He was still smoking and gazing out over the garden. ‘I told her she should have got a dog rather than a fake cow. A real dog, I mean.’
‘She’s away a lot. It’s impossible to look after a dog properly when you’re all over the place the way Molly is.’
‘That’s what she said, but I told her I’d look after it. I’d mind it at my place, or I’d come over here every day if she preferred. Feed it. Take it for walks. I know she was tempted. She likes dogs.’
‘She does,’ I agreed.
‘We always had dogs when we were children,’ Fergus said. ‘We had a spaniel called Bingo. Gorgeous creature, she was, so gentle. Sort of toffee-coloured. I still remember the feel of her ears, like silk they were …’ His voice trailed away.
‘Why “Bingo”?’
‘Do you know, I have absolutely no idea. I can’t remember now.’ Unusually, he looked me straight in the eye as he said this, and he smiled. I was the one who glanced away, overwhelmed by the combination of the lost child in him with his memories, and that haunting voice. How did Molly bear it? I picked up my glass and drank some of the icy cold water.
‘Are you writing a new play?’ he asked me shyly, and I said that I was attempting to do so. ‘Will there be a part in it for Molly?’
‘I’m not sure yet. It would be good if it turned out that way. I’d love to work with her again. But it’s early days yet. All I know is that it’s about a hare.’ He stared at me, astonished, and then I realised that he’d misunderstood. ‘That’s H-A-R-E,’ I added, and we both laughed.
‘You had me worried there for a minute. And how does the hare fit in? Is it a character? Will you have a real live animal there on the stage?’
‘I don’t know. I’m still playing about with the idea, I haven’t actually started writing it yet.’ I don’t usually talk to people about work in progress; that I did so today was a sign of my desperation. I had hoped that spoken of aloud it would impress me too, but that trick hadn’t worked.
‘Molly’s going to London after New York, isn’t she?’ he said. ‘She’s making one of those book things, tapes that people listen to in the car. I’ve got all of them. The Mayor of Casterbridge. Wuthering Heights. Jane Eyre. She’s amazing on that one. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. I listen to them at night when I can’t get to sleep.’
I take back any impression I may have given that Fergus lacks his sister’s charisma. He may not have her ability to transform herself, to project dramatically, but his quiet charms are powerfully beguiling. The intimate and confiding manner, together with his gentleness, his sweet nature, is quite a combination. If he knew what he was about you’d call him the most subtle of seducers. That he doesn’t know – and he really doesn’t – almost beggars belief. This lack of self-knowledge, and its consequences, exasperates Molly no end.
‘This is how it works,’ she’d explained to me once. ‘Fergus meets a woman. He reels her in without even trying. She thinks he’s the sweetest, kindest man she’s ever met, and he may well be. Fergus thinks that at last he’s found what he’s wanted all his life, someone who loves him. He doesn’t pick up on the fact that she doesn’t know him. For a while things bowl along well enough, and Fergus thinks he’s happy. And then it begins to unravel. Women pay a lot of lip service to the idea of romantic love, but it’s all nonsense. They’re generally looking for money and security, for social power.’ I protested the cynicism of this. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she replied ironically. ‘Maybe there are plenty of women out there who’d be happy to share their life with one of the most endearing men you could ever meet, who’d overlook the problems he has through no fault of his own, but wherever these women are, Fergus never seems to meet them.’
She was being disingenuous and she knew it. Fergus’s problems were no small thing, and fretting about them had blighted Molly’s own life for years. The heavy drinking and the bouts of depression, the serious medication and the inability to have a real career, his general helplessness and haplessness: you would have had to wonder about the woman who would have willingly chosen to take all of this on board and engage with it. I said as much to Molly.
‘But I engage with it!’ she said with sudden passion. ‘I love Fergus and I’ll never let him down.’ I backed off at that point. Close as I was to Molly, the conversation was moving into a place where I had no business being and didn’t want to go. I looked at Fergus sitting beside me, quietly smoking his cigarette. Heartbreaking, it must be, to have such a brother. Suddenly I felt that if I were Molly, I might well have cut Fergus out of my life. I knew she’d thought of it occasionally. There were periods when she distanced herself from him, when he was well enough to be left to get on with his life while she got on with hers. But there were also crises time and time again that wore her down emotionally and mentally. She told me of a recurrent nightmare she had, crudely simple in its psychology but none the less powerful for that, none the less terrifying, of trying to save Fergus from drowning and realising that they were both going to go under. Terrifying, yes, that’s what he was, this gentle, broken man who sat before me in the scented summer garden, drinking iced water and making banal conversation. At this precise moment I couldn’t imagine a more unnerving sibling. To look at him and to see yourself, the same physique, the same rare gift, and to see what had become of him, and to know that it could so easily have happened to you. Molly was heroic, saintly, I thought. Her circumstances would have defeated most people: they would certainly have defeated me. Fergus was a dangerous man, with his tenderness and his charm and the deep and unending darkness of his mind that was an abyss into which Molly might also vanish one day if she wasn’t strong enough. There was no knowing when, if ever, she might reach tipping point. He repelled me even as my heart went out to him for all he had suffered and lost.
