Molly Fox's Birthday

by Deirdre Madden

  The stairs were carpeted with tough sea-grass and on the return stood a grandfather clock with a big pale face on which the name of the maker and the word Dublin was painted in a flowing hand; above this was a picture of the moon. The clock struck eight as I passed, dissonant against the pips of the radio. Then the newsreader gave the headlines again and more comprehensive details of the troubles of the world, which he still clearly found hard to believe. The usual scatter of letters was missing from the hall mat, reminding me again that it was Saturday.

  In the kitchen I made coffee and toast, squeezed orange juice and boiled an egg. While waiting for it I set a tray, and when everything was ready I carried it out into the back garden. There was music again now. The piano had given way to contrapuntal singing, ancient and pure in high clear voices, evoking the grey cold of an empty cathedral, the shimmering light of a rose window. The back garden was much larger than the front, and quite different in its character. It was long, rectangular and confined by stout stone walls against which grew all manner of trailing plants: ivies and vines, sweet pea and climbing roses. There was a laburnum tree and beneath it metal chairs and a table topped with mosaic, where I settled down with the breakfast tray.

  Near to the wall on the right-hand side was a row of fruit bushes, raspberries, gooseberries and blackcurrants. Molly told me she had planted these after reading a description in an estate agent’s window of a house for sale ‘with mature soft-fruit garden’. A more original and plausible come-on, we agreed, than ‘fine, well proportioned rooms’, or even ‘paddock with own donkey’, something that would be irresistible even to people who didn’t know what a paddock was. And so even though she knew that what was meant was probably little more than a few tatty raspberry canes, a couple of mildewed currant bushes, she decided at once that she too would have to have such a thing. ‘And until such time as they grow,’ she had said, gesturing towards them, ‘this is my immature soft-fruit garden. In the meantime, we can enjoy the raspberries.’ Raspberries: she drew from the word all of its crushed and bleeding sweetness, its soft and jewelled redness.

  At the other end of the garden there was a black-and-white cow. When I arrived at the house to stay some four days earlier Molly had still been there. As we stood talking in the kitchen while she made tea, I happened to glance out of the window and couldn’t believe what I saw. Why was there a cow in her garden? How had it got there, given that the only ways in were either through the house or over the high stone walls? ‘What is it?’ she asked, for I had broken off in mid-sentence. She saw the look on my face and laughed. ‘Don’t worry, you’re not the first to be taken in.’

  The cow was made of fibreglass. Molly said she had seen it outside a junk shop and had known at once that she had to have it. ‘Isn’t it fabulous?’ she said and she laughed again, staring out at the cow, her brown eyes shining and her whole face animated with delight. It was, I agreed. It was fabulous.

  This was a lie. The fake cow was absurd, and it baffled and astonished me that Molly of all people should buy such a thing and put it in her garden. I mean, what was the point of it? Even a real cow seemed a more sensible, if less practical, idea. What bothered me most about this was that I had thought I knew Molly well. We had been friends for over twenty years now, and with the exception of Andrew, she was the last person I would have expected to go in for this type of whimsy. It was out of keeping with the style of the rest of the house, with its kilims and mirrors, its trays of beaten brass and low dark tables of solid wood. Sitting now at breakfast, staring at the cow, I wondered why I hadn’t said this to her. I had always thought we knew each other well enough to be completely honest, at least about something as trivial as this.

  I couldn’t help wondering what Andrew would make of it. I have known Andrew ever since we were undergraduates together at Trinity. I was ostensibly reading for a degree in English Literature, but most of my time was taken up with student theatricals or sitting in my bedsit writing; for I was already determined to be a dramatist. My infrequent trips to the library were usually occasioned by a frantic need to study because of a deadline for an essay, or a tutorial paper to be prepared. Unlike some of my friends, I did not go there night after night to idle away my time: when I went to the library I really needed to get work done. I got into the habit of sitting in the Art History department because I knew I wouldn’t meet any of my friends there and be distracted into wasting time in long whispered conversations. Art History also had the advantage of being nearer the exit than the English section, making it more convenient for the frequent coffee breaks that to me were essential.

