Molly Fox's Birthday

by Deirdre Madden

  ‘How badly injured were you?’ I asked.

  ‘Not very. The cut looked worse than it actually was. My shoulder was sore from where I’d fallen on it, and I had a terrible headache from having hit the edge of the table as I went down. It was as if I’d been beaten up in terms of both the physical pain and the sense of deep shock I felt. The bath didn’t help as much as I’d hoped it would. Afterwards I poured myself a large whisky, which probably wasn’t a great idea, but I was desperate for a drink. And then something quite strange happened.

  ‘The apartment itself began to disturb me. As I’ve told you, up until then I’d been quite contented in it. That it belonged to strangers about whom I knew nothing hadn’t troubled me in the slightest, but now it was precisely that which bothered me. Everything there was charged with the presence of these people whom I’d never met. There was a sofa upholstered in yellow silk that was slightly frayed at the armrests. There was a candle in a small pot of thick glass that had been lit at some point in the past and then extinguished. There was an intimacy about all these things, but one that I couldn’t connect with because I didn’t know the people who owned them, and that failure to connect was deeply unsettling. It made the whole apartment feel more anonymous to me than any hotel room could ever have been; and anonymity was the last thing I wanted that night. There was a peculiar stillness, too, a heightened quality, as though I were sitting in the middle of something distant and perfected. The room was beautiful and mysterious and still; but as for me, I was distraught, I was broken and grieving.’ Even just remembering it and talking to me about it, Andrew was clearly upset. ‘What followed was easily the worst night I’ve ever experienced in my life.

  ‘I didn’t go to bed. I was afraid of falling asleep in case I had concussion, so I sat on the sofa all night until dawn. I desperately wanted to ring Tony, but that was out of the question. We’re acutely sensitive to each other. Having managed to persuade him that everything was all right, I knew that if I spoke to him again, particularly in the frame of mind in which I now was, he would pick up on it immediately. I couldn’t upset him just in an attempt to console myself. That wouldn’t have been fair.’

  ‘You should have called me,’ I said.

  ‘I did think of it. Then I remembered that you’d gone to Australia for a month. If it happened now I would call Molly. I thought about a couple of other friends, but in the end I rang no one. That was one of the things that made the night so lonely and painful. I realised how few people there were upon whom I could call when I was in trouble. All of this happened at a particularly low point in my life generally. I was still shell-shocked from the marriage having ended, and my career was in the doldrums. I was bored with the museum work, and the television thing didn’t open up until the following year. Of course now that I’m successful,’ he went on ironically, ‘I suppose there’s no end of people I could ring if I felt the need, and they’d be happy to help me. From what you say, I could even ring Marian Dunne. I couldn’t have been lonelier or more upset that night if I’d been lost in a forest, rather than holed up in a comfortable bourgeois apartment in the middle of Paris.

  ‘I felt so far from home. I started to think about Billy, I mean really think about him, not in that abstracted, almost wistful way he used to come into my mind, but Billy himself, just as he was. I wondered what he would have been like had he lived. Would we have got on any better? He might have settled a bit, got married, children, who knows? I was always so angry in those days when we were growing up together, pushing myself, desperate to get away, and I can see now why we didn’t get on. Billy was the exact opposite of me: happy-go-lucky, always cracking jokes, a real live wire. He energised any company he was in. I started to mourn him that night. It was as if I’d been numb for all those years and only then begun to feel the pain of his loss. That he’d had such a violent death bore in on me. I remembered the ring my father had given me and I wished I had it with me. I think it might have given me some sort of comfort, some sort of connection amongst all those things in the apartment that meant nothing to me. I had the idea that when I got back to London I’d take it out of the drawer and from that day on, I’d keep it with me at all times.’

