Molly Fox's Birthday

by Deirdre Madden

  I have asked myself many times since that day why, so late in my professional life, did I make such a basic mistake as to go against my instincts, to ignore Dislike (ignoring, too, Dislike’s sinister little brother, Distrust). My illness and the subsequent struggle to complete The Yellow Roses had unnerved me. I was rattled, worn out. I needed the energy and confidence, the charmed magic of success that I didn’t feel in myself but that I believed Stuart could bring to the production. In this I was forgetting about my own considerable reputation which was, I suppose, why Stuart swallowed his own dislike of me and wanted to direct the play.

  I found him false. His origins were not dissimilar to my own. We both came from modest farming backgrounds, in a remote boggy part of Tyrone, mountainous and wild, in my case; a croft in the Scottish highlands in his. Stuart held the world that had produced him in contempt. Apart from the accent, which he’d decided to keep, he’d made himself over completely. In itself, I wouldn’t have had a problem with this. Andrew had done the same thing and I’d found it admirable. The difference was that with Andrew I always felt that he had become something he needed to be, something that he was but that had been denied to him until he had the courage to accept it. Stuart was just a phoney.

  For all that, agreement was reached, dates fixed, actors cast and contracts signed: Stuart and I were locked into working together. Molly thought that a certain degree of tension between us might be no bad thing. She told me that she had on occasion done good work with people she didn’t much care for, whom she’d found abrasive or hostile. Even if it was dark energy that was being generated it was still energy, and if it could be converted and channelled into the work it would make for a powerful production. ‘You’re not going to live with this person,’ she pointed out. ‘You don’t have to be their friend.’ Her argument persuaded me, because I realised that I had experienced the opposite situation many years earlier, when a cast, director and technical people had been so fond of each other, such good mates and so uncritically admiring of each other’s efforts, that the end result had had all the edge and power of a school play.

  And so we went into rehearsal. The Yellow Roses was about an Irish couple, Ellie and Lorcan, who had moved to London in their twenties, she a nurse, he a labourer, where they met and married. Now in retirement, Lorcan wants to go back to live in Connemara again, while Ellie insists she wants to stay in London. The conflict between them about this, together with the input from their doctor daughter and schoolteacher son, formed the substance of the play. It was a work that dealt with the nature of home, how it was often a state of mind as much as a place.

  After I left my family to go to university, I never again lived in the north, but it has remained a constant in my life, a touchstone, the imaginative source of so much of my writing. Even this new play I was struggling now to write in Molly’s house was connected with it: the hare’s world was also mine. I have always believed that I know who I am, no small thing in the shifting dream that is contemporary life. I put this down to my background, my identity as solid as the mountainside on which I grew up. With Stuart and the actors we talked in rehearsal about home, about returning. I said that the person in the play with whom I most closely identified was Lorcan. I told them that although I too had lived in London for most of my adult life my plan was that eventually I would live in Ireland again.

  ‘But you can’t,’ Stuart said. ‘You can never go back. Never’ – and when I gently protested against this, he became more vehement, scornful even. Our discussion quickly moved from being a valid exploration of something to help us in the production of the play to personal acrimony. I suppose I had known that going back was as much a wish as a plan, and writing the play had been a way for me to deal with it, to let myself down gently. I knew Stuart was probably right, and he knew that I knew, that was the worst thing. ‘And anyway, why would you want to go back?’

  ‘I do!’ I cried, petulant as a child. ‘I just do!’ He laughed and turned away, changed the subject. He’d rattled me in front of the cast, got under my skin, and I realised then that this was how he operated.

  In the following days and weeks he worked his way steadily through everyone involved in the production, systematically sowing conflict and dissent, setting people up and playing them off against each other. By instilling a sense of fear and insecurity in everyone, he wanted to get the upper hand. I could see how this tactic might work. Doubtless it had contributed to his rapid rise and early successes; but to deliberately create tension and unease in an enterprise as fragile as a theatre production is a high-risk strategy, and on The Yellow Roses his luck ran out. We all eventually realised that he was an arch manipulator, but by then the damage had been done.

