Minding Frankie

by Maeve Binchy

  Moira looked at Erin. “It’s great that he’s here with you. He has had so little warmth and affection. He was never in a loving family. You won’t … you wouldn’t …”

  Erin interrupted her. “He’s found a loving family now and here he will stay. Rest assured of that.”

  “Thank you, I will,” Moira said.

  “And come back and see us again and when you do, stay in our house—don’t be paying fancy prices up in Stella Maris.”

  “How did you know I was there?”

  “One of my friends works there. She rang and told me you were asking questions about me. Harry’s long gone, Moira. He’s not coming back. Pat is staying. He is exactly what we all need. He’s cheerful and happy and reliable and always there. I didn’t have that before, and for me it’s lovely too.”

  Moira gave her an awkward hug and went back to Stella Maris.

  “I wonder if it will be an inconvenience if I cancel tonight’s booking? I find I have to go back to Dublin on the afternoon train.”

  “No problem, Ms. Tierney. I’ll just prepare your bill for one night. Will you be coming back to us again?”

  Moira remembered that Erin had a friend here who reported things.

  “Well, I may stay with Erin O’Leary next time. She very kindly invited me. I was so pleased.”

  “Very nice,” the receptionist said. “Always nice to stay in a family home.…”

  Moira looked out the window at the rain-covered countryside. Cows standing wet and bewildered, horses sheltering under trees, sheep oblivious to the weather, farmers in rain gear going along narrow lanes.

  Most people on the train were going to Dublin for some outing or activity. Or else they were going back to a family. Moira was going home to an empty flat halfway through the long weekend. She could not bear to stay in the place where her brother and her father had found such happiness and where she had found nothing but resentment and sadness.

  It was still early enough to go somewhere. But where? She was hungry, but she didn’t feel like going to a café or a restaurant on her own. She went into a shop to buy a bar of chocolate.

  “Gorgeous day, isn’t it? The rain’s gone,” said a woman about her own age behind the counter.

  “Yes, it is,” Moira said, surprised she hadn’t noticed that the weather had improved.

  “I’ve only another hour here and then I’m off,” the shop assistant confided. She had stringy hair and a big smile.

  “And where will you go to?” Moira asked. She wasn’t being polite; she was interested. Possibly this woman, like everyone else in the universe, had a huge, loving family dying for her shift to finish.

  “I’ll go out to the sea by train,” she said. “Don’t know where yet, but maybe Blackrock, Dun Laoghaire, Dalkey or even Bray. Anywhere I can walk beside the sea, have a bag of chips and an ice cream. Maybe I’ll have a swim, maybe I’ll meet a fellow. But I wouldn’t be standing indoors here all day with the sun shining outside and everyone else free as a bird.”

  “And you’d do all this by yourself?” Moira was curious.

  “Isn’t that the best part? No one else to please, and all my options open.”

  Moira walked out thoughtfully. She had never taken the train out to the seaside. Not in all her years in Dublin. If work brought her that way, she would go. Not otherwise. She didn’t know that people did that—just went out to the sea, like children in storybooks.

  That’s what she would do now. She would walk on beside the River Liffey until she caught the little train south. She would sit beside the sea, go for a paddle, maybe. It would calm her, soothe her. Oh, yes, there would certainly be crowds of people playing at Happy Families or Being in Love with each other, but maybe Moira would be like the woman in the shop who was aching to have the sunshine on her shoulders and arms and watch the sea lapping gently towards the shore.

  That’s what she would do. She would spend some of the long weekend by the sea.

  Of course it wasn’t magic.

  And it didn’t really work.

  Moira did not become calm and mellow. The sun did shine on her arms and shoulders but there was a breeze coming in from the sea at the same time and it felt too chilly. There were too many people who had decided their families must go to the seaside.

  Moira studied them.

  In her whole childhood she never remembered once being brought to the seaside and yet it seemed that every child in Dublin had a God-given right to go to the seashore as soon as the sun came out. Her sense of resentment was enormous and she frowned with concentration as she sat silently amid all the families who were calling out to one another on the beach.

