Molly Fox's Birthday

by Deirdre Madden

  ‘And what about the theatre then?’

  Tom thought about this. ‘What about the theatre? Well, it exists in time – a play lasts an hour and a half, two hours, but if it’s any good at all it takes you somewhere outside time. And then you can see things – see things differently. But then, who am I to say that? You’re the actor and you’re the playwright. What do I know about the theatre?’ He picked up the bread-basket and offered it to me. I had already started eating some moments earlier, but still Molly sat there and didn’t lift her cutlery. She was staring at Tom. Sometimes Molly reminds me of a cat. She has that same stillness, that concentrated energy, that steady, unblinking gaze. Suddenly Tom put down his fork again.

  ‘Last week, I called to visit a family in my parish. They have a lot of difficulties, a lot of social problems. The father drinks heavily and there’s a strong sense of domestic violence, although the mother denies it. Social services are on the case and there are small children involved. It’s all very sad. The father runs a breaker’s yard from right beside the house. The place is surrounded by old broken rusty wrecks of cars; it’s as bleak a spot as you can imagine. I parked and went up to the house, where one of the daughters of the family, Eileen, who’s about five, was sitting on the doorstep crying. Her hair is badly cut, with a big square fringe that doesn’t flatter her at all; and her face was blotched and red. I don’t know when I last saw such a grimy, pitiful little scrap of humanity. I said hello and asked her how she was. She didn’t reply and I hunkered down beside her. “Is something wrong? Do you want to tell me?” Still she said nothing, but she sniffed and shook her head. She was holding a Barbie-type doll, and even by Barbie standards it was quite over the top. It had a tiara and transparent wings, blonde hair and a gold dress covered in sequins. “Is that you?” I asked. She looked up at me and she smiled. “That’s me,” she said. “I’m really a princess.”

  “I could tell that,” I said.

  “I’m a princess and sometimes I’m a fairy, and I’m a mermaid too.” I thought she was marvellous. She knew her own worth, she insisted on it. She knew that no matter how miserable the circumstances in which life placed her, she was better than that. She knew that a part of her was special and remarkable, and she was able to articulate that in her own way. “I’m a princess and sometimes I’m a fairy, and I’m a mermaid too.”’

  ‘What made you mention that, just now?’ Molly said.

  ‘I’m not sure. Eileen, indeed her whole family, have been very much on my mind in the past few days. I wish I could do more to help them, change their circumstances in some way. Forgive me for talking shop, this is foolish of me. I’m distracting you from your dinner,’ Tom said to Molly, and he gestured to her to eat. ‘I hope I’m not annoying you, saying foolish things about your profession. It’s only speculation on my part. Why don’t you tell me what it’s like being an actor.’

  ‘I don’t know – it’s hard to say.’ She was abstracted, and I could see that she had been thinking of something else entirely. ‘There are two schools of thought on acting,’ I said to help her out. ‘Some people consider actors to be vain, silly people who only want to show off. And some think they’re incredibly brave – not for the way they embrace a life with so much insecurity and rejection hardwired into it, but for the way they put their whole self out there.’

  ‘There are as many ways of being an actor as there are people who act,’ Molly said. ‘That’s the beauty of it, that it’s so individual. Some are quite restrained and understated, some completely manic.’

  ‘Surely that depends on the role?’

  ‘Not in the way I’m thinking. It’s always about energy, energy either released and displayed, or held back and controlled; but one way or another it has to be there. If it isn’t, you’re just seeing bad acting. Some actors, like me, are chameleons, they transform themselves completely. And then there are other actors who are always just themselves. That isn’t to say that they’re bad at what they do; that they can’t act. Some of the finest actors who have ever worked in the theatre are like this. What I mean is that they have a highly developed persona in their everyday life that closely resembles what they present in their work. The public accepts it perhaps without fully understanding it or being aware of it, so deep is the convention. You tend to see it more in the cinema than on stage, and to be honest you don’t see it that often. The more protean type, the kind of thing I do, is more usual. Take David now, for example,’ she said, turning to me. ‘David McKenzie. He’s a classic example. He’s a wonderful actor, but he’s always himself.’

