Minding Frankie - Maeve Binchy [4]
“She taught art in a school, Mam. She might have brought her own pictures,” he had said, and amazingly his mother had agreed immediately.
“You’re quite right, Noel. I have a tendency to make all the decisions in the world. It will be nice having another woman to share all that with.”
Noel mildly hoped that she was right and that this woman would not disrupt their ways. This was going to be a time of change in their household anyway. His father was going to be retired as porter in a year or two. His mother still had a few more years in the biscuit factory but she thought she might retire also and keep Charles company, with the two of them doing some good works. He hoped that Emily would make their lives less complicated rather than more complicated.
But mainly he gave the matter very little thought.
Noel got by well by not thinking too deeply on anything: not about his dead-end job in Hall’s; not about the hours and money he spent in Old Man Casey’s pub; not about the religious mania of his parents, who thought that the Rosary was the answer to most of the world’s problems. Noel would not think about the lack of a steady girlfriend in his life. He just hadn’t met anyone, that’s all it was. Nor indeed did he worry about the lack of any kind of mates. Some places were easy to find friends. Hall’s wasn’t one of those places. Noel had decided that the very best way to cope with things not being so great was not to think about them at all. It had worked well so far.
Why fix things if they weren’t broken?
Charles Lynch had been very silent. He hadn’t noticed his wife’s new hairdo. He hadn’t guessed that his son had drunk four pints on the way home from work. He found it hard to raise any interest in the arrival next morning of his brother Martin’s daughter, Emily. Martin had made it clear that he had no interest in the family back home.
Emily had certainly been a courteous correspondent over the years—even to the point of offering to pay her bed and board. That might come in very useful indeed these days. Charles Lynch had been told that morning that his services as hotel porter would no longer be needed. He and another “older” porter would leave at the end of the month. Charles had been trying to find the words to tell Josie since he got home, but the words weren’t there.
He could repeat what the young man in the suit had said to him earlier in the day: a string of sentences about it being no reflection on Charles or his loyalty to the hotel. He had been there, man and boy, resplendent in his uniform and very much part of the old image. But that’s exactly what it was—an old image. The new owners were insisting on a new image, and who could stand in the way of the march of progress?
Charles had thought he would grow old in that job. That one day there would be a dinner for him where Josie would go and wear a long frock. He would be presented with a gold-plated clock. Now none of this was going to happen.
He was going to be without a job in two and a half weeks’ time.
There were few work opportunities for a man in his sixties who had been let go from the one hotel where he had worked since he was sixteen. Charles Lynch would have liked to have talked to his son about it all, but he and Noel didn’t seem to have had a conversation for years now. If ever. The boy was always anxious to get to his room and resisted any questions or discussions. It wouldn’t be fair to lay all this on him now.
Charles wouldn’t find a sympathetic ear or any font of advice. Just tell Josie and get it over with, he told himself. But she was up to high doh about this woman coming from America. Maybe he should leave it for a couple of days. Charles sighed again about the bad timing of it all.
Dear Emily,
I wish that you hadn’t decided to go to Ireland. I will miss you greatly.
I wish you had let me come and see you off … but then you were always