  To her surprise, a big man with a red face and an open-necked red shirt stopped beside her.

  “Moira Tierney as I live and breathe!”

  She hadn’t an idea who he was. “Um, hello,” she said cautiously.

  He sat down beside her.

  “God, isn’t this beautiful to be out in the open air? We’re blessed to live in a capital city that’s so near the sea,” he said.

  She still looked at him, confused.

  “I’m Brian Flynn. We met when Stella was in hospital and then again at the funeral and the christening.”

  “Oh, Father Flynn. Yes, of course I remember. I just didn’t recognize you in the … I mean without the …”

  “A Roman collar wouldn’t be very suitable for this weather.” Brian Flynn was cheerful and dismissive. He was a man who rarely wore clerical garb at all, except when officiating at a ceremony.

  “Did your parents take you to the sea when you were young?” Moira asked him unexpectedly.

  “My father died when we were young, but my mother brought us for a week to the seaside every summer. We stayed in a guesthouse called St. Anthony’s and we all had a bucket and spade. Yes, it was nice,” he said.

  “You were lucky,” Moira said glumly.

  “You didn’t get to the sea when you were young?”

  “No. We never got anywhere. We should never have been left in our home. We should have been placed somewhere … anywhere, really.”

  Brian Flynn saw where the conversation was leading. This woman seemed to have an obsession about taking children away from parents and into care. Or that’s what Noel said, in any case. Noel was terrified of Moira, and Katie said that Lisa felt just the same way.

  “Well, I suppose things have changed a bit … moved on,” Brian Flynn said vaguely. He began to wish that he hadn’t approached Moira but she had looked so lonely and out of place in her jacket and skirt, right in the middle of all the seaside people.

  “Do you ever feel your work is hopeless, Father?”

  “I wish you’d call me Brian. No, I don’t feel it’s hopeless. I think we get things wrong from time to time. I mean the Church does. It doesn’t adapt properly. And I get things wrong myself, quite apart from the Church. I keep battering away to get people a Catholic wedding and, just when I succeed, it turns out that they got tired of waiting and got the job done in a register office and I’m left like a fool. But, to answer your question, no, I don’t think it’s all hopeless. I think we do something to help and I certainly see a lot that inspires me. I expect you do too?” He ended on a rising note, but if he was expecting some reciprocal statement of job satisfaction he was wrong.

  “I don’t think I do, Father Flynn, truly I don’t. I have a caseload of unhappy people, most of them blaming their unhappiness on me.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.” Brian Flynn wished himself a million miles from here.

  “It is true, Father. I got a woman into exactly the kind of facility she was looking for—a place with vegetarian cookery and, if you’ll excuse the expression, with religion seeping from the walls. It’s coming down with saintliness, and she’s still not happy.”

  “I expect she’s old and frightened,” Brian Flynn said.

  “Yes, but she’s only one of them. I have a very nice old man called Gerald. I kept him out of a home and stopp
ed a lot of nonsense with his children, built up all the support systems for him, but now he says he’s lonely all day. He’d like to go to a place where they play indoor bowls.”

  “He’s probably old and frightened too,” Brian Flynn suggested.

  “But what about the ones who are not old? They don’t want any help either. I have a thirteen-year-old girl who slept rough. I got her back to her family. There was a row over something—black lipstick and black nail polish, I think. Anyway, she’s gone again. The Garda are looking for her. It needn’t have got this far. All that talking, sitting under a bridge way into the night, and it meant nothing.”

  “You never know …,” Brian Flynn began again.

  “Oh, but I do know. And I know how there’s an army of people lined up against me over that unfortunate child who is being raised by an alcoholic.…”

  Brian Flynn’s voice was a lot more steely now.

  “Noel adds up to much more than being just an alcoholic, Moira. He has turned his life around to make a home for that child.”

