Molly Fox's Birthday

by Deirdre Madden

  ‘It’s great to see you again. What would you like to drink?’ The Belfast accent had gone, and the pace and modulation of his voice had also changed. I watched him as he went up to the bar to order. He struck me as nervous, as well he might be, for he knew me to be both tactless and capable of cruelty. Christ, what happened to you? Carefully carrying two glasses, he made his way back through the crowds of drinkers to where I was sitting beneath an etched window of frosted glass, wines & spirits. ‘I’ve never seen you looking so well. England obviously suits you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ he replied. ‘It does.’ He relaxed a bit and started to tell me about how much he was enjoying his new life; that he had been down to Hampton Court recently to examine the Triumphs of Caesar, and was planning a trip to Italy. I had no sense of him pretending to be something he wasn’t. There was nothing fake about him, nothing false. It was instead as if he was at last becoming himself, becoming the kind of person he needed to be, the person he really was. It was the tense, prickly man I’d known at college who had been the fake. I’d always been aware that he hadn’t enjoyed his time as an undergraduate. How could he have done so? He hadn’t been studying so much as trying to save his own life, and to expect him to be having a good time would have been as strange and heartless as calling out to a drowning man as he struggled to the shore, asking him if he was enjoying the swim.

  In remembering all of this I had made my way to the shop, through the labyrinth of little streets of redbrick houses. Some of these houses, like Molly’s, were well maintained, but others were dowdy and neglected, with net curtains drooping at dusty windows and front gardens strewn with rubbish. The shop itself was dispiriting too, like all convenience stores, as if one had to be punished simply for being there, for not being well enough organised to have got one’s shopping elsewhere in the first place. Battered and fried things being kept warm under glass, tinned pies – how far gone did you have to be to eat a tinned pie? – exhausted fruit and a cart-load of lurid magazines. Molly has never been recognised here, not once, she told me proudly. She was just another local who had run out of coffee, sloping in mid-morning in a grey marl tracksuit and no make-up. I walked to the back of the shop. The milk was kept there, no doubt in the hope that customers might be tempted by something they saw on the way to the chill cabinet, a tin of strawberries, perhaps, or even one of those pies. I chose a loaf, then two newspapers from the stacks on the floor, paid at the till and left.

  As I walked back I remembered again that I had had a wonderful dream just before waking that morning, but still I couldn’t recall what it had been about. Only the atmosphere of it remained. The house itself seemed unnaturally dark after the brightness of the day, and was pleasantly cool. I dropped my shopping on the kitchen table. Lunch would be simple: bread, ham, fruit, coffee; I couldn’t be bothered to prepare anything more elaborate. The table was a solid affair, large, rectangular, the wood scrubbed almost white.

  The first time she raised the subject of birthdays, we’d been sitting here. I’d known Molly for about a couple of years by then. The subject must never have come up before, or if it did, she must have skilfully dismissed it, with so little ceremony that it didn’t register with me. I saw her do this later with other people when I knew the significance of the subject to her, and although I was sympathetic – hugely sympathetic – to her position, I always found it slightly chilling to see the ease with which she could manipulate the direction of a conversation. ‘Birthday? What do you want to know about my birthday for? Birthdays are for little children. Is it jelly you’re after? Jelly and cake? Oh that reminds me, tell me now before I forget …’ And a new subject would be introduced; there would be no getting back to birthdays. There was nothing dishonest in it, yet still it felt like watching someone tell lies.

  I was staying with her at the time. We’d been out, to dinner or to the cinema, I can’t recall which, but when we came back it wasn’t very late, probably no more than ten-thirty. There was an open bottle of red wine on the kitchen table. She offered me a glass and for the next hour or so we sat there talking and drinking. We were contented and relaxed and were still sitting there when the grandfather clock began to strike midnight. A silence fell over us. Inwardly I counted the chimes and after the last one I said, ‘Today’s the summer solstice. The longest day of the year,’ to which Molly replied, ‘It’s my birthday today.’

  ‘Happy birthday,’ I said, and she gave a dry ironic laugh. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Any plans for the day?’

  ‘No.’

  When you’re in a hole, keep digging. ‘Why don’t you celebrate?’ I mustn’t have known her as well as I thought; now I would never be so foolish as to do such a thing. Now I know that Molly will never talk about anything significant at a time and a place where there is leisure and peace. Her most intimate and significant confidences will always be communicated in an off-the-cuff way, thrown over her shoulder as she goes out the door, as she jumps into a taxi. She didn’t bridle or become annoyed at my question, but she didn’t answer me either. I didn’t break the silence that followed, and it became a long silence. I left it to her to take control of the conversation and change the subject, as I was sure she would.

  She drank from her glass and then she said, ‘I remember when I was about twelve. We lived in Lucan then. It was a difficult time. Fergus was more trouble than a bag of monkeys; my poor father was at his wits’ end with him. Fainting fits, sleepwalking; he’d be poleaxed by pains that never seemed to have any real cause. So gentle he was too, though, Fergus, so sweet-natured.’ She moved the foot of her glass across the table. By now it was almost as if she was talking to herself. ‘I was always far more streetwise; I was a tough little madam. I looked after him; I fought his corner. And then when I hit puberty I fell apart too, but in a completely different way.

