Molly Fox's Birthday

by Deirdre Madden

  I passed a house where the front door lay open, and I could hear a woman’s light voice deep within, at the end of the darkened hall. There were bunches of coloured balloons tied to the door knocker, more on the gate, and the garden fence was festooned with streamers and a foil banner: Seven Today! When Molly eventually told me that her mother had left not just in her seventh year, but on her seventh birthday, she did so in the laconic, offhand way in which I had by now come to expect when she was telling me something important. She knows how to pick her moment, my mother. You have to give her that, if nothing else. I forced myself to think again about the play on which I was working, about the man with the hare, in the hope of breaking the impasse I had reached. I had very little to go on so far, scraps of ideas, a general intuition. I could hear a child’s voice saying, Nothing must change. That phrase had been embedded in my mind almost as long as the image of the hare in the man’s arms, and I knew they were linked, but I hadn’t been able to find the vital connection and get on with the work.

  I was walking in Molly’s footsteps now, taking the particular route into town that she had pointed out to me as being the quickest and also the most interesting: the route where there was most to see. She had walked these streets by herself time without number, and I had walked them with her on many occasions. She had pointed out to me the things she liked along the way. The massive clump of arum lilies that crowded out all the space of a tiny garden. The white oblong stones at the top of certain houses, carved with pointing hands and the names of the streets. The little tree that brought forth a startling foam of blossom each springtime, a tree so small and insignificant that one never noticed it when its branches were bare; it always seemed, Molly said, to have appeared overnight. In recognising such things we claim the city, make it our own. I never cross the Green that I don’t think of Countess Markievicz; never am in Merrion Square that I don’t think of Oscar. Oscar the child, she meant, she said when I pressed her, the tall boy who played with his friends in the enclosed garden but who noticed and who never forgot the children of the Dublin paupers, glimpsed on the other side of the railings. Every afternoon as they were coming from school, the children used to go and play in the Giant’s garden.

  As I walked along the hot streets the houses gave way now to offices and shops as I neared the city centre. I would look for a jug first, to replace the one I had broken. There was a shop I was familiar with near Grafton Street that sold kitchen things and china; I would look there. I hoped to find something particular and unusual, something out of the common run, and I knew the kind of thing Molly liked. As I was going into the shop a woman and a teenage girl were coming out. I held the door open for them and she looked at me, a glance first, and a smile to thank me. Then she looked more acutely, and then she said my name aloud. Her face was vaguely familiar to me but I couldn’t place her at all, and then she said her own name. ‘Marian. Marian Dunne. Don’t you remember me?’

  ‘Marian!’ I exclaimed. ‘This is so strange. I was thinking about you only a couple of hours ago, thinking about when we were at college together.’

  ‘And what put you in mind of me,’ she said, ‘after all these years?’ That I didn’t feel I could honestly answer, and I blustered a bit, made much of the coincidence of chance thoughts and a chance meeting. We moved aside from the door of the shop so as not to block it and the teenage girl – clearly Marian’s daughter – withdrew to a slight distance from us, took out her mobile phone and started to check her texts.

  Marian had always been blonde, and now she was resolutely so. The complicated arrangement of long hair had been replaced by a short, neat cut; and she was all gold chains and red lipstick, all crumpled white linen, with her sunglasses perched on the top of her head. She looked well; prosperous and soignée. It wasn’t that she hadn’t changed over the years, for she had; but what she had become in no way fell short of what I would have expected her to be at this time in her life. I thought of her gentle dismissal of Andrew all those years ago. It’s a pity.

  Weirdly then, before she asked after me or spoke about herself, she suddenly said, ‘Tell me, Andrew Forde: do you still see him? I remember you were great friends altogether.’ Was I becoming psychic? Was I able to summon up people merely by thinking about them? Could I plant thoughts in the minds of others? I told her that yes, Andrew and I had stayed in touch on and off over the years; we were still firm friends. ‘Did you see him in the paper this morning? And his programme’s on television tonight. I have all his books. He’s done so well for himself, hasn’t he? But of all people I would never have expected him to end up on television.’ I told her that no one had been more surprised when it happened than Andrew himself, and she asked me how it had come about.

  As an expert in the field, Andrew had been asked to present a five-minute film about a Bellini Crucifixion, in a little Easter series based on paintings. A tiny enterprise, it had been moving and powerful, not least because of Andrew’s on-screen presence. Against a background of Charpentier’s Tenebrae he didn’t come across at all as a fusty pedant, his occasional self-deprecating description of himself. He wore his knowledge easily and was confident, relaxed. The film-makers picked up on his unexpected charisma and thought that it would be a waste for him to retreat back to his papers and paintings, to a life that was purely scholarly. They suggested a follow-up to him, an hour-long documentary about Giorgione, in which it was confirmed that Andrew was a natural for the small screen. Obviously I didn’t say so to Marian, but this new development in his career had been something of an eye-opener for me. I had thought I knew Andrew very well indeed; I hadn’t expected anything new to be revealed to me. But it was. There was something of himself he could communicate only in this way: not his considerable scholarship, but something else, some response to the work that was deeper, that was more than intellectual. I have never been able to define it, but I think that it was this unnameable thing, combined with his ability to be both populist and learned, that made him such a success in his new career. A series on portraits followed, together with a book, and then a similar project on landscape. I filled Marian in on the essence of this, the facts, and she listened, rapt.

