Molly Fox's Birthday

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by Deirdre Madden


  But the young woman playing Cecily was outstanding. So fully and naturally did she inhabit the part that it was impossible to see how she was doing what she was doing, to deconstruct her art into its component parts. Her remarkable presence and charisma were not dependent on her looks, for she was not particularly pretty, and her only distinguishing physical feature, waist-length dark brown hair, I took to be a wig. But there was the voice of course, that beautiful, musical voice. During the interval when the lights came up in the shabby theatre, I took out my programme to see who she was, and I noticed several people around me do the same thing. In the course of the following months I saw her in other plays and noticed her name in the papers. Even when a production was comprehensively panned, she always seemed to escape censure. Only the singularly gifted Molly Fox emerges with honour from this sorry hotchpotch of bad direction and shoddy acting.

  Around the time I left college – I think it was just after Andrew had left for England – something uncanny happened to me one day. I was at a table in a café when I noticed a young woman sitting nearby, with a cup of coffee and a book. Her face was familiar and yet I couldn’t place her. Perhaps she was also a student at Trinity and I knew her face from seeing her in the library or passing her in the squares, without ever having spoken to her. She was wearing a black leather jacket and draped over her left shoulder was a dark brown plait, shiny, and stout as a rope that might tie up a ship. With that, I realised who she was: so it wasn’t a wig after all. She picked up a small brown packet of sugar and shook it hard so that the contents fell to the bottom, tore it open and poured it onto the froth of the coffee. For the next half-hour she read her book and sipped at the mug, while I watched her. Nothing else happened. I have described it as an uncanny incident, and it was. I did not approach Molly – what could I possibly have said? I really liked you in ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’. And what could she have replied? Why thank you very much. What would that have amounted to? Less than nothing. There are forms of communication that drive people apart, that do nothing other than confirm distance. But there are also instances when no connection seems to be made and yet something profound takes place, and this was just such a moment.

  I realised the enormity of her gift. I had been aware of it when watching her on stage, but seeing her here in the café, unrecognised, anonymous, confirmed it for me. It was hers in the same way that her thick pigtail was hers, complete, real, undeniable, hers to do with as she thought fit. I believe that this was clearer to me then than it could have been to Molly, for how we see ourselves, our future, is often tainted by the very hope of what we wish to become. I was at that time already a person of enormous ambition. I knew even then that nothing except being a playwright could ever reconcile me to life; but my gift, I thought, was only a spark. I had none of the effortless brilliance of this other woman. As was the case with Wilde himself, we are at each moment of our lives the persons we were and shall become. The convict in his arrowed uniform who wept on the station platform as people screamed abuse and spat at him had been present years earlier when the same man had been hailed triumphant on the first night of his theatrical success. In the same way, the actor who would give some of the most profound and intelligent performances that one could ever wish to see on stage was already there in that young woman with her coffee and book.

  I like to think that she looks exactly the same as she did when I knew her first, but it isn’t true. The Molly of today is far more groomed and poised than the person I saw in the café all those years ago. The long hair, the leather jacket, the casual slick of lipstick have all gone, but they went gradually, so that her transformation, as is the case with most people, happened slowly over time. It is only now, by making a conscious mental effort or by looking at old photographs, that I can recall her as she was, and I can pinpoint no one day, or even a particular time in her life, when she suddenly appeared to me as having completely changed.

  And what had I been doing in the café on that day? By a strange coincidence, jotting down notes for the play I had just begun to write, and which would make both Molly’s reputation and mine the following year. It was based upon my experiences in London the previous summer, when I had worked as a chambermaid in the morning and as a domestic cleaner in the afternoon and had gone every night to the theatre. My hunger for the stage at that time was intense in a way I now find somewhat alarming. I watched plays with the kind of voracity with which small children read books; with the same visceral passion, the same complete trust in the imagination which is so difficult to sustain throughout the course of one’s whole life. It sat uneasily with my daytime existence, spent in the luxurious squalor of dirty hotel bedrooms and the homes of affluent strangers.

  There was one particular apartment, a place in St John’s Wood, that spooked me from the moment I stepped into it, and I could never understand why. Having grown up in a fairly modest farming background I’d never before experienced such splendour, and I think I expected to be impressed. Instead of which, I fled every day when I had finished to a greasy-spoon café two streets away, where there was always a group of men off a building site, having their tea break. I grew to depend on them, on their yellow hats and their fag-smoke, their tabloids and their laughter. I don’t think they ever noticed me sitting nearby as they ribbed each other and ate bacon rolls, swilling them down with big mugs of tea. The stifling atmosphere of the empty apartment where I worked felt like a parallel universe, and after a few hours there it did me good to be around the builders, to tap into their reality. All the rooms in the apartment seemed too big and were arranged in such a way as to militate against any kind of intimacy and warmth. They lacked such things as books and adequate light by which to read, an open fire or any sign of the presence of children; and no amount of Scandinavian glass, no number of cream sofas, could make up for this.

