Molly Fox's Birthday

by Deirdre Madden

  ‘Don’t underestimate all the trouble I’ve had, but don’t make the mistake either of disregarding all that she’s achieved. Molly Fox: she’s remarkable. You do know that today’s her birthday?’

  ‘I do.’ I felt a sudden anger for Molly’s sake. ‘You can say what you want about your mother, she certainly picked her moment.’

  ‘I think these moments pick themselves, don’t you? When something’s over, it’s over. You know yourself, I suppose, when a relationship’s run its course you can’t simply string it along for a week or so more just because Christmas, say, is coming or somebody’s birthday. I think that’s how Mummy would reason it.’

  Now I didn’t know what I thought. Perhaps Molly was right, and her poisonous mother had turned Fergus’s head, justifying her own actions to make herself feel better. Of course you could hang on for extra time. Some people lived a lie their whole lives, and was that worse than abandoning two small children? Anyway, it was done now, and it had been a disaster.

  ‘I used to think I remembered this day,’ he said. ‘I mean Molly’s seventh birthday, the day my mother left. I can see the two of us eating ice creams, and I’m crying. But then someone told me that if you can see yourself in a memory, as if you’re watching a film, then it isn’t true. And I’m afraid that’s how it is in this particular instance. I can see two small children, one of whom is me, in our kitchen at home. But maybe my father or Molly told me that one time, that we had ice creams and I cried, and I’m imagining that I remember it.’

  He moved to take something from his pocket, and in doing so he accidentally dislodged the cat. He winced as it hooked its claws into his leg to try to prevent itself from slipping off his lap, but the pain made him push it away. The cat tumbled to the grass almost in slow motion and slunk off down the garden, disgruntled. I had thought Fergus was looking for his cigarettes, but instead from his jacket he took a small wooden box. ‘I bought this for Molly. It’s a little present for her birthday. You know she doesn’t really celebrate it. I’m the only person she accepts presents from today.’ He couldn’t keep a childlike note of pride out of his voice as he said this.

  The box was made of contrasting pale and dark woods, and one narrow side had been fashioned to resemble the spine of a book. But it was hinged, and when Fergus released a metal clasp on the other side of the box it opened out flat. I saw then that it contained a miniature chess set. The board and the chess men were also made of the same contrasting woods. There were holes in the board, and each of the tiny chess pieces, intricately carved, was fitted with a peg on the bottom, by which it could be slotted into the holes. Fergus moved a few pieces across the board at random to show me how it functioned. I wished that I had chanced upon it in a shop so that it could have been my gift to Molly, because I could think of few things that would have appealed to her more. Everything about it – its small scale, its concealment and intricacy – would delight her.

  ‘Do you think she’ll like it?’ Again that voice, so mellifluous, so haunting.

  ‘I do, Fergus. I think she’ll like it very much.’ He placed it on the table for me to give to her on her return, and stood up. ‘I should be going now.’

  He followed me out of the garden and back into the house. We fell again to small talk, as we had done on his arrival. I regretted that he had wanted no more than cold water to drink; he wished me well for my play. We both hoped to meet again before long. He stopped in the hall before all Molly’s photos, her trophies and prizes and posters, and we stood there together for a moment looking at them. There were pictures of Molly in full Restoration costume, as a flapper, in a draped Greek garment; pictures of her alone, of her locked in an embrace with someone, of her laughing. In all of them she was striking. Even in stills she conveyed the energy she transmitted on stage. ‘She was so young then,’ Fergus remarked, pointing at one of the photographs. ‘Look how long her hair was.’

  ‘That was the first time we worked together. That was my play, Summer with Lucy.’ I didn’t say it to him but it seemed like a lifetime ago now. He then inspected the trophies while I inspected him. ‘I know this must sound odd, but sometimes, even yet, I can hardly believe that she’s my sister. When I see her like this, professionally, I mean, and I think of how much she’s achieved … I suppose I realise I don’t tell her often enough how much I admire her.’

