Molly Fox's Birthday (19 page)

When I switched on, the opening credits were already
running, a flowing sequence of images, stained glass, paintings and cathedral facades that faded into each other and was overlain by staccato minimalist music. When the actual programme began, the opening shot was of Andrew standing before the Menin Gate. The camera pulled back from him to reveal how vast the structure was, and then panned over the lists and lists of the war dead. ‘What do we intend,' he asked in a voice-over, ‘when we memorialise? Is it simply to do honour, and if so to what? To the person or to our memory of the person? Is it that we want someone not to be forgotten? And is that genuinely possible? Is not our wish to, quite literally, set in stone, our thoughts and feelings, our memories and our idea of someone who is now dead – is not that wish in its very essence a futile one?'

To begin with, he concentrated on the difference between public and private memorialising. He went from the Menin Gate to a huge cemetery from the First World War, inspecting individual graves as people tended to them, placing flowers and flags. He contrasted this with the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey and with a tiny war memorial in a Cotswold village. In everything he said he operated at the highest levels of intellectual debate, but there was such clarity to his thought, such logic and a kind of exalted simplicity to his ideas, that what he was saying was made accessible to pretty well anyone who might care to listen. There was also an enormous sympathy in his presentation, an emotional undertow that tempered the scholarly and subtly emphasised the deep humanity of the subject. There is something about Andrew that he can only communicate when he is in front of a camera. Even though he is an out
standing teacher and lecturer, he only really comes into his own when he is being filmed. The impersonality of the medium allows that extra degree of emotional privacy into which he can relax, so that each viewer feels he is speaking directly to them, and to them alone. He conveys a sense of intimacy that is beyond what he ever makes available in his private life. That and his remarkable capacity for intellectual synthesis are at the core of his success.

He talked about how, with the decline of religious belief, our concept of death changed in society as a whole. More than that, he quoted Virginia Woolf's remark about how sometime around 1910 human nature changed, and argued convincingly that this was more germane to the issue of memorialising than anything to do with religion. ‘It is our attitude to life that is ultimately more significant than our attitude to death.' Time and again he came back to this idea of the self, of what had brought about this change in perception (the development of psychology, the wars of the twentieth century, the rise of science and rationalism). The self we were left with after all this was, according to Andrew, a much more nebulous and evanescent thing, more socially determined than would have been conceivable in the nineteenth century.

He used an exhibition of quilts commemorating people who had died of AIDS to illustrate what he was saying and to show how the nature of memorials had to change as a result of these changed perceptions. Quilting had always been considered a folk tradition rather than an art form. It was an area of female activity, unlike stone cutting or wood carving, the products of which were more enduring and therefore had always been seen as more
suitable for memorials. ‘For the one thing we always wanted to believe about such constructions – tombs, statues, monuments – was that they were built to last. Unlike the things they represented, they would
endure
.' Cue to weathered headless angels in a Victorian cemetery, full of broken statuary. While the AIDS quilts were undoubtedly a continuation of a certain tradition, they also indicated a radical break with the past, ‘a new kind of memorial for a new idea of the self'.

Walking amongst the coloured quilts, with their embroidered names, dates and symbols of flowers, rainbows, notes of music and so on, he remarked on their aesthetic, simply on how attractive they were as objects. ‘And that, I must admit, is something that has often given me problems about certain memorials,' Andrew confessed to the camera. ‘The discrepancy there is between the undeniable beauty of the memorial itself and the ugliness, the terrible violence of the deaths they record: acts of war, acts of the utmost inhumanity.'