  I remember watching him the night before the first preview as he berated the young actor who was playing the daughter. Had this happened early in rehearsal I would have got involved myself and tried to get him to back off. Now I realised that this was exactly what he wanted and that I would most likely have ended up arguing with the actor while Stuart withdrew, amused and in control. I kept my own counsel and studied him from the far side of the room. His accent, the expensive casual clothes he wore, the small leather-bound books in which he made notes while he worked and the black fountain pen with which he made them: all of this I held in disdain. What was he running away from? I asked myself. And what did he think he was running towards? I loathed social ambition as much as I approved of artistic ambition, of making the work as good as it could possibly be; and Stuart was a shameless social climber, always dropping names, always sucking up to the famous and powerful.

  By the time the first night came, I thought that if Summer with Lucy had been the glorious start to my career then The Yellow Roses might well mark its ignominious end. I couldn’t help hoping for a miracle, of the kind that does sometimes happen in the theatre. Was it possible that all the ill-will generated, all the bad feeling rife in the company, might by some strange means be converted into that good energy of which Molly had spoken, that it might transform and electrify the production?

  No. There was to be no miracle. The first night did not go well and we all got mauled in the press the following day, every last one of us: the cast, the set designer, the wardrobe people, the musicians; but the most scathing and dismissive responses were aimed at the writer and the director. I read the reviews the following morning with that strange, flesh-crawling sensation, that sudden brief flush of a chill, nauseous feeling that goes with being on the receiving end of a bad press. This tedious play … lacklustre production … yellow roses that have faded and lost their bloom … banality … inept … truly dreadful … It was like being mugged. By some weird means the critics divined the bad feeling between Stuart and myself and cranked it up. There’s no knowing what possessed Stuart Ferguson to make his contemporary directing debut with this lazy play, from a writer whose best work is long past. Lazy? Christ Almighty! Now I was ready to mug the mugger. I pushed the newspapers away from me and with that the phone rang.

  ‘You must be bitterly disappointed.’ It was Molly. That marvellous voice was charged with all the power that those two words were capable of carrying, the bitterness, the disappointment, and yet to hear it made me feel better, as if she was able to articulate for me the pain that I could only feel. ‘Yes, Molly,’ I said, ‘I am.’

  Perhaps the most unfortunate thing of all was that my ignominy coincided exactly with her greatest triumph. She had opened in The Duchess of Malfi a fortnight earlier, and already it was being called a performance that would define the role for a generation. If my play had also been a success, how we would have celebrated together! If I had been as I was now, quietly engaged in writing a new work, I would have been energised and fired up by her success. Instead, we both had to face at the end of that week a newspaper column giving an overview of current theatrical offerings:

  Don’t Miss: Molly Fox is a magisterial Duchess of

  Malfi.

  Don’t Bother: The Yellow Roses: Tediou
s and turgid.

  I realised immediately that this would be every bit as painful and unpleasant for Molly as it was for me. It gave, and then it took away. Our friendship and our close artistic collaboration on many of my plays were common knowledge. It was as if she was being used to humiliate me. Even Molly has had bad notices in her day, and if a performance of hers had been rubbished in the same breath as my work was being praised, it would have killed off any pleasure I might have felt; it would have enraged me. But I couldn’t find the words to say all this to Molly.

  All this had happened at the start of the year, and now it was midsummer. Now I was sitting in a spare bedroom in Molly’s house, gazing down into her garden and trying to write a new play. Now I was beginning to realise how severely damaged my confidence had been by all of this. As I sat at the desk, struggling with the idea of the man and the hare, I couldn’t help wondering if I was unconsciously trying to close down my own imagination, so that I wouldn’t be able to write another play, and as a result would never have to go through such a grisly experience again. My computer screen had gone black yet again, as coloured geometric shapes morphed languidly across it. I moved the mouse just for the sake of it, to cancel the screen saver and bring up what little text was there, to give myself the illusion of actually doing something. As one does in such circumstances I tried to find an excuse, and decided it was to do with the room in which I was working.

