Minding Frankie - Maeve Binchy [11]
He struggled to make out what his father was talking about: walking dogs, minding pets, raising money, restoring St. Jarlath to his rightful place. In all his years of drinking, Noel had not come across anything as surreal and unexpected as this scene. And all this on a night when he was totally sober.
Noel shifted in his seat slightly and tried to catch the eye of his cousin Emily. She must be responsible for all this sudden change of heart: the idea that today was the first day of everybody’s life. Mad, dangerous stuff in a household that had known no change for decades.
In the middle of the night, Noel woke up and decided that giving up drink was something that should not be taken lightly or casually. He would do it next week, when the world had settled down. But when he reached for the bottle in the box, he felt, with a clarity that he had not often known, that somehow next week would never come. So he poured the contents of two bottles of gin down his sink, followed by two bottles of red wine.
He went back to bed and tossed and turned until he heard his alarm clock the next morning.
In her bedroom, Emily opened her laptop and sent a message to Betsy:
I feel that I have lived here for several years and yet I have not spent one night in the country!
I have arrived at a time of amazing change. Everyone in this household has begun some kind of journey. My father’s brother was fired from his job as a hotel porter and is now going to go into a dog-walking business, his wife is hoping to reduce her hours at her place of employment and set up a petition to get a statue erected to a saint who has been dead for—wait for it—fifteen hundred years!
The son of the house, who is some kind of recluse, has chosen this, of all days, to give up his love affair with alcohol. I can hear him flushing bottles of the stuff down the drain in his bedroom.
Why did I think it would be peaceful and quiet here, Betsy? Have I discovered anything about life or am I condemned to wander the earth learning little and understanding nothing?
Don’t answer this question. It’s not really a question, more a speculation. I miss you.
Love,
Emily
Chapter Two
Father Brian Flynn could not sleep in his small apartment in the heart of Dublin. He had just heard that day that he had only three weeks to find a new place to stay. He hadn’t many possessions, so moving would not be a nightmare. But neither had he any money to speak of. He couldn’t afford a smart place to live.
He hated leaving this little flat. His pal Johnny had found him this entirely satisfactory place to live, only minutes from his work in the immigrant center, and only seconds from one of the best pubs in Ireland. He knew everyone in the area. It was worrying to have to move.
“Couldn’t the Archbishop find you a place?” Johnny was unsympathetic. He himself was going to move into his girlfriend’s place. This wasn’t a solution open to a middle-aged Catholic priest. Johnny was in the habit of saying to anyone who would listen that a man must be certifiably mad to be a priest in this day and age and the least the Archbishop of Dublin could do was provide lodgings for all these poor eejits who had given up anything that mattered in life and went around doing good day and night.
“Ah, it’s not really the Archbishop’s job. He has more important things to do,” Brian Flynn said, “but it should be no trouble to find a place.”
It was proving more troublesome than he had thought possible. And there were only twenty days to go.
Brian Flynn could not believe the amounts people were asking as rent. Surely they could never get sums like that? In the middle of a recession as well! Other things kept him awake too. The appalling priest who had broken his leg in Rome falling down the Spanish Steps and who was still out there eating grapes in an Italian hospital. Father Flynn was therefore still acting chaplain in St. Brigid’s Hospital, with all