Molly Fox's Birthday (10 page)

I could hardly believe her cheek. Although we were close we were both quite reserved with each other. I think a certain kind of mutual respect was one of the reasons as to why our friendship was so strong. Of course we confided in each other about many things, but we never fished for information, never followed up casual signals or leads. If there was something one of us wanted to share with the other, she would tell it in her own time. I knew that she might sometimes ask someone a staggeringly frank and direct question, but she always did it as a tactic, as a way of wrong-footing the other person, distracting them when they were perhaps getting too close to something that she didn't want to reveal. It was a way of throwing people off balance. She had never before done it to me.

Obviously our friendship would survive such a thing; her friendship with Andrew was another story. If it had been down to me they would never have met again, a rather small-minded, even spiteful reaction I admit. I would certainly never have brought them into each other's company; but some months after their first meeting
at my house, they bumped into each other by chance. It was late at night in the centre of London. Andrew was on his way home from a concert, and Molly had just left the theatre where she had been performing. They went off together for a drink, Andrew told me, and sat talking for hours. It was on that night, rather than at my party, that their friendship had really begun.

It was something of a relief to me to learn all this. I had realised by then that I'd over-reacted to Molly's remark, and that if she and Andrew got on well together then for all three of us to be friends made perfect sense. Together we were more than the sum of our parts. They were my oldest, my closest friends, and what developed between us was an enrichment of what was already there, what I already had with each of them separately. And it gave me pleasure to watch these two people, who I knew so well and of whom I was so fond, gradually get to know each other. It gave me pleasure to watch the friendship of my two best friends grow and develop.

On occasion Molly would ask me leading questions about him, but I wouldn't be drawn; I didn't feel it was appropriate. It was up to Andrew himself to tell her about his life and in due course he did: about how he had met his wife Nicole while they were both postgraduate students in Cambridge. They had married as soon as their studies were completed and moved to London, where she took up a job with an auction house and he began working at the Courtauld Institute. Their son Tony was born four years later, and by the time he was five the marriage was over. Molly was made aware of these bald facts but was left to divine for herself their true emotional weight and significance. You have to think of Oscar and Bosie to
envisage the degree of
amour fou
of which Andrew is capable.
How could I not love him? He ruined my life
. Does Molly know even yet, I wonder, that Andrew's loves have about them the quality of obsession? I remember this from the time we were at university together and he fell for a classmate, who was also a friend of mine, with such a degree of passion and intensity that I, callow girl that I then was, couldn't quite comprehend it.

Her name was Marian Dunne. She was a vet's daughter from County Kildare and she was studying History of Art and French. ‘There's Andrew Forde. He asked me to go to Trinity Ball,' she said to me one afternoon as he sloped past at a distance, unaware that we were watching him. ‘Just imagine!'

‘He's a really decent guy,' I said, and she agreed, with mild regret. She was gentle in manner, pretty, with long fair hair that she wore swept up into a complicated arrangement, secured with lacquered clips. Marian was decent too. She was sensible to the good heart concealed beneath the rancid jumper, but couldn't quite bring herself to get beyond the fact of the jumper. Suddenly even I could see that Andrew as he then was, scruffy, broke and blunt of manner, hadn't a hope. This made me say, perversely, ‘You should go to the ball with him.' Marian didn't reply. We watched him walk out of our line of vision and then she sighed. ‘It's a pity,' she said, and it was.

But it was only when she started going out with a fourth-year medical student and it developed into a steady relationship that I began to understand how deeply affected Andrew was. Rejection only made the attachment stronger. I realised that the impossibility of connection was a driving force behind his desire. This
made me lose patience with him. He wanted Marian precisely because he couldn't have her; and it was aspirational too, I thought: he was the snob in wanting her, not she in turning him down. I put it down to too much time spent on art, too much time spent gazing at paintings of saints and goddesses, perfected, unattainable, impossible women. I took to creeping up to him at his library desk and whispering in his ear, ‘You should get out more.' He never spoke to me about his feelings, but I was aware of them all the same, as on the day when I finally had to tell him, ‘Marian's going to an engagement party tonight.'

