Molly Fox's Birthday (16 page)

We stood up to take our leave of each other. He confidently enfolded me into a great warm bear-hug, and it embarrasses me to admit that I was completely thrown by this and that I pretty much collapsed into his embrace. I clung to him for some moments with my head on his shoulder; I didn't want to let him go. David reacted with aplomb, as well he might, having stage-managed this moment. If Molly didn't do intimacy, clearly David didn't do anything else.

I had remembered all of this as I sat there in the cinema with her; I thought of how it would be difficult to find two people more dissimilar. ‘Molly,' I said to her when the lights came up at the end, ‘it would never have worked. You must realise that.'

She looked at me blankly. ‘What are you talking about?'

‘You and David McKenzie.'

‘Of course it wouldn't have worked. I didn't say that it would have, did I? Really and truly!' She gave a little snort of exasperation as if I was being incredibly obtuse, which of course I was.

While I'd been thinking about him the bus bearing David's image had long since disappeared. By now it would be far out of the city centre, out by the sea, out where I'd been living at the time when Andrew had stayed with me, just before he left for England. It was mid-afternoon by now. I left the café and looked in a few more bookshops for a while, then I did some food shopping. I had some coffee beans weighed and ground for a percolator.
In a shop fronted by a display of stacked, tilted wooden crates I bought grapes and tomatoes, salad and strawberries. From an elaborate display of fish in shattered ice, heaped on marble, I selected a piece of cod, and then I realised that I hadn't thought through any of this, that I should have bought parsley and a lemon earlier to go with the fish. I was taking a scattergun approach, stringing things out because I didn't much want to go home, but in the strange, remembering, slightly melancholy frame of mind I was in I couldn't think of anything else I would be able to settle on. I had checked the paper earlier and there was nothing in the cinema I wanted to see. I knew that, preoccupied as I was, I wouldn't be able to focus on looking at paintings. When I had dragged out the shopping for as long as possible I headed back to the house, but even then I took a long, illogical route, passing through Stephen's Green.

There were people everywhere, draped out on the grass in the sunshine, talking and laughing, small children feeding the ducks. Molly had once remarked that in her experience every city had places that were particularly psychically charged, that they were the focus of odd energies and that strange things happened there – highly unusual encounters and connections, remarkable coincidences – and that in Dublin Stephen's Green was such a place. Fergus was there when she said this, and he laughed out loud. ‘You're talking rubbish, Molly. It's a park, a public space. If odd things happen there, that's why. They could just as easily occur in any public place.'

‘But they don't.'

‘They do! All the time,' he insisted.

‘Not when you're just walking down the street.'

‘Parks are like hotels. The very nature of what they provide allows the kind of thing you're talking about to happen.' They asked me then to adjudicate, and I sided with Fergus, for I did think what Molly was arguing was fanciful. But about six months later something happened that made me not so sure.

I was back in Dublin for a brief visit and was to stay with Molly. I took the coach in from the airport and got off in O'Connell Street. As was so often the case, she would be coming from another meeting which was in that part of the city, and she had suggested that I wait for her in a nearby hotel with which I was unfamiliar. Tucked away in a side-street, it was shabby and unfashionable, and I liked the look of it immediately for that very reason. It struck me as a place where you would be most unlikely to bump into someone you knew, which made it appealing in a city where anonymity was so often in short supply. I sat down in the lobby to wait for Molly.

‘Do you mind if I join you?' The question was a formality. Even as she asked, the woman who had spoken was easing herself into a deep armchair opposite me; she settled her many shopping bags around her and ordered tea from a passing waitress. This was in the days before the smoking ban, and now she didn't even bother to ask if I had any objection, but took out her cigarettes and lit up. She smoked in a slightly exaggerated fashion. Although she was in late middle age, her pose was that of a young woman who has recently taken up cigarettes in an attempt to appear sophisticated. She was a strange little person, with powdery make-up. I also noticed that she was wearing a lot of costume jewellery, cheap rings with bright fake stones.

