Minding Frankie - Maeve Binchy [100]
“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 stopped 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