  “And that child will thank us all later for leaving her with a drunken, resentful father?”

  “He loves his daughter very much. He’s not a drunk. He’s given it up.” Brian Flynn was fiercely loyal.

  “Are you telling me, hand on heart, that Noel never strayed, never went back on the drink since he got Frankie?”

  Brian Flynn couldn’t lie. “It was only the once and it didn’t last long,” he said. Immediately he realized that Moira hadn’t known. He saw that in her face. As usual he had managed to make things worse. In future he would walk about with a paper bag over his head and slits cut for his eyes. He would talk to nobody. Ever again.

  “I hope you don’t think I’m rude, Moira, but I have to um … meet someone … um … farther along here …”

  “No, of course.” Moira realized that there was less warmth in his face now. But then that was often the case in her conversations.

  Father Flynn had moved on. She felt conspicuous on this beach. It wasn’t her place. Slowly Moira gathered her things together and headed towards the station, where a little train would take her back into the city.

  Most people liked the train journey. Moira didn’t even see the view from the window. She thought instead of how she had been duped. They had even told that priest, who had nothing to do with the setup. But they hadn’t seen fit to tell the social worker assigned to the case.

  Moira could not call to Chestnut Court armed with her new information, since she knew that Noel and his parents had taken the baby off to some small town that she had never heard of—a place with a magic statue, apparently. Or, to put it another way, Charlie and Josie would be investigating the statue. Noel could well have the child in some pub by now.

  She would deal with Emily when she came back from her sojourn in the west with Dingo Duggan, with Lisa when she and Anton came back from London, and eventually she would deal with Noel, who had lied to her. There were so many places where she could put Frankie, where the child would grow up safely, with love all around her. Look at that couple—Clara Casey’s daughter Linda and her husband, Nick, who was the son of Hilary in the heart clinic—they were just aching for a baby girl. Think of the stability of a home like that: two grandmothers to idolize the child and a big, extended family.

  Moira sighed again. If only there had been a magical social worker who could have placed Pat and herself in a home like that. A place where they would have been loved, where there would have been children’s books on a shelf, maybe a story read to them at night, people who would be interested in a child’s homework, who would take her to the seaside on a hot day with a bucket and spade to make sandcastles.

  Coming fresh as she did from visiting the wreckage that was her own childhood, Moira was now determined that she would ease Frankie Lynch’s path into a secure home.

  It would be the only thing that might make any sense of Moira’s own loss—if she could make it right for someone else. All she had to do was to get through this endless weekend until all the cast eventually came back from their travels and reassembled and she could get things going.

  Lisa was actually back in Dublin, even though Moira didn’t know it. There had been some crossed wires in London. Lisa had thought that it was a matter of visiting restaurants and talking to various patrons. April had thought it was a PR exercise and had arranged several interviews for Anton.

  “They don’t have a bank holiday in England this weekend, so it will be work as usual,” April had chirruped to them.

  “Not much work at a weekend, though.” Lisa had tried hard to be casual.

  “No, but Monday is an ordinary day in London and we can rehearse on Sunday.” April’s face was glowing with achievement and success. It would have been churlish and petty for Lisa not to enthuse. So she had appeared delighted with it all; she decided to get out with her pride.

  She had loads to see to back in Dublin, she said casually, and saw, to her pleasure, that Anton seemed genuinely sorry to see her go. And now she was back in Dublin with nothing to do and nobody to meet.

  As she let herself in to Chestnut Court she thought she saw Moira in the courtyard talking to some of the neighbors. But it couldn’t be. Noel and the baby were off in this place Rossmore; Moira, herself, was meant to have gone to the country to see her family. Lisa decided she was imagining things.

  But she looked over the wall on the corridor leading to their apartment and saw that it was indeed Moira. She couldn’t hear the conversation, but she didn’t like the look of it. Moira knew nobody in this apartment block except them. She was here to spy.

  Lisa turned and crossed the courtyard.