‘Whose?' he said.

‘Her own.'

‘Oh,' he said, and it was a small cry, but full of pain, as if he'd been burnt or stung.

With Nicole it was different. Perhaps because his love was reciprocated, or because his own life had changed by then, he had the confidence to declare himself freely. ‘I just adore her,' he said, the first time he told me about Nicole. Not long before they left Cambridge for London I visited them at the house they shared, where already the rooms were full of tea chests and packing cases. Nicole was a silent, smiling woman. The big room was flooded in light, and she sat on a broad windowsill, at a slight distance from us. Andrew was in high good humour about the move. ‘We've been really fortunate, someone we know here owns a flat in Highgate that's just fallen vacant, so we'll be renting that in the first instance. It's a beautiful place, isn't it?' Nicole smiled and nodded. She was dressed in cream; she looked cool in spite of the heat of the day. You could spend a lifetime, I thought, looking at that lovely face and wondering at the nuances of its
speechless expression: affection, condescension, contempt. Nicole was like a force of nature, like a cosmic void into which energy vanished. I saw that she could absorb anger as easily as adoration and still keep smiling calmly. She said nothing against me, was in no way hostile, and yet I realised as I walked away from the house afterwards that not since my final afternoon in Lucy's employ had I felt myself to be so comprehensively dismissed. And in spite of all this I believed that Andrew could be happy with her, because, as Molly says, we all do get what we really want in life. We make a point of it, although sometimes we choose not to own it. Andrew wanted to be the adorer, not the adored; in any relationship he wanted to worship. Sometimes what we want is not in our own best interests. Sometimes we hunger for our own destruction.
How could I not love him? He
ruined my life
.

By now the cat that had been trying to pilfer my lunch was sitting on top of the fibreglass cow. It looked funny, as they were both black and white but one was so tiny and active, the other immense and inert. The cat was sitting on the cow's head. It patted the point of one of the cow's horns with its paw, as though testing for sharpness. Then it turned around with amazing dexterity and walked away. It sat down on the cow's wide back and gazed up at the sun. With slow deliberation the cat began to wash its face.

I looked again at the photograph in the magazine, at the dim splendour of the room, at Andrew's face. Was I disappointed that he hadn't been able to find a place for me in his list, that he hadn't called me
incomparable, our
finest playwright bar none?
Perhaps. I thought that
maybe he put me in the same category as his son Tony; that our relationship was too special to be vulgarised in this way. I have known Andrew for longer than anyone else in his life, of that I'm certain. By the time he and Molly met they were both successful and established, there's no comparison. I remembered that last day Andrew and I spent in Dublin, now more than twenty years ago, the light on the sea, how the blue night fell.

I put the magazine aside and took up the newspaper. There was a surprise there too, as I leafed through it. Tucked in under the obituaries was a small column devoted to recording the birthdays of famous people that fell on that day. There, in amongst the high court judges and the cricketers, the senior civil servants and the celebrity chefs, was
Molly Fox, actress, 40
.

Molly would go wild when she found out about this. It was just as well she was out of the country. How had this come about? And was it even true? Was she really forty today? Strange as it may seem, I didn't know. I thought she would have turned forty two years earlier. I would pass that particular milestone myself at the end of this year, and I had always been under the impression that she was a couple of years older than me.

There were two reasons as to why I wasn't sure. Firstly, there was her general distaste for birthdays. Because of what had happened in the past she never celebrated on this day. I knew better than to offer presents or a cake, it would only have annoyed her. I remember one year being with her on the twenty-first of June as she opened her post, and in amongst the bills and circulars was a card. Whether it was from a close friend or a theatre-goer I have no idea, but she glanced at its gaudy motif of candles
and balloons, rolled her eyes in exasperation, and then threw the card in the bin without further comment. That was Molly's attitude to her birthday.

