saying that she had written so regularly since 1969 and now here they were in the eighties and yet her parents had never been able to reply to a letter. Surely the only explanation was that all the letters must have gone astray.
    Brenda wrote a letter of high approval.
    ‘Good girl yourself. You have them totally confused. I’d say you’ll have a letter from your mother within the month. But stick to your guns. Don’t come home for her. She wouldn’t write unless she had to.’
    The letter came, and Signora’s heart turned over at her mother’s familiar writing. Yes, familiar even after all these years. She knew every word had been dictated by Helen and Rita.
    It skated over twelve years of silence, of obstinate refusal to reply to the beseechings of her lonely daughter overseas. It blamed most of it on ‘your father’s very doctrinaire attitudes to morality’. Signora smiled wanly to herself at the phrase. If she were to look at a writing pad for a hundred years, her mother could not have come up with such an expression.
    In the last paragraph the letter said: ‘Please come home, Nora. Come home and live with us. We will not interfere with your life but we need you, otherwise we would not ask.’
    And otherwise they would not have written, Signora thought to herself. She was surprised that she did not feel more bitter, but that had all passed now. She had been through it when Brenda had written saying how they didn’t care about her as a person, only as someone who would look after elderly and unbending parents.
    Here in her peaceful life she could afford to feel sorry for them. Compared to what she had in life,