  ‘I felt destroyed. It was as if I’d lost my soul. Up until then I’d been pretty well behaved, but practically overnight I became a delinquent. I started going about with this bunch of wild kids that I didn’t even like. I’d cut class and take the bus into Dublin, go shoplifting. I stole things to order for my new friends. The things I stole for myself, sweets, make-up, little bits of jewellery, most of the time I didn’t even want them, I’d end up throwing them away. I started drinking, I stayed out half the night, and when I was at home it was war. And through all of this, there was a voice, screaming and screaming inside my head. Who am I? Who am I? I thought I was going mad. Perhaps I was; I’d certainly lost my reason. All the bad behaviour was a way to try to drown out this terrible scream, Who am I? But nothing worked.

  ‘And then the miracle happened. On one of the rare days that I did show up at school, they took us out to the theatre, to see Hamlet. I think it must have been a good production even though I had no point of comparison. They caught Hamlet’s youth, that ironic anger he has, his rage against his mother. Sneering when he wasn’t in despair: that was me too. I’d never before seen anything so real. All of my life, and the past year in particular, was like a dream, and what I was watching on the stage, that was reality, that was the truth. In the interval I put my hand in my pocket and found a lipstick I’d stolen the day before. I remember staring at it, this little gilded cylinder. It was a thing from another life, the life that ended when I walked into the theatre. And as I watched the play through to the end I gradually came to realise something: So that’s who I am: I’m an actor. This is a crucial distinction – it wasn’t that I wanted to be an actor, I knew that I was one already. And it wasn’t that I wanted to pretend to be other people either. All I ever wanted was to be myself. Who am I? Who am I? I never again heard that voice screaming in my head. I now knew exactly who I was. I was an actor. As soon as I was old enough I would go on stage and I would become other people. That was how I would spend the rest of my life.’

  Perhaps unwittingly, she had just explained to me something important about her gift. Many actors spend years doing exactly what Molly had dismissed: they pretend to be other people
. They select voices and movements that might plausibly suit a particular character, and they assume these voices and movements in the same way as they might put on a costume, a wig or a cardboard crown. It isn’t convincing. Molly had understood this from the start. There was always something unmediated and supremely natural about her acting, it was the thing itself. Becoming, not pretending. It was a showing forth of her own soul, something about which she had always been fearless.

  ‘So that’s my life,’ she said, and she turned and gave me a look, just as she spoke, which it wasn’t, of course, it wasn’t her whole life. What she had said begged more questions than it answered. But such a look! In it was all the pain of which she had spoken but which her voice had withheld, for she had spoken to me in neutral tones. There was anger, there was fear, bewilderment, and a passionate desire, a rage for love that could never be fulfilled. It was all there, a whole magma of dark emotion that could have destroyed her but which she had controlled and made central to her art. But still I didn’t know what had caused this suffering, where it all came from. It would be quite some time before I found out. Molly looked away and the moment was gone.

  ‘Let’s finish this bottle out, and then I’ll open another.’ She topped up our glasses.

  ‘This is enough for me,’ I said, ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Well I’m not.’ She selected a new bottle from a small rack on the worktop and deftly removed the cork. The kitchen was dim, low-lit, and now she was alert as a cat, silent and tense. She emptied her glass and poured more wine. We couldn’t find our way back into the conversation after what had passed between us, and eventually she suggested that I go up to bed if I wished. I left her there, for I sensed that she wanted to be alone. I lay awake for hours, and the clock had struck three before I heard the sound of her bedroom door closing.

  I took my lunch and the newspapers out to the back garden, where I was joined by a neighbour’s cat, a neat, greedy, ill-mannered creature that stuck its face in the milk jug and tried to get at the ham, until I had to move the tray well out of its reach. I read the colour supplement because it was easier to manage than the broadsheet; and in the list of contents I noticed a familiar name.

  Berry Nice: making the most of the fruits of summer.

  Page 4

  Reasons to be Cheerful: Andrew Forde. Page 8

  Land of the Rising Temper: Colin Smith loses his cool in Japan. Page 10

  Reasons to be Cheerful is one of those features in which people with a new book, film, play or suchlike to promote do so by discussing the contents of their fridge or their handbag, showing off the finest room in their house or, as here, sharing with the public a list of things that make them happy. Most of the double spread on pages eight and nine was taken up with a striking photograph of Andrew, the text occupying a rather narrow column on the left-hand side. Several of his choices I could have second-guessed. Correggio, for example, at number two: Quite simply my favourite painter; or Chartres Cathedral at number seven. Several were as bland and anodyne as the concept of the piece implicitly required: Dark chocolate, at least 70 per cent cocoa and Valhrona for choice; but some were surprisingly robust: Atheism. I detest religion. It has done untold harm and nothing would give me greater cause for celebration than if it were to die out completely. There was no mention of his son, Anthony, which told me he was taking the whole thing in the spirit I would have expected – some things are too deep, too private to be referred to in so light a context. But listed there at number nine, between Venice and Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, was The incomparable Molly Fox, our finest actress, bar none. I wondered how she might react to this, whether the faux pas of the noun would cancel out the splendour of the adjective. At the bottom of the page was printed in italics: Andrew Forde’s new book, ‘Remember Me: The Art of the Memorial’ is published by Phaidon, price £30.00. The four-part documentary of the same name continues on Channel Four this evening at 8 p.m.