  ‘And you,’ I said then. ‘How are things with you?’

  ‘Martin, do you remember Martin? He was studying medicine then. Well, I married him. He’s a consultant now, a neurologist. We have two children. This is my daughter Sarah,’ and she indicated the teenager, whose thumbs were flitting over the console of her phone. ‘The boy, Thomas, is younger. He’ll be thirteen on his next birthday. Did you ever marry?’

  Two close shaves, three if you count Henry: bottled out of marrying Ken, with a week to go, because I knew it wouldn’t work; bottled out of marrying Louis three years later, simply to punish myself for having bottled out the first time around. My love life deserves Molly’s scorn.

  ‘Me? No, I never married.’

  ‘You’re just right not to. I never thought you would anyway, you were always so into your theatre work. In any case so many marriages don’t work out nowadays. Did I read somewhere that Andrew’s divorced?’ I nodded. What she said had affronted me, stung me, and I was tempted to walk away without another word. ‘He has a son?’ she persisted. ‘He does,’ I agreed.

  ‘And you, you never had any children?’

  ‘I would never want to have children without being married, and as I told you, that never happened,’ I said. ‘Terribly old-fashioned of me, I know.’ She bit her lip and nodded, unsure as to whether or not I was being ironic.

  ‘I’m still in Kildare,’ she said suddenly. ‘Can you believe it? All of my life, practically. I’ve got a part-time job with an interior designer, now that the children are half-grown. Advising on furniture, paintings, ceramics, that kind of thing. That’s been my life: Kildare, Martin, the family.’ In that instant she looked like someone who had awoken from a dream, the dream that was her life, and who saw it for the first time for what it was, how far it was from what she had imagined in the past
it might become. She stared at me, more astounded by what she had just told me than she would have been by anything I could have told her. ‘I’ll give Andrew your best when next I see him,’ I said, and she told me to be sure to do that. And then we went our separate ways.

  I spent the first ten minutes in the shop looking blankly at kettles and thinking about Marian. Meeting her had been a dispiriting experience, as it so often can be when one meets old friends. The initial delight, the sense of connection, and then the distancing, the unravelling of that connection as information is exchanged and it becomes clear why one hasn’t stayed in touch. Defensiveness sets in, and it all ends in melancholy when one is alone again. Then my eye fell on a thick pottery fruit bowl, spattered and dripped with colour, and I remembered why I had gone into the shop in the first place.

  They had no ceramics I really liked; more to the point, nothing I thought would please Molly. I went to three more shops before I came on a cream-jug and sugar basin, a matching set in sponge-ware with a pattern of rose hips and little birds that was just what I wanted. From there I went to a bookshop, where the tables were piled high with books for the summer tourist trade – Joyce, Synge, Beckett. I noticed a small gift volume of Wilde that would have appalled Oscar himself, for the jacket bore a design of peacock feathers. While this gave it a suitably stylish fin de siècle tone, it took no account of the fact that Wilde had a great superstitious fear of peacock feathers. And this little book would be no gift for Molly, because she shared the same fear. She had an argument once with a wardrobe mistress who wanted her to wear a dress adorned with peacock feathers; but it’s a common enough superstition in the theatre, in itself a world riddled with such beliefs. The director backed Molly and the feathers were removed. I spent some time browsing in the bookshop but could see nothing that immediately suggested itself as something she would like.

  I went to a café after that and had a mineral water outside on the terrace with the smokers, even though I gave up cigarettes many years ago. I was tired from the crowds in the streets, tourists, Saturday shoppers; and the heat of the day was draining. Open-topped tour buses went past as I sat there and then a thing like a boat, a thing packed with children dressed as Vikings, who cheered as they went around the corner. I thought again about my encounter with Marian. I wondered how she would have reacted had it been Andrew she’d met by chance in the street, and I remembered his passion for her all those years ago. It was strange that someone whose need to worship was so intense could be so dismissive of religion.

  The night his son Tony was born, for only the second time in all the years we’ve known each other, my friendship with Andrew crossed a certain line. Friendship is only that, friendship. There are areas of reserve and distance, knowledge and experience that cannot be shared or entered into. When these limits are not observed, it stops being friendship and starts being something else. I was the first person Andrew rang from the maternity hospital. Tony was born in the depths of the night, sometime after 4 a. m., the hour of the wolf, the hour of dreams and nightmares, of deepest sleep. The phone call caught me then with no conscious defences whatsoever, the incessant ringing frightened me at such an hour. There was a man crying on the other end of the line, and then he said my name and I knew it was Andrew. ‘What’s wrong? What’s happening?’ He told me that his son had just been born. Coming straight from the delivery room, he was in a strange state of extreme emotional openness; and in my own night-time confusion I more than matched him. If he was like someone who had been caught up in an explosion, I was like a hibernating animal that had been accidentally woken out of a sleep that was close to coma. Nicole was fine, the baby was fine, he had never imagined … he didn’t know … Had he rung me like this, babbling and weeping, at four in the afternoon rather than four in the morning, I’d probably have reacted with cool amusement. I’m very glad things didn’t work out that way, and Tony’s birth became an emotionally charged moment of connection between Andrew and myself, unique, intimate, something we have never spoken of again to each other from that day to this. Andrew was still sobbing and close to incoherent when he hung up. I crashed back into sleep almost immediately, and when I awoke in the morning the memory of the whole thing was like a bizarre dream.

