For young Irishman Damian, working as a carer in London had never been his dream job, but he enjoys it and it pays the bills. When he’s booked to look after Frankie, an 84-year-old Irish woman with a broken ankle, he’s irked because lumping Irish people together annoys him. It reminds him of the way straight people urge him to meet their other gay friend “as if their sexuality reduced them to dogs on a play date in the park”.
In turn, Frankie feels that her oversolicitous friend, Nora, has foisted an unneeded caregiver on her. Then, over long sleepless nights, Frankie tells Damian about her life. Not unexpectedly, it turns out to be a hell of a story.
Norton has previously shown us – this is his sixth novel – that he is very good at small-town Ireland. At lifelong secrets, and yearning, and beady-eyed gossips. He’s good at portraying women, too.
Frankie grew up in small-town Ireland. Aged 11, she is orphaned and sent to live with her aunt and uncle. He is a Church of Ireland minister and the couple provide a joyless and puritanical home. Even a parish social gathering – held so that “Protestants could meet, marry and produce babies to be used like sandbags against the constant spring tide of Roman Catholic births” – is denied a teenage Frankie.
Instead, she is married off to a middle-aged canon who, yes, turns out to have his own sexual secrets. A frustrated, still virginal, Frankie is caught kissing a handsome local man and is banished from the area by the canon. She flees to London.
There, she seeks out old school friend Nora, who opens the door of her Pimlico flat “looking cool and crisp, a white shirt tucked into some high-waisted black trousers”. Nora is now an emphatically out lesbian. Theatre agent Van, one of Nora’s friends, gives Frankie a job accompanying her to New York for a work trip.
It turns out Van has her own designs on Frankie, and when Frankie rejects her, Van kicks her out of the hotel and destroys her ticket home. Frankie is marooned. Then she meets Joe.
She lives in New York for the next 30 years. She marries Joe, who goes from being a driver to a celebrated gallery artist. His art involves murals and mosaics, and when Frankie – finding her true passion – starts running a boutique restaurant, Joe decorates it with rivers of tiny cars, mannequin hands and jungle motifs. People come from far and wide for the famous food and art.
Through all this, doughty Frankie keeps her feet firmly on the ground, and tries to ensure the mercurial Joe does, too.
The art scene in New York in the 1960s and 70s is portrayed vividly. As is the voraciousness of ambition: when news comes that Warhol had been shot, “Joe, sitting at the bar, had blurted out ‘Is he dead?’ so quickly that he didn’t have time to mask the hope in his voice.”
The marriage is good, until it isn’t. Eventually, Frankie returns to London at 50, and her life appears surprisingly empty. “Damian, do not become like me, sat in this flat for 20 years with nothing but memories,” she warns.
He is distraught she feels her best days are so far behind her. But there are heartening twists to come, involving her past and her present.
Damian is lightly sketched, so we don’t get a great deal more than he is Irish, empathetic and gay. Frankie is the unstarry star of the show.
Gently melancholic, this novel is lovely company.
Frankie, by Graham Norton (Hachette, $37.99), is out now.
