Minding Frankie

by Maeve Binchy

  “Will we agree that Frankie is not on the agenda?” Lisa asked.

  “Frankie who?” Moira said, with a strange kind of lopsided look on her face. Lisa realized that it was meant to be a smile.

  They chose to go to Ennio’s trattoria. It was a family restaurant: Ennio himself cooked and greeted; his son waited on the tables. Ennio had lived in Dublin for rather more than twenty years and was married to an Irishwoman; he knew that having an Italian accent added to the atmosphere. Anton, on the other hand, had said to Lisa that Ennio was a fool of the first order and that he would never get anywhere. He never advertised, you never saw celebrities going in and out, he never got any reviews or press attention. It seemed like an act of independence to go there.

  Moira had often passed the place and wondered who would pay seven euros for a spaghetti Bolognese when you could make it at home for three or four euros. For her it was an act of defiance to go there, defying her natural thrift and caution.

  Ennio welcomed them with a delight that made it appear as if he had been waiting for their visit for weeks. He gave them huge red and white napkins, a drink on the house and the news that the cannelloni was like the food of angels—they would love it with an almighty love. He had opened his restaurant two decades ago and his simple, fresh food had proved instantly popular. Since then, word of mouth had kept the place full to bursting almost every night. Lisa thought to herself that Anton might be wrong about Ennio. The place was almost full already, everyone was happy, there were hardly any overheads. No client was attracted here by style or decor or lighting—nor, indeed, publicity interviews. Maybe Ennio was far from being a fool.

  Moira was beginning to realize why people actually paid seven euros for a plate of pasta. They were paying for a bright, checked tablecloth, a warm welcome and the feeling of ease and relaxation. She could have put together a cannelloni dish, but it wouldn’t be the same as this if eaten in her small, empty flat. It would not be the food of angels.

  She relaxed for the first time in a long time and raised her glass. “Here’s to us,” she said. “We may have had a bad start, but, boy, we’re survivors!”

  “Here’s to surviving,” Lisa said. “Can I begin?”

  “Let’s order his cannelloni first and then you can begin,” Moira agreed.

  She was a good listener. Lisa had to hand her that. Moira listened well and remembered what you said and went back and asked relevant questions, like how old was Lisa when she realized that her parents disliked each other, and irrelevant questions, like did they ever take the girls to the seaside? She was sympathetic when she needed to be, shocked at the right times, curious about why Lisa’s mother stayed in such a loveless home. She asked about Lisa’s friends and seemed to understand exactly why she never had any.

  How could anyone bring a friend home to a house like that?

  And Lisa told her about working as a graphic designer for Kevin and how she met Anton and everything had changed. She had left the safe harbor of Kevin’s office and set up on her own. No, she didn’t really have any other clients, but Anton had needed her to give him that boost and he always said he would be lost without her. Even this time in London, this very morning, he had begged her not to leave, not to abandon him to April.

  “Oh, April,” Moira said, breezily, recalling her lunch with Clara at Anton’s. “A very vapid sort of person.”

  “Vapid!” Lisa seized on the word with delight. “That’s exactly what she is! Vapid!” She said it again with pleasure.

  Moira gently moved the conversation away, towards Noel, in fact. “And wasn’t it great that you found somewhere to stay so easily?” she hinted.

  “Oh, yes, if it hadn’t been for Noel, I don’t know what I would have done that night, the night when I realized my father, my own father, in our own house …” She paused, upset at the memory.

  “But Noel welcomed you?” Moira continued.

  “Well, I suppose ‘welcomed’ might be putting it a bit strongly … but he gave me a place to stay, which, considering he hardly knew me, was very generous of him, and then we worked out with Emily that it might be best if I could stay; it would share the whole business of looking after Frankie and I could have a place to stay for free.”

  “Free? You mean Noel has to pay for you as well as all his other expenses?” Moira’s eyes were beginning to glint. More and more information was coming her way without her even having to ask for it.