  “Well, hello, Moira,” she said, showing great surprise. The two middle-aged women whom Moira had been interrogating shuffled with embarrassment. Lisa knew them both by sight. She nodded at them briefly.

  “Oh, Lisa … I thought you were away?”

  “Well, yes, I was,” Lisa agreed, “but I came back. And you? You were going away too?”

  “I came back too,” Moira said. “And did Noel and Frankie come back as well?”

  “I don’t think so. I haven’t been in to the apartment yet. Why don’t you come up and see with me?” The women neighbors were busy making their excuses and looking to escape.

  “No, no, it wouldn’t be appropriate,” Moira said. “You’ve only just got back from London.”

  “Moira is our social worker,” Lisa explained to the fast-retreating neighbors. “She’s absolutely great. She drops in at the least expected times in case Noel and I are battering Frankie to death or starving her in a cage or something. So far she hasn’t caught us out in anything, but of course time will tell.”

  “You completely misunderstand my role, Lisa. I am there for Frankie.”

  “We’re all bloody there for Frankie,” Lisa said, “which is something you’d realize if you saw us walking her up and down at night when she can’t sleep. If you saw us changing her nappy, trying to spoon food into her when she keeps turning her head away.”

  “Exactly,” Moira cried. “It’s too hard for you both. It’s my role to see whether she would be better placed with a more conventional family … people with the maturity to look after a child.”

  “But she’s Noel’s daughter!” Lisa said, unaware that the other women who had been about to leave were standing there, openmouthed. “I thought you people were all meant to be keeping the family together and that sort of thing.”

  “Yes, but you are not family, Lisa. You’re just a roommate, and Noel, as a father, is unreliable. We have to admit that.”

  “I do not have to admit that!” Lisa knew she looked like a fishwife with her hands on her hips, but really this was too much. She began to list all that Noel had done and was doing. Moira cut across her like a knife.

  “Can we move somewhere that we can have more privacy, please?” She glared at the two neighbors, who were still hovering at the corner, and they vanished quickly.

 
; “I don’t want any more time with you,” Lisa said. She knew she sounded pettish but she didn’t care.

  Moira was calm but furious at the same time. “In all this hymn of praise about Noel,” she said, “you managed to forget that he went off the rails and was back on the drink. That was a situation where the baby was at risk and not one of you alerted me.”

  “It was over before it began,” Lisa said. “No point in alerting you and starting World War Three!”

  Moira looked at her steadily for a moment. “We are all on the same side,” she said eventually.

  “No, we’re not,” Lisa said. “You want to take Frankie away. We want to keep her. How’s that the same side?”

  “We all want what is best for her.” Moira spoke as if to a slow learner.

  “It’s best for all of us if she stays with Noel, Moira.” Lisa sounded weary suddenly. “She keeps him off the drink and keeps his head down at his studies so that he’ll be a good, educated father for her when the time comes for her to know such things. And she keeps me sane too. I have a lot of worries and considerations in my life, but minding Frankie sort of grounds me. It gives it all some purpose, if you know what I mean.”

  Moira sighed. “I do know what you mean. You see, in a way, she does exactly the same for me. Minding Frankie is important to me too. I never had a chance as a child. I want her to have a start of some kind, not to get bogged down by a confused childhood like I did.”

  Lisa was stunned. Moira had never admitted anything personal before. “Don’t talk to me about childhood! I bet mine could leave yours in the ha’penny place!” Lisa said in a chirpy voice. Moira didn’t know what to say, then she surprised herself as much as she did Lisa.

  “You don’t feel like having supper tonight, do you? It’s just that I’m a bit beaten. I was down in my old home and it was all a bit upsetting and there seems to be nobody in town …”

  Lisa ignored the gracelessness of the invitation. She didn’t want to go back to the flat alone. There was nothing in—well, there might be a tin of something in the kitchen cupboard or a pack of pasta in sauce in the freezer. But it would be lonely. It might be better to hear what Moira had to say, but would it only be more of the same?