Molly Fox's Birthday

by Deirdre Madden

  ‘She had a son about a week later, whom I love dearly, as I love all my nieces and nephews. But I think you can see what I’m getting at. Close as I am, I feel that I don’t belong. When I look at my family, their lives seem to me like a dream, a beautiful dream, full of warmth and companionship, but a dream for all that. While this was happening all around me, while I was growing up in it, Tom was simultaneously giving me books, making me question things, making me think. Tom in himself had been a challenge, drifting in and out of the house from time to time, the respect the rest of my family felt for his calling keeping him at a distance from them, although they would have denied this. I know he felt it, for he told me so. I think Tom and I saved each other from the worst of the loneliness that comes from being part of a family where you don’t fit in. He helped me to find a life of my own that was right for me, a life that was a balance between his rather austere consciousness and their unthinking warmth.’

  ‘You’re very fortunate.’

  ‘I suppose I am. Have you ever spoken to Molly about this? She has a theory that everyone gets pretty well what they want in life because they make a point of doing so, but the problem is that a great many people either don’t know what it is that they want or they won’t admit it.’

  ‘Yes,’ Andrew said, ‘Molly did talk to me about this. It’s something that’s very important to her, the idea of owning your own life, standing over the choices you’ve made and honouring them, owning your mistakes as well as your successes.’

  A change had come over his face at the mention of Molly’s name, and it was a look I recognised. The three of us had met up in a London hotel on a dark afternoon the previous December when snow was forecast. Andrew and I arrived first and we ordered hot chocolate against the bitter cold of the day. We sat in an alcove near a big window, which afforded little light. The room was small and dim, low-lit by wall sconces, and there was a candle burning on the table. It was all chintz and gilt; and as the chocolate was served a gentle snow began to fall. I have never got over my childish delight in snow, and at its first falling I cannot help a feeling of excitement I know to be absurd. And then Molly arrived. She was dressed in brown, a colour that suits her well. She wore a brown wool coat with a velvet collar and a small felt hat that would have defeated a lesser woman, would have made her dowdy, but Molly did honour to it even as she pulled it off and tossed it aside. Snow! Chocolate! We called for an extra cup, and she started eating the almond biscuits that had been brought to us. She was like nothing so much as a bird that day, a wren, all restless energy. What did we talk about? I have no idea. I only know that Andrew and Molly did most of the talking. I fell silent. I watched my friends, and I saw for the first time Andrew look at Molly in that particular way, that softness that he manifested today even when he was only thinking about her. How to describe it? Adoration, I suppose. Yes, adoration.

  By now I was regretting the champagne. I felt fuddled, but not pleasantly so. I think I had hoped for – no, I think I had confidently expected – the cheerful euphoria the red wine had given us all those years ago, instead of which it had brought only a flat melancholy. Billy’s ring was still sitting on the table. It was beginning to upset me, looking at it there. I couldn’t help thinking of it as a thing full of bad energy. ‘Don’t forget that,’ I said in the hope that Andrew would put it in his pocket immediately, and to my relief he did, but he also took it as a cue to leave which I certainly hadn’t intended. ‘I should make a move.’

  ‘Stay here for a few minutes more,’ I pleaded. We sat there in silence listening to the night around us, until the listening became active, meditative, an experience in itself. A dog was barking in the distance. A car passed on the road beyond the house. In a garden further down the street a group of people were also making the most of the longest day; we could hear their laughter, their voices. That short period of listening redeemed the evening for me. White flowers glowed in the low light: lilies, lobelia, stock’s fragrant little stars. It all became peaceful and profound, and when the time was right it was I who suggested that we move into the house.

  It was only when I stood up that I realised I’d had more to drink than I’d intended, even though I’d made sure that the lion’s share of the bottle had gone into Andrew’s glass. He moved to lift the tray, but I told him to leave it, and said that I would deal with it later. ‘Come up to the drawing room for a moment,’ I added. ‘There’s something I want to show you.’

