Molly Fox's Birthday (20 page)

‘It is cold,' he admitted.

‘So much the better. We'll take it into the back garden and we'll drink to Molly and to you too. I've just been watching your memorials programme. Congratulations, it was great, really moving.'

‘You're very kind to say so. I brought Molly a copy of the book of the series. You'll get your copy when you go back home, I posted it to your house in London the other
day.' I thanked him, and he passed me Molly's copy to look at. ‘That's the reason I'm in Dublin, to do a few interviews and promotion around the series. I was doing a signing session in a shop in town this afternoon.'

The title of the book showed a photograph of the words ‘Remember Me' carved in stone. It was a most impressive volume, with many coloured plates of all kinds of monuments and artworks, and a series of essays. I noticed that the printed dedication at the front read ‘i.m. William (Billy) Forde', followed by Billy's dates. ‘You're listed in the acknowledgements,' Andrew said.

‘Me? But why? What did I do?'

‘More than you can ever know. You're my friend and you've always been there for me.' I was taken aback by this frank declaration, and I hardly knew how to reply to Andrew, except to thank him again.

‘Anyway, Molly,' he said briskly.' What's she doing in New York?'

‘I don't know. I think she's just there for a holiday.'

‘On her own? Won't that be terribly lonely?'

‘I wouldn't have thought so, not for a lone wolf like Molly.'

‘I spoke to her quite recently and she didn't mention it.' I started to explain that she would be there for a week and then was off to London, but he interrupted me. ‘
Adam Bede,
yes, I know. She did tell me about that. Maybe the States was a last-minute decision.'

‘Maybe,' I said, but I knew it hadn't been. She had told me months earlier that she would be away mid-June into July, New York for a week and then London; the house would be available if I wanted it. ‘You'd have to talk to Molly herself about all this.'

I started to prepare things for the champagne and asked Andrew to move so that I could get some ice from the fridge. Crossing to the window he glanced out and did the usual double-take with the cow, but realised almost immediately that it wasn't real. ‘Fibreglass,' I said helpfully.

‘Isn't that just typical of Molly,' he said and he started to laugh.

‘Isn't it just,' I said, and the ice cubes rattled into the ice bucket. I had decided to take the line of least resistance as far as Andrew and Molly were concerned. ‘Do you like it?'

‘It's hilarious. I think it's great.'

I suggested then that he might go out into the garden and wait there while I finished preparing the tray. Andrew likes everything just so, and therefore I hunted down the correct glasses, a white cloth for the tray and another to drape over the bottle. I knew that Molly had such things, and as I searched them out in the drawers and cupboards I glanced out of the window from time to time, keeping an eye on Andrew. It amused me to see him wandering around admiring the flowers, for a more urban man than he, a bigger library cormorant and creature of the great indoors, would be hard to imagine. He studied the bird feeder as though trying to work out what purpose this mysterious object might serve; broke a few spines from a rosemary bush and rubbed them between his fingers, sniffed them with extreme caution, as though fearing their fragrance might knock him unconscious. I finished my preparations just as he was settling down at the table and I carried the tray out to join him.

I got Andrew to open the bottle. He hauled it dripping
from the chrome bucket; it was like an icy baby being born. But he opened it with less style than I had expected, for the cork shot off into a rosebush and some of the champagne gushed out before he could put a tilted glass beneath the neck of the bottle.

‘To Molly.'

‘To Molly. And to you too, Andrew. “Remember Me”.'

The champagne was fragrant, bone-dry, almost metallic but pleasantly so. I said to Andrew that too often any champagne I drank was in a work context, at first nights or press receptions, and it was good to be sharing a bottle with a friend for a change. I was glad to see him. It was about two months since we had last met, but there was nothing unusual in that, given how busy both our lives were.

