Molly Fox's Birthday (15 page)

I couldn't concentrate on the movie, whatever it was, for thinking about what she had said. Not for a moment did I doubt the veracity of her statement. It was the implications that confounded me.

Molly doesn't do intimacy
. Who was it who had made this telling remark? Not me, not David, certainly not Andrew. It was Fergus. Fergus of all people, Molly's beloved brother. He said it one day when the three of us were together in her house, and she had made some remark
about ‘an intimate friend' just as she was leaving the room to fetch something. He waited until she was out of earshot and then he said to me, ‘Intimate friend? As if. Molly doesn't do intimacy.' Fergus, I had realised not long after I met him, for all that he was vulnerable, for all that he was intermittently troubled and depressed, knew and understood Molly to a degree that was slightly unnerving. Until I got to know him well, I expected very little from Fergus. I defined him by his distress, and it took me a long time to work out that this was a mistake; longer still to realise that my initial view was one that Molly encouraged, that she had even planted the idea in my head. Fergus's shaky emotional life concealed a sharp mind. He would make the odd aperçu that surprised me until I thought about it and saw it to be both accurate and profound, as was the case here. The closer you get to Molly, the more she seems to recede. Sometimes she seems to me like a figure in a painting, the true likeness of a woman, but as you approach the canvas the image breaks up, becomes fragmented into the colours, the brushstrokes and the daubs of paint from which the thing itself is constructed. Only by withdrawing can the illusion be effected again. Molly wants to be remote.

What she does do, instead of intimacy, is love. She loves Fergus, for example, to a degree that I find hard to comprehend: an intense, visceral,
Nelly, I am Heath cliff
kind of love in which the personalities, the very souls of the people involved seem to melt into each other. I can't follow her there and I don't want to. That kind of love frightens me.

She loves Tom, my brother, too. I know this because she told me one day when she was showing me one of his little gifts, a candle in a holder of blue stained glass. ‘I
love Tom,' she said as she replaced the candle on the shelf. I knew she meant it because it was lightly said; and it was not an expression she used casually. Never would she use it about any of her passing boyfriends.
He's a laugh. He's
great fun. I'm very fond of him. He's a decent bloke, good
company. I'm glad he's around
. I even dared to mention this once to Tom himself. ‘Molly really loves you, you know,' and I think his reply was just what I would have expected. ‘That's sweet of her. She's very endearing.' By this time I felt more sure about the link that there was between them, even though neither of them had ever said a word to me about it.

In speaking of Marian, I mentioned a man named Louis whom I almost married. That I ultimately refused to do so was, and remains, the single most foolish act in a life not wanting in errors of judgement. Louis was a set designer, a gentle soul with whom I could have had a happy life. I know that now. But here's the rub: I knew it at the time and yet I insisted on breaking up with him. Afterwards, I was bewildered by the way I had behaved. What was the source of this desire to act against my own best interests? My own actions and motivation were so unfathomable to me that I decided only therapy could help. I wanted to understand and, to use the relevant jargon, move on with my life.

Of the many books on Molly's shelves, I doubt if there's a single one concerning psychology. It is a subject of which she has an innate and profound understanding, and she brings it to bear upon her acting. The psychological depth and accuracy of her work is something that is frequently remarked upon and praised. And yet towards psychology as a discipline, towards any structured
approach to it, she is at best indifferent and at worst hostile. She attempted to talk me out of what I was planning.

