Evening Class (42 page)

When the family came to visit they got hardly any information about pain and nausea, but a lot of detail about the place she was in and the work it was doing. The hospice was a happy place, open to ideas and receptive to anything new. This is what she wanted them to channel their energy into, not to bringing her sweets or bed jackets. Something practical, something that would help. That’s what Rose wanted from her family.

So they set about organising it.

Laddy got them a second-hand snooker table and gave lessons, and Gus came with Maggie to do cookery demonstrations. And the months passed easily and happily. Even though Rose was very thin now and her step was slower she said she was in no pain, and she wanted no sympathy, only company and enthusiasm. At least her mind was fine, she said.

It was too fine for Gus and Maggie, they couldn’t hide from her the catastrophe that happened to them. They had insured and invested with a company that had gone bankrupt. They would lose the hotel, their hopes and dreams and future. Perhaps there was a hope that they could keep it from Rose. Maybe she could die without knowing what had happened to them. After all, she was so frail now that they could not take her back home to the hotel, as they had been able to do in the early months, for a Sunday lunch with her grandchildren. The only thing they could save from the disaster was the fact that Rose might not know how her investment in them had been lost.

But they could not hide it.

‘You
have
to tell me what it is,’ she said to Gus and Maggie. ‘You cannot leave this room without telling me what’s happening. I only have weeks left of my life, you won’t let me spend them in torment, trying to work out what is. Letting me imagine it even worse than it is.

‘What would be the worst thing that you might think it is?’ Maggie asked.

‘That there’s something wrong with one of the children?’ They shook their heads ‘Or with either of you? Or Laddy? Some illness?’ Again they said no. ‘Well, we can face anything else,’ she said, her thin face smiling and her eyes burning brightly out at them.

They told her the story. How it was in the papers that the assets were gone. There was nothing left in the funds to meet the calls that were being made. Then the plausible man Harry Kane had said on television that nobody would lose their investment, the banks would rescue them, but people still feared they would. Nothing was clear.

Tears poured down Rose’s face. Gypsy Ella had never told her this. She cursed herself for believing the fortune teller in the beginning. She cursed Harry Kane and all belonging to him for his greed and theft. They had never seen her so angry.

‘I knew we shouldn’t have told you,’ Gus said dismally.

‘No, of course you had to tell me. And swear you’ll tell me every single thing that happens from now on. If you tell me that it’s fine and it isn’t, I’ll know, and I’ll never forgive you.’

‘I’ll show you every page of the paperwork, Mam,’ he said.

‘And if he doesn’t, I will,’ Maggie promised.

‘And Mam, suppose it
does
go down you know, and we have to get another job, you know we’ll take Laddy with us.’

‘Of course she knows that,’ said Maggie scornfully.

And as the days passed they brought her letters from the bank. And there did seem to be a rescue package. Their investment had been shaken but not lost. She read the small print carefully to make sure there was nothing she had missed.

‘Does Laddy understand how near we came to losing everything?’ she asked.

‘He understands at a level of his own,’ said Maggie, and with a great rush of relief Rose realised that whatever happened when she was gone, Laddy would be in safe, understanding hands.

She died peacefully.

She never knew that a woman called Siobhan Casey would call to the hotel and explain that a substantial reinvestment would now be called for, to make up for the hotel having been rescued. Miss Casey pointed out that in similar circumstances when a limited company had failed investors had not been recompensed, and that the money payable to the Neils for their hotel had come from the personal finances of Mr Kane, who was now being supported in his new venture by all those whose businesses he had saved.

There was an element of secrecy about it which was called confidentiality. The paperwork looked impressive but it was requested that it should not be put through the books in the normal way. It was a gentleman’s agreement, nothing for the accountants to be involved in.

At first the amount suggested was not large, but then it increased. Gus and Maggie worried about it. But they
had
been pulled out of the fire when they assumed everything was gone. Perhaps in the swings and roundabouts of business this was accepted practice. Miss Casey spoke of her associates in a slightly respectful tone as if these were people of immense power, people it might be foolish to cross.