  Lisa seemed to recognize that she had spoken too freely. “Well, not exactly free. I mean, we each contribute to the food. We have our own phones and we share the work with the baby.” Lisa didn’t say she was overdrawn on her bank account.

  “But he could have let that room to a real tenant for real money.”

  “I doubt it,” Lisa said, with spirit. “You wouldn’t get anyone paying real money to live in a house with a baby. Believe me, Moira, it’s like ‘Macbeth shall sleep no more.’ It can be total bedlam at three a.m. with the two of us trying to soothe her down.”

  Moira just nodded sympathetically. She was getting more and more ammunition by the second.

  But, oddly, it did not delight her as much as she had once thought it would. In a twisted way, she would prefer if these two awkward, lonely people—Lisa and Noel—should find happiness to beat their demons through this child. If it were Hollywood, they would also find great happiness in each other.

  Lisa knew nothing of her thoughts.

  “Now you,” she said to Moira. “Tell me what was so terrible.”

  So Moira began. Every detail from the early days when she came home from school and there was nothing to eat, to her tired father coming in later and finding only a few potatoes peeled. She told it all without self-pity or complaint. Moira, who had kept her private life so very, very private for years, was able to speak to this girl because Lisa was even more damaged than she was.

  She told the story right up to the present, when she had left Liscuan and come back because the sight of her father and brother having made something of the shambles of their lives was too much to bear.

  Lisa listened and wished that someone—anyone—had ever said to Moira that there was a way of dealing with all this, that she should be glad for other people instead of appearing to triumph over their downfall. She might have to pretend at first, but soon it would become natural. Lisa had managed to make herself glad that Katie had a happy marriage and a successful career. She was pleased that Kevin’s agency was doing well. Of course, when people were enemies like her father was, and April was, then it would be superhuman to wish them well.…

  As Lisa’s mind began to drift, she realized that the woman at the next table was beginning to choke seriously. A piece of amaretto had become lodged in her throat; the young waiter stared, goggle-eyed, as she changed from scarlet to white.

  “What is it, Marco?” asked the young blond waitress—was that Maud Mitchell? What was she doing working here? Lisa wondered—who then, taking in the situation at a glance, called over her shoulder, “Simon, we need you here now!”

  Immediately her brother arrived, and he too was dressed in a waiter’s uniform.

  “She’s getting no air in …,” Maud said.

  “It’s a Heimlich …,” Simon agreed.

  “Can you get her to cough once more?” asked Maud, in total control.

  “She’s trying to cough—something’s stuck there.…” The woman’s daughter was nearly hysterical at this point.

  “Madam, I’m going to ask you to stand up now and then my brother is going to squeeze you very hard. Please stay calm, it’s a perfectly normal maneuver,” said Maud in a voice both firm and reassuring.

  “We’ve been trained to do this,” Simon confirmed. Standing behind the woman and putting his arms around the diner’s diaphragm, he pushed hard inwards and upwards. The first time there was no response but the second time he squeezed her abdomen, a small piece of biscuit shot out of her mouth.

  Instantly she was breathing again. Tears of gratitud
e followed, then sips of water and a demand to know the names of the young people who had saved her life.

  Lisa had been mesmerized by the entire scene and suddenly realized she hadn’t been listening to a word Moira had been saying for the last few minutes. The entire episode had happened so quickly it looked as though few other people had noticed anything amiss. Really, those twins were something else. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the waiter they’d called Marco shake Simon enthusiastically by the hand and then give Maud a hug that looked more than just grateful.…

  Lisa and Moira divided the bill and got up to leave, well pleased with their evening.

  Ennio, in his carefully maintained broken English, wished them good-bye.

  “Eet is always so good to meet the good friends who ’ave a happy dinner together,” he said cheerfully, as he escorted them to the door. They were not good friends but he didn’t know this. If they had been real friends, they would not have gone home with such unfinished business between them. Instead they just touched the levels of each other’s loneliness but had made no effort each to find an escape route for the other or a bridge between them for the future. It was one night made less bleak by a series of circumstances and the warmth of Ennio’s welcome, but it was no more than that.