  And now he took the ring from his pocket and set it on the table. It was just as he’d described it, a chunky, vulgar thing, solid and bright. I was glad he hadn’t handed it to me because I didn’t want to touch it. ‘A lot of things came together that night. Billy’s ring went from being something I didn’t want to being something very precious to me. Billy’s death became integrated into my life in a way that it should have been years earlier, only that I’d been too obtuse and resistant up until then. All the pieces were vaguely in place, but it took the shock of that night to pull them all together. Apart from this,’ and he indicated the ring, ‘what was there by which to remember Billy? A few faded photographs, and a headstone over the family grave, a place I never visited. I started to think about how people disappear, and then how they’re forgotten or remembered; the things we make in their memory, the way we try to honour them. By the way,’ he said suddenly, ‘to this day Tony doesn’t know about what happened in Paris, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention it to him.’

  Unbeknownst to Andrew, I’d already made a similar promise to Tony to keep secret from his father a conversation we’d had about a year earlier. I’ve known Tony all his life, and he regards me as something of an honorary aunt. Molly knows him well too, but she would strongly resist such a concept in relation to herself. When they’re together she flirts shamelessly with him, something he clearly finds embarrassing and thrilling in equal measure. Andrew and I were going out to lunch together on that day and had arranged to meet at his house. Tony opened the door to me when I arrived, and explained that his father had rung a short while before to say that he was running late. ‘He’ll be here as soon as he can.’ Tony led me into the drawing room, formal with its gilded mirrors and dark furniture, a room that for me he had unconsciously humanised with his attendant clutter. There was an open bag on the floor with textbooks spilling out of its maw on to the rug. On a little table sat a mug of tea and a massive, half-eaten, crudely made sandwich, with bits of lettuce and ham hanging out of it. Tony politely ignored this until I urged him to continue with his lunch, and then he set to it with extreme and casual appetite. We chatted about his studies – he had exams coming up – and he told me that he was more interested in science than in arts and that it was something of a running joke between himself and Andrew. ‘I don’t know how much he means it, though. That is, I don’t know if he’ll be really disappointed if I don’t follow him into the arts.’ I said I felt sure Andrew would be happy with whatever choice he made, that he would rather Tony had his own interests and followed through on them rather than trying to please his father.

  He swallowed the last of the sandwich, and then he said without any warning or preamble whatsoever, ‘Did you ever meet my uncle?’ This was so unexpected that for a moment I had no idea as to which uncle he might be referring: I thought that he might mean a brother of Nicole’s. ‘Which uncle would that be?’

  ‘Uncle Billy.’

  ‘Why no, Tony, I didn’t. I never met your uncle.’

  ‘But you know who I mean?’

  ‘I do, of course.’

  ‘You know he was murdered?’ His face as he said this was strange, half grieved and half excited, and I didn’t like the excitement.

  ‘Yes,’ I said shortly.

  ‘You must remember the time when it happened, because you were at college with my dad.’

  ‘You should ask Andrew about all of this, not me.’

  ‘I don’t want to upset him. If he felt all right about talking to me about it then he’d bring up the subject himself, wouldn’t he? But he never does. It’s important for me because it’s my family too, you see.’ I thought about this for a minute and then I said, ‘I’ll tell you what I know, Tony, but it isn’t much.’

  I described to him in some detail that
Saturday evening so many years ago when I’d met Andrew on the street and gone with him to his house. I told him how cold it had been, how the sky had been deep pink as the sun set and how all this had happened just before his uncle was killed. I knew that what I was telling him was important, even though it was indirect, allusive, because it would help to put the bald fact of Billy’s death into an imaginative context for him.

  ‘Don’t tell my dad,’ he said again, ‘but I went to the newspaper library and looked up that date. There wasn’t much in the English papers but I was able to get to see some of the Irish papers on microfilm, and there was more there. It was so weird, seeing his name and thinking, “That’s my dad’s brother. That’s my uncle.”’

  ‘All of this must seem quite unreal to you.’

  ‘It doesn’t. That’s the problem. It seems completely real but I can’t get at it, somehow.’

