Minding Frankie Read online

  But mainly he gave the matter very little thought.

  Noel got by well by not thinking too deeply on anything: not about his dead-end job in Hall’s; not about the hours and money he spent in Old Man Casey’s pub; not about the religious mania of his parents, who thought that the Rosary was the answer to most of the world’s problems. Noel would not think about the lack of a steady girlfriend in his life. He just hadn’t met anyone, that’s all it was. Nor indeed did he worry about the lack of any kind of mates. Some places were easy to find friends. Hall’s wasn’t one of those places. Noel had decided that the very best way to cope with things not being so great was not to think about them at all. It had worked well so far.

  Why fix things if they weren’t broken?

  Charles Lynch had been very silent. He hadn’t noticed his wife’s new hairdo. He hadn’t guessed that his son had drunk four pints on the way home from work. He found it hard to raise any interest in the arrival next morning of his brother Martin’s daughter, Emily. Martin had made it clear that he had no interest in the family back home.

  Emily had certainly been a courteous correspondent over the years—even to the point of offering to pay her bed and board. That might come in very useful indeed these days. Charles Lynch had been told that morning that his services as hotel porter would no longer be needed. He and another “older” porter would leave at the end of the month. Charles had been trying to find the words to tell Josie since he got home, but the words weren’t there.

  He could repeat what the young man in the suit had said to him earlier in the day: a string of sentences about it being no reflection on Charles or his loyalty to the hotel. He had been there, man and boy, resplendent in his uniform and very much part of the old image. But that’s exactly what it was—an old image. The new owners were insisting on a new image, and who could stand in the way of the march of progress?

  Charles had thought he would grow old in that job. That one day there would be a dinner for him where Josie would go and wear a long frock. He would be presented with a gold-plated clock. Now none of this was going to happen.

  He was going to be without a job in two and a half weeks’ time.

  There were few work opportunities for a man in his sixties who had been let go from the one hotel where he had worked since he was sixteen. Charles Lynch would have liked to have talked to his son about it all, but he and Noel didn’t seem to have had a conversation for years now. If ever. The boy was always anxious to get to his room and resisted any questions or discussions. It wouldn’t be fair to lay all this on him now.

  Charles wouldn’t find a sympathetic ear or any font of advice. Just tell Josie and get it over with, he told himself. But she was up to high doh about this woman coming from America. Maybe he should leave it for a couple of days. Charles sighed again about the bad timing of it all.

  Dear Emily,

  I wish that you hadn’t decided to go to Ireland. I will miss you greatly.

  I wish you had let me come and see you off … but then you were always one for the quick, impulsive decision. Why should I expect you to change now?

  I know that I should say that I hope you will find all your heart’s desire in Dublin, but in a way I don’t want you to. I want you to say it was wonderful for six weeks and then for you to come back home again.

  It’s not going to be the same without you here. There’s an exhibit opening and it’s just up the street and I can’t bring myself to go to it on my own. I won’t go to nearly as many theater matinees as I did with you.

  I’ll collect your rent every Friday from the student who’s renting your apartment. I’ll keep an eye open in case she is growing any attitude-changing substances in your window boxes.

  You must write and tell me all about the place you are staying—don’t leave anything out. I am so glad you will have your laptop with you. There will be no excuse for you not to stay in touch. I’ll keep telling you small bits of news about Eric in the suitcase store. He really IS interested in you, Emily, whether you believe it or not!

  I’ll hear all about your arrival in the land of the Shamrock when you get your laptop up and running and read this.

  Love from your lonely friend,

  Betsy

  Hi, Betsy,

  What makes you think that I would have to wait to get to Ireland to hear from you? I’m at Kennedy Airport and the machine works.

  Nonsense! You won’t miss me—you and your fevered imagination! You will have a thousand fantasies. Eric does not fancy me, not even remotely. He is a man of very few words and none of them are small talk. He speaks about me to you because he is too shy to speak to you. Surely you know that?

  I’ll miss you too, Bets, but this is something I have to do.

  I swear that I will keep in touch. You’ll probably get twenty e-mails from me every day and wish you hadn’t encouraged me!

  Love,

  Emily

  “I wonder, should we have gone out to the airport to meet her?” Josie Lynch said for the fifth time next morning.

  “She said she would prefer to make her own way here,” Charles said, as he had on the previous four occasions.

  Noel just drank his mug of tea and said nothing.

  “She wrote and said the plane could be in early if they got a good wind behind them.” Josie spoke as if she were a frequent flyer herself.

  “So she could be here any time …,” Charles said with a heavy heart. He hated having to go in to the hotel this morning knowing that his days there were numbered. There would be time enough to tell Josie once this woman had settled in. Martin’s daughter! He hoped that she hadn’t inherited her father’s great thirst.

  There was a ring at the doorbell. Josie’s face was all alarm. She snatched Noel’s mug of tea from him and swept up the empty eggcup and plate from in front of Charles. Patting her new hairdo again, she spoke in a high, false voice.

  “Answer the door please, Noel, and welcome your cousin Emily in.”