  After I had been working there for about a fortnight, I turned around from the kitchen sink one afternoon and literally bumped into a young woman. Having believed myself to be completely alone in the flat it frightened me horribly, and I screamed so loudly that I frightened her and she screamed too. We both drew back and cowered, staring hard at each other like animals at bay.

  Let’s call her Lucy. That wasn’t her real name, but it’s what I called her when she became a character in my play. Over the following weeks a strange relationship developed between us that I mistakenly took to be a friendship. The manner of its conclusion proved how wrong I had been. Lucy was about three years younger than I, and had left school at the start of that summer. She hadn’t applied to go to university and didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life. Her boyfriend, she told me, was a film-maker and she was perhaps going to be a photographer, but she wasn’t sure. The brother of a schoolfriend owned a photography gallery in the East End, and maybe she was going to have an exhibition there later in the year. Nowadays I would see through this kind of thing immediately; but this was the first occasion I had come across someone for whom art was a means of avoiding reality rather than confronting it head on, an idea so strange to me that I didn’t fully comprehend it at the time. In some ways she was far more worldly and experienced than I – the film-maker boyfriend was only the most recent of many men – and then at other times she struck me as remarkably naïve and childlike, given her age. The one thing she craved was an audience, and I certainly provided that in due course. In the short term she trailed about the house in my wake as I polished and dusted, while she moaned about her mother and mimicked with little skill her father’s mistress, whom she loathed. I came to realise how lonely she was, and how vulnerable. She adored her father, whose attention she could never hold for as long as she needed, and I grew to pity her. I only had to clean this palace of alienation; she, poor girl, had to live in it.

  She insisted that I abandon my work for up to an hour at a time, to drink coffee with her and to talk about my life, for I was as exotic and interesting to her as she was to me. My childhood growing up on a farm in Northe
rn Ireland fascinated her in a way I found hard to comprehend. I told her that I was the youngest of seven children. I don’t believe I’ve ever met anyone before with so many brothers and sisters. That one of these brothers was a Catholic priest astounded her further. I described to her the wild boggy upland that was my home and my ambivalent feelings towards it. I thought she understood me. I thought she liked me. I thought she was my friend.

  The summer ended and I prepared to go back to Dublin for my final year at college. Lucy wasn’t in when I arrived at the apartment on my last day. I wanted to exchange addresses with her so that we could keep in touch. I thought to suggest to her that she would join me in the greasy spoon so that we could sit for a while in the reflected glow of the builders’ camaraderie. It would do her good. I was in the kitchen when she did at last arrive home, bringing with her a young man. Whether or not it was the film-maker boyfriend or his successor I was never to know. ‘I’ll see you in a while,’ she said to me, as she took him into the drawing room, which I had already cleaned. I hoped he wouldn’t linger, but they sat there talking for the rest of the afternoon. At the end of my shift I put my head around the door.

  ‘Well, what is it? What do you want?’ Even I knew better than to suggest tea and bacon rolls at a moment like this.

  ‘I’ve finished. I’m off now.’

  ‘So, off you go.’ I couldn’t believe that all the time we had spent together, all our confidences, amounted to nothing.

  ‘It’s my last day!’ I said helplessly.

  ‘So, it’s your last day.’ She turned to the man and pulled a face, shook her little head, so much as to say, You see the kind of people I have to put up with? I withdrew from the room. As I was putting my jacket on in the hall I could hear him ask, ‘Who was that?’ and Lucy’s reply, ‘Oh it was nobody, it was just the cleaner. She’s probably trying to scrounge a tip because it’s her last day, but she’s not getting anything.’ I slammed the front door of the apartment behind me with all the force of Nora departing at the end of A Doll’s House; and I kept this as the conclusion of Summer with Lucy: it was effective, even though it had been done before.

  As soon as my finals were over at university, I took a job teaching English as a foreign language. All my classes were finished by lunchtime every day, and I spent my evenings and nights working on the play. I remember it as a time of great contentment. I wrote the play easily and quickly; I enjoyed doing it. I thought it would always be like this. I didn’t know that forever after it would be a struggle to find the right words, the right form, that this sudden fluency was a gift, never to be repeated. If someone had told me this at the time, how would I have reacted? I’d probably have laughed at them. Youth is wasted on the young.

  Summer with Lucy was a simple play, a two-hander, requiring a single set and providing two good roles for women. One of the characters was based on me; was a sharper, more witty and ironic me, someone whose esprit didn’t wait until l’escalier. The other character was based on Lucy. I think I more than did her justice. I think I did her a favour. The ‘real’ Lucy was ultimately rather a dull girl, peevish and whingeing, with a distinct lack of imagination. I resented the choices and chances her wealth gave her and which she failed to realise. The Lucy I created was a far more complex personality, manipulative, intelligent, vulnerable and sly. The relationship she had with my fictional alter ego was edgier than it had been in real life, with a much stronger bond developing between the two characters and an underlying sense of violence. I knew when I finished it that I’d written a good play.

  But I didn’t realise just how good until it was accepted by Bread and Circus, the first company to which I sent it, and I attended the read-through.