  ‘They weren’t particularly close, Andrew and Billy. They didn’t get on.’

  ‘I know that. I imagine that must have made it even more difficult for Dad.’

  ‘Sometimes family things aren’t easy.’ He looked at me straight-faced, this child of divorced parents, this veteran of family life, and politely agreed with me. Andrew would have done anything for Tony. He lived in comfort, was sent to the best of schools; both his welfare and his pleasures were carefully considered and lavishly provided for. The one thing Andrew couldn’t do for his son was to protect him from what he himself was, from the strange evolution and deep grief of his own life. Sometimes the most important and powerful element is an absence, a lack, a burnished space in your mind that glows and aches as you try to fill it.

  ‘How much have you talked to your dad about this?’

  ‘Hardly at all. I’ve always known about it. I mean, I sort of grew up knowing that my dad had had a brother, and I knew what had happened to him, but I didn’t really think about it much. You don’t understand these things when you’re a little kid. Just recently I’ve been trying to get my head round it, but like I said, I don’t want to upset him. Promise me you won’t tell him we talked about this.’

  ‘I’ll do no such thing. I’ll tell him he needs to tell you everything he knows about Billy.’

  ‘No, please, promise.’ There was the sound of Andrew’s key in the door, and Tony stared at me in alarm. ‘Please.’ I relented, and against my better judgement hissed ‘Promise’ as Andrew came into the room. He was completely preoccupied with being so late and didn’t notice the atmosphere between Tony and me.

  Because both our lives were so busy, although I had seen Andrew a few times since that day when I talked to Tony, this drink in Molly’s garden, on her birthday, was the first private and considered meeting we had had since then. ‘The next time you see Tony,’ I said, ‘tell him about Paris.’

  ‘But I lied.’

  ‘Explain why. He was a child. He’ll understand now. He’s not a child any more. You should talk to him about Billy, too. Show him the ring. Tell him the whole story behind it, just as you’ve told it to me. Tony has a right to know about these things. They’re a part of his life too, his identity. He needs to know.’

  ‘A couple of months ago he said he wanted to go to Belfast.’

  ‘Did you take him there?’

  ‘I ignored it. I thought he was pulling my leg. You know, I thought I was getting to the bottom of things, but it seems I’m still evading them. Billy was the whole idea behind the memorials series. All the time I was working on the project about portraits and then the landscapes, at the back of my mind there was always the thought of how people are memorialised, and all of that came from Billy. And yet when we made the series and I wrote the book, his was the one death that I couldn’t bring myself to address. You see,’ he said to me, ‘there’s something I don’t think you’re really considering here, and I very much doubt if Tony’s aware of it either. Billy was killed. But it’s also highly likely that he himself killed people too. He was deeply involved in Loyalist paramilitary activity, there’s not the slightest doubt about that. Coming to terms with the idea that he was murdered was one thing. That he killed people, innocent people, is something else entirely. I still don’t know how I’d explain that to Tony, how I’d help him cope with it. And that’s why I avoid talking to him about his uncle.’

  ‘It’s great that the book is dedicated to him,’ I said, and he laughed.

  ‘I suppose so. What kind of expiation is that? The best I could manage, but it would have been meaningless to the Billy I remember. Maybe I did it for myself. That’s one thing the making of this series convinced me about – that memorials of any kind have more to do with the living than with the dead.’

  The heat had gone from the day, but warmer tones had come into the light, deep golden, as the evening wore on. Everything in the garden, the trees, the table, the fake cow, threw bizarrely long, distorted shadows. Near where we sat there was a honeysuckle, all frail cream and yellow spikes, all heaped and clustered against the wooden lattice. Its fragrance sweetened and intensified as the day ended into a deep rich perfume; and there were roses too in Molly’s garden, roses and stock. When I was growing up in the country there was woodbine in the hedges, honeysuckle’s wild little cousin, its stubby spikes yellow and pink, its perfume even stronger than honeysuckle. These things never leave you. I remembered that night more than twenty years ago just before Andrew went away, when we sat drinking cheap wine in the rough garden of a rented house.

