Molly Fox's Birthday (18 page)

I've always liked Fergus, even though I've never got to know him very well. Pretty well all our meetings have taken place by chance here in Molly's house, with months or even sometimes years between them. She would never have willingly brought us into each other's company, much less fostered strong links between us, and it occurred to me that this was yet another area where things weren't quite on the level with her. It was all very well for her to befriend my brother, for Tom to become her spiritual guide and mentor, but it would have been quite another thing for Fergus and me to have any sort of friendship independent of Molly.

After I split up with Louis I took my broken heart to Dublin, to Molly's house. Much to my embarrassment Fergus happened to call round and was witness to my tears, my red eyes and swollen face. ‘I hate you seeing me like this,' I said, sniffing and gulping, to which he replied, ‘Oh come now, it shouldn't bother you at all, given the way you've seen me over the years.' That pulled me up short. I had known Fergus anaesthetised by drink. I had seen him curled up in a blanket on Molly's sofa, speechless with grief, like a man who was turning into stone. I had briefly seen him on one of the several occasions when he was hospitalised for depression, when Molly hadn't been able to face going into the ward on her own; and to my shame I had never realised how humiliating Fergus might find all of this in his more lucid and coherent hours.

The cat that had pestered me at lunchtime was back in the garden now. Fergus stubbed out his cigarette and
coaxed it over to him, set it on his lap and petted it. The creature settled down there and let him make quite free with it. He had turned up one of its paws and was studying the soft pink pads when he suddenly asked me a question completely out of left field: ‘Have you ever met my mother?'

‘No Fergus, I haven't.'

This was an instinctive lie rather than a calculated one, and I regretted it immediately. Perhaps Fergus was being disingenuous: perhaps Molly had told him about our encounter with their mother and he was curious to hear my version of what had taken place. If this was the case he was being most duplicitous, for he released the cat's paw and took to stroking its head, and said, ‘No, I don't suppose you would ever have had occasion to meet, now I come to think of it.'

‘What's she like?' I dared to ask.

‘Mummy?' He considered this for a few moments and then he said, ‘Remote. She's a nice person but she's hard to get to know. She doesn't like people to get close to her emotionally. You can get to a certain point and then she draws back, becomes distant, and that can be hard to take. But it's just the way she is,' he said mildly. ‘Everybody has their own peculiarities, don't they?' They most certainly do, I thought. ‘I actually think they're quite alike, Mummy and Molly, but Molly hates me saying that. It's true though, isn't it? Molly's the best in the world and I don't know how I'd have got this far in life without her, but she's remote in that same way. She doesn't like anybody to get too close.' I asked him if he saw his mother often.

‘I try to. It isn't always easy. She doesn't live in Dublin
and neither of us can drive, so it's awkward. I worry a lot about her, now that she's getting older. I think she's lonely. There's not much I can do but I hate to think of her being isolated.' He lifted his gaze from the cat on his knee and looked me straight in the eye. ‘Do you think there's any way you could persuade Molly to make her peace with our mother? Molly likes you lots. She's as close to you as she is to anyone. She might listen.' Given the way the conversation was developing, I thought it best to be straight with him.

‘Fergus,' I said, ‘that's a pretty tall order. She's extremely hostile to your mother.'

‘Oh, she can't stand her. Molly
hates
Mummy, I'm fully aware of that. She can't tolerate being in the same room. She blames our mother for everything, especially for all my troubles.'

‘And you don't?'

‘Of course not.' He was still holding my gaze with unusual firmness of purpose for such a shy man. ‘My life is a shambles. No, let's not pretend otherwise,' for he saw me begin to demur. ‘A total shambles. I don't have any of the things a man in his mid-thirties might reasonably expect to have – a home of his own, a wife or a partner, maybe children, a career. And I mean a career, not a job: not a dazzling career like Molly's, I know how rare that is, but not a dead-end lousy clerking job either, like the one I'm stuck in. I'm aware how little all of what I have amounts to; and when I wake in the small hours and think about it, it's more unimpressive still, believe me. But here's the key point,' and he laid his hand over his heart. ‘My life is
my life
. Not my mother's or Molly's or anyone else's but
mine
. And I take full responsibility for it.
Wouldn't that be the worst thing of all? To be a man of thirty-five and still be blaming one's mother for life not having worked out as one might have wanted it to?' He paused for a moment to let me consider this idea.