  The ceiling light would have been too glaring and harsh, so I switched on a small lamp sitting on a table beside a stack of books. The lamp was a fake antique, with a shiny metal base and a spherical globe of frosted glass, etched with swags of ribbons and flowers, the sort of thing I knew Andrew abhorred. I sat down in a low armchair beside the table, while Andrew wandered around the dim room inspecting everything. All the books were pushed well back into the bookcases and here and there, against the spines, Molly had propped postcards she had received: Sydney Opera House, Venice, a reproduction of a Cézanne still life. There were a few small photographs in amongst the postcards, mostly unframed snapshots of Molly herself, casual photos unrelated to her work, taken with Fergus or with friends. There was also a framed photograph of her father. Such invitations as she had recently received, including one to a garden party in London on this very day, she had placed in traditional manner on the mantelpiece. Andrew was gazing at a vase full of twiggy branches. He crossed to the window and picked up from the sill a lump of white quartz that Molly had found somewhere and that had taken her fancy. ‘This is such a marvellous room,’ he said, even though there was so much in it that he couldn’t possibly like. Anyone could see, even someone who really didn’t want to understand, what all this was about. These objects had value and beauty for him simply because they belonged to her, to Molly Fox.

  ‘There was something,’ he said, ‘you wanted to show me.’ There wasn’t. I had only said that as a pretext for keeping him here for a little while longer. I heaved myself out of the chair and went over to the glass-fronted bookcase where Molly kept her most precious books, unlocked it with the small key and removed The Duchess of Malfi. ‘Come over here to the light,’ I said, ‘and look at this.’ I handed the book to him and he turned it over in his hands in that appraising professional manner he has when examining things. He stood there with his head bent and his eyes lowered, gazing at the book; and it afforded me an opportunity to look closely at him. I remembered how I used to watch him studying in the library all those years ago, when I’d been awed by his ability to concentrate. With hindsight it surprised Andrew too, for he’d said to me once that there was a type of intellectual single-mindedness of which one was capable only in one’s early twenties and which was astonishing in retrospect. ‘Although of course it’s possible,’ he went on, ‘that it isn’t an age thing, it’s rather that having done it once you can never again motivate yourself nor find the energy to repeat it.’ Not that I would know about that. His face in youth had been quite shut, stern even, as he frowned over his textbooks, closed off in his own mind from everyone around him. Since then the student’s fair hair had faded and thinned. Physically he had never fitted the stereotype of the aesthete; he was too solidly built and powerful. His forehead was large and square. Those hands that held the book would never wear Billy’s ring. I was suddenly aware of how his look had softened over the years, and why. All the tribulations he had been through, and they were considerable – his difficult relationship with his family, Billy’s death, the failure of his marriage – had not embittered him. Andrew had won through to some kind of moral knowledge, and it had matured him. He had successfully integrated these shocks and disappointments not just into his life but into his self, his sense of who he was. It was quite an achievement. With that, he raised his head and looked at me.

  ‘You’ve had a hard time,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, everything that’s happened,’ I explained lamely, and he shrugged.

  ‘It
’s only life.’ He closed the book and handed it back to me. ‘Molly has impeccable taste. And now I really must be on my way.’

  We went out into the hallway, and he wished me luck with my play. Already the ideas I had had for it while I was sitting in the garden had lost their appeal: I was no longer sure that they would help me find my way into the work.

  ‘I’ll call you when we’re both back in London. If you’re talking to Molly, give her my love. Tell her I said Happy Birthday.’

  He bent down and kissed me goodbye, a formal, polite kiss; and as he did so I remembered again that night I’d slept with him. Only this time it wasn’t just the fact of it that came back to me. This time my whole body remembered, in a rush, a shock. It was like stepping onto something that wouldn’t hold and falling through, and in that fraction of a second between his lips brushing my cheek and the front door closing behind him I caught his eye, and I couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t also remembering the same thing in the same way. Then he was gone.

  There was a chair in the hall where no one ever sat, but I sat on it now; and the clock at the head of the stairs began to chime softly, first its warning chords, and then it struck ten times. I sat there in the absolute silence that fell afterwards, still in another reality, aroused and emotionally shattered. And that’s how and where I was when the doorbell rang.

  Andrew. He had come back.

  I’d been correct, then, in what I’d sensed he was thinking as he left the house. But should I open the door to him? Was this what I really wanted? Who was I trying to fool? This was what I’d wanted for years. What had held me back until now was exactly this, waiting for some kind of cue from Andrew, and it had never been there until tonight. But would I really be able to go through with it? In Molly’s house, of all places? In Molly’s bed? It couldn’t be helped, and in any case, she would never find out. The doorbell rang again and I realised with a start that he might think I was refusing him, he might go away again. I jumped up from the chair and opened the front door.

