Molly Fox's Birthday (12 page)

The train pulled out of the tunnel and into the brightness of the station at Piccadilly Circus. Molly stood up. ‘I hope we meet again before long,' she said, leaning over and pressing her hand on Tom's forearm. Her voice, which had been forced and harsh as she shouted out the great secret of her life, reverted now to its usual sweetness. ‘I'll phone you during the week,' she said as she turned to me. ‘Enjoy the play,' and again to Tom in particular, ‘All the best for the rest of your time in London.' Then she was gone, minding the gap, disappearing into the dense, swarming crowds on the platform. The doors slammed shut and the train moved on. Neither Tom nor I spoke. The appropriate conversation wouldn't have been possible over the racket, and when we arrived at our stop we hurried because we were late. At the theatre there was time to do nothing more than buy a programme and take our seats.

In spite of Molly's good wishes, I didn't enjoy the play. It was a contemporary work, one that has since been justly forgotten, and I don't know how it had garnered the good reviews that had lured Tom and me there. I spent the whole of the first half sitting in the darkness watching the actors rant and emote on the lit stage as I thought about what Molly had said just before we parted, trying to square it with what I already knew about her life.

Over the few years I had known her she had drip-fed me bits of information. A suburban childhood in a semidetached house. A father who had worked at some kind of office job, who died just after she left school and of whom she always spoke warmly, whom she had evidently loved. A younger brother who was deeply troubled in himself (I had not yet met Fergus at this stage, but I had heard him weeping behind the closed door) and to whom she was fiercely loyal, viscerally close. A mother whom she almost never mentioned, and then always disparagingly. Once, for example, we had been out shopping together and had seen a particularly dreadful handbag. It had a large piece of crystal incorporated into the clasp, and was the kind of thing that could not be redeemed from vulgarity, not even by the most highly developed sense of irony or fondness for kitsch. ‘My mother would love it,' Molly sneered. Another time she had mentioned something about the time her father passed away and I asked her if her mother was also dead. ‘Oh no, she's still around, she's out there somewhere, living her life,' she replied, but it was the short, dry laugh that preceded this remark that said still more, that chilled me. What she had said this evening did fit the picture I had had: it all added up, it did make sense now.

I suppose I expected that Tom had been thinking along the same lines as me, but when the interval finally came and the lights went up he turned to me with a sigh and said, ‘Oh well, some you win, some you lose.' We talked only about the play, and although he mentioned later how much he had liked meeting Molly he didn't pick my brains about her, as anyone else might have done. He did ask me very late one night, completely out of context,

‘That thing Molly said to us about her mother – did you already know about that?'

‘No,' I said, ‘I didn't.'

‘I see,' he replied, and he said nothing more.

The following week, after Tom had gone back to Ireland, Molly asked me for his address. She wanted, she said, to drop him a note, to say what a pleasure it had been to meet him. I thought she perhaps felt embarrassed at what she had said at the moment of parting. It wasn't mentioned again to me, and I knew not to refer to it. Molly sets the tone for any encounter: from day one I have always known instinctively what not to say, when she wanted an issue addressed, and when it was strictly off limits. I gave her the address and heard no more about it, from either Molly or Tom, indeed I thought no more about it until a year later, when my brother wasn't long back from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and Molly showed me the little olive-wood bowl: ‘Tom gave me this.'

I had had no idea they'd been in contact with each other all this time, and yet how could I not have seen it coming? I should have known on that day in London that already she had recognised him as someone whom she needed in her life, someone who could help her. No, I hadn't realised that it was happening, and I resented it when I found out. While Molly is undoubtedly generous with her possessions, she can take over other people's friendships and relationships as a cuckoo takes over nests. But what was it that really bothered me in all of this? Was it that I didn't want to share Tom with Molly or that I didn't want my brother too closely linked to my other life, my life away from the family? Probably both were an issue and yes, it does pain me to know how
small-minded all of this shows me up to be. Tom is a good listener. He is compassionate and intelligent, with a rare degree of moral knowledge and experience.

Molly on the other hand was more deeply wounded, more damaged by her early years than I could then imagine. She is also ardently although not conventionally religious; and like much else in her life this is something that she conceals rather well. Her childhood introduction to religion was made in an uninspiring suburban church, a barn of a place, to which she and Fergus would be taken on Sunday mornings by her father. It had nothing of the mystery, the earthed connection to place, to the seasons, that I knew from my own childhood church in the country. For all that, something got through to Molly, some spark, something that she needed in her life and that she has quietly cherished ever since.

The gift of the wooden bowl happened many years ago, and now there are other little tokens of Tom's affection scattered around the house. An edition of the Psalms bound in dark green morocco. A rosary with pearl beads. A tiny Greek icon. I take for granted their friendship now, even though it remains something from which I am generally excluded.

Having finished with the lunch dishes, I decided to go into town and try to replace the jug I had broken. I stood in the hall for a moment to check that I had everything I needed – keys, money, basket, list. I also took a notebook with me in case I had a good idea about my work while I was out, unlikely though that was. I paused just before leaving. The hallway of Molly's house is arresting, because she has made of it a small shrine to her career, to her success. The walls are covered with framed posters of
productions in which she has starred, together with striking black-and-white photographs: Molly as Ophelia, as Lady Macbeth, as Hedda Gabler. There is a chest of drawers the top of which is covered with awards she has won: great chunks of cut glass, gilded masks, semi-abstract figurines. I do not know how she lives with this, and I have told her so. My own awards – and there are a considerable number of them – are either in my family home or hidden away in cupboards and drawers. On a day such as today when I'm struggling with the work and failing to make any progress they would seem to me more like a mockery than a valediction. Molly and I were in her hall when we talked about this, and I could see that she was only half-listening, smiling up at these proofs of her triumph. ‘Do you really think so?' she said. ‘It always cheers me up to look at them. I wouldn't have it any other way.'

