Molly Fox's Birthday (2 page)

I knew how fond she was of her home and everything in it, something that was difficult to square with her attitude of non-attachment. Take our mutual friend Andrew, for example. I'm even closer to him than to Molly, and I've known him for longer too, but he would never give me the free run of his home, of that I'm certain. Not that I would need it anyway, for he also lives in London, and I
wouldn't want it because of the responsibility. While Molly's house is full of stylish bric-a-brac, unusual but inexpensive things that she has picked up on her travels, pretty well everything Andrew owns – vases, rugs, furniture – is immensely valuable. Worrying that I might spill a glass of red wine over some rare carpet or mark an antique table with a cup of coffee would take away any pleasure in staying there. Given how clumsy I am it's always a relief, even when visiting him, to leave without having broken or damaged anything.

Andrew. He had been much on my mind of late. I had hoped to see him before I left London. I had called and left a message on his answering machine, asking him to ring, but he hadn't got back to me. No doubt this was a particularly busy time for him. His new series had started on television the previous week; the second part would be shown tonight. I had wanted to wish him the best for it.

Yawning, I stretched out and switched on a small radio on the bedside table. The music that came from it was hesitant and haunting, a piano played with a kind of rising courage, the notes sparse and scattered with a yearning quality that somehow seemed to match the mood of the morning: it was, at least, what I needed to hear. What would I do today? I would spend the morning working in the spare bedroom that I had set up as an office for the time that I would be here. Because it was Saturday I would give myself the afternoon off and go into town. I knew that I had had a pleasant dream just before I awoke but I couldn't remember what it had been about. I looked again at my watch and decided it was still too early to get up even though the room was flooded with light. It was
the twenty-first of June, the longest day of the year. It was Molly Fox's birthday.

I saw Molly on stage before ever I met her. When I was in my last year at university, at Trinity in Dublin where I read English, I went one night to see a production of
The
Importance of Being Earnest
, hoping that I wouldn't be disappointed. All my life I have used this play to discover what people really know about the theatre, as opposed to what they think they know. Anyone who dismisses it as a slight, rather empty piece of entertainment immediately falls in my estimation. Too often it is staged in a stale and complacent way which suggests that the director also holds it in limited regard. But this production, by a young company called Bread and Circus, wasn't at all like that. While fully exploiting the elegance and wit of the language, it also brought out the darker side of the play, the snobbery and the social hypocrisy, Wilde's yearning to be a part of something that he knew did not merit respect.
Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only
people who can't get into it do that
. Didn't he know that he was worth the whole lot of them put together, and that by not assuming superiority he was only bringing himself down to their level and setting himself up for his own destruction? By the use of Irish accents for certain characters this production subtly addressed a colonial aspect of the play that I had never thought about until then; and it also brought out the sexual politics of the work, the pragmatism and deception. They were a young company, and while that was a part of their strength, giving them their wonderful irreverence, their willingness to take risks, it was also part of their weakness. None of them was over
thirty, a distinct disadvantage for playing Miss Prism or Lady Bracknell; and some of the acting was frankly poor.

But the young woman playing Cecily was outstanding. So fully and naturally did she inhabit the part that it was impossible to see how she was doing what she was doing, to deconstruct her art into its component parts. Her remarkable presence and charisma were not dependent on her looks, for she was not particularly pretty, and her only distinguishing physical feature, waist-length dark brown hair, I took to be a wig. But there was the voice of course, that beautiful, musical voice. During the interval when the lights came up in the shabby theatre, I took out my programme to see who she was, and I noticed several people around me do the same thing. In the course of the following months I saw her in other plays and noticed her name in the papers. Even when a production was comprehensively panned, she always seemed to escape censure.
Only
the singularly gifted Molly Fox emerges with honour from
this sorry hotchpotch of bad direction and shoddy acting
.