  It startled me that she should so suddenly mention him, when I’d been thinking intently about him in relation to Tom. It was almost as if she could read my mind, and it spooked me.

  ‘Is he the actor who was in your last play?’ Tom asked me, and I nodded.

  ‘He’s working on a film at the moment,’ Molly said. ‘He’s going to be a huge star, wait and see. He’s got everything going for him.’

  By this stage she appeared to have relaxed into the situation. She ate her salad and chatted to Tom about the theatre, about the play he and I were to see later that evening. I withdrew somewhat from the conversation and studied my brother. Why had I been so worried about bringing him into my new life? It was more than just a social thing. Many of my friends were openly hostile to the church and with good reason. I fully understood their anger. I would probably have made much more of a distance from it myself had it not been for Tom, by which I don’t mean mere family loyalty. Even if he hadn’t been my brother he’d have given me pause for thought, had he crossed my path. The very least he could do was make you consider the possibility of the divine in a world where the notion was generally scorned. I had often wondered how someone as mentally sophisticated as Tom endured his life. He was at that time a curate in the small mid-Ulster town where one of our sisters lived with her family. I had met his parish priest, with whom he shared a house: a humourless and unimaginative man who went through the rituals of his vocation, conducting marriages and funerals, saying Mass, as if it were all meaningless and functional. Tom has an exceptionally good mind. All through my teens it was he who had fed my imagination, been my intellectual mentor and companion. He’d introduced me not only to the theatre, but to Russian literature and Baroque music. He countered the pietistic Catholicism to which I was exposed at home and at school, all medals and miracles, by giving me books by St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila; he told me about Charles de Foucauld and about Liberation theology. And I took it all for granted. I didn’t realise that he was setting my mind free, that he was giving me a life. Nor did I realise how much I meant to him. Sitting in that London restaurant I remembered being home for a weekend during my first year at university and suddenly Tom had blurted out to me when there was no one else around: ‘I miss you.’ At the time I didn’t understand. It was only now I realised how lonely he must have been after I’d gone.

  The rest of the meal passed over pleasantly enough, as far as I can recall. Nothing of any great consequence was said, and my memory of it has been somewhat eclipsed by what happened afterwards on the Tube. The three of us set out together although Molly, who was going home, was to get out at the stop before us to change lines. In the train we managed to secure for ourselves seats for four, two and two facing. I sat beside Molly, and Tom was facing us. I think the rolling stock must have been very old, because it was particularly noisy; we could barely hear each other. We had, I thought, by that stage fallen into the platitudes and courtesies with which one wraps up such an evening, when there is little time left for anything real to be said. ‘It was lovely to meet you at last, having heard so much about you,’ Molly shouted at Tom. ‘You’re fortunate to have each other, to come from such a happy family. When I think about my own childhood … My mother walked out on my brother and me when I was seven.’ So extraordinary was this information to me, so offhand the delivery and so strange the circumstances in which she had chosen to share it, that for a mom
ent I thought I must have surely misheard. I glanced over at Tom, but his face was quite impassive.

  The train pulled out of the tunnel and into the brightness of the station at Piccadilly Circus. Molly stood up. ‘I hope we meet again before long,’ she said, leaning over and pressing her hand on Tom’s forearm. Her voice, which had been forced and harsh as she shouted out the great secret of her life, reverted now to its usual sweetness. ‘I’ll phone you during the week,’ she said as she turned to me. ‘Enjoy the play,’ and again to Tom in particular, ‘All the best for the rest of your time in London.’ Then she was gone, minding the gap, disappearing into the dense, swarming crowds on the platform. The doors slammed shut and the train moved on. Neither Tom nor I spoke. The appropriate conversation wouldn’t have been possible over the racket, and when we arrived at our stop we hurried because we were late. At the theatre there was time to do nothing more than buy a programme and take our seats.