  ‘I’m sure she knows, Fergus.’ He raised his eyes and looked at me. I knew then how hard it would be for me to find a way to express my admiration for him. I knew he would never believe me.

  The clock chimed again as Fergus left. He had been there for an hour; it was later than I had thought. When I went back down to the kitchen I was struck by how it had changed since the morning, with the changing light of the day. I had seen this room – and this house – at all seasons, at all times of the day and night. I had been here when the whole place was cocooned with snow. I had seen it by candlelight. I had been here during heavy rain, the kind of rain that becomes pleasurable to watch because it makes of the house a haven. The rooms in which one moves become a world apart from the wet streets, the sodden garden. The kitchen now had moved into shadow; it had become a more sombre place than it had been this morning. The things I had bought in town were still sitting on the kitchen table where I had dumped them on Fergus’s arrival, and I had just about time to tidy them away. The second part of Andrew’s series on memorials would be starting on television shortly, and I wanted to see it.

  When I switched on, the opening credits were already running, a flowing sequence of images, stained glass, paintings and cathedral facades that faded into each other and was overlain by staccato minimalist music. When the actual programme began, the opening shot was of Andrew standing before the Menin Gate. The camera pulled back from him to reveal how vast the structure was, and then panned over the lists and lists of the war dead. ‘What do we intend,’ he asked in a voice-over, ‘when we memorialise? Is it simply to do honour, and if so to what? To the person or to our memory of the person? Is it that we want someone not to be forgotten? And is that genuinely possible? Is not our wish to, quite literally, set in stone, our thoughts and feelings, our memories and our idea of someone who is now dead – is not that wish in its very essence a futile one?’

  To begin with, he concentrated on the difference between public and private memorialising. He went from the Menin Gate to a huge cemetery from the First World War, inspecting individual graves as people tended to them, placing flowers and flags. He contrasted this with the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey and with a tiny war memorial in a Cotswold village. In everything he said he operated at the highest levels of intellectual debate, but there was such clarity to his thought, such logic and a kind of exalted simplicity to his ideas, that what he was saying was made accessible to pretty well anyone who might care to listen. There was also an enormous sympathy in his presentation, an emotional undertow that tempered the scholarly and subtly emphasised the deep humanity of the subject. There is something about Andrew that he can only communicate when he is in front of a camera. Even though he is an out standing teacher and lecturer, he only really comes into his own when he is being filmed. The impersonality of the medium allows that extra degree of emotional privacy into which he can relax, so that each viewer feels he is speaking directly to them, and to them alone. He conveys a sense of intimacy that is beyond what he ever makes available in his private life. That and his remarkable capacity for intellectual synthesis are at the core of his success.

  He talked about how, with the decline of religious belief, our concept of death changed in society as a whole. More than that, he quoted Virginia Woolf’s remark about how sometime around 1910 human nature changed, and argued convincingly that this was more germane to the issue of memorialising than anything to do with religion. ‘It is our attitude to life that is ultimately more significant than our attitude to death.’ Time and again he came back to this idea of the self, of what had brought about this change in perception (the de
velopment of psychology, the wars of the twentieth century, the rise of science and rationalism). The self we were left with after all this was, according to Andrew, a much more nebulous and evanescent thing, more socially determined than would have been conceivable in the nineteenth century.

  He used an exhibition of quilts commemorating people who had died of AIDS to illustrate what he was saying and to show how the nature of memorials had to change as a result of these changed perceptions. Quilting had always been considered a folk tradition rather than an art form. It was an area of female activity, unlike stone cutting or wood carving, the products of which were more enduring and therefore had always been seen as more suitable for memorials. ‘For the one thing we always wanted to believe about such constructions – tombs, statues, monuments – was that they were built to last. Unlike the things they represented, they would endure.’ Cue to weathered headless angels in a Victorian cemetery, full of broken statuary. While the AIDS quilts were undoubtedly a continuation of a certain tradition, they also indicated a radical break with the past, ‘a new kind of memorial for a new idea of the self’.