‘Do you ever talk to Molly about this?'

‘Are you kidding? It's off the agenda. Mummy's a monster, and everything's her fault. End of story. Nothing to discuss. Why do you think I'm talking to you?'

‘And have you spoken to your mother?'

‘We have discussed it at length over the years, but there's nothing much more to be said now. I try to avoid the subject. I don't like to upset her. In any case, what I'm telling you is that it's Molly's perspective that's wrongheaded and causing problems, not my mother's.'

‘Fergus,' I said, ‘everything you're telling me is so much at odds with what I thought was the situation in your family that I'm at a loss to know what to say.'

‘I know,' he replied, and he sighed. ‘I can well imagine all this must come as a shock, and I'm sorry to spring it on you so suddenly. But I must admit that I'm glad to be having this conversation. I think it was meant to be. In all the years you and Molly have known each other, this is the first time we've met without her also being present. Isn't that strange?'

‘Did you plan this? Am I being set up?'

‘Oh no, no, far from it.' I considered this for a moment: I believed him. He broke my gaze and looked away down the long scented garden, at the fruit bushes and the roses before he turned to me again.

He told me that he thought his mother should never have married. It wasn't that she made a bad marriage, it was that she was unsuited to the whole state of married
life. ‘She had been brought up in a generation where it was what was expected of a woman, and so a great many married and had children, whether it suited them or not. At least my mother had the self-knowledge to realise what she had done, and you have to give her credit for that. I think a lot of women were in the same position but they couldn't see the damage they were doing. By the time she understood the situation, it was too late, in that Molly and I had arrived on the scene. So I think that the whole time we were small she was wondering should she stay or should she go – which would do least harm.'

‘Whereas Molly's view is that she just got fed up with the situation and shipped out.'

‘Exactly.'

I felt that the man with whom I was having this conversation was not the person with whom I had sat down about half an hour earlier. For me that Fergus – timid, weak, a failure in life – had disappeared for ever. This new Fergus was a man of wisdom and acute moral knowledge. He had had the courage and insight to inspect his own life more closely than most might dare to do, and he had compassion and forgiveness for those who had hurt him. The memory of that detached, coolly amused woman whom I had briefly met tempered my thoughts: I might have considered him less extraordinary had I not seen what he was up against, although it was imperative now that he should never know I'd met her. It didn't matter that his life, in social terms, was not a success. To expect someone to gain a mature perspective on their troubled life as he had, and to also expect them to have worked out to their advantage all those other things such as property, relationships and career that we mistakenly confuse with
life itself – that would have been unreasonable. What he had achieved seemed to me more precious by far.

‘There's no villain in all of this,' he said. ‘Mummy didn't deliberately set out to cause harm, any more than I intended all the grief and trouble I've given Molly over the years.' Molly. I'd thought she had won through in life, whilst Fergus was defeated, broken. Now it seemed to me that things were perhaps quite the opposite, and her brother's woes notwithstanding, Molly was the one who really hadn't come to terms with the past, who was still bitter about it in a way that was corrosive and did more harm to her than to anyone else. I felt that Molly herself knew this. What else was her connection with Tom but an attempt to find that understanding, that forgiveness that her brother had come to? And if Tom hadn't got her there, what hope was there for me?

‘Maybe someday I'll talk to Molly about this as you ask. The one thing I can't promise is that it'll make any difference.'

‘Don't underestimate all the trouble I've had, but don't make the mistake either of disregarding all that she's achieved. Molly Fox: she's remarkable. You do know that today's her birthday?'

‘I do.' I felt a sudden anger for Molly's sake. ‘You can say what you want about your mother, she certainly picked her moment.'

‘I think these moments pick themselves, don't you? When something's over, it's over. You know yourself, I suppose, when a relationship's run its course you can't simply string it along for a week or so more just because Christmas, say, is coming or somebody's birthday. I think that's how Mummy would reason it.'