  In spite of Molly’s good wishes, I didn’t enjoy the play. It was a contemporary work, one that has since been justly forgotten, and I don’t know how it had garnered the good reviews that had lured Tom and me there. I spent the whole of the first half sitting in the darkness watching the actors rant and emote on the lit stage as I thought about what Molly had said just before we parted, trying to square it with what I already knew about her life.

  Over the few years I had known her she had drip-fed me bits of information. A suburban childhood in a semidetached house. A father who had worked at some kind of office job, who died just after she left school and of whom she always spoke warmly, whom she had evidently loved. A younger brother who was deeply troubled in himself (I had not yet met Fergus at this stage, but I had heard him weeping behind the closed door) and to whom she was fiercely loyal, viscerally close. A mother whom she almost never mentioned, and then always disparagingly. Once, for example, we had been out shopping together and had seen a particularly dreadful handbag. It had a large piece of crystal incorporated into the clasp, and was the kind of thing that could not be redeemed from vulgarity, not even by the most highly developed sense of irony or fondness for kitsch. ‘My mother would love it,’ Molly sneered. Another time she had mentioned something about the time her father passed away and I asked her if her mother was also dead. ‘Oh no, she’s still around, she’s out there somewhere, living her life,’ she replied, but it was the short, dry laugh that preceded this remark that said still more, that chilled me. What she had said this evening did fit the picture I had had: it all added up, it did make sense now.

  I suppose I expected that Tom had been thinking along the same lines as me, but when the interval finally came and the lights went up he turned to me with a sigh and said, ‘Oh well, some you win, some you lose.’ We talked only about the play, and although he mentioned later how much he had liked meeting Molly he didn’t pick my brains about her, as anyone else might have done. He did ask me very late one night, completely out of context,

  ‘That thing Molly said to us about her mother – did you already know about that?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘I see,’ he replied, and he said nothing more.

  The following week, after Tom had gone back to Ireland, Molly asked me for his address. She wanted, she said, to drop him a note, to say what a pleasure it had been to meet him. I thought she perhaps felt embarrassed at what she had said at the moment of parting. It wasn’t mentioned again to me, and I knew not to refer to it. Molly sets the tone for any encounter: from day one I have always known instinctively what not to say, when she wanted an issue addressed, and when it was strictly off limits. I gave her the address and heard no more about it, from either Molly or Tom, indeed I thought no more about it until a year later, when my brother wasn’t long back from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Molly showed me the little olive-wood bowl: ‘Tom gave me this.’

  I had had no idea they’d been in contact with each other all this time, and yet how could I not have seen it coming? I should have known on that day in London that already she had recognised him as someone whom she needed in her life, someone who could help her. No, I hadn’t realised that it was happening, and I resented it when I found out. While Molly is undoubtedly generous with her possessions, she can take over other people’s friendships and relationships as a cuckoo takes over nests. But what was it that really bothered me in all of this? Was it that I didn’t want to share Tom with Molly or that I didn’t want my brother too closely linked to my other life, my life away from the family? Probably both were an issue and yes, it does pain me to know how small-minded all of this shows me up to be. Tom is a good listener. He is compassionate and intelligent, with a rare degree of moral knowledge and experience.

  Molly on the other hand was more deeply wounded, more damaged by her early years than I could then imagine. She is also ardently although not conventionally religious; and like much else in her life this is something that she conceals rather well. Her childhood introduction to religion was made in an uninspiring suburban church, a barn of a place, to which she and Fergus would be taken on Sunday mornings by her father. It had nothing of the mystery, the earthed connection to place, to the seasons, that I knew from my own childhood church in the country. For all that, something got through to Molly, some spark, something that she needed in her life and that she has quietly cherished ever since.

