Molly Fox's Birthday (22 page)

‘I'd obviously heard bombs when I was growing up in Belfast, and I'd been caught up in things, scares and riots and stuff, but this was the closest call I'd ever had. And even as I was sitting there the irony of that struck me. My whole life had been a kind of flight from the north and everything that happened there. I'd studied hard so that I could become what I knew I needed to be. Life had brought me at last after so many years here to Paris, to look at some drawings, and I'd almost been killed in a bomb blast as a result, in a dispute that had nothing to do with me. Then I thought about Billy and how he had died, even though for years I had actively tried not to think of him. I rarely felt sorry or sad about him, just angry and disgusted at the waste of a life. And suddenly I felt the whole loss of him in a way I'd perhaps never allowed myself to feel it before. It was just awful. I couldn't bear it. I stood up and walked away from the café, just to distract myself, just to be doing something.

‘I was beginning to feel really stiff and sore, like I'd been beaten up. My head hurt. A lot of time seemed to have passed since the bomb exploded, but I realise now that it can only have been a matter of minutes. There were people around who were screaming and crying, but most were like me, silent and dazed, wandering around not knowing where they were going. There was a sense of calm that was more eerie and weird than the screaming. I saw a woman who was kneeling beside a man, cradling
him in her arms, soothing him, and then I saw that all of his left arm, from the elbow down, had been blown off. I turned away and I saw another man who was also sitting on the ground. He said something to me urgently, and although I speak pretty good French I didn't understand what he was saying. He repeated it, and then he touched his temple with his fingers and pointed at me. I also touched my right temple, and then I realised what he had been trying to tell me, for when I looked at my hand it was drenched in blood. I must have cut my head when I hit the chair on the way down, and although my shirt and jacket were soaked I hadn't even noticed. My hand was dripping blood,' he said again. ‘I looked as if I'd murdered someone.' He gave a rather dry ironic laugh. ‘This will amuse you. When I saw the blood my first reaction, quite honestly, was that I had never before seen such a fabulous colour. I could be bleeding to death and all I can think about is how extraordinarily beautiful my blood is. It was like the colour of life itself; I couldn't get over it. The man who had pointed it out to me pulled a tablecloth off a café table and handed it to me. He was talking to me in French, and I remember I kept thanking him in Italian, but I didn't realise it until much later that night.

‘So now what was I to do? With hindsight, remembering how confused and disoriented I was, I'm surprised at how clearly I was then able to think. I knew that the hospitals would be in a state of emergency, and that I didn't want to go there. I was wounded but not, I hoped, too badly. If I hung around I would be forced to get into an ambulance, so I decided to make myself scarce. The traffic was already completely snarled up, and I reckoned that the métro, at least in that part of town, would immediately have been
closed down. As I say, I'm surprised at how clearly I was able to think and reason. I decided I would walk home. The man who had handed me the tablecloth tried to stop me walking away. I think he wanted me to go to the hospital, but that just strengthened my resolve. I pulled away from him and disappeared into the crowds.

‘I don't know how long it took me to walk home, and I don't know how I did it. Out of the whole thing, that's the only part that's a bit hazy in my memory. People were staring at me. A man approached, he wanted to help me but I pushed him away and told him to leave me alone. I had only one thought now, to get back to the apartment. There was no one around when I got there, and I was glad of that, no one saw me enter the building. When I went into the actual apartment and saw myself in the hall mirror I got a shock, because I don't think I'd quite realised until then the state I was in. At least I'd stopped bleeding, it was dried and crusted on my face.

‘My first thought then was to call Tony, but as I reached for the receiver the phone rang. It was Nicole, and I could hear someone sobbing in the background. “There's just been a news flash,” she said. “It appears there's been a bomb attack in Paris. Because you're there, Tony's got it into his head that you've been killed.”

“Let me speak to him,” I said. Nicole went off the line, and I could overhear her saying to Tony, “Didn't I tell you that you were being stupid? Didn't I tell you there was nothing to worry about?”' Andrew took a deep breath. ‘In spite of all we've been through, I still esteem Nicole and I respect her as Tony's mother. And so it pains me to have to say this, but sometimes she can be rather cold.' I nodded sympathetically but had the sense not to endorse this.

‘The poor child, when he came to the phone he was crying so much he could hardly speak. I told him I was fine. I lied and said I'd been at home all day, just to reassure him. He kept saying, “I'm sorry, Daddy, I'm sorry,” shame I suppose for crying, for being, as Nicole said, stupid. It was hard for me to hold back, but I was aware that if I let myself become upset and emotional he'd know I wasn't telling the truth about the bombing. “It wasn't silly of you to worry about me,” I said. “It was loving and kind.” To get off the line I told him there was something in the kitchen I needed to attend to, and promised to ring him again the following day.