‘And how is the work going at the moment, if I might ask? Are you working on a new play?' When I said that I was he asked me if I felt able to say what it was about. I replied as I had to Fergus, that I hardly knew myself because it was still at such an early stage. I sat quietly for a moment and watched the bubbles rush upwards in my drink. All day when I had tried to think of my work I had felt a kind of panic, and the more this gripped me the less able I had been to think straight. Instead of one idea opening into another, growing and developing, I had watched my thoughts close down, like some computer system into which a terrible virus had entered, blocking, deleting, destroying irrevocably. Now I felt no panic whatsoever.

I knew that the play would be about animals and their relations to humans, how we anthropomorphise them, how we project things onto them. I knew that this tended
to happen more in the city than in the country, where people are less sentimental about animals. Our relationships with animals change the animals themselves. I thought about wild swans, about how they were truly wild, potentially angry and dangerous creatures, and how they never came looking for bread. I compared them with the swans one knew from the ponds and canals of cities, those sly, charming birds, constantly soliciting food.

And that was what had been so intriguing, I realised, about the man with the hare. I didn't know what the relationship between them was. Perhaps he had been going to kill it and eat it. Perhaps he had been going to breed it or to sell it. Or perhaps it was a pet, a companion, as a cat might be. Perhaps he was on his way to give it to someone as a gift, a bizarre love gift, like a woman in a fairytale asking for things she thought she could never receive, so as not to have to deal with the man's love.
Bring me
gloves made of the skin of a fish. Bring me a wild hare
that will follow at my heels like a lapdog
. Maybe he was going to kill it for its pelt. And the reason why I didn't know, couldn't even hazard a guess as to which of these was the real situation, was because the relationship between the two had been so neutral. The man did not tenderly stroke its fur, but nor did he appear to treat it harshly. It was impossible to know if the hare was still because of fear or trust.

And once, I remembered, when I was in France I had seen a sign for a lost dog with a full description and phone number. One line in heavy type said
Il est ma seule famille
!
and for the rest of that day I hadn't been able to get it out of my mind. It upset me more than I would have thought it might, the idea of someone whose only family
was a dog. And now that dog had disappeared. I gravitated back to the notice the following day and noticed another line that I hadn't seen on my first reading.
Attention! Il est très méchant avec les enfants!
So here we had a person whose only family was a dog which was extremely dangerous around children. Remembering this years later in Molly's back garden on a summer evening, drinking champagne with Andrew, I knew at once that this person would be the central character in the play I was going to write.

I instantly regretted that Andrew was there with me, that I couldn't simply go straight up to my desk and begin writing, now that I knew what I was about. Yes, the subject had suddenly fallen open before me, like a chestnut in its case that splits to reveal the clean white lining, the glossy brown of the nut, after days of trying to pick open tightly sealed prickly green cases. We were still sitting in silence. Andrew was staring not at me but at his drink, so I had at least time to think through all of this, and to try and fix it in my mind, in the hope of writing it all down as soon as he had gone.

‘Molly says there's a hedgehog that lives in the garden,' I said. ‘She told me it often comes out at dusk, but I haven't seen it yet.' Andrew raised his eyes from his champagne glass and looked at me oddly. I realised that while this remark was linked to the animal thoughts that were in my mind, it had nothing to do with anything I had said to him and must have struck him as bizarre.

‘By the way,' I said, ‘I bumped into an old friend of yours this afternoon. Marian Dunne.'

‘Seriously?' I nodded, and he laughed. ‘Did she ask after me?'

‘She most certainly did. Wanted to talk about nothing and nobody else except you and your brilliant career.'

‘You do surprise me. I wonder did she ever marry that medical student.'

I said that she had. I filled him in on the facts of her life, such as she had related them to me. It didn't take long. I told him she looked well but that she was bored with her life; that she had everything she'd set out to get – a husband, children, a big house, money, social position – and that it wasn't enough.

‘Did she tell you this?'

‘Don't be silly Andrew, of course not. But you didn't have to be a master psychologist to work it out.'

‘Is she happy?'