Her attitude to her age was more typical. Like a great many women actors she was deliberately vague about how old she was for a good reason: she was afraid of being passed over for roles. ‘If people know you're thirty they won't cast you as a twenty-five-year-old no matter how young you look,' she had remarked to me once. The much older actor who had played the mother in
The
 
Yellow
 
Roses
had expressed it to me with far more bitterness, staring at her own wrinkled, unmade-up face in the harshly lit mirror of her dressing room: ‘There's no profession that despises older women more than the theatre does.' Duplicity about one's age was therefore understandable, indeed it was downright common sense. But was Molly really forty today? I had no idea.

I would buy her a present for all that, or perhaps a series of small presents, which I knew she preferred, as tokens to thank her for the loan of the house. I would get her a book and some hand-made chocolates, what else, I didn't know. I carried the tray with the ruins of lunch back into the house, but as I was clearing up at the sink, I broke Molly's milk jug. I swore violently at myself for my own clumsiness even as the jug was exploding on the quarry tiles in a mess of milk and bits of ceramic. I would replace it when I was in town that afternoon I told myself as I picked up the biggest pieces and put them in the bin, and wondered where the mop was kept. That is, I would buy her another jug, but the piece I had broken was really irreplaceable. Like most of her possessions it was particular and unusual. It had a matching sugar bowl and
she had told me once, when I admired them, that they had been bought in Russia. Blue and white they were, the blue intense as lapis, and handsomely set off by the white motif, by the fine gold line around the rim. And now I had broken the jug and ruined the set.

Oddly enough, I knew that Molly wouldn't mind. I knew exactly what she would say:
These things mean
nothing
. I was often surprised by the contexts in which she used this phrase. She'd said it when she herself cracked a glass vase of which I knew she was particularly fond, by rinsing it under a cold tap immediately after having washed it in scalding water. Her annoyance lasted for seconds, and then it was over, dismissed with precisely those words with which I knew she would dismiss the fate of the milk jug. I have always found it hard to square her acquisitive nature, her fondness for things, with her complete non-attachment to them. She would show these objects to me, these tokens and trinkets, with a childlike simplicity of heart: a wooden candlestick, an enamelled box, a fragment of antique lace. And then one day she handed me a small bowl made of olive-wood and she said to me shyly, ‘Tom gave me this.'

Tom. My Tom. They met for the first time during the first run of
Summer with Lucy
but only really got to know each other a couple of years later, by which time I was settled in London. By then the discrepancy between my life as a playwright and my other life as a member of my family bothered me greatly. One way of dealing with it was to keep them strictly separate, and in many ways this was easy. The geographic distance helped. Then my parents and siblings, while displaying a pleasing pride in me and enthusiasm for my progress, my successes, also
had a useful lack of curiosity about what it was that I was actually about. Although they sent me cards and phoned to wish me luck, to congratulate me on any new production, they rarely came to see the work, and when they did, had no problem in cheerfully declaring themselves bamboozled. And this suited me fine.

The problem was Tom. Tom was the link between my two worlds. It was, after all, he who had introduced me to the theatre in the first place, and so it seemed churlish now to exclude him from it. But I was trying to protect him, I told myself. I had come a long way from when I was Lucy's cleaner and would no longer artlessly announce to all comers that my brother was a Catholic priest. It only took a couple of unkind remarks to teach me to keep such information to myself. Tom's idea of a good time was to come to visit me in London for a few days. He would trawl the book and music shops during the day, look at paintings, and then in the evening meet up with me and we would go to see a play. That was what he suggested to me for his first visit over. It sounded fine by me, and it set the pattern for many visits to come.

I went out to meet him at Heathrow, but when he arrived my delight at seeing him was tempered with dismay: he was in full clerical garb. Why did this surprise me? The dark clothes and dog collar were such a part of him that it shouldn't have done so. Suddenly it struck me that I wouldn't just be going round London for the next few days with my brother Tom, I'd be going round London with a priest. On the Tube in from the airport I wondered if I could ask him to tone it down a bit: a grey, open necked shirt and a black suit would be enough. But I hadn't the heart. I didn't want to hurt him and I said nothing.