‘Are you up from the country?' she asked me.

‘No, I'm over from London for a few days.'

‘I'm here to see my son.'

‘Is he staying in the hotel?' I asked.

‘No, I mean “here” as in “here in Dublin”. I spent this afternoon with him. He isn't well.' As she imparted this last piece of information she stared down at the tabletop, sternly implying that this subject was strictly off-limits, which made me wonder why she had mentioned it at all.

‘You've been shopping,' I remarked, indicating the carrier bags at her feet, and she brightened at this. She told me that she loved shopping in Dublin; that she didn't get to the city anything like as much as she wanted. She was only here for the day, she was passing time in the hotel waiting for her train home. I asked her where she lived and she pretended she hadn't heard me. Her life, she said, was lonely. She was a widow. ‘My husband died many years ago; I'm all alone in the world.'

‘At least you have your son,' I reminded her, and she shot back immediately, ‘Have you any children?'

‘I don't.'

‘Well if you did you would know,' she said enigmatically, stubbing out her cigarette as the coffee arrived. And then, most unexpectedly, she gave me a most engaging smile. ‘Won't you join me in coffee? Waitress, bring another cup, please.'

There was something so bizarre about the rapport between us that I was beginning to enjoy it. I couldn't figure this woman out at all, with her overstated femininity and her shifting humours, drawing me towards her emotionally and then pushing me away again. I felt that she
wanted to confide in me – there was something complicit, conspiratorial about her – but when I responded to this she became haughty and distant. She complimented me extravagantly on my unremarkable clothes. Several of my questions, all seemingly innocuous, she quite simply ignored. I had never before met anyone who behaved as she did, and the playwright in me was fascinated. People actually tend to be predictable in their thought and behaviour; originality is more uncommon than you might imagine. Even when people are bizarre they tend to be so in ways that one has already encountered many times before. My little companion, now full of charm, now latent hostility, was as psychologically strange a person as I had ever come across.

And then Molly arrived. She walked over to where we were sitting and stared at us, from the woman to me and back again, without saying a word. The woman met her stare at first with cold indifference, and then all of a sudden she turned on a smile, a great beaming, delighted smile, and she said, ‘Molly! Why look who it is! It's Molly Fox!' This surprised me, for I would never have taken her for a theatre-goer. Let me also at this point put my hands up and admit that I can at times be stupid, stupid beyond belief. Finally Molly spoke. ‘What is this? Some kind of conspiracy?' and she glared at me. ‘What's going on here?' The nature of the situation was becoming apparent, and I could scarcely believe it. This was one of those incredible coincidences which life occasionally throws up and which one can never replicate in a novel or a play because it would seem unconvincing, a mere device. ‘Why, Molly …' the woman began in coaxing, emollient tones, at which Molly exploded.

‘You're to leave Fergus be. Do you hear me? Stay out of his life.'

‘This is ridiculous, I've never heard such nonsense. I'm his mother.'

‘Is it not enough that you've driven him mad? Do you want to kill him too?' Molly was shouting at the top of her voice. People in the lobby stopped what they were doing and turned to look at us. Molly was making a scene: shy, self-effacing, timid Molly, who usually slipped in and out of shops and restaurants with her head down, unnoticed and unrecognised.

‘The only thing wrong with Fergus is that he won't stand on his own two feet. You won't let him,' Molly's mother said. ‘And anyway Fergus wants me to see him. Why do you think I'm here? Who do you think told me he was in hospital again?' Through all of this she was smiling, a small, faintly amused smile.

‘Stay away from him,' Molly commanded. ‘Stay out of his life.' She nodded to me curtly to pick up my luggage and to follow her, which I meekly did.