  Standing on the front step was a woman, a complete stranger.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I was looking for Molly Fox.’

  ‘Well she’s not here.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said again, and this time her disappointment was considerable, but still nothing like mine. There are no words that can do justice to the weird combination of grief and mortification that I was undergoing. I was also fed up with opening the door to people who were crestfallen to find me on the other side of it, and then the woman said, ‘But she does live here, doesn’t she? This is her house?’ and I saw that my annoyance was unreasonable. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Molly Fox lives here.’ Because I was at something of a loss to know what to do, I asked the woman to come in.

  She stepped blinking into the light of the hall, and I realised that she was much older than I had at first thought. I had taken her to be in her mid-fifties, but she was at least ten years older than that. She was wearing a floral print cotton dress with a pale blue cardigan over it. ‘I’m sorry to barge in like this, I know it’s so late …’ I brushed aside her apologies and brought her into the front room where the table lamp was still lit. The woman was carrying a light, shallow crate of the kind in which vegetables are sold, and it was full of little plants. As I gestured to her to sit down in the low chair that I had earlier occupied, she handed the box to me. ‘I wanted to give these to Miss Fox. They’re herbs – coriander, dill, mint, thyme and rosemary. I was going to bring her parsley but she’s probably already got some, and I was going to bring her some basil but it had bolted.’ The plants were damp, and she touched them as she spoke of them, releasing their fragrance, bringing into the house the fresh, earthy odour of the garden, of the warm summer night. Her broad hands were mottled with age spots, reminding me of the hands of my grandmother, my grandmother who had come to me in a dream that morning, also bearing gifts. I realised now that the woman was nervous and shy, that I had been somewhat brusque with her for no reason except for the ridiculous fact that she wasn’t Andrew. I thanked her warmly for the plants as I took them from her, as she finally sat down. ‘There’s a punnet of strawberries, too, from my own garden, and a surfinia, a dark red one.’

  ‘Molly will be delighted. She loves gardening.’

  ‘I know. I sometimes see her out working at the front. That’s how I knew that this was her house. I live near here and one day I was passing when I saw her out weeding. I’ve seen her in her garden a couple of times since then, and every time I walk down this road I think of her. When I pass this house I always say to myself, Molly Fox lives here.’

  I noticed that she was paying no heed to the room. Unlike Andrew, whose eyes had flickered around restlessly, looking at Molly’s possessions, her mirror, her Chinese vases and her kilims, as if to know them was to truly know her, this woman seemed to register nothing around her. When speaking, she either looked straight at me or down at her own hands. I was sitting across from her, in a pocket of darkness beside the bookcase. I switched on a lamp that stood nearby, but I tilted the shade away from me. I realised that there was a chance, albeit slight, that the woman might recognise me, and I didn’t want that. I called to Molly Fox’s house but she wasn’t there. I met that writer, I can’t remember her name, the playwright, you know who I mean, they’ve worked a lot together. She was in a strange humour; I think she’d been drinking.

  ‘I met her once,’ she went on, and then she laughed in a self-deprecating way. ‘That is, we spoke to each other. You could hardly call it a meeting. She’d been putting in bedding plants, violas, they were, purple with a little yellow star in the heart of each one. Just as I passed the gate she straightened up, she caught my eye. I said to her, “All you need now is a little shower of rain,” and she laughed, looked up at the sky and said, “I think I’ll get it before the day’s out.” We smiled at each other and I walked on. Such a voice she has! It was extraordinary to hear it, you know, just like that, not in the theatre or on the radio, but in the street, saying something very ordinary about the garden. Afterwards I was sorry that I hadn’t said more. It was a chance for me to thank her, to tell her how much it’s meant to me, seeing her on stage over the years. But I was only sorry in a way. I don’t really know what people like her think about people like me.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ve lost me,’ I said, and she smiled ironically.

  ‘I’m a fan.’

  It was hard to know how to reply to this. I shrugged and said, ‘Most everyone likes to be told that they’re good; they like to be praised and flattered.’