The scene moved to Paris, to Île de la Cité, with Notre Dame behind him. ‘I'm here to visit not the cathedral,' he said, ‘but the memorial to the some 200,000 people deported from France during World War Two, amongst them Jewish people, resistance workers and forced labourers.' He descended a flight of steps and was confronted by black iron bars and spikes. ‘Already there is a sense of narrowness and constriction.' He turned and as he entered a doorway, said: ‘It's difficult for us to film here. This is a dark place. It's cramped and claustrophobic, intentionally so; and even on a hot afternoon such as we have today, one is chilled.' In a low voice he described the interlinked cell-like structures, the metal bars, the
thousands of tiny lights and the single bare bulb, the poems on the walls, the names of the camps to which the deported had been sent. ‘This is a profoundly moving place. There is also something terrible and desolate about it. It is not a place to which one would wish to return, but it is a place which stays in the mind and in the heart long after one has been here. I realise that our filming today is to a large degree inadequate, but I make no apology for it. This is not a place you see. This is a place you experience.' I expected the camera to move to another place at that point, to another stele or plaque. Instead, it cropped closely to Andrew's face.

‘But harrowing as this place is,' he said, ‘I think that I would argue in favour of something more extreme still. There is a certain aesthetic at work here. Some crimes are so ugly, such an affront to humanity, that only a brutal, raw, even crude response is adequate. Anything else seems dishonest and disrespectful.'

Now he was in a garden, a strange garden that was full of dark vegetation, hellebores and low plants with sharply pointed black leaves. ‘But who after all are memorials for?' Andrew asked as he walked slowly towards a bench and sat down. ‘Are they for the living or the dead? By their very beauty can they offer comfort to those who have suffered loss, those who are left behind? Surely the answer must be yes. Surely this is one of the most important functions of a memorial, to redeem suffering through beauty.'

In the closing sequences he drew together the various strands of thought he had explored in the course of the programme. The final shot found him walking through a cornfield, full of bright poppies. ‘I'm back where I started.
The Menin Gate is a few kilometres west of here. That massive stone monument is a thing of its time. We live in a more vertiginous age, an age of doubt and reason. There's something almost weightless about our world, I think, something fleeting and insubstantial that's ill at ease with any pretence of certainty.' The camera moved in for a close-up of a poppy moving in the wind, with its crumpled red petals and black heart. ‘There can be no more fitting memorial to the Great War, when a whole world passed away, than these poppies: than the fields of Flanders themselves.' At that the camera pulled back to show thousands upon thousands of poppies scattered through the cornfield that stretched to the far horizon.

‘Well, you've changed your tune,' I thought to myself as the final credits rolled and I remembered how dismissive he'd been of a Dublin sky all those years ago in college. Nothing would have been good enough for him then but art of the highest order. A week ago I had seen the first programme in the series, in which he'd dealt with the ancient world, with Greece, Rome and Etruria. He'd remarked upon how sometimes it was tempting to disregard what one knew of the function or meaning of some of the objects concerned, tomb paintings and marble steles, and to consider them purely in aesthetic terms, to project upon them our own feelings and ideas. When we looked at a terracotta sarcophagus on which sat life-sized figures of a man and a woman it was difficult not to interpret it in the light of our own conception of what the relations between a couple might be; to bring to bear upon it sentimental feelings that would have been incomprehensible to the Etruscans themselves. One of the most difficult things of all, he had said, was to stand outside our own
time, to see the society in which we lived with a similar distance and detachment. Even to attempt to do it brought great insight. In tonight's programme I had sensed a kind of unease, as if he himself was not fully convinced of the arguments he was making.

I switched off the television and went down to the kitchen. I cooked the fish I had bought earlier, watching under the eye-level grill as the flesh became white and opaque. I put together a simple salad and cut bread. All the time I was preparing this meal and then eating it at the kitchen table I was thinking about Fergus. How completely I had bought Molly's version of him! And even more to the point, how completely I had bought Molly's version of herself. I should have been aware long before now that there was much more to Fergus than the trouble there had been in his life. His distress lay over him like a grey veil, obscuring who and what he was, but not changing his essential self. I could now see his personality and his disturbance as two quite distinct things: connected, yes, but not integral to each other in the way I had thought. This confusion had done him a great disservice. I wished it could be possible for me to develop a friendship with this kind, gentle, witty man, independent of my relationship with his sister, but I knew there was no chance of that.