  ‘One other thing about that night in Paris,’ he went on. ‘At one stage in the evening I turned on the television and I saw news coverage of what had happened. It made me aware of exactly what I had been caught up in, how near a miss I had had. It frightened and upset me; I turned it off almost at once. Months later, when I was back in England, I happened to be watching television and suddenly there again was footage of that evening in Paris, the helicopters, people distressed and crying, the buildings of the city and the sky exactly as they had been. But the film was being used as part of a broader documentary about terrorism and there was a soundtrack over it, a voice-over and music. The music changed everything. It was a kind of soft jazz; for me it trivialised the images, and I was incensed. I did something I’d never done before; I rang the duty office of the channel that was broadcasting it. I spoke to a bored woman there. “What exactly is your problem, sir? That we’re showing a news documentary and using music over it? That’s actually quite common in the media now.” I told her not to be sarcastic. When she heard that I had been there on the day, that I’d been caught up in it, she thought that was my beef, which it wasn’t, not really. I hung up in the end, I could get no change out of her, and I sat there alone on the sofa, so angry. And then I thought, “This is just because I was involved on the day.” The woman was right, I had seen any number of broadcasts like this in the past and they hadn’t bothered me in the same way. All of this happened before I worked in television myself and I suppose, with hindsight, it was a good thing. It made me aware of the sensitivities of trying to present other people’s realities in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise have understood. After all I’ve said,’ he went on, ‘you may find this hard to believe, but I don’t often think about that night in Paris. The knowledge that came out of it is with me every day, but the event itself has become distant and strange. I don’t like thinking about it, and I’ll probably never mention it to you again.

  ‘But there is something I want to ask, if I may, something about you that has always puzzled me. I’ve always envied you your relationship to your family,’ he said, ‘your closeness to them and the support they give you. And yet I have to confess I don’t think I’ve ever understood it.’

  I knew exactly what he meant. Yes, I was close to my family. I went back to visit them whenever I could, and when they were able, some of them came to visit me. We spoke to each other frequently on the phone. I knew all their news, both serious and trivial things: the results of hospital tests, the results of minor football matches. Unlike many in my circle
I think I have always understood the value of formulaic conversation and how it can make for real communication. Such exchanges can forge a link with someone when there is deep affection but no real common ground. Andrew, with his impatient intelligence, would never understand this. But I know Molly would agree with me. Her relationship with Fergus is built upon a similar visceral warmth, the childhood bond that has never been broken. Closeness of that particular type is perhaps only possible with people one has known all one’s life, when the bonds have been made before something in one’s soul has been closed down by consciousness, by knowledge; a kind of closeness that can coexist even with dislike. Perhaps this was something that Andrew could understand, perhaps this was why he was haunted by the thought of Billy, but I wasn’t sure that I could explain it to him.

  Instead I said, ‘I remember when I was a teenager, one of my sisters was already married. She was in her early twenties and she was expecting her first baby. We were at home together alone and she was talking about it, how excited she was, how much she was looking forward to it; and then she said, “When this child is born, my life won’t count for anything any more. Everything will be for him. The only meaning my life will have will be in relation to the baby.” Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a complaint, for she said it with delight. Her attitude was shocking to me for it was as if life was some sort of terrible problem, a burden, and she had discovered a way to evade it, to pass it on to someone else and to let them suffer it. And even then, even though I was hardly more than a child myself, I knew that that wasn’t right. I remember that you were arguing with Molly one time about religion and you said that one’s first and perhaps only moral responsibility was to be fully human. If you did that, you said, everything else followed on. If you ask me, I suppose I’d say that the only thing you have to do with your life is to live it. And my sister’s attitude appalled me because it was a repudiation of that, and yet she felt fully justified and vindicated in doing it.