Minding Frankie - Maeve Binchy [106]
“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 their 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