‘I wouldn't have thought so. No, not particularly.'

‘Serves her right,' he said severely. I was surprised at this sudden flash of anger. ‘It wasn't that she didn't want me because she didn't like me. I happen to know that she was very fond of me. I'm good enough for her now although I wasn't good enough for her then, but I'm still the same person.'

I made sympathetic noises, but I couldn't help thinking that there was such a thing as bad judgement. Andrew had always been a sucker for the kind of woman who has an ulterior motive, an agenda, and that he could never see this had always baffled and at times irritated me. I said as much to Molly once and she said, ‘He can't see it because he's a man and they're women. Even if you explained it to him he probably wouldn't be able to see it.'

Suddenly he said, ‘Look at the difference between Marian and you. You're happy to be my friend now, but you were also happy to be my friend when I was a scruffy
student with nothing going for me, and I know that if my life were to fall apart tomorrow, for whatever reason, you'd be there for me. That's real friendship. It took me a long time to discover how rare that kind of integrity is.' I was surprised and deeply touched by this.
Friendship is
far more tragic than love. It lasts longer
.

With that, a dark thought came to my mind. What if Molly had asked him the same question she had asked me? She was capable of it. What if he hadn't lied?
Yes, we
did sleep together, but only once. It was a long time ago.
We were both students, and it meant nothing. Don't tell
her I told you, though, or she'll kill me
. And I would, too, I thought, looking at him, his head averted as he gazed off down the garden at the fake cow and the raspberry bushes, at the pink roses clustered on the wall. There was no way I could ever know the truth about this. Molly would never tell me, and I couldn't possibly ask Andrew.

‘Marian Dunne,' he said softly, and he laughed. ‘Strange, all of that is like a lifetime ago now. It seems more distant than when Billy died, although it was around the same time. I suppose it's because I haven't thought of Marian for years, and there's not a day goes by that I don't think of Billy.' I didn't know what to say to this surprising admission. I couldn't remember the last time he'd mentioned Billy, and even then it would only have been a passing reference. When he spoke again a few moments later I thought it was to change the subject completely, because he said, ‘Do you ever think about the energy there can be in things? Jewellery, or a piece of silver or glass, for example. I think about it sometimes in the course of my work. There's the pure aesthetic of the thing, but sometimes you can't help
being aware of something more, as if it still means what it meant to the person who used to own it.'

I told him that there were mediums who claimed to be able to describe a person in detail, their character and their destiny, simply by handling an object they had habitually used. I had thought that he would briskly dismiss this, and to my surprise he said slowly, thoughtfully, ‘Well, I don't think I could ever believe in that, but I certainly understand where it's coming from. Nicole hated antique jewellery. I used to suggest it as a gift, and she wouldn't hear tell of it. It was nothing to do with the design, it was the thought of other people having owned it, of it being emotionally loaded, that she couldn't bear. And that's fair enough. I respect that.' I didn't know where all this was leading, and then he said ‘Do you remember when I left Ireland, that last night before I went to Cambridge? I stayed with you, do you remember?'

He wasn't looking at me as he spoke, and I made a point of not catching his eye as I replied.

‘Yes.'

‘Something happened just before I left home, something I've never spoken about to anyone. We weren't a demonstrative family, and when my father became all emotional about me leaving and about Billy I didn't know what to say. It embarrassed me, and even annoyed me a bit. I just wanted it to stop so I could pick up my bags and go. And then he said, “Your mother and I want you to have this.” We were sitting at the kitchen table at the time, drinking tea, and my father was smoking a cigarette. He put his hand in his pocket and took something out, set it there on the oilskin tablecloth in the middle of all the spilt sugar and the cake crumbs. It was a ring. A
gold ring.' Andrew gave a little laugh that was full of sorrow. ‘It was without a doubt one of the ugliest things I'd ever seen in all my life. A clunky, heavy-looking thing; it spelt out the word “son” across the knuckle, and the sides of it were textured like bark.'