‘Do you know what she’s doing in New York?’ I asked him.
‘It’s just a holiday, as far as I’m aware. You know Molly. She loves cities and the bigger the better. She likes to be alone while knowing that there are lots of people around her.’
‘That’s true,’ I agreed, remembering the first time I ever saw Molly, sitting reading her book in a café, with that great rope of dark hair draped over her shoulder.
‘She seems to be having a great time,’ Fergus went on. ‘She’s got a ticket for the opera for tonight.’
‘You’ve spoken to her recently?’
‘She called me yesterday. It wouldn’t be possible for Molly to go more than a couple of days without speaking to me.’ I was struck by the unconscious egotism of this, and he noticed me noticing. My unspoken objection to what he had said hung in the air between us. It seemed to amuse him faintly, for he gave a little smile but said nothing. After a moment or two, to break a silence that was becoming increasingly awkward, I asked him, ‘How’s your job going these days?’
‘Oh, much as ever. It’s incredibly boring, just basic office stuff, but at least it’s a job. They’re very understanding when I’m stretchered off, and that counts for a lot.’
‘Architect’s office, isn’t it?’
‘No, a solicitor’s. I had to leave the architect’s a few years back. The boss was so aggressive; I just couldn’t take it. Fergus, you did this. Fergus, you did that. Always shouting at me. I hate aggressive people. It was a pity because the job itself was more interesting than where I am now.’ I saw in his eyes a flash of that vulnerability and fear I always expected to find in him; and I realised that it had been strikingly absent today, up until this moment. He drew hard on his cigarette. ‘The solicitor’s is all right, they’re decent to me. I’m lucky to have work. And I like the place where I’m living. I can walk into town in twenty minutes, and it’s on a direct bus route to here, so it’s handy for when I want to come and see Molly. Obviously it’s nothing like this,’ and he gestured towards the garden, the house. ‘It’s a flat and it’s small, but it gets a lot of light and the landlord’s nice. I was lucky to find it.’
I’ve a
lways liked Fergus, even though I’ve never got to know him very well. Pretty well all our meetings have taken place by chance here in Molly’s house, with months or even sometimes years between them. She would never have willingly brought us into each other’s company, much less fostered strong links between us, and it occurred to me that this was yet another area where things weren’t quite on the level with her. It was all very well for her to befriend my brother, for Tom to become her spiritual guide and mentor, but it would have been quite another thing for Fergus and me to have any sort of friendship independent of Molly.
After I split up with Louis I took my broken heart to Dublin, to Molly’s house. Much to my embarrassment Fergus happened to call round and was witness to my tears, my red eyes and swollen face. ‘I hate you seeing me like this,’ I said, sniffing and gulping, to which he replied, ‘Oh come now, it shouldn’t bother you at all, given the way you’ve seen me over the years.’ That pulled me up short. I had known Fergus anaesthetised by drink. I had seen him curled up in a blanket on Molly’s sofa, speechless with grief, like a man who was turning into stone. I had briefly seen him on one of the several occasions when he was hospitalised for depression, when Molly hadn’t been able to face going into the ward on her own; and to my shame I had never realised how humiliating Fergus might find all of this in his more lucid and coherent hours.
The cat that had pestered me at lunchtime was back in the garden now. Fergus stubbed out his cigarette and coaxed it over to him, set it on his lap and petted it. The creature settled down there and let him make quite free with it. He had turned up one of its paws and was studying the soft pink pads when he suddenly asked me a question completely out of left field: ‘Have you ever met my mother?’
‘No Fergus, I haven’t.’
This was an instinctive lie rather than a calculated one, and I regretted it immediately. Perhaps Fergus was being disingenuous: perhaps Molly had told him about our encounter with their mother and he was curious to hear my version of what had taken place. If this was the case he was being most duplicitous, for he released the cat’s paw and took to stroking its head, and said, ‘No, I don’t suppose you would ever have had occasion to meet, now I come to think of it.’
‘What’s she like?’ I dared to ask.
‘Mummy?’ He considered this for a few moments and then he said, ‘Remote. She’s a nice person but she’s hard to get to know. She doesn’t like people to get close to her emotionally. You can get to a certain point and then she draws back, becomes distant, and that can be hard to take. But it’s just the way she is,’ he said mildly. ‘Everybody has their own peculiarities, don’t they?’ They most certainly do, I thought. ‘I actually think they’re quite alike, Mummy and Molly, but Molly hates me saying that. It’s true though, isn’t it? Molly’s the best in the world and I don’t know how I’d have got this far in life without her, but she’s remote in that same way. She doesn’t like anybody to get too close.’ I asked him if he saw his mother often.