  Walking amongst the coloured quilts, with their embroidered names, dates and symbols of flowers, rainbows, notes of music and so on, he remarked on their aesthetic, simply on how attractive they were as objects. ‘And that, I must admit, is something that has often given me problems about certain memorials,’ Andrew confessed to the camera. ‘The discrepancy there is between the undeniable beauty of the memorial itself and the ugliness, the terrible violence of the deaths they record: acts of war, acts of the utmost inhumanity.’

  The scene moved to Paris, to Île de la Cité, with Notre Dame behind him. ‘I’m here to visit not the cathedral,’ he said, ‘but the memorial to the some 200,000 people deported from France during World War Two, amongst them Jewish people, resistance workers and forced labourers.’ He descended a flight of steps and was confronted by black iron bars and spikes. ‘Already there is a sense of narrowness and constriction.’ He turned and as he entered a doorway, said: ‘It’s difficult for us to film here. This is a dark place. It’s cramped and claustrophobic, intentionally so; and even on a hot afternoon such as we have today, one is chilled.’ In a low voice he described the interlinked cell-like structures, the metal bars, the thousands of tiny lights and the single bare bulb, the poems on the walls, the names of the camps to which the deported had been sent. ‘This is a profoundly moving place. There is also something terrible and desolate about it. It is not a place to which one would wish to return, but it is a place which stays in the mind and in the heart long after one has been here. I realise that our filming today is to a large degree inadequate, but I make no apology for it. This is not a place you see. This is a place you experience.’ I expected the camera to move to another place at that point, to another stele or plaque. Instead, it cropped closely to Andrew’s face.

  ‘But harrowing as this place is,’ he said, ‘I think that I would argue in favour of something more extreme still. There is a certain aesthetic at work here. Some crimes are so ugly, such an affront to humanity, that only a brutal, raw, even crude response is adequate. Anything else seems dishonest and disrespectful.’

  Now he was in a garden, a strange garden that was full of dark vegetation, hellebores and low plants with sharply pointed black leaves. ‘But who after all are memorials for?’ Andrew asked as he walked slowly towards a bench and sat down. ‘Are they for the living or the dead? By their very beauty can they offer comfort to those who have suffered loss, those who are left behind? Surely the answer must be yes. Surely this is one of the most important functions of a memorial, to redeem suffering through beauty.’

  In the closing sequences he drew together the various strands of thought he had explored in the course of the programme. The final shot found him walking through a cornfield, full of bright poppies. ‘I’m back where I started. The Menin Gate is a few kilometres west of here. That massive stone monument is a thing of its time. We live in a more vertiginous age, an age of doubt and reason. There’s something almost weightless about our world, I think, something fleeting and insubstantial that’s ill at ease with any pretence of certainty.’ The camera moved in for a close-up of a poppy moving in the wind, with its crumpled red petals and black heart. ‘There can be no more fitting memorial to the Great War, when a whole world passed away, than these poppies: than the fields of Flanders themselves.’ At that the camera pulled back to show thousands upon thousands of poppies scattered through the cornfield that stretched to the far horizon.

  ‘Well, you’ve changed your tune,’ I thought to myself as the final credits rolled and I remembered how dismissive he’d been of a Dublin sky all those years ago in college. Nothing would have been good enough for him then but art of the highest order. A week ago I had seen the first programme in the series, in which he’d dealt with the ancient world, with Greece, Rome and Etruria. He’d remarked upon how sometimes it was tempting to disregard what one knew of the function or meaning of some of the objects concerned, tomb paintings and marble steles, and to consider them purely in aesthetic terms, to project upon them our own feelings and ideas. When we looked at a terracotta sarcophagus on which sat life-sized figures of a man and a woman it was difficult not to interpret it in the light of our own conception of what the relations between a couple might be; to bring to bear upon it sentimental feelings that would have been incomprehensible to the Etruscans themselves. One of the most difficult things of all, he had said, was to stand outside our own time, to see the society in which we lived with a similar distance and detachment. Even to attempt to do it brought great insight. In tonight’s programme I had sensed a kind of unease, as if he himself was not fully convinced of the arguments he was making.