  The gift of the wooden bowl happened many years ago, and now there are other little tokens of Tom’s affection scattered around the house. An edition of the Psalms bound in dark green morocco. A rosary with pearl beads. A tiny Greek icon. I take for granted their friendship now, even though it remains something from which I am generally excluded.

  Having finished with the lunch dishes, I decided to go into town and try to replace the jug I had broken. I stood in the hall for a moment to check that I had everything I needed – keys, money, basket, list. I also took a notebook with me in case I had a good idea about my work while I was out, unlikely though that was. I paused just before leaving. The hallway of Molly’s house is arresting, because she has made of it a small shrine to her career, to her success. The walls are covered with framed posters of productions in which she has starred, together with striking black-and-white photographs: Molly as Ophelia, as Lady Macbeth, as Hedda Gabler. There is a chest of drawers the top of which is covered with awards she has won: great chunks of cut glass, gilded masks, semi-abstract figurines. I do not know how she lives with this, and I have told her so. My own awards – and there are a considerable number of them – are either in my family home or hidden away in cupboards and drawers. On a day such as today when I’m struggling with the work and failing to make any progress they would seem to me more like a mockery than a valediction. Molly and I were in her hall when we talked about this, and I could see that she was only half-listening, smiling up at these proofs of her triumph. ‘Do you really think so?’ she said. ‘It always cheers me up to look at them. I wouldn’t have it any other way.’

  The early-afternoon sun was strong on the front of the house when I left. I stepped out into the heat, into a great sweetness, a complex of fragrances: cut grass from someone’s lawn, and lavender, robust, overlain with the peculiarly fragile scent of sweet pea. As I walked away from the house I wondered at the facility some people have for creating a home for themselves. Molly can do it, Andrew too, but it has always eluded me. The places I have lived in have remained only that: places I have lived in; rooms full of papers and books. I should like a proper home not just for my own sake but because it would be an extension of me, and would allow me to communicate something of myself to others. But how people managed to do this with the things I glimpsed in the houses I passed – candles, rugs, bentwood chairs, dressers and lamps – baffled and defeated me.

  In a tiny basement area of one house an old man was sunning himself, surrounded by plants in containers. He was wearing braces over a striped shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a white straw hat was tilted to conceal his eyes. Seeing him, I w
as suddenly reminded of my dream of the night before, not just the atmosphere but the substance of it. For the first time since waking that morning I remembered the dream precisely – my grandmother, the shoes, the blanket, the feeling of being loved and protected. And this in turn triggered another memory, something that I had forgotten for years, of a fruit shop in the south of France where the woman behind the counter was identical to my late grandmother, and so strong was the resemblance that I became convinced that it was indeed her. She didn’t recognise or acknowledge me, but kept on weighing out the fruit for which I kept on asking. I bought cherries and apricots, grapes and plums, more than I wanted, more than I could ever possibly eat, simply to keep open the line of communication with her. This is my grandmother. Even as all of this was happening I knew that it was absurd. How could someone be dead and buried in Ireland and then be selling fruit in Provence years later? It wasn’t just that she looked like my grandmother, she moved like her, had the same habit of smoothing down her apron; she emanated the same sweetness of nature. I stopped asking for fruit when my grandmother remarked as to whether or not I would be able to carry all I had.

  All I could feel afterwards was gratitude that this had happened. Being able to understand it was of no great importance. We see no visions because we live in an age in which they are not permitted; but if we accepted the idea of them, who’s to say what we wouldn’t see? Marriage is no longer a mystical union but a social contract. The moment when new beliefs reach critical mass and become generally accepted always eludes us, we are always looking away. Thereafter I would think from time to time about whatever it was that had happened that day in the fruit shop; in due course I thought about it less and less. But it was doubtless the memory of that uncanny meeting, deep in my unconscious, that had triggered the dream of last night. And for that too I was grateful.