Gus knew that if his mother were alive she would be against it. This made him worry about why he was being so naive as to go ahead with it. They told Laddy nothing. They just made economies. They couldn’t get a new boiler when they needed one, and they didn’t replace the hall carpet, they bought a cheap rug instead to cover the worn bit. But Laddy realised that something was wrong and it worried him. It couldn’t be that they didn’t have enough business, the customers were coming in thick and fast. But the Hearty Irish Breakfasts weren’t as hearty as they used to be, and Maggie said there was no need for Laddy to go to the market for fresh flowers any more, they were too dear. And when one of the waitresses left she wasn’t replaced.

They were getting a fair few Italians now, and Paolo who worked in the chip shop was worn out coming to translate. ‘One of you should learn to speak the language,’ he said to Gus. ‘I mean, we’re all Europeans, but none of you are even trying.’

‘I had hoped the girls might be interested in languages,’ Gus had apologised. But it hadn’t happened.

An Italian businessman, his wife and two sons came to stay in the hotel. The man was holed up in offices with the Irish Trade Board all day, his wife was in the shops fingering soft Irish tweed and examining jewellery. Their two teenage sons were bored and discontented. Laddy offered to take them to play snooker. Not in a hall where there would be smoking and drinking and gambling but in a Catholic Boys’ Club where they would come to no harm. And he completely transformed their holiday.

From Paolo he got a written list…
tavola da biliardo, sala da biliardo, stecca da biliardo
. The boys responded by learning the words in English: billiard table, cue.

They were a wealthy family. They lived in Roma, that was all Laddy could get from them. When they were leaving they had their photograph taken with him outside the hotel. Then they got into their taxi and went to the airport. On the footpath when the taxi pulled away Laddy saw the roll of notes. Irish bank notes tightly wrapped together with a rubber band. He looked up to see the taxi disappearing. They would never know where they had dropped it. They might not notice it until they got home. They were wealthy people, they wouldn’t miss it. The woman had spent a fortune in Grafton Street every time she had got near the place. They wouldn’t need this money.

Not like Maggie and Gus, who badly needed some things. Nice new menu holders, for example. Theirs had become very stained and tattered. They needed a new sign over the door. He thought along these lines for about four minutes, then he sighed, and got the bus out to the airport to give them back the money they had lost.

He found them checking in all their lovely expensive soft leather luggage. For a moment he wavered again but then he thrust out his big hand before he could change his mind.

The Italian family all hugged him. They shouted out to everyone around about the generosity and the marvellousness of the Irish. Never had they met such good people in their lives. Some notes were peeled off and put into Laddy’s pocket. That wasn’t important.

‘
Può venire alia casa. La casa a Roma
,’ they begged him.

‘They’re asking you to go to Rome to stay with them,’ translated people in the queue, pleased to hear such enthusiasm for one of their own.

‘I know,’ said Laddy, his eyes shining. ‘And what’s more I’ll go. I had my fortune told years ago, and she said I’d go abroad across the water.’ He beamed at everyone. The Italians all kissed him again and he went back on the bus. He could hardly wait to tell them his good news.

Gus and Maggie talked about it that night.

‘Maybe he’ll forget it in a few days,’ Gus said.

‘Why couldn’t they just have given him the tip and left it?’ Maggie wondered. Because they knew in their hearts that Laddy would think he was invited to stay with these people in Rome and that he would prepare for it and then his heart would break.

‘I’ll need to get a passport, you know,’ Laddy said next day.

‘Won’t you need to learn to speak Italian first?’ Maggie said with a stroke of genius.

If they could delay the whole expedition for some time, Laddy might be persuaded that the trip to Rome was only a dream.

In his snooker club Laddy asked around about Italian lessons.

A van driver he knew called Jimmy Sullivan said there was a great woman altogether called Signora who had come to live with them, and she was starting Italian lessons up in Mountainview school.

Laddy went up to the school one evening and booked. ‘I’m not very well educated, do you think I’d be able to keep up with the lessons?’ he asked the woman called Signora when he was paying his money.