  I went to the maternity hospital the following day. Nicole was sitting up in bed holding the baby, with Andrew on a chair leaning in towards them, to form a version of one of his beloved paintings: a secular nativity. Nicole’s little face was pale and shut as a Flemish Madonna; the baby was absurdly small, out of proportion with the rest of the scene; and Andrew gazed at the pair of them in frank adoration, the ecstatic patron experiencing a vision. As the years passed and Tony grew, I realised that Andrew had at last found an object worthy of his devotion, someone who would return his wholly unconditional love.

  Andrew’s mother died and was long buried before I heard about it, for I was abroad when it happened, but I did attend his father’s funeral, about five years after Tony was born. I found out quite by chance that he was dead, when I decided for no particular reason one day to speak to Andrew. We had drifted apart a bit in those years of his marriage, mainly because Nicole and I didn’t get on. On the rare occasions when I did ring him, I had taken to calling him at work to avoid having to speak to her. ‘Mr Forde won’t be in for the rest of the week,’ his assistant told me, ‘his father passed away this morning.’ I made a snap decision to be at the funeral, even though I was particularly busy with work at that time. It was easy enough to find out where and when it was taking place. I cancelled two meetings and booked a flight, arranged to pick up a hire car at Belfast airport. My plan was to be over and back within the day, which was eminently possible.

  I was nervous as I went into the church. Although in London I had attended funerals in traditions with which I was unfamiliar, in Ireland I had only ever been to Catholic ceremonies. Andrew’s family was Church of Ireland. It was a small funeral and most of the mourners were elderly. As I sat waiting for the service to begin I looked around the church, admiring it: the great brass lectern in the shape of an eagle, the lustre of the tiled floor, cream and ochre and dark green. With a start I realised that this must be the church Andrew told me about, the first beautiful thing he had ever seen. I hoped that he would remember that today, and that it might afford him some comfort.

  Andrew came into the church just before the funeral began, with Nicole walking a short distance behind him. The service was short, with a few hymns and readings from the Bible, using the King James Version, which was unfamiliar to me. It distanced and made strange familiar texts – the sufferings of Job, the raising of Lazarus – but the grave beauty of the language also enhanced them. The minister spoke at some length about Andrew’s father, whom he had attended in the hospital in the final weeks of his life, and whom he referred to as ‘Andy’. I hadn’t known until then that Andrew had been named after his father. The minister said that Andy had lived the last twenty years of his life under the burden of a sorrow so great as to be nigh on unbearable: the death, indeed the murder, of his beloved son Billy. He likened Andrew’s father to King David, whose cries rang through the palace as he grieved for Absalom: O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son! He said that Andy, his late wife Rose and their loving and dutiful son Andrew, who was here with us today, were all fully victims of the Troubles, and that they had borne with fortitude their terrible loss. Andrew’s devotion to Andy had been moving to see, he said; his solicitude, his many visits back to Belfast particularly in this last year of his father’s life. Now Andy’s grief was over, now he was at peace. Something was at an end, but it was also a new beginning. Then we said a few more prayers, there was another hymn, and it was all over.

  Afterwards I stood outside the church, ill at ease amongst the mourners who gathered in groups talking to each other. There was no one I recognised, no one I knew except Nicole. She was also standing on her own, but when I caught her eye and started to move t
owards her, she gave no hint of recognition. It was as if she had never seen me before and had no wish to get acquainted. I abandoned my attempt to approach her. Instead, I joined a small huddle of people who were gathered around Andrew, taking their turn to shake his hand and offer their sympathy. Most of them were elderly: friends and neighbours of his parents; old work colleagues of his father’s. I was finding the whole day ineffably depressing, much more so than I had expected. I had come out of loyalty to Andrew, but the deep sorrow of the occasion, which the minister had skilfully identified, was getting to me. I waited for the last few people gathered around Andrew to disperse. It was November, but at least it was a dry, bright day, the sky all blue and the ground covered with fallen leaves. And then Andrew saw me.

  He hadn’t realised until then that I was present at the funeral, and it was clearly a great surprise to him. I tried to say a few words of condolence, but it was beyond me. He said my name; he said it again, and then he enveloped me in a great brotherly bear hug, crushing me and holding me to himself for some moments, so that my face was buried in the soft darkness of his overcoat. It was the first heartfelt gesture I had seen him make, the first real emotion he had shown all morning. I was overcome by it too, for it was out of character for Andrew and me, who were usually so undemonstrative with each other. When, as a part of the package of new social rituals he had adopted on moving to England, he took to giving me a little kiss when we met, he knew I found it slightly false, and although we still greeted each other in this way, it was usually with a degree of irony on both sides.