  I switched off the television and went down to the kitchen. I cooked the fish I had bought earlier, watching under the eye-level grill as the flesh became white and opaque. I put together a simple salad and cut bread. All the time I was preparing this meal and then eating it at the kitchen table I was thinking about Fergus. How completely I had bought Molly’s version of him! And even more to the point, how completely I had bought Molly’s version of herself. I should have been aware long before now that there was much more to Fergus than the trouble there had been in his life. His distress lay over him like a grey veil, obscuring who and what he was, but not changing his essential self. I could now see his personality and his disturbance as two quite distinct things: connected, yes, but not integral to each other in the way I had thought. This confusion had done him a great disservice. I wished it could be possible for me to develop a friendship with this kind, gentle, witty man, independent of my relationship with his sister, but I knew there was no chance of that.

  I felt that I was being disloyal thinking along these lines while I was staying in Molly’s place. The sense of it being her house, indeed a sense of Molly herself began to close in around me in the kitchen as it had done, more agreeably, on my waking that morning in the bedroom. On the kitchen table was a willow basket she used as a fruit bowl. There was a blue-and-white china tub for utensils near the sink, bristling with salad servers and wooden spoons; and beside it was an iron trivet in the shape of a flower, to support hot dishes and pans. Looking at these things made me feel weirdly nervous, too close to Molly at a moment when I felt disconnected from her. Beyond the kitchen window I could see the fake cow, that wretched thing that I wouldn’t have tolerated in my own life or home for a moment. Now it seemed to me like the most ridiculous affectation, the caprice of a woman with more money than either taste or sense, and I felt a sudden anger within me.

  Just at that, the doorbell rang. It startled me but I was glad to hear it because I needed company. I was spiralling into some strange mental state that I only half understood but that I knew I needed to get out of fast. Even if it was only someone selling raffle tickets or looking for directions it would be enough. It would oblige me to put on my social mask for a moment and connect me with another person, and th
at was what I needed right now.

  When I opened the door the caller was standing with his back to me, but I recognised him for all that, and this gave me the upper hand when he turned to face me.

  ‘Hello, Andrew.’

  ‘Molly,’ he said. ‘Where’s Molly?’

  ‘New York.’

  ‘New York?’ He could hardly have been more surprised if I’d said that she’d gone to the moon. ‘What are you doing here? And what’s she doing there?’

  ‘Aren’t you going to say hello to me?’ He gave an embarrassed little laugh then, apologised and greeted me.

  As he bent down and kissed me I remembered something that I neglected to mention earlier: Andrew and I had been to bed together. It only happened once, at the very end of that day I described, the last he spent in Ireland. I had offered him the choice of my absent friends’ rooms, but in fact he had spent his second and final night in the house with me. I remembered it now but only the cool fact of it, as one might recall that one had once visited Japan or been far out in a small boat on the open sea without recalling the precise details, without remembering in the fullest sense of the word. I am aware that what I am saying here doesn’t tally with what I said to Molly when she asked about this, but that’s easily explained: I was lying. It was none of her business. Anyone who asks such a question deserves to be lied to.

  ‘It’s Molly’s birthday.’

  ‘I know,’ I replied to him.

  ‘I hadn’t known it was today. I saw it in the paper.’

  ‘I saw it too. She won’t be pleased.’

  Why is that?’

  ‘Come through to the kitchen,’ I said. He was in the hall by now, and I closed the front door behind him.

  He looked well, but then he always does. He was dressed in pale clothes and was carrying a soft, biscuit-coloured jacket over his arm. Since he started working on television he has taken on even more of a gloss. People whom one has only known from seeing them on the small screen often look hyper-real in the flesh, and I had always put that down to the difference between the medium and real life. But since Andrew’s change of career I’ve begun to realise that it has more to do with certain habits of dress or grooming, of professional polish, that are required for the cameras and that are then carried on into daily practice.