The early-afternoon sun was strong on the front of the house when I left. I stepped out into the heat, into a great sweetness, a complex of fragrances: cut grass from someone's lawn, and lavender, robust, overlain with the peculiarly fragile scent of sweet pea. As I walked away from the house I wondered at the facility some people have for creating a home for themselves. Molly can do it, Andrew too, but it has always eluded me. The places I have lived in have remained only that: places I have lived in; rooms full of papers and books. I should like a proper home not just for my own sake but because it would be an extension of me, and would allow me to communicate something of myself to others. But how people managed to do this with the things I glimpsed in the houses I passed –
candles, rugs, bentwood chairs, dressers and lamps – baffled and defeated me.

In a tiny basement area of one house an old man was sunning himself, surrounded by plants in containers. He was wearing braces over a striped shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a white straw hat was tilted to conceal his eyes. Seeing him, I was suddenly reminded of my dream of the night before, not just the atmosphere but the substance of it. For the first time since waking that morning I remembered the dream precisely – my grandmother, the shoes, the blanket, the feeling of being loved and protected. And this in turn triggered another memory, something that I had forgotten for years, of a fruit shop in the south of France where the woman behind the counter was identical to my late grandmother, and so strong was the resemblance that I became convinced that it was indeed her. She didn't recognise or acknowledge me, but kept on weighing out the fruit for which I kept on asking. I bought cherries and apricots, grapes and plums, more than I wanted, more than I could ever possibly eat, simply to keep open the line of communication with her.
This is my grandmother
. Even as all of this was happening I knew that it was absurd. How could someone be dead and buried in Ireland and then be selling fruit in Provence years later? It wasn't just that she looked like my grandmother, she moved like her, had the same habit of smoothing down her apron; she emanated the same sweetness of nature. I stopped asking for fruit when my grandmother remarked as to whether or not I would be able to carry all I had.

All I could feel afterwards was gratitude that this had happened. Being able to understand it was of no great importance. We see no visions because we live in an age in
which they are not permitted; but if we accepted the idea of them, who's to say what we wouldn't see? Marriage is no longer a mystical union but a social contract. The moment when new beliefs reach critical mass and become generally accepted always eludes us, we are always looking away. Thereafter I would think from time to time about whatever it was that had happened that day in the fruit shop; in due course I thought about it less and less. But it was doubtless the memory of that uncanny meeting, deep in my unconscious, that had triggered the dream of last night. And for that too I was grateful.

I passed a house where the front door lay open, and I could hear a woman's light voice deep within, at the end of the darkened hall. There were bunches of coloured balloons tied to the door knocker, more on the gate, and the garden fence was festooned with streamers and a foil banner:
Seven Today!
When Molly eventually told me that her mother had left not just in her seventh year, but on her seventh birthday, she did so in the laconic, offhand way in which I had by now come to expect when she was telling me something important.
She knows how
to pick her moment, my mother. You have to give her
that, if nothing else
. I forced myself to think again about the play on which I was working, about the man with the hare, in the hope of breaking the impasse I had reached. I had very little to go on so far, scraps of ideas, a general intuition. I could hear a child's voice saying,
Nothing must change
. That phrase had been embedded in my mind almost as long as the image of the hare in the man's arms, and I knew they were linked, but I hadn't been able to find the vital connection and get on with the work.

I was walking in Molly's footsteps now, taking the particular route into town that she had pointed out to me as being the quickest and also the most interesting: the route where there was most to see. She had walked these streets by herself time without number, and I had walked them with her on many occasions. She had pointed out to me the things she liked along the way. The massive clump of arum lilies that crowded out all the space of a tiny garden. The white oblong stones at the top of certain houses, carved with pointing hands and the names of the streets. The little tree that brought forth a startling foam of blossom each springtime, a tree so small and insignificant that one never noticed it when its branches were bare; it always seemed, Molly said, to have appeared overnight. In recognising such things we claim the city, make it our own.
I never cross the Green that I don't think of
Countess
Markievicz
; never am in Merrion
Square that I
 
don't think of Oscar
. Oscar the child, she meant, she said when I pressed her, the tall boy who played with his friends in the enclosed garden but who noticed and who never forgot the children of the Dublin paupers, glimpsed on the other side of the railings.
Every afternoon as they
were coming from school, the children used to go and
play in the Giant's
garden.

As I walked along the hot streets the houses gave way now to offices and shops as I neared the city centre. I would look for a jug first, to replace the one I had broken. There was a shop I was familiar with near Grafton Street that sold kitchen things and china; I would look there. I hoped to find something particular and unusual, something out of the common run, and I knew the kind of thing Molly liked. As I was going into the shop a woman
and a teenage girl were coming out. I held the door open for them and she looked at me, a glance first, and a smile to thank me. Then she looked more acutely, and then she said my name aloud. Her face was vaguely familiar to me but I couldn't place her at all, and then she said her own name. ‘Marian. Marian Dunne. Don't you remember me?'

‘Marian!' I exclaimed. ‘This is so strange. I was thinking about you only a couple of hours ago, thinking about when we were at college together.'

‘And what put you in mind of me,' she said, ‘after all these years?' That I didn't feel I could honestly answer, and I blustered a bit, made much of the coincidence of chance thoughts and a chance meeting. We moved aside from the door of the shop so as not to block it and the teenage girl – clearly Marian's daughter – withdrew to a slight distance from us, took out her mobile phone and started to check her texts.