‘Oh, there’ll be no problem about that. If you love the whole idea of it we’ll have you speaking it in no time,’ she said.

‘It’ll only be two hours off on Tuesday and Thursday evening,’ Laddy said in a pleading tone to Gus and Maggie.

‘Take all the time you like, for God’s sake, Laddy. Don’t you work a hundred hours a week as it is?’

‘You were quite right that I shouldn’t go out there like a fool. Signora says she’ll have me speaking it in no time.’

Maggie closed her eyes.
What
had made her open her mouth and get him to go to Italian lessons? The notion of poor Laddy keeping up with an evening class was ludicrous.

He was very nervous on the first evening so Maggie went with him.

They looked a decent crowd going in to the rather bleak-looking school yard. The classroom was all decorated with pictures and posters and there even seemed to be plates of cheese and meat that they would eat later. The woman in charge was giving them big cardboard labels with their names on, translating them into an Italian form as she went along.

‘Laddy,’ she said. ‘Now that’s a hard one. Do you have any other name?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Laddy sounded fearful and apologetic.

‘No, that’s fine. Let’s think of a nice Italian name that sounds a bit like it. Lorenzo! How about that?’ Laddy looked doubtful, but Signora liked it. ‘Lorenzo,’ she said again and again, rolling the word. ‘I think that’s the right name. We don’t have any other Lorenzos in the class.’

‘Is that what all the people called Laddy in Italy call themselves?’ he asked eagerly.

Maggie waited, biting her lip.

‘That’s it, Lorenzo,’ said the woman with the strange hair and the huge smile.

Maggie went back to the hotel. ‘She was a nice person,’ she told Gus. ‘There’d be no way she’d make poor Laddy feel a fool or anything. But I’d give it three lessons before he has to give it up.’

Gus sighed. It was just one more thing to sigh about these days.

They couldn’t have been more wrong about the class. Laddy loved it. He learned the phrases that they got as homework each week as if his very life depended on it. When any Italians came to the hotel he greeted them warmly in Italian, adding
mi chiamo Lorenzo
with a sense of pride, as if they should have expected the porter at a small Irish hotel to be called something like that. The weeks went on and often on nights when it rained they saw Laddy being driven home to the door in a sleek BMW.

‘You should ask your lady friend in, Laddy.’ Maggie had peered out a few times and just seen the profile of a handsome woman driving the car.

‘Ah no, Constanza has to get back. She has a long drive home,’ he said.

Constanza! How had this ridiculous teacher hypnotised the whole class into her game-playing. She was like some pied piper. Laddy missed a snooker competition which he would definitely have won because he couldn’t let down the Italian class. It was parts of the body that week and he and Francesca would have to point out to the class things like their throats and elbows and ankles. He had them all learned:
la gola
he had his hand on his neck,
i gomiti
one hand on each elbow and he bent down to touch
la caviglia
on each foot. Francesca would never forgive him if he didn’t turn up. He’d miss the snooker competition, there’d be another. There wouldn’t be another day with parts of the body.
He
would be furious if Francesca didn’t turn up because she was in some sort of competition or other.

Gus and Maggie looked at each other, amazed. They decided that it was good for him. They had to believe that, other things were so grim at the moment. There were improvements that were now pressing and they just couldn’t afford to make them. They had told Laddy that things were difficult but he didn’t appear to have taken it on board. They were trying to live one day at a time. At least Laddy was happy for the moment. At least Rose had died thinking all was well.

Sometimes Laddy found it hard to remember all the vocabulary. He hadn’t been used to it at school where the Brothers hadn’t seemed to need too much studying from him. But in this class he was expected to keep up.

Sometimes he sat, fingers in ears on the wall of the school yard, learning the words. Trying to remember the emphasis.
Dov‘è il dolore
, you must say that in a questioning way. It was the thing the doctor would say to you when you ended up in hospital. You wouldn’t want to be an eejit and not know where you were hurting, so remember what he would ask.
Dov’e il dolore
, he said over and over.