Now I didn't know what I thought. Perhaps Molly was right, and her poisonous mother had turned Fergus's head, justifying her own actions to make herself feel better. Of course you could hang on for extra time. Some people lived a lie their whole lives, and was that worse than abandoning two small children? Anyway, it was done now, and it had been a disaster.

‘I used to think I remembered this day,' he said. ‘I mean Molly's seventh birthday, the day my mother left. I can see the two of us eating ice creams, and I'm crying. But then someone told me that if you can see yourself in a memory, as if you're watching a film, then it isn't true. And I'm afraid that's how it is in this particular instance. I can see two small children, one of whom is me, in our kitchen at home. But maybe my father or Molly told me that one time, that we had ice creams and I cried, and I'm imagining that I remember it.'

He moved to take something from his pocket, and in doing so he accidentally dislodged the cat. He winced as it hooked its claws into his leg to try to prevent itself from slipping off his lap, but the pain made him push it away. The cat tumbled to the grass almost in slow motion and slunk off down the garden, disgruntled. I had thought Fergus was looking for his cigarettes, but instead from his jacket he took a small wooden box. ‘I bought this for Molly. It's a little present for her birthday. You know she doesn't really celebrate it. I'm the only person she accepts presents from today.' He couldn't keep a childlike note of pride out of his voice as he said this.

The box was made of contrasting pale and dark woods, and one narrow side had been fashioned to resemble the spine of a book. But it was hinged, and when Fergus
released a metal clasp on the other side of the box it opened out flat. I saw then that it contained a miniature chess set. The board and the chess men were also made of the same contrasting woods. There were holes in the board, and each of the tiny chess pieces, intricately carved, was fitted with a peg on the bottom, by which it could be slotted into the holes. Fergus moved a few pieces across the board at random to show me how it functioned. I wished that I had chanced upon it in a shop so that it could have been my gift to Molly, because I could think of few things that would have appealed to her more. Everything about it – its small scale, its concealment and intricacy – would delight her.

‘Do you think she'll like it?' Again that voice, so mellifluous, so haunting.

‘I do, Fergus. I think she'll like it very much.' He placed it on the table for me to give to her on her return, and stood up. ‘I should be going now.'

He followed me out of the garden and back into the house. We fell again to small talk, as we had done on his arrival. I regretted that he had wanted no more than cold water to drink; he wished me well for my play. We both hoped to meet again before long. He stopped in the hall before all Molly's photos, her trophies and prizes and posters, and we stood there together for a moment looking at them. There were pictures of Molly in full Restoration costume, as a flapper, in a draped Greek garment; pictures of her alone, of her locked in an embrace with someone, of her laughing. In all of them she was striking. Even in stills she conveyed the energy she transmitted on stage. ‘She was so young then,' Fergus remarked, pointing at one of the photographs. ‘Look how long her hair was.'

‘That was the first time we worked together. That was my play,
Summer with Lucy
.' I didn't say it to him but it seemed like a lifetime ago now. He then inspected the trophies while I inspected him. ‘I know this must sound odd, but sometimes, even yet, I can hardly believe that she's my sister. When I see her like this, professionally, I mean, and I think of how much she's achieved … I suppose I realise I don't tell her often enough how much I admire her.'

‘I'm sure she knows, Fergus.' He raised his eyes and looked at me. I knew then how hard it would be for me to find a way to express my admiration for him. I knew he would never believe me.

The clock chimed again as Fergus left. He had been there for an hour; it was later than I had thought. When I went back down to the kitchen I was struck by how it had changed since the morning, with the changing light of the day. I had seen this room – and this house – at all seasons, at all times of the day and night. I had been here when the whole place was cocooned with snow. I had seen it by candlelight. I had been here during heavy rain, the kind of rain that becomes pleasurable to watch because it makes of the house a haven. The rooms in which one moves become a world apart from the wet streets, the sodden garden. The kitchen now had moved into shadow; it had become a more sombre place than it had been this morning. The things I had bought in town were still sitting on the kitchen table where I had dumped them on Fergus's arrival, and I had just about time to tidy them away. The second part of Andrew's series on memorials would be starting on television shortly, and I wanted to see it.