  I was aware of Andrew long before I spoke to him or knew who he was. I came to realise that no matter how early I went to the library (admittedly never that early) he was always there before me and at night he never left until the library closed. He habitually sat at the same desk. Surrounded by fortifications of books, great tomes on Romanesque architecture or medieval illuminations, he looked and had the air of a man under siege and toiled with a diligence at which I could only marvel. I remember that he had a silver fountain pen that he kept in a slim wooden box. He removed and replaced it with great ceremony – even then chipped and chewed biros would have been out of the question for Andrew. In time I came to like sitting near him because he created a force field of concentrated energy around himself into which one was drawn. I was less likely to daydream or doodle in the margins when under his influence. He also policed the area, and people who giggled or whispered would be ordered, in a marked Belfast accent, to stop. This was how I discovered that he was also from the north. He was tall and quite heavily built, with thick dark-blond hair that he would ruffle with his hands as he worked, so that by the end of most evenings he looked like a man who had had a bad fright.

  ‘If you give me one of those cigarettes, I’ll buy you a coffee.’ He insists that those are the first words I ever spoke to him, although I can’t remember it myself. It certainly sounds like me, and would tally with my idea that we first fell into conversation on a coffee break at the library doors. We came to acknowledge each other with a smile when I entered or left the library; we came to arrange our coffee breaks so that they coincided. I developed a Masonic gesture – the right hand held somewhat claw-like, the left closed but for an extended, slightly parted index and middle finger – to suggest it was time to stop for a drink and a smoke. He almost always accepted, and from time to time he would also accept one of the apples I usually had in my bag in those days, as an emergency food supply. But while I, once away from the books, would have been quite happy to sit chatting outside the library for the rest of the evening, Andrew would always look at his watch after exactly fifteen minutes and announce it was time for us to go back in.

  What was he like then? I’ve already mentioned the Belfast accent, which was one of the most striking things about him. It disappeared so completely after he went to live in England that I’m still not convinced that he didn’t take elocution lessons. I can detect a faint trace of it only occasionally on certain words or more generally when he’s tired or angry. I doubt if anyone else would notice it at all, and I rather like it because it reminds me of the past.

  Even then he wore his learning lightly and it was quite some time before I realised how quietly brilliant he was. Although he was from a modest background, he had attended a prestigious grammar school for boys to which he had won a scholarship. When I asked him why he had chosen to come to Dublin to study he said, ‘To get away from Belfast, why d’you think?’, but I subsequently discovered that he also had a scholarship to Trinity. While art history was his principal interest and was to remain a life-long passion, I discovered that he was also broadly interested in a great many other things, including history, music, philosophy, literature and drama. ‘You have to be,’ he said. ‘Because they all fit together. There’s no point in looking at them in isolation.’ I think it’s fair to say that I myself knew almost nothing in those days, and his well-stocked mind became a thing of wonder to
me, as did the clarity and logic with which he expressed his ideas. This brilliance was the first thing that I understood about him.

  Later, I realised that he was interested only in artifice. Nature meant nothing to him. It was as if the world around him were there solely to be translated into art. One afternoon, walking across Front Square together, I remarked upon the extraordinary clouds above us. He barely glanced up at them and made no comment. Then, remembering, brightening, he said, ‘Constable did some amazing paintings of clouds; I must show you pictures of them.’ A tree, a painting of a tree: he would always choose the painting.

  One day he asked me, ‘What was the first beautiful thing you ever saw?’ I knew by then that to say ‘A sunset’ or ‘A flower’ was not what he meant, and that a fruit bowl my mother had made of green carnival glass wouldn’t pass muster either, so I told him I had no idea. ‘What about you?’ I asked.