  It would have saddened him to know this as he locked the doors after them—they had been the last to leave. Ennio was a cheerful man. He would have much preferred to think he had been serving a pair of very good friends.

  Chapter Ten

  Emily had a wonderful weekend in the west with Paddy and Molly Carroll. Dingo Duggan had been an enthusiastic, if somewhat adventurous, driver. He seemed entirely unable and unwilling to read a map and waved away Emily’s attempts to find roads with numbers on them.

  “Nobody can understand those numbers, Emily,” he had said firmly. “They’ll do your head in. The main thing is to point west and head for the ocean.” And they did indeed see beautiful places like the Sky Road, and drove through hills where big mountain goats came down and looked hopefully at the car and its occupants as if they were new playmates come to entertain them. They spent evenings in pubs singing songs, and they all said it had been one of the best outings they had ever taken.

  Emily had told them about her plans to go to America for Betsy’s wedding. The Carrolls thought this was marvelous: a late marriage, a chance for Emily to dress up and be part of the ceremony, two kindred souls finding each other.

  Dingo Duggan was less sure. “At her age marriage might all be too much for her,” he said helpfully.

  Emily steered the conversation into safer channels.

  “How exactly did you get your name, Dingo?” she inquired.

  “Oh, it was that time I went to Australia to earn my fortune,” Dingo said simply, as if it should have been evident to everyone, and it wasn’t asked by one and all. Dingo’s fortune, if represented by the very battered van he drove, did not seem to have been considerable, but Emily Lynch always saw the positive side of things.

  “And was it a great experience?” she asked.

  “It was, really. I often look back on it and think about all I saw: kangaroos and emus and wombats and gorgeous birds. I mean real birds with gorgeous feathers looking as if they had all escaped from a zoo, flying round the place picking at things. You never saw such a sight.” He was settled happily, remembering it all with a beatific smile.

  “How long did you stay there?” Emily was curious about the life he must have led thousands of miles away.

  “Seven weeks.” Dingo sighed with pleasure. “Seven beautiful weeks and I talked a lot about it, you see, when I got back, so they gave me the nickname Dingo. It’s a kind of wild dog out there, you see.…”

  “I see.” Emily was stunned at the briefness of his visit. “And, er … why did you come back?”

  “Oh, I had spent all my money by then and couldn’t get a job … too many Irish illegals out there snapping them all up. So I thought, Head for home.”

  Emily had little time to speculate about Dingo’s mind-set and how he seriously thought he was an expert on all things Australian after a visit of less than two months, ten years ago. She had a lot of e-mailing to cope with to and from New York.

  Betsy was having pre-wedding nerves. She hadn’t liked Eric’s mother, she was disappointed with the gray silk outfit she had bought, her shoes were too tight, her brother was being stingy about the arrangements. She needed Emily badly.

  Could Emily please come a few days earlier, she asked, or there might well be no wedding for her to attend. Emily soothed by e-mail, but also examined the possibility of getting an earlier flight. Noel helped her sort through the claims and offers of airlines, and they found one.

  “I don’t know why I am helping you to go back to America,” Noel grumbled. “We’re all going to miss you like mad, Emily. Lisa and I have been working out a schedule for Frankie and it’s looking like a nightmare.”

  “You should involve Dr. Hat more,” Emily said unexpectedly. “Frankie likes Dr. Hat, he’s marvelous with her.”

  “Do I tell Moira?” Noel was fearful.

  “Most certainly.”

  Emily was already busy e-mailing the good news to her friend Betsy; she would be there in three days. She would sort out the dull gray dress, the tight shoes, the miserly brother, Eric’s difficult mother. All would be well.

  “Moira will be worse than ever when you’re gone,” Noel said, full of foreboding.

  “Just take Frankie to Hat’s place in the afternoon. He plays chess online with a boy in Boston—some student, I gather. Hat gets great fun out of it. He even asked me if I could go to visit him when I was in the States and give the boy a chess set, but I told him that I’d never have time to get all that way in such a short time.”