The therapist's office was furnished with such quiet good taste that it resembled the home of someone with no personality whatsoever. Magnolia walls. Cut flowers. A framed print of a painting by Raoul Dufy. A wide desk with a jug of water on it, two glasses and a box of tissues. I went there every Wednesday morning for months on end. It became a black hole in the middle of my week, a desolate appointment with the aspects of myself I least liked, and I grew to dread it. The therapist was a woman of about my own age – I was then in my early thirties – but more
soignée
and elegant than I would ever even aspire to be. She wore cashmere, pearls and little tailored suits in pastel colours. I paid her a fortune, drank the water from the jug, and snuffled my way through many tissues as we speculated tirelessly on the root and cause of my problems. We considered my family, my position therein, my mother, my father, my siblings and my relations with them, Ken, Louis, and even my childhood sweetheart, poor old Henry, the fact of whose existence she winkled out of me. (The therapist thought that Henry was particularly significant and that in disagreeing with this judgement I was in denial.) I rarely left the room feeling better about the situation than I had done when I arrived, and any shred of insight gained lasted only until the next session, when it would all be unpicked and unravelled like incompetent knitting, and a new source of woe would be speculated upon.

Eventually we began to focus upon my career, which the therapist thought highly suspect and perhaps as significant a source of trouble as Henry. Her theory was that
the creation of different characters in the course of writing plays was, in essence, the creation of multiple selves. I asked her if she was suggesting that this was an expression of dissatisfaction with my real self. She smiled at me pityingly and said, ‘Your “real” self? Ah, if only such a thing existed!' I told her that while I was at times as riddled with anxiety and insecurity about my work as any writer, concerning my identity as a playwright I was in no doubt whatsoever. It was the one area in which I would brook no question, the one matter in which I was impregnable. Even in moments when I wasn't actively engaged upon writing plays, being a playwright was what I was. I could see that she thought I was being obtuse. She also thought I was being self-aggrandising, and I tried to clarify what I meant by admitting that it was quite possible that I wasn't a particularly good playwright. Indeed there would be days when I would be the first to admit that this was the case. (Today, Molly's birthday, was a perfect example of such a day.) The therapist declared that she had finally found the cause of all my troubles in life, but that my stubborn denial of it would first have to be broken down. ‘We have a great deal of work ahead of us,' she said as I was leaving at the end of that session. ‘It will require considerable courage on your part.' I politely agreed and left the building, knowing that I would never return.

It so happened that Molly was in London the following weekend. She knew by my demeanour that something was up, and she wouldn't rest until she had coaxed out of me what had happened. ‘I feared this,' she said, when I had explained the situation. ‘I thought that this would never work because I believed that there was never anything
much wrong with you in the first place, nothing that time and life itself won't sort out.' In all of this she was much more sympathetic than I would have expected. I remember clearly how she looked as she spoke to me. She was wearing a plain black woollen dress with a silver pin in it. Her brown eyes were soft and she was thoughtful, sombre. ‘I regret now having been so forceful in trying to dissuade you. But believe me, if you'd been like Fergus, I'd have been the first to help you, to make sure you got proper treatment. Doctors. A good psychiatrist.'

‘I know that, Molly,' I soothed her. I could see that the subject was distressing her and I understood why. Her mother's departure when she was seven was not something that I thought about often, and when I did I associated it more with Fergus than with Molly.

I soon realised that Molly had been right all along. Time and life itself sorted me out. I awoke the following Wednesday morning feeling light-hearted, elated to know that I would be spending no portion of the day, nor indeed any time ever again in the future, in the magnolia room with that woman. I threw myself into my work, finished a new play, was involved in the successful revival of an earlier work, and then began rehearsals for the new piece. I started a new relationship and, unusually for me, one of the things I liked about it was that I knew it wouldn't last. Right from the beginning I could sense that the end of this particular affair was hardwired into it and – this was a new idea to me – it only made it all the sweeter while it lasted. And in this way I got over Louis. Molly approved hugely. There has always been much about me that she considers quaint, but to know this has never bothered me in the least. Such a friendship can
provide good checks and balances in life. In particular she has always found my idea that marriage might be the end-station of any given connection to be hopelessly outmoded, which made her remark in the cinema about David McKenzie all the more surprising.