  The woman looked down at her hands. ‘Oh, I always think of what Auden said, you know? It’s you they want to meet but themselves they want to talk about. I shouldn’t like to come across in that way.’

  ‘You don’t.’ I meant it too: this woman was out of the common run of fans.

  She looked up at me again. ‘I was so pleased after that little exchange the day she was planting the violas. You’re the first person I’ve ever told about it, and I can’t think she ever mentioned it to anyone else, because it was so slight, so inconsequential that there was nothing to tell, certainly on her side. I did once mention to my husband that I’d seen Molly Fox in her garden, but I didn’t tell him we’d ever spoken to each other. I like to think that out of our whole lives, hers and mine, there was this little moment that only the two of us shared. If I’d mentioned anything about her acting it would have changed it and spoiled it. This is silly, I know. These things mean nothing. I always go to see any play she’s appearing in here in Dublin; sometimes I go two and even three times. I have a son who lives in London, and when I visit him I always make a point of trying to catch one of her plays. Sometimes I plan a trip to coincide with a particular run.’

  ‘Are your family also interested in theatre?’ I asked.

  ‘No, not at all,’ she said. ‘Play-acting, that’s what my husband calls it. He doesn’t like it that I go to the theatre. He doesn’t understand it, and he tries to make out I think I’m so
mehow better than him, which is absolute nonsense, of course.’

  ‘Did you see The Duchess of Malfi?’ I asked. I didn’t feel comfortable with the direction the conversation had taken and I wanted to change the subject.

  When she replied I thought she hadn’t heard me, that she was still talking about her family, because she said, ‘So much of life amounts to nothing, doesn’t it? I mean really,’ and she gave a little laugh, ‘absolutely nothing whatsoever. You’re locked into this iron routine, cooking and shopping and cleaning, saying things to people and them saying things back to you, and none of it meaning anything, all of it pointless. Maybe it has to do with getting older, I don’t know. I feel like I’m sleepwalking through the years, but I want to wake up. Reality, you know? Why is it so hard to find? And why do so many other people not seem to notice this? Why don’t they care? Yes, I did go to see The Duchess, and all of this was very much on my mind that particular evening. I was worn down with it all, I felt stultified. And then the play – well, Molly Fox in particular, she was electrifying. All that dullness, that unreality I’m talking about, she blew a hole through it with language, with that voice of hers; it was like an explosion going off in your soul. And to tell you the truth, I can’t think why and I can’t explain it, because the play itself is strange. It has nothing whatsoever to do with my life, the world I live in, and yet it touched me like nothing I’d ever experienced before.’

  As the woman spoke I myself remembered being in the theatre the night I saw the play. The brassy music, cold, all horns and cymbals; the fires blazing in cressets, the black and red costumes, cloth of gold. I too had been struck by what the woman referred to: how something so artificial could also be so moving and true. On the evening I saw The Duchess I’d seen Molly briefly in her dressing room a short while before the curtain went up. She was already in costume and fully made-up. Seen close to and without stage lighting she looked peculiar, almost grotesque, with her eyes heavily painted and two hectic spots of rouge on her cheeks. She wore a heavy dress made from what looked like upholstery fabric for a pretentious hotel, with all the fake luxury of cheap red brocade and gold trims. Molly seemed diminished in the middle of all this, muted, as she always is just before she goes on stage. I had gone to her dressing room at her invitation, but our talk was inconsequential. She would ask me questions and then I would be aware that she was not listening to the answers. From time to time she would self-consciously reach up and touch the elaborate wig she was wearing. I left her with a little time to spare before she was due on stage. I understood why she had needed my company and, not for the first time, I wondered at the psychological toll acting was taking on her. She had confided in me once that if ever anything brought her career to a standstill it wouldn’t be stage-fright, but the terrifying loneliness she would suffer sometimes just before she went on stage. This surprised me, given how solitary a person she is in her life, but she insisted that this was different, that it was a dark, malevolent thing that made her understand what Fergus went through in his depressions. She said that it was as if, in preparing to become someone else, she sometimes fell between two psychic states; or as if, to fully inhabit the personality of the character, she had to become alienated from her self. I told her I couldn’t imagine what that must feel like. ‘You don’t want to know, believe me,’ had been her short reply.