  ‘It was the floor of a church, of all things,’ he said with a laugh, ‘which is ironic, given the way I feel about religion.’ I knew by now that he had no time whatsoever for it. He told me that his parents had been infrequent churchgoers but that when he was about seven, he was taken out of school to visit the local church. ‘I liked everything about it, to be honest – the coloured glass in the windows, the big brass eagle with a book on its outstretched wings, this strange-looking musical instrument, like a piano with loads of metal pipes coming out of it – I’d never seen an organ before, I didn’t know what it was. But the floor was just gorgeous. I mean, now when I think of it, it was probably quite modest, but the colours – terracotta, cream, bottle green, all in patterns and shiny. I hardly dared walk on it and I didn’t want to leave at the end. The service itself didn’t interest me, I just liked the building. That night, I was at home. We were having our tea and I was looking at the floor. It was covered in lino, grey with wee dark red squares scattered across it. I’d been looking at it all my life, but I realised then that it was ugly. I hadn’t known until that day that a floor could be a thing so marvellous you couldn’t take your eyes off it. And it didn’t have to be in church. Sitting there I had a sudden revelation: that things could be beautiful or ugly and that practically everything in our house was ugly. The lino was ugly and the crockery was ugly, the curtains and the rugs, the bedding, and I hated it all. I wanted to live in a house where everything was beautiful. That was a good day. I knew from then on what I wanted.’

  I soon realised that he didn’t much care for the inhabitants of the ugly house, any more than he cared for its fixtures and fittings, and that he’d meant his early remark to me about studying in Dublin to get away from Belfast.

  ‘My father works as a mechanic, my mother’s a housewife. I’ve one brother, Billy. He’s three years older than me and he’s an electrician. I don’t really get on with him. We’re not a close family; we don’t have much in common.’ We were outside the library, drinking coffee as usual and smoking when he told me this, and I was at something of a loss as to know what to say. I was aware it was a stupid question but I asked it anyway. ‘What are your parents like?’ Andrew narrowed his eyes and blew out a long stream of smoke. ‘My mother’s a snob. My father’s a bigot. He would hate you – hate you – on principle. He’d call you a Papish. I must tell him some time that I’m good mates with someone whose brother’s a Catholic priest. That’ll be a laugh.’

  ‘And Billy?’

  Andrew’s face closed. ‘Don’t even ask.’ He dropped the butt of his cigarette into the dregs of his coffee. ‘I’d best get back to the books.’

  I was still very young then and I think I found it hard to imagine a family so unlike my own. My own background amazed Andrew, as it was to amaze Lucy and, in due course, a great many other people; and to begin with, this amazed me. At that time I thought my own family one of the most unremarkable there could be. I was the youngest of seven. The eldest was the priest, Fr Tom, and most of the siblings in between were already married with children of their own by the time I went to university. It all added up to a great warm web of people, sisters and brothers and husbands and wives, nieces and nephews, like some vast, complex soap opera but without the rows and the tension, without the violence and drama. They all still lived in the remote part of Northern Ireland where we had grown up and where my father worked a small farm. My family lived in scattered bungalows, or in semi-detached houses in estates at the edges of small market towns. They worked as teachers and as bank clerks, as nurses and minor civil servants. Two of my sisters stayed at home to look after their babies, and they helped mind the children of the other women in the family who went out to work. They all lived in each other’s pockets, helping each other out, going to the pub together and to football matches, babysitting for each other, giving each other lifts here and there. At the time all this seemed perfectly normal to me. I was unaware that elsewhere in Western Europe, even in Ireland, the nuclear family was shrinking in on itself, as its emotional temperature plummeted.

  Of all my brothers and sisters, I’ve always been closest to Tom, even though he’s sixteen years older than me. Sometimes when we’re all together again, at Christmas lunch or a family birthday, we’ll look down the table at each other and suddenly connect. Over the shouting and roaring, the clash of cutlery and babies bawling, I see Tom and I as contained together in a private silence. Although we may not have what the others have, we know something that they don’t. When I think of Tom, most often that’s how I imagine him, smiling at me, complicit.