  Is there a more nerve-wracking, a more anxiety-inducing experience possible than first read-through? If so, I hope never to have to endure it. As an actor friend once remarked to me, ‘It makes going on a blind date feel like yoga.’ I think this is why I have no memory of actually meeting Molly, and this is something I very much regret. I can recall being there in the rehearsal room with her. ‘It’s so cold in here. Why is it always so cold? Does this thing work at all?’ and she dragged the old gas heater across the floor, then hammered at the buttons on the side to try and switch it on. She helped me to a mug of bad coffee and asked me if I wanted milk. I was so nervous that I said no, even though I hate black coffee. All her initial conversation with me struck me as bland and oblique. I found her aloof. She chatted more with Ellen, the young woman who was to play ‘my’ character, and who, as a fellow member of the company, was an old friend of hers. I would like to be able to recall being introduced to her, the first words we addressed to each other, but in truth it’s all lost now.

  The read-through itself, though, remains vividly in my mind. Ellen was a fine actor, but Molly was outstanding. Even in that first raw attack on the text, she lifted the whole thing to a new level. I had thought I knew everything – absolutely everything – there was to know about this play, which, after all, I and I alone had written. It was strange to realise that this was not the case. It was like being a composer and hearing the symphony one had, until then, heard only in one’s mind, being suddenly played by a full orchestra, and being taken aback by its depth and resonance, far greater than one could ever have expected. In the course of the hour and a half that the read-through lasted, Molly became Lucy; and in doing so she reminded me, weirdly, of the real Lucy, of the lost and lonely child who had trailed around behind me in the apartment during that hot London summer.

  As I have already said, I don’t know how actors do what they do, so Molly’s interpretation that day seemed almost magical to me, and yet I did wonder, as I was to wonder all through the weeks of rehearsal, what was the secret. It was only while watching her from the wings one night, months later, when the play was already a hit, that I realised one important part of the mystery. It was compassion. Molly never judged a character. I had, at best, felt pity for Lucy, but Molly felt something more. No matter how difficult or unpleasant a character might seem, she could find in herself an understanding of why someone might be as they were and this enabled her to become them.

  The read-through ended. Ellen brought the flat of her hand down hard on the table to represent the slamming of the door that ended the play and we all sat in silence for a few moments. Then Molly tossed her script down and threw her arms wide. ‘We’re all going to be famous!’ she said.

  It’s the sort of foolish, camped-up and half-joking remark any ambitious young woman might make, but it was a memorable moment because she spoke no more than the truth. Within the year Molly, Ellen and I were if not exactly household names then certainly much talked about by anyone with even a passing interest in theatre. As soon as Summer with Lucy opened it became a word-of-mouth hit, a sensation. The first run sold out almost immediately, we revived it later that year in a bigger theatre with similar success. We took it to festivals both at home and abroad, and we all won awards. I was commissioned to write my second play; Molly and Ellen were courted with offers of prestigious roles; in short, we were on our way, launched with as much glory and honour as anyone could desire. Of the three of us, it was actually Ellen who became most famous with the general public in the long run. She moved into television work and made her name in a police drama watched by millions. On the day of the read-through she and the director had somewhere to go afterwards, and so it was to me alone that Molly said, ‘Will we go and have a proper cup of coffee, instead of this sludge?’

  At her suggestion, we went to the café where I had seen her sitting reading. ‘I like this place,’ she said artlessly, ‘I come here all the time.’ Our friendship began there on that day, and the café became a place to which we would often go together, or where we would arrange to meet. I found her much warmer than I had before the read-through, yet still she was reserved. At a nearby table someone had lit a cigarette, and the smoke drifted incessantly towards us. Molly fanned it away with her hand, but I could see that she found it incr
easingly irritating, until at last I said, ‘Why don’t I just go over and ask them to stub it out?’ She looked at me with alarm. ‘No, don’t. They might get annoyed.’

  ‘Well, their smoke’s annoying us.’

  She grasped my forearm to stop me moving. ‘Don’t, please don’t. I can cope, really, it’s not a problem.’ She pleaded with me so vehemently that I felt I had no option but to do as she wished, and let the cigarette smoke drift on. But her behaviour puzzled me, and as we resumed our conversation, at the back of my mind I kept wondering about this. Suddenly it came to me. I knew it was the truth and yet it was a shock: Molly Fox was shy.

  How could this be? I had seen her on stage only a few weeks earlier before more than a hundred people …

  While I had been remembering all of this, drifting in and out of sleep, the radio had been idling. It was seven-thirty, the announcer now said, cutting into my thoughts. He read the news headlines with an air of incredulity, as if even he could hardly believe the horrors – political breakdown, hurricanes, house fires and car crashes – he was sharing with the nation. I rose and went to the bathroom, taking the radio with me. Even though here too Molly had urged me to make free with what was available, I didn’t use any of her rose-scented bath oil in its bottle of smoked glass, the label hand-written in French. By the time I had washed and dressed the weather forecast was being read: it was to be a sunny day, warm and dry. I picked up the radio to take it down to the kitchen with me. I passed the door of the room where I had set up my computer and where I had been attempting to work in recent days. Enough: I could think of that later.

 

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