Around the time I left college – I think it was just after Andrew had left for England – something uncanny happened to me one day. I was at a table in a café when I noticed a young woman sitting nearby, with a cup of coffee and a book. Her face was familiar and yet I couldn't place her. Perhaps she was also a student at Trinity and I knew her face from seeing her in the library or passing her in the squares, without ever having spoken to her. She was wearing a black leather jacket and draped over her left shoulder was a dark brown plait, shiny, and stout as a rope that might tie up a ship. With that, I realised who she was: so it wasn't a wig after all. She picked up a small brown packet of sugar and shook it hard so that the
contents fell to the bottom, tore it open and poured it onto the froth of the coffee. For the next half-hour she read her book and sipped at the mug, while I watched her. Nothing else happened. I have described it as an uncanny incident, and it was. I did not approach Molly – what could I possibly have said?
I really liked you in ‘The Importance of
Being Earnest
'. And what could she have replied?
Why
thank you very much
. What would that have amounted to? Less than nothing. There are forms of communication that drive people apart, that do nothing other than confirm distance. But there are also instances when no connection seems to be made and yet something profound takes place, and this was just such a moment.

I realised the enormity of her gift. I had been aware of it when watching her on stage, but seeing her here in the café, unrecognised, anonymous, confirmed it for me. It was hers in the same way that her thick pigtail was hers, complete, real, undeniable, hers to do with as she thought fit. I believe that this was clearer to me then than it could have been to Molly, for how we see ourselves, our future, is often tainted by the very hope of what we wish to become. I was at that time already a person of enormous ambition. I knew even then that nothing except being a playwright could ever reconcile me to life; but my gift, I thought, was only a spark. I had none of the effortless brilliance of this other woman. As was the case with Wilde himself, we are at each moment of our lives the persons we were and shall become. The convict in his arrowed uniform who wept on the station platform as people screamed abuse and spat at him had been present years earlier when the same man had been hailed triumphant on the first night of his theatrical success. In the
same way, the actor who would give some of the most profound and intelligent performances that one could ever wish to see on stage was already there in that young woman with her coffee and book.

I like to think that she looks exactly the same as she did when I knew her first, but it isn't true. The Molly of today is far more groomed and poised than the person I saw in the café all those years ago. The long hair, the leather jacket, the casual slick of lipstick have all gone, but they went gradually, so that her transformation, as is the case with most people, happened slowly over time. It is only now, by making a conscious mental effort or by looking at old photographs, that I can recall her as she was, and I can pinpoint no one day, or even a particular time in her life, when she suddenly appeared to me as having completely changed.

And what had I been doing in the café on that day? By a strange coincidence, jotting down notes for the play I had just begun to write, and which would make both Molly's reputation and mine the following year. It was based upon my experiences in London the previous summer, when I had worked as a chambermaid in the morning and as a domestic cleaner in the afternoon and had gone every night to the theatre. My hunger for the stage at that time was intense in a way I now find somewhat alarming. I watched plays with the kind of voracity with which small children read books; with the same visceral passion, the same complete trust in the imagination which is so difficult to sustain throughout the course of one's whole life. It sat uneasily with my daytime existence, spent in the luxurious squalor of dirty hotel bedrooms and the homes of affluent strangers.

There was one particular apartment, a place in St John's Wood, that spooked me from the moment I stepped into it, and I could never understand why. Having grown up in a fairly modest farming background I'd never before experienced such splendour, and I think I expected to be impressed. Instead of which, I fled every day when I had finished to a greasy-spoon café two streets away, where there was always a group of men off a building site, having their tea break. I grew to depend on them, on their yellow hats and their fag-smoke, their tabloids and their laughter. I don't think they ever noticed me sitting nearby as they ribbed each other and ate bacon rolls, swilling them down with big mugs of tea. The stifling atmosphere of the empty apartment where I worked felt like a parallel universe, and after a few hours there it did me good to be around the builders, to tap into their reality. All the rooms in the apartment seemed too big and were arranged in such a way as to militate against any kind of intimacy and warmth. They lacked such things as books and adequate light by which to read, an open fire or any sign of the presence of children; and no amount of Scandinavian glass, no number of cream sofas, could make up for this.