  Noel opened the door to a small woman, forty-something, with frizzy hair and a cream-colored raincoat. She had two neat red suitcases on wheels. She looked entirely in charge of the situation. First time in the country and she had found St. Jarlath’s Crescent with no difficulty.

  “You must be Noel. I hope I’m not too early for the household.”

  “No, we were all up. We’re about to go to work, you see, and you are very welcome, by the way.”

  “Thank you. Well, shall I come in and say hello and good-bye to them?”

  Noel realized that he might have left her forever on the doorstep, but then he was only half awake. It took him until about eleven a.m., when he had his first vodka and Coke, to be fully in control of the day. Noel was absolutely certain that nobody at Hall’s knew of his morning injection of alcohol and his midafternoon booster. He covered himself very carefully and always allowed a bottle of genuine Diet Coke to peek out of his duffel bag. The vodka was added from a separate source when he was alone.

  He brought the small American woman into the kitchen, where his mother and father kissed her on the cheek and said this was a great day that Martin Lynch’s daughter had come back to the land of her ancestors.

  “See you this evening then, Noel,” she called.

  “Yes, of course. I might be a bit late. Lots of things to catch up on. But settle in well.…”

  “I will, and thank you for agreeing to share your home with me.”

  He left them to it. As he pulled the door behind him he could hear the pride in his mother’s voice as she showed off the newly decorated downstairs bedroom. And he could hear his cousin Emily cry out that it was just perfect.

  Noel thought his father had been very quiet today and last night. But then he was probably just imagining it. His father didn’t have a care in the world, just as long as they made a fuss of him in that hotel and while he was sure there would be the Rosary every evening, an annual visit to Lourdes to see the shrine and talk of going farther afield one day, like maybe Rome
or the Holy Land. Charles Lynch was lucky enough to be a man who was content with things the way they were. He didn’t need to numb himself against the dead weight of days and nights by spending long hours drinking alcohol in Old Man Casey’s.

  Noel walked to the end of the road, where he would catch his bus. He walked as he did every morning, nodding to people but seeing nothing, noting no details about his surroundings. He wondered mildly what that busy-looking American woman would make of it all here.

  Probably she would stick to it for about a week before she gave up in despair.

  At the biscuit factory Josie told them all about the arrival of Emily, who had found her own way to St. Jarlath’s Crescent as if she had been born and reared there. Josie said she was an extremely nice person who had offered to make the supper for everyone that night. They were just to tell her what they liked and didn’t like and point her to the market. She didn’t need to go to bed and rest, apparently, because she had slept overnight on the plane coming over. She had admired everything in the house and said that gardening was her hobby so she would look out for a few plants when she went shopping. If they didn’t mind, of course.

  The other women said that Josie should consider herself lucky. This American could have easily turned out to be very difficult indeed.

  At the hotel, Charles was his normal, pleasant self to everyone he met. He carried suitcases in from taxis, he directed tourists out towards the sights of Dublin, he looked up the times of theater performances, he looked down at the sad face of a little fat King Charles spaniel that had been tied to the hotel railing. Charles knew this little dog: Caesar. He was often attached to Mrs. Monty—an eccentric, titled old lady who wore a huge hat and three strands of pearls, a fur coat and nothing else. If anyone angered her, she opened her coat, rendering them speechless.

  The fact that she had left the dog there meant she must have been taken into a psychiatric hospital. If the past was anything to go by, she would discharge herself from the hospital after about three days and come to collect Caesar and take him back to his unpredictable life with her.

  Charles sighed.

  Last time, he had been able to conceal the dog in the hotel until Mrs. Monty came back to get him, but things were different now. He would take the dog home at lunchtime. Josie wouldn’t like it. Not at all. But St. Francis had written the book as far as animals were concerned. If it came to a big, dramatic row Josie wouldn’t go against St. Francis. He hoped that his brother’s daughter didn’t have any allergies or attitudes towards dogs. She looked far too sensible.

  Emily had spent a busy morning shopping. She was surrounded by food when Charles came in. Immediately, she made him a mug of tea and a cheese sandwich.

  Charles was grateful for this. He had thought that he was about to miss lunch altogether. He introduced Emily to Caesar and told her some of the story behind his arrival in St. Jarlath’s Crescent.

  Emily Lynch seemed to think it was the most natural thing in the world. “I wish I had known he was coming. I could have gotten him a bone,” she said. “Still, I met that nice Mr. Carroll, your neighbor. He’s a butcher. He might get me one.” She hadn’t been here five minutes and she had got to know the neighbors!

  Charles looked at her with admiration. “Well, aren’t you a real bundle of energy,” he said. “You took your retirement very early for someone as fit as you are.”

  “Oh, no, I didn’t choose retirement,” Emily said, as she trimmed the pastry crust around the pie. “No, indeed, I loved my job. They let me go. Well, they said I must go, actually.”

  “Why? Why did they do that?” Charles was shocked.

  “Because they thought that I was old and cautious and always very much the same. It was a question of my being the old style. The old guard. I would take children to visit galleries and exhibits. They would have a sheet of paper with twenty questions on it and they would spend a morning there trying to find answers. I thought that it gave them a great grounding in how to look at a picture or a sculpture. Well, I thought so, anyway. Then came this new principal, a child himself, with the notion that teaching art was all about free expression. He really wanted a recent graduate who knew how to do this. I didn’t, so I had to go.”