  The photograph had been taken in a room with the air of a gentleman’s club. Andrew sat in a deep leather armchair, and on the wall behind him hung a gilt-framed painting of a winter landscape. He was wearing a pale blue shirt, open at the neck, and a dark blue jacket. Although he was sitting in a slightly unnatural pose, with all his fingers balanced delicately against each other at the tips, he looked relaxed and at ease, as he always does in any context connected with his work.

  I think that Molly very much regrets that she didn’t know Andrew before his great transformation. They didn’t meet until about eight years ago, which was already about ten years after Andrew and I had left college. There were many logical and valid reasons as to why this should have been. During those first ten years when we were all in our twenties and busy consolidating our careers and our lives in general, there were long stretches when I saw little of either of them myself. Work commitments and other relationships, friends and family, kept us occupied and apart. When Andrew got married I didn’t much care for his wife, Nicole, nor she for me, and we perhaps saw less of each other because of that.

  But I would be lying if I didn’t admit that the main reason they never met was that I deliberately kept them apart for years on end, and for the best possible reason – I thought they wouldn’t like each other. Andrew knew and admired Molly as an actor and had even begun to pester me a bit about her. When are you going to introduce me to that amazing friend of yours? I knew that this was exactly the wrong approach to take with her. One of the strange anomalies of Molly is that she has never, I think, successfully developed a public persona in which to conceal and protect herself in society; another harder, somewhat untrue personality that can be passed off as the real thing. She always was, and remains, painfully shy. Quite frankly, I feared that Andrew would find her a disappointment, mousy and introverted, dull even, so unlike the magisterial presence he knew from the stage. I had seen this happen before, and Molly did nothing to prevent it. In social situations she might well be deliberately taciturn and sullen. And if I thought Andrew might not get along with Molly, I was completely certain that she would dislike him. She is a merciless student of human nature, and while she finds her greatest truth in life through the artifice that is her gift, I thought that in the artifice that was Andrew she would find nothing but pure surface, and despise him.

  My own birthday is around the end of the year, and eight years ago I decided to throw a combined Christmas and birthday party at my home in London. By this time Molly, like half the country, had become familiar with Andrew through his career as a television art critic, and she had begun to ask to meet him, as he asked to meet her. It seemed the best idea to invite them both to the party. If they got on together, well and good; if not, there would be enough people there for them to simply withdraw and talk to someone else. I had little time to speak to either of them that evening. As the giver of the party, I was too busy making sure that everyone had something to eat and drink, that no one was excluded or ill at ease. I did notice that Molly and Andrew were talking, but not monopolising each other. When I spoke to them in the following days I was slightly surprised by their reactions. I got the impression that Andrew had found her slightly intimidating, a reaction she rarely elicits, and while she had clearly enjoyed his company, what interested her most about him was precisely that change in him that I had spoken about and which she had not witnessed for herself.

  ‘He’s a study. That accent! Where did that come from, those vowel combinations? I’ve never heard the like of it. And did you notice his cufflinks? Little bars of lapiz lazuli.’ Yes, I had noticed the cufflinks. Molly is not the only one whose profession has sharpened her eye for detail, but I was surprised at how much she picked up on the speech, because Andrew’s accent is most convincing. ‘What on earth was he like when you knew him first?’ She was very curious about this, and quizzed me about exactly how he had changed. At the time I put this down to the actor’s interest in the transformation of the self. Now I’m not so sure. I think she found my answers unsatisfactory, and I grew to resent having
to try to explain it. In some ways he had changed completely, in others not at all. The way he looked, the way he dressed and spoke, yes, all that had changed comprehensively. In another man these changes might have made him seem effete and affected, but in Andrew they simply seemed right. There was a robust quality to both his mind and his personality that remained constant, that complemented his new manners and suited them perfectly. His essential self, in as far as I could understand it, hadn’t changed at all.

  But Molly couldn’t get it. ‘So it’s purely a surface thing then?’

  ‘No. He was angry when I knew him first and that’s gone. He’s much less sardonic. He’s become the person he needed to be, and he’s been able to relax into that.’

  ‘Have you slept with him?’

  ‘Molly! What a question!’

  ‘I take it that’s a Yes?’ she said coolly.

  ‘It’s a No. It’s an Absolutely not.’

  I could hardly believe her cheek. Although we were close we were both quite reserved with each other. I think a certain kind of mutual respect was one of the reasons as to why our friendship was so strong. Of course we confided in each other about many things, but we never fished for information, never followed up casual signals or leads. If there was something one of us wanted to share with the other, she would tell it in her own time. I knew that she might sometimes ask someone a staggeringly frank and direct question, but she always did it as a tactic, as a way of wrong-footing the other person, distracting them when they were perhaps getting too close to something that she didn’t want to reveal. It was a way of throwing people off balance. She had never before done it to me.