After I had been working there for about a fortnight, I turned around from the kitchen sink one afternoon and literally bumped into a young woman. Having believed myself to be completely alone in the flat it frightened me horribly, and I screamed so loudly that I frightened her and she screamed too. We both drew back and cowered, staring hard at each other like animals at bay.

Let's call her Lucy. That wasn't her real name, but it's what I called her when she became a character in my play. Over the following weeks a strange relationship
developed between us that I mistakenly took to be a friendship. The manner of its conclusion proved how wrong I had been. Lucy was about three years younger than I, and had left school at the start of that summer. She hadn't applied to go to university and didn't know what she wanted to do with her life. Her boyfriend, she told me, was a film-maker and she was perhaps going to be a photographer, but she wasn't sure. The brother of a schoolfriend owned a photography gallery in the East End, and maybe she was going to have an exhibition there later in the year. Nowadays I would see through this kind of thing immediately; but this was the first occasion I had come across someone for whom art was a means of avoiding reality rather than confronting it head on, an idea so strange to me that I didn't fully comprehend it at the time. In some ways she was far more worldly and experienced than I – the film-maker boyfriend was only the most recent of many men – and then at other times she struck me as remarkably naïve and childlike, given her age. The one thing she craved was an audience, and I certainly provided
that
in due course. In the short term she trailed about the house in my wake as I polished and dusted, while she moaned about her mother and mimicked with little skill her father's mistress, whom she loathed. I came to realise how lonely she was, and how vulnerable. She adored her father, whose attention she could never hold for as long as she needed, and I grew to pity her. I only had to clean this palace of alienation; she, poor girl, had to live in it.

She insisted that I abandon my work for up to an hour at a time, to drink coffee with her and to talk about my life, for I was as exotic and interesting to her as she was
to me. My childhood growing up on a farm in Northern Ireland fascinated her in a way I found hard to comprehend. I told her that I was the youngest of seven children.
I don't believe I've ever met anyone before with so many
brothers and sisters
. That one of these brothers was a Catholic priest astounded her further. I described to her the wild boggy upland that was my home and my ambivalent feelings towards it. I thought she understood me. I thought she liked me. I thought she was my friend.

The summer ended and I prepared to go back to Dublin for my final year at college. Lucy wasn't in when I arrived at the apartment on my last day. I wanted to exchange addresses with her so that we could keep in touch. I thought to suggest to her that she would join me in the greasy spoon so that we could sit for a while in the reflected glow of the builders' camaraderie. It would do her good. I was in the kitchen when she did at last arrive home, bringing with her a young man. Whether or not it was the film-maker boyfriend or his successor I was never to know. ‘I'll see you in a while,' she said to me, as she took him into the drawing room, which I had already cleaned. I hoped he wouldn't linger, but they sat there talking for the rest of the afternoon. At the end of my shift I put my head around the door.

‘Well, what is it? What do you want?' Even I knew better than to suggest tea and bacon rolls at a moment like this.

‘I've finished. I'm off now.'

‘So, off you go.' I couldn't believe that all the time we had spent together, all our confidences, amounted to nothing.

‘It's my last day!' I said helplessly.

‘So, it's your last day.' She turned to the man and pulled a face, shook her little head, so much as to say,
You see the
kind of people I have to put up with?
I withdrew from the room. As I was putting my jacket on in the hall I could hear him ask, ‘Who was that?' and Lucy's reply, ‘Oh it was nobody, it was just the cleaner. She's probably trying to scrounge a tip because it's her last day, but she's not getting anything.' I slammed the front door of the apartment behind me with all the force of Nora departing at the end of
A Doll's House
; and I kept this as the conclusion of
Summer with Lucy
: it was effective, even though it had been done before.