  It had been Molly’s idea that I sleep in her bed and set up my computer in the de facto spare room. There were white gauze curtains figured with daisies. When I stayed with her in winter, Molly always lit a fire for me in the tiny fireplace. The bed had a pink quilt and was piled with small lacy pillows. There was the desk and chair at which I was working and a comfortable chintzy armchair. It was soft and bright and restful.

  Once, many years ago, not long after I first met Molly and a short while after she’d bought the house, I came at her invitation to spend a day with her. When she met me at the door she looked thoughtful and concerned. ‘Fergus, my brother, is staying here with me,’ she said. ‘He’s had a kind of breakdown.’ She didn’t elaborate and I didn’t pursue the matter. I had never met Fergus. He was closed away in the spare room and he didn’t appear at all for the duration of my visit, but there wasn’t a moment throughout that day that we weren’t aware of him.

  Sometimes, on stage, not showing something can be more powerful than showing it. The idea that murder or torture is taking place behind a closed door is more disturbing than watching actors grapple with each other, ineffectually mimicking horrors. And so it was that day in Molly’s house. She went up a few times to see Fergus; I could hear soft voices and then the sound of the solid bedroom door closing behind her before she reappeared, looking worried and upset, but she said nothing about him and I knew better than to ask. At one point I went upstairs to the bathroom and from behind the shut door of the spare room I could hear the sound of someone crying, although to say that doesn’t begin to do justice to it. It was the most heartbreaking sound I think I’ve ever heard, such suffering there was in it, such terrible abandonment and grief.

  Thereafter, I always associated the spare room with Fergus, and I didn’t like it. It was as if his sorrow was so intense it had infiltrated the curtains and the carpets, the very walls, and could never be eradicated. No matter how softly pretty its furnishings it had for me always an air of melancholy; I even fancied it was always a couple of degrees cooler than the other rooms in the house at any given time. This was nonsense, of course, as was the image that I conceived of Fergus. I could never forget that terrible weeping I had heard, and he became in my mind some kind of monster of grief, the embodiment of human misery. ‘Unhappy.’ That was as much as Molly would say about him for a long time. Poor Fergus, he’s so unhappy. She was vague about what was actually wrong with him, vaguer still about the cause of it. But one thing soon became apparent to me: Fergus was the most important person in her life. She had a deep, almost fierce attachment to him that has, if anything, grown stronger with the passing of time.

  The passing of time … the clock at the head of the stairs chimed for noon. My computer screen had gone dark again, and with a mixture of resignation and relief I decided to give up for the day.

  There were a few things I needed to buy before lunch – milk, bread, the newspapers – but I’d have gone out anyway, just to get away from the house, to distance myself from the dead end that had been the morning’s work. I felt better as soon as the door closed behind me, and I stood there on the step for a moment, taking consolation from the glory of Molly’s garden, its roses, its dog-daisies. The bright fresh morning had developed into a seriously hot day. As I closed the garden gate behind me, I thought of Andrew. A hot day in the city always made me think of his last days in Dublin, now so many years ago, when there had been weather such as this.

  Andrew graduated from Trinity with a first-class honours degree, with prizes and a scholarship, in the same summer that I received the 2:2 that was far more than I deserved. Almost immediately he took himself off to England, to begin a PhD on Mantegna, at Cambridge. At that time I was living in a little redbrick terraced house in Dublin that was a smaller, more dowdy version of Molly’s current home, and he stayed there with me just before he left Ireland. The two friends with whom I was sharing were both away for the week, and in the casual manner in which we then lived, I gave him his choice of the other girls’ rooms for the two nights that he would be there. He arrived down from Belfast where he had been staying with his family, and I cautiously asked how things had been.