  “They can’t sack you for being mature, surely?” Charles was sympathetic. His own case was different. He was the public face of the hotel, they had told him, and these times meant the hotel’s face must be a young face. That was logical in a cruel sort of way. But this Emily wasn’t old. She wasn’t fifty yet. They must have laws against that kind of discrimination.

  “No, they didn’t actually say I was dismissed. They just kept me in the background doing filing, away from the children, out of the art studio. It was unbearable, so I left. But they had forced me to go.”

  “Were you upset?”

  “Oh, yes, at the start. I was very upset indeed. It kind of made nothing of all the work I had done for years. I had gotten accustomed to meeting people at art galleries who often said, ‘Miss Lynch, you started off my whole interest in art,’ and so I thought it was all written off when they let me go. Like saying I had contributed nothing.”

  Charles felt tears in his eyes. She was describing exactly his own years as porter in the hotel. Written off. That’s what he felt.

  But Emily had cheered up. She put twirly bits of pastry on top of the pie and cleared the kitchen table swiftly. “But my friend Betsy told me that I was crazy to sit sulking in my corner. I should resign at once and set about doing what I had really wanted to do. Begin the rest of my life, she called it.”

  “And did you?” Charles asked. Wasn’t America a wonderful place! He wouldn’t be able to do that here—not in a million years.

  “Yes, I did. I sat down and made a list of what I wanted to do. Betsy was right. If I had gotten a post in some other school maybe the same thing would have happened. I had a small savings account, so I could afford to be without paid work for a while. Trouble was I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do, so I did several things.

  “First I took a cooking course. Tra-la-la. That’s why I can make a chicken pie so quickly. And then I went to an intensive course and learned to use computers and the Internet properly so I could get a job in any office if I wanted to. Then I went to this garden center where they had window-box and planter classes. So now that I am full of skills I decided to go and see the world.”

  “And Betsy? Did she do that too?”

  “No. She already understood the Internet and she doesn’t want to cook because she’s always on a diet, but she did share the window-box addiction with me.”

  “And suppose they asked you back to your old job. Would you go?”

  “No. I can’t now, even if they did ask. No, these days I’m much too busy,” Emily said.

  “I see.” Charles nodded. He seemed about to say something else but stopped himself. He fussed about getting more milk for the tea.

  Emily knew he wanted to say something; she knew how to listen. He would say it eventually.

  “The thing is,” he said slowly and with great pain, “the real thing is that these new brooms which are meant to be sweeping clean, they sweep away a lot of what was valuable and important as well as sweeping out cobwebs or whatever.…”

  Emily saw it then. This would have to be handled carefully. She looked at him sympathetically. “Have another mug of tea, Uncle Charles.”

  “No, I have to get back,” he said.

  “Do you? I mean think about it for a moment, Uncle Charles. Do you have to? What more can they do to you? I mean that they haven’t done already.…”

  He gave her a long, level look.

  She understood.

  This woman he had never met until this morning realized, without having to be told, exactly what had happened to Charles Lynch. Something that his own wife and son hadn’t seen at all.

  · · ·

  The chicken pie that evening was a great success. Emily had made a salad as well. They talked easily, all three of the
m, and Emily introduced the subject of her own retirement.

  “It’s just amazing—the very thing you most dread can turn out to be a huge blessing in disguise! I never realized until it was over that I spent so much of my life on trains and crosstown buses. No wonder there were no hours left to learn the Internet and small-scale gardening.”

  Charles watched in admiration. Without ever appearing to have done so, she was making his path very smooth. He could tell Josie tomorrow, but maybe he would tell her now, this very minute.

  It was much easier than he would ever have believed possible. He explained slowly that he had been thinking for a long time about leaving the hotel. The matter had come up recently in conversation and, amazingly, it turned out that it would suit the hotel too and so the departure would be by mutual agreement. All he had to do now was make sure that he was going to get some kind of reasonable compensation.

  He said that for the whole afternoon his head had been bursting with ideas for what he would like to do.

  Josie was taken aback. She looked at Charles anxiously in case this was just a front. Perhaps he was only blustering when inside he was very upset. But inasmuch as she could see he seemed to be speaking from the heart.

  “I suppose it’s what Our Lord wants for you,” she said piously.

  “Yes, and I’m grabbing it with both hands.” Charles Lynch was indeed telling the truth. He had not felt so liberated for a long time. Since talking to Emily today at lunchtime, he had begun to feel that there was a whole world out there.

  Emily moved in and out, clearing dishes and bringing in some dessert, and from time to time she entered the conversation easily. When her uncle said he had to walk Mrs. Monty’s dog until she was released from wherever she was, Emily suggested that Charles could mind other people’s dogs as well.

  “That nice man Paddy Carroll, the butcher, has a huge dog named Dimples who needs to lose at least ten pounds,” she said enthusiastically.

  “I couldn’t ask Paddy for money,” Charles protested.