  “Hat playing chess online! How did he ever learn how to use the computer?”

  “I taught him,” Emily said simply. “He taught me chess in exchange.”

  “I don’t know the half of what’s going on round here,” Noel said.

  “Don’t be afraid of Moira. She’s not the enemy, you know.”

  “She’s so suspicious, Emily. When she comes into the flat she shakes a cushion suddenly in case she might find a bottle of whiskey hidden behind it and looks in the bread bin for no reason, just hoping to unearth a half a bottle of gin.”

  “I’ll be back, Noel, and Frankie will have grown, so she’ll need a couple of new dresses from New York. Just you wait until she’s old enough for me to teach her painting. We can start booking the galleries for twenty years ahead because she’ll be exhibiting all over the world.”

  “She might too.” Noel’s face lit up at the thought of his daughter being a famous artist. Maybe he’d take out his art supplies box from the closet. He had made sure before he moved it that there were no bottles hidden, but he hadn’t had time to draw. Wouldn’t it be a good influence on Frankie if he started drawing again?

  “If she wants it enough it will happen.” Emily nodded as if this were a certainty.

  “What about you? What did you want for yourself, Emily?”

  “I wanted to teach art and I got that and then eventually, when they thought I wasn’t modern enough for them, I wanted to travel and I’ve started that. I like it very much.”

  “I hope you won’t want to move on again from here,” Noel said.

  “I’ll wait until Frankie’s raised and you’ve found yourself a nice wife.” She smiled at him.

  “I’ll hold you to that,” Noel said.

  He was very pleased. Emily didn’t make promises lightly, but if she had to wait for him to find a nice wife … Emily might well be here forever!

  They would all miss Emily. Down at the charity shop there was already confusion. Molly said that Emily was able to judge someone’s size and taste the moment that she walked in the door. Remember that beautiful heather suit that Moira had bought and pretended she hadn’t? People whose window boxes she had planted and tended were beginning to panic that th
eir flowers would wilt during Emily’s three-week absence.

  Charles Lynch was wondering how he could keep his dog-walking business in credit. Emily was always finding him new clients and remembering to segregate dogs of different sexes in case they might do something to annoy their owners greatly. Emily did his books for him so that nobody from the income tax could say that he was anything other than meticulous.

  At the doctors’ practice they would miss her too. Nobody seemed to know exactly where to find this document or that. Emily was a reassuring presence. Everyone who worked there had her mobile number, but they had been told that she couldn’t be called for three weeks. As Declan Carroll said, it was unnerving, just like going out on a high diving board, facing all this time without Emily.

  Who else would know all the things that Emily knew? The best bus route to the hospital, the address of the chiropodist whom all the patients liked, the name of the pastoral care adviser in St. Brigid’s?

  “Perhaps you could get all this wedding business over within a week?” Declan suggested.

  “Dream on, Declan. I don’t want to ‘get it over with.’ I’m longing for it. I want it to go on for at least two months! My very best friend getting married to a man who has adored her for years! I have to sort out shoes that turned out to be too tight, brothers, mothers-in-law, a dress that turned out to be dull. I can’t be dealing with you, Declan, and where you put your dry-cleaning ticket.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to muddle through without you,” Declan grumbled. “But don’t stay away too long.”

  Lisa was just the same. “We can’t phone you if Frankie starts to cough.”

  “Well, you don’t normally,” Emily said mildly.

  “No, but we feel that we could,” Lisa confessed. “Listen, while I have you, Emily, I may have slightly ballsed things up with Moira. We had a meal together and I sort of said or let drop that it was fairly exhausting cleaning Frankie, feeding her, burping her and taking her from place to place. I meant it to be a compliment to Noel, you know, and how well we are managing things, but it came out sounding like a whine or a moan, and of course Moira picked up on it and wondered were we capable of minding Frankie and all that, which was the last thing …”