  ‘We sat there last night,’ he answered ‘and I was trawling my brain for something to say to them, to ask them, and I couldn’t think of a thing. There was nothing there. And I thought – who are these people? What am I doing here? I felt like a stranger who’d wandered in off the street and they’d decided to humour him and let him stay instead of throwing him out. And then when I was leaving this afternoon my Da came over all portentous, which was weird; I hadn’t expected that. He said to me, “Try to make something of yourself, for Billy’s sake.” I thought, What’s Billy got to do with it? Billy was never going to amount to anything; his life had been ruined when he was still a kid. He was always going to end up in jail or dead. I thought, I’m out of here, it’s over.’

  ‘And were your parents not pleased about your results?’

  ‘My Da doesn’t understand what it means, still doesn’t know what I’m about. As for Ma, I just don’t think she’s ever really been interested in me. Billy was always the one she wanted, even when we were very small. He was always the joker, the funny one. I was too serious and dull, sitting with my nose in a book, while he’d be doing silly things and making her laugh. Because I knew she preferred him by far, that made me surly and then there was even less to like. I think she can’t forgive me for not being Billy, or rather, she can’t forgive me for being alive, and Billy being dead. He’s still the one she wants, not me. When the train was going through Drogheda I looked down at the river, the timber yards, and I thought – if I never went back, never phoned, never wrote, would she care? Would she even notice?’

  ‘You know she would,’ I protested, to which Andrew gave a sardonic laugh. As at the time of Billy’s death, I was struck by how he was more angry than grieved by the situation. Even that anger had dwindled with the passing of time; what he showed now was something closer to impatience and irritation.

  All of this blighted the rest of that evening; but we didn’t let it spoil the following day. The hot weather that tormented us all through our finals had, against our expectations, lingered on into the holidays, and Andrew’s last day was glorious, perfect, a day such as today. We rose late and had breakfast in the overgrown, daisy-studded back garden, lingered until noon over peaches and orange juice and a few flabby croissants from the shop around the corner. It was unusual for Andrew not to have an exam for which to prepare, a seminar paper or an essay to write; and he was the better for it. The incred
ible pressure under which he’d put himself for the past four years had made him habitually edgy and tense, and it was good to see him begin to relax. Because his results had been so outstanding, he wouldn’t have to prove himself to anybody when he went to Cambridge, he told me, ‘Least of all to myself.’ He was looking forward to being there and was excited about his new area of study.

  I think one of the reasons I always look back on that day with such fondness is that it was a day lived between two lives, and therefore it managed to slip through the constraints of time itself. We were young, we were confident, we were hugely, even arrogantly, ambitious. Andrew was going to become an internationally acclaimed art historian, I was going to be a renowned playwright, and that we later succeeded in all of this only makes the memory of that day and its simple pleasures all the sweeter.

  In the afternoon we went swimming at Seapoint. In honour of the fine weather my housemates and I had clubbed together to buy a barbecue. Andrew thought this was hilariously at odds with the lax and slipshod fashion in which we generally ran our shabby home, but that evening I badgered him into helping me light it. He seemed willing enough, and we incinerated a few chops and sausages, ate them with salad and bread and cheap red wine; then sat outside drinking and talking and laughing until long after a radiant summer darkness had fallen over the city.

  He left for England early the following morning, and I never saw him again. That is to say, the Andrew whom I met in a Victorian pub in London at the end of that year wasn’t the Andrew whom I had known at college. He had disappeared, taking with him his trainers, his rank jumpers and his sports bag full of books; and in his place was the dandified scholar who has been my friend ever since. Certainly there would be further fine tuning of the image over the years – the clothes would become more elegant and well-cut, the attention to detail would become total – but broadly speaking, the whole persona was already in place.