I had met David again a couple of years before that for the first time since we had worked together, me and Molly and David and Ken, back in the early days. I had arrived for a meeting at a hotel in central London to find that David and a few of his fellow actors were upstairs giving press interviews about their latest film. Although I knew he would be working to a tight schedule and that it would be all but impossible to penetrate the mass of PR people, minders and assistants who surrounded him in situations like this, I put in a request to see if it would be possible to meet. The publicist to whom I spoke seemed to recognise my name and said that she couldn't promise anything, but would see what she could do. And so it came about that at the end of the afternoon, when we had both finished our meetings, I was ushered into his presence.

‘Isn't this incredible?' he cried, jumping up from his chair when he saw me. ‘I couldn't believe it when they said you were here.' The room was all gold and white, with fake Louis XV furniture and elaborate curtains, looped and fringed. I wished our meeting might have happened elsewhere: in its own way this place was as anonymous as the therapist's room had been, but this was the world in which David now lived. He kissed me, settled me in a chair beside a display of roses and lilies, arranged for drinks to be sent up, and said again, ‘This is incredible.'

And it was. All the time I was talking to him, and we were together for just over an hour, I was aware of a kind
of parallax, of how he loomed and receded before me, my view of him changing on the moment by some imperceptible means. Sometimes I was acutely aware of his being David McKenzie, the celebrity, the star he had become, whose image was familiar from Manhattan to Malawi. In the next instant he was again just David, the kindhearted, easy-going actor with whom I had worked many years ago. There was no initial awkwardness to be got over. Meeting him again was a far more comfortable experience than meeting Marian was to be. There was no point-scoring, no prickliness; neither of us was using the other to defend our position or bolster our own shortcomings. I was no threat to David, and he had nothing to prove. At my insistence we talked a bit about his new film. Laughing, self-deprecating, he dismissed it. It was another piece of hokum, this time about aliens and computer hacking, and then I dared to ask him if he ever thought about going back to the theatre. ‘I'd love that,' he said, ‘but it's not going to happen. I've burnt my boats on that one.' I protested that lots of film actors were returning to the stage, but he shook his head. ‘It wouldn't work,' he said. ‘The kind of people who like to watch my movies don't want to see Chekhov, and the kind of people who like Chekhov don't want to see me. It definitely wouldn't work but I'm not complaining. I made my choice years ago and I'm happy to stand by it. You can't have everything in life.'

Perhaps not, but as we talked more I realised that David came as close to it as was possible. He was still with Mel, and they had three children now, ‘American kids,' he said, amused at the idea. They'd moved to the States when his film career began to take off; it had made
perfect sense, and had worked out better than he had ever dared hope. They got home from time to time to see their families back in England, but more often than not David's parents and Mel's came and stayed with them. He wasn't telling me anything I hadn't read a dozen times in newspapers and celebrity magazines: his contented home life was legendary.

But then that imperceptible shift took place again, like a piece of coloured glass slipping within a kaleidoscope, and everything changed. Sitting before me, green-eyed, handsome, smiling, was that rare thing: a happy man. The glittering career was beside the point. Here was someone whose mother hadn't walked out on him when he was seven. He didn't have a traumatised brother, nor one who was his bitter rival. He wasn't a misfit, someone who was the product of a stable background but who simply couldn't fit into it, and whose whole life and work was an effort to understand this failure to connect. He wasn't compensating for anything. David was fortunate and he knew it; he would frankly admit as much if you asked him. His gift was mimesis and it was considerable. He could act out grief, fear, love, anything he was called upon to present. He couldn't have been more unlike Molly, whose soul and art were full of darkness. Why did I feel such pathos as I talked to him? Not for his own sake but for the way in which he was a bright field, that set all the rest of us in relief. The time was racing past. I wanted to stay in his presence. He asked me about my own life, my work, my family; we talked about the film industry, the theatre, about Molly, Ken. I'd have been happy to talk to him about the weather. An assistant appeared at the door and reminded him about another appointment
elsewhere. He sent her away, saying he would be ready in a moment. We talked for another quarter of an hour but when the assistant came back again briefly, looking peeved, I knew that I really ought to go.