  It was Tom who introduced me to the theatre. When I was twelve, he insisted, in the face of my mother’s opposition, on taking me to Belfast to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream. ‘It’ll be money down the drain. How could a child like that understand Shakespeare?’ my mother said.

  ‘She might, she might not,’ was Tom’s mild reply. ‘At the very least it’ll be an outing for her and company for me.’

  In the car on the way to the city, he broadly outlined the story of the play, and this helped me to follow the action on stage. But my mother was right, there was much I didn’t understand, and it was precisely this that drew me in. Certainly I was dazzled by the costumes and the lights, as any child might be, by the idea of actors and the whole strange world of the theatre. But it was the language that enchanted me most. I loved its blunt truth: I am as ugly as a bear, its richly visual quality, that called forth images even more vivid and real to me than the softly glittering scene before my eyes.

  I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,

  Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows

  Afterwards, Tom loaned me his Complete Works of Shakespeare, with its Bible-fine pages. I looked up the text, these words, words, words that I had seen translated into the extraordinary experience of a few days earlier. Because even then I understood that theatre, if it was any good at all, wasn’t something you saw, it was something that happened to you.

  I knew that by this time I should go upstairs and get to work, but couldn’t bring myself to do so. Instead, I made another cup of coffee and took it out to the back garden. The fake cow stared at me blankly. Molly had told me that there was a hedgehog living somewhere in the flower borders, much to her delight. ‘Why are we always so pleased when we see a hedgehog?’ she said. She had always thought of them as slow creatures, she told me, but that this one could move remarkably swiftly when it had a mind to do so.

  One of the strange things about really old friendships is that the past is both important and not important. Taking the quality of the thing as a given – the affection, the trust – the fact that I had known both Molly and Andrew for over twenty years gave my relationships with them more weight and significance than friendships of, say, three or four years’ standing. And yet we rarely spoke to each other of the past, of our lives and experiences during that long period of time. To do so would have been in many instances mortifying. Andrew once said to me, ‘You have the most extraordinary memory,’ to which I replied, ‘I’m very good at forgetting things too,’ and he respon
ded, without missing a beat, ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

  During my first year at college, for example, I frequently went home at the weekends, because I still had a boyfriend in the north, someone with whom I had been going out since I was sixteen. Henry, his name was. He was studying in Belfast at the time; he was going to be a maths teacher. My family was extremely fond of him, and a significant part of those weekends home consisted of him sitting on our sofa with my nephews and nieces crawling all over him; or drinking cups of tea and talking to my brothers about hurling. ‘Sounds like he’s practically one of the family already,’ Andrew said after I’d been talking to him about a recent visit. ‘Your Ma probably thinks you’re going to marry him.’ Marry! Marry Henry, of all people! I actually laughed in Andrew’s face when he said this, but, ‘Think about it,’ he replied. I did, later, and realised with horror (the word is not too strong here) that Andrew was correct. The pattern of my relationship with Henry was exactly that of my sisters when they had been going out with the men who were now their husbands, and there most probably was an unspoken understanding all round that we too would eventually get married and live locally. How could I not have seen it before now?

  I dumped Henry suddenly, brutally, the following weekend. To be sure of a complete break I told him I’d been two-timing him for almost a whole term with someone in Dublin, and he was suitably, understandably, hurt. ‘What’s this man’s name then?’ he asked me coldly, and I almost spoiled it, almost blurted out, ‘I don’t know.’ Henry’s pain was nothing compared to my mother’s anger. ‘I don’t know what kind of airs and graces you’re getting about yourself at that university, madam, that the likes of Henry isn’t good enough for you now. Leading him on like that, what must he think of us?’ By Sunday night, my mother and I were barely speaking to each other.