It was raining when we left the hotel, and we took a taxi from the rank at the door. We didn't speak much on the journey to her house. I said, ‘I hadn't known that Fergus was back in hospital,' and she said, ‘Well, he is.' Then she turned and stared sullenly through the wet windscreen at the streets slipping past us. I was taken aback, both at how Molly had behaved in the hotel and how she was behaving now. What had I done wrong? How could I possibly have known the identity of the stranger who had buttonholed me? Hindsight, of course, is a wonderful thing. Now that I knew the connection I could see how there was an odd likeness to Molly that
shimmered in her mother. But what had astounded me about what Molly had done earlier was that
she had been
acting
.

I need to clarify here what I mean by this. There are some actors who never stop acting. Indeed there are some
people
who never stop acting. Whole societies. There's the old joke about how everyone in Italy is an actor but only the ones who are no good at it take it up professionally. What I'm talking about here are people who work on stage and who use the skills of their profession in their everyday life to distance those around them, to make an illusion, to create the self which they feel any given situation requires. Which is all very well unless the person for whom this is intended rumbles what's happening. Towards the end of our time together, Ken did this increasingly towards me, and I was aware that the bright, teasing person I was encountering wasn't the man with whom I had been planning to spend the rest of my life. It was years before I could see why he was doing it – alarm, I suspect, at the unadorned reality of my own personality. Be that as it may, once you're conscious of what's happening, it's incredibly tiresome.

Actors who habitually do what I'm describing in their daily life come across as exactly what someone who has no knowledge whatsoever of the theatre world would expect an actor to be. Most of these irritating drama queens are not very convincing when they're actually on stage. The very best actors tend to be as Ken was before he started throwing up his smokescreen – quietly complex, understated almost to the point of dullness. One might have been easily convinced that he was spending his life holding down some unexciting desk job in middle-
management. And much the same was true of Molly, or had been for me, until this evening.

You're to leave Fergus be! Do you hear me? Stay out of
his life
. When Molly uttered these words she hadn't been simply talking, she had been delivering lines. This was Molly Fox playing an outraged woman named Molly Fox who was defending her vulnerable brother against the woman who had all but destroyed his life: their own mother. She brought to this role all her skill, all her years of experience on stage. Ostensibly addressing her mother and me, her voice was expertly pitched and modulated to reach everyone who was present in the lobby that day: the astonished waitresses, the bemused guests. She played it like one of the big roles for women, played it with the dark and complex energies required for Lady Macbeth or Hedda Gabler. And I was in the supporting role: ever the stooge, no progress made since my student days as Second Gentlewoman. I was somewhere between sarcasm and genuine admiration when I said to her in the taxi, ‘That was quite a performance back there.'

She turned to me with a look of such sincere misery in her brown eyes that I regretted having spoken. I attempted then to apologise but she shook her head and indicated to me not to speak in front of the taxi driver. All I could do was take her hand in mine and to my relief she gripped it tightly. Then she closed her eyes and rested her head against the back of the seat, looking drained and exhausted.

I was deeply unsettled by what had happened. Finally I had met this person who had cast such a shadow over Molly and Fergus's lives. I realised how much thought I too had given to her over the years. Although Molly
rarely spoke of her, and then only in the most allusive, elliptical fashion, the idea of her had been constant. Being in her presence, I had experienced that strange sense of parallax I was later to know when meeting David again, almost as if one was encountering two people at the same time. In the case of Molly's mother, even when she was physically present there before me I had been conscious above all of a sense of absence; of a failure, more than that, a refusal to communicate something of herself. I remembered what Louis had said to me not long before we parted, when he was struggling to understand what was happening between us:
You won't let me
know you
. Before I met her, Molly's mother had been inconceivable to me. I couldn't conjure up in my mind the woman who had done what Molly said she had done. To think about her had been like trying to imagine God. The banality of her – the powdery make-up, the tacky jewellery – had therefore come as something of a shock; but on reflection it was that withholding of herself, that unfathomable, sly, smiling coolness that seemed more sinister to me than, say, a bad temper or aggressive personality would have been. This woman would not just deny responsibility for any problem, she would look at you, detached, amused, and deny that any problem existed.