I felt that I was being disloyal thinking along these lines while I was staying in Molly's place. The sense of it being her house, indeed a sense of Molly herself began to close in around me in the kitchen as it had done, more agreeably, on my waking that morning in the bedroom. On the kitchen table was a willow basket she used as a fruit bowl. There was a blue-and-white china tub for utensils
near the sink, bristling with salad servers and wooden spoons; and beside it was an iron trivet in the shape of a flower, to support hot dishes and pans. Looking at these things made me feel weirdly nervous, too close to Molly at a moment when I felt disconnected from her. Beyond the kitchen window I could see the fake cow, that wretched thing that I wouldn't have tolerated in my own life or home for a moment. Now it seemed to me like the most ridiculous affectation, the caprice of a woman with more money than either taste or sense, and I felt a sudden anger within me.

Just at that, the doorbell rang. It startled me but I was glad to hear it because I needed company. I was spiralling into some strange mental state that I only half understood but that I knew I needed to get out of fast. Even if it was only someone selling raffle tickets or looking for directions it would be enough. It would oblige me to put on my social mask for a moment and connect me with another person, and that was what I needed right now.

When I opened the door the caller was standing with his back to me, but I recognised him for all that, and this gave me the upper hand when he turned to face me.

‘Hello, Andrew.'

‘Molly,' he said. ‘Where's Molly?'

‘New York.'

‘New York?' He could hardly have been more surprised if I'd said that she'd gone to the moon. ‘What are you doing here? And what's she doing there?'

‘Aren't you going to say hello to me?' He gave an embarrassed little laugh then, apologised and greeted me.

As he bent down and kissed me I remembered something that I neglected to mention earlier: Andrew and I
had been to bed together. It only happened once, at the very end of that day I described, the last he spent in Ireland. I had offered him the choice of my absent friends' rooms, but in fact he had spent his second and final night in the house with me. I remembered it now but only the cool fact of it, as one might recall that one had once visited Japan or been far out in a small boat on the open sea without recalling the precise details, without remembering in the fullest sense of the word. I am aware that what I am saying here doesn't tally with what I said to Molly when she asked about this, but that's easily explained: I was lying. It was none of her business. Anyone who asks such a question deserves to be lied to.

‘It's Molly's birthday.'

‘I know,' I replied to him.

‘I hadn't known it was today. I saw it in the paper.'

‘I saw it too. She won't be pleased.'

Why is that?'

‘Come through to the kitchen,' I said. He was in the hall by now, and I closed the front door behind him.

He looked well, but then he always does. He was dressed in pale clothes and was carrying a soft, biscuit-coloured jacket over his arm. Since he started working on television he has taken on even more of a gloss. People whom one has only known from seeing them on the small screen often look hyper-real in the flesh, and I had always put that down to the difference between the medium and real life. But since Andrew's change of career I've begun to realise that it has more to do with certain habits of dress or grooming, of professional polish, that are required for the cameras and that are then carried on into daily practice.

On returning to the kitchen I was conscious that the air was heavy with the smell of fish, as I hadn't been while I was cooking and eating. I quickly opened the window and moved my dirty plates from the table to the sink. Andrew draped his jacket over the back of a chair and looked suddenly forlorn. I noticed now that he was carrying a paper carrier bag that clearly contained a bottle of champagne and a large book. ‘I don't know what to do,' he said. ‘I feel like a bit of an idiot.'

‘If that champagne is cold we'll drink it now,' I said robustly. ‘I'll put a replacement bottle in the fridge for Molly before I leave. I'm absolutely delighted to see you again.'

My suggestion was born out of an attempt to make the best of the situation. Simply by being there I had found out about his plan for a little celebration with Molly, something I suspect he would have preferred me not to know about. Then again, had she been at home, I very much doubt that it would have been the delightful occasion he imagined. All I had to offer him was the red wine sitting on the counter that I had subtly denied Fergus. Cheap plonk with me instead of champagne with Molly: I could well understand Andrew's disappointment. The least I could do was open the bottle.