‘I try to. It isn’t always easy. She doesn’t live in Dublin and neither of us can drive, so it’s awkward. I worry a lot about her, now that she’s getting older. I think she’s lonely. There’s not much I can do but I hate to think of her being isolated.’ He lifted his gaze from the cat on his knee and looked me straight in the eye. ‘Do you think there’s any way you could persuade Molly to make her peace with our mother? Molly likes you lots. She’s as close to you as she is to anyone. She might listen.’ Given the way the conversation was developing, I thought it best to be straight with him.
‘Fergus,’ I said, ‘that’s a pretty tall order. She’s extremely hostile to your mother.’
‘Oh, she can’t stand her. Molly hates Mummy, I’m fully aware of that. She can’t tolerate being in the same room. She blames our mother for everything, especially for all my troubles.’
‘And you don’t?’
‘Of course not.’ He was still holding my gaze with unusual firmness of purpose for such a shy man. ‘My life is a shambles. No, let’s not pretend otherwise,’ for he saw me begin to demur. ‘A total shambles. I don’t have any of the things a man in his mid-thirties might reasonably expect to have – a home of his own, a wife or a partner, maybe children, a career. And I mean a career, not a job: not a dazzling career like Molly’s, I know how rare that is, but not a dead-end lousy clerking job either, like the one I’m stuck in. I’m aware how little all of what I have amounts to; and when I wake in the small hours and think about it, it’s more unimpressive still, believe me. But here’s the key point,’ and he laid his hand over his heart. ‘My life is my life. Not my mother’s or Molly’s or anyone else’s but mine. And I take full responsibility for it. Wouldn’t that be the worst thing of all? To be a man of thirty-five and still be blaming one’s mother for life not having worked out as one might have wanted it to?’ He paused for a moment to let me consider this idea.
‘Do you ever talk to Molly about this?’
‘Are you kidding? It’s off the agenda. Mummy’s a monster, and everything’s her fault. End of story. Nothing to discuss. Why do you think I’m talking to you?’
‘And have you spoken to your mother?’
‘We have discussed it at length over the years, but there’s nothing much more to be said now. I try to avoid the subject. I don’t like to upset her. In any case, what I’m telling you is that it’s Molly’s perspective that’s wrongheaded and causing problems, not my mother’s.’
‘Fergus,’ I said, ‘everything you’re telling me is so much at odds with what I thought was the situation in your family that I’m at a loss to know what to say.’
‘I know,’ he replied, and he sighed. ‘I can well imagine all this must come as a shock, and I’m sorry to spring it on you so suddenly. But I must admit that I’m glad to be having this conversation. I think it was meant to be. In all the years you and Molly have known each other, this is the first time we’ve met without her also being present. Isn’t that strange?’
‘Did you plan this? Am I being set up?’
‘Oh no, no, far from it.’ I considered this for a moment: I believed him. He broke my gaze and looked away down the long scented garden, at the fruit bushes and the roses before he turned to me again.
He told me that he thought his mother should never have married. It wasn’t that she made a bad marriage, it was that she was unsuited to the whole state of married life. ‘She had been brought up in a generation where it was what was expected of a woman, and so a great many married and had children, whether it suited them or not. At least my mother had the self-knowledge to realise what she had done, and you have to give her credit for that. I think a lot of women were in the same position but they couldn’t see the damage they were doing. By the time she understood the situation, it was too late, in that Molly and I had arrived on the scene. So I think that the whole time we were small she was wondering should she stay or should she go – which would do least harm.’
‘Whereas Molly’s view is that she just got fed up with the situation and shipped out.’
‘Exactly.’
I felt that the man with whom I was having this conversation was not the person with whom I had sat down about half an hour earlier. For me that Fergus – timid, weak, a failure in life – had disappeared for ever. This new Fergus was a man of wisdom and acute moral knowledge. He had had the courage and insight to inspect his own life more closely than most might dare to do, and he had compassion and forgiveness for those who had hurt him. The memory of that detached, coolly amused woman whom I had briefly met tempered my thoughts: I might have considered him less extraordinary had I not seen what he was up against, although it was imperative now that he should never know I’d met her. It didn’t matter that his life, in social terms, was not a success. To expect someone to gain a mature perspective on their troubled life as he had, and to also expect them to have worked out to their advantage all those other things such as property, relationships and career that we mistakenly confuse with life itself
– that would have been unreasonable. What he had achieved seemed to me more precious by far.
‘There’s no villain in all of this,’ he said. ‘Mummy didn’t deliberately set out to cause harm, any more than I intended all the grief and trouble I’ve given Molly over the years.’ Molly. I’d thought she had won through in life, whilst Fergus was defeated, broken. Now it seemed to me that things were perhaps quite the opposite, and her brother’s woes notwithstanding, Molly was the one who really hadn’t come to terms with the past, who was still bitter about it in a way that was corrosive and did more harm to her than to anyone else. I felt that Molly herself knew this. What else was her connection with Tom but an attempt to find that understanding, that forgiveness that her brother had come to? And if Tom hadn’t got her there, what hope was there for me?
‘Maybe someday I’ll talk to Molly about this as you ask. The one thing I can’t promise is that it’ll make any difference.’
Molly Fox's Birthday Page 14