‘It was only when I came off the phone that I realised what a state I was in. Tony had managed to blurt out that he'd heard on the news people had died in the bombing. I'd feared as much, but it rattled me to have it confirmed. I suppose I did begin to realise that I'd had something of a narrow escape, and how incredible that would have been, to come from where I come from and to end up maimed or killed here. Then I looked in a mirror again and noticed that I was still a total mess.

‘Never was I so glad for a few creature comforts. The person who lived in the apartment had left the bathroom pretty much as it was, with all kinds of toiletries and things, and I'd scrupulously not touched so much as a cotton wool bud. Now I just raided the cabinet. There was everything I needed, gauze, cotton, antiseptic, the lot. There was a box of some kind of salts, and I helped myself to that, ran a hot bath and poured it in. By that stage everything was really hurting.'

‘How badly injured were you?' I asked.

‘Not very. The cut looked worse than it actually was.
My shoulder was sore from where I'd fallen on it, and I had a terrible headache from having hit the edge of the table as I went down. It was as if I'd been beaten up in terms of both the physical pain and the sense of deep shock I felt. The bath didn't help as much as I'd hoped it would. Afterwards I poured myself a large whisky, which probably wasn't a great idea, but I was desperate for a drink. And then something quite strange happened.

‘The apartment itself began to disturb me. As I've told you, up until then I'd been quite contented in it. That it belonged to strangers about whom I knew nothing hadn't troubled me in the slightest, but now it was precisely that which bothered me. Everything there was charged with the presence of these people whom I'd never met. There was a sofa upholstered in yellow silk that was slightly frayed at the armrests. There was a candle in a small pot of thick glass that had been lit at some point in the past and then extinguished. There was an intimacy about all these things, but one that I couldn't connect with because I didn't know the people who owned them, and that failure to connect was deeply unsettling. It made the whole apartment feel more anonymous to me than any hotel room could ever have been; and anonymity was the last thing I wanted that night. There was a peculiar stillness, too, a heightened quality, as though I were sitting in the middle of something distant and perfected. The room was beautiful and mysterious and still; but as for me, I was distraught, I was broken and grieving.' Even just remembering it and talking to me about it, Andrew was clearly upset. ‘What followed was easily the worst night I've ever experienced in my life.

‘I didn't go to bed. I was afraid of falling asleep in case
I had concussion, so I sat on the sofa all night until dawn. I desperately wanted to ring Tony, but that was out of the question. We're acutely sensitive to each other. Having managed to persuade him that everything was all right, I knew that if I spoke to him again, particularly in the frame of mind in which I now was, he would pick up on it immediately. I couldn't upset him just in an attempt to console myself. That wouldn't have been fair.'

‘You should have called me,' I said.

‘I did think of it. Then I remembered that you'd gone to Australia for a month. If it happened now I would call Molly. I thought about a couple of other friends, but in the end I rang no one. That was one of the things that made the night so lonely and painful. I realised how few people there were upon whom I could call when I was in trouble. All of this happened at a particularly low point in my life generally. I was still shell-shocked from the marriage having ended, and my career was in the doldrums. I was bored with the museum work, and the television thing didn't open up until the following year. Of course now that I'm successful,' he went on ironically, ‘I suppose there's no end of people I could ring if I felt the need, and they'd be happy to help me. From what you say, I could even ring Marian Dunne. I couldn't have been lonelier or more upset that night if I'd been lost in a forest, rather than holed up in a comfortable bourgeois apartment in the middle of Paris.

‘I felt so far from home. I started to think about Billy, I mean really think about him, not in that abstracted, almost wistful way he used to come into my mind, but Billy himself, just as he was. I wondered what he would have been like had he lived. Would we have got on any
better? He might have settled a bit, got married, children, who knows? I was always so angry in those days when we were growing up together, pushing myself, desperate to get away, and I can see now why we didn't get on. Billy was the exact opposite of me: happy-go-lucky, always cracking jokes, a real live wire. He energised any company he was in. I started to mourn him that night. It was as if I'd been numb for all those years and only then begun to feel the pain of his loss. That he'd had such a violent death bore in on me. I remembered the ring my father had given me and I wished I had it with me. I think it might have given me some sort of comfort, some sort of connection amongst all those things in the apartment that meant nothing to me. I had the idea that when I got back to London I'd take it out of the drawer and from that day on, I'd keep it with me at all times.'

And now he took the ring from his pocket and set it on the table. It was just as he'd described it, a chunky, vulgar thing, solid and bright. I was glad he hadn't handed it to me because I didn't want to touch it. ‘A lot of things came together that night. Billy's ring went from being something I didn't want to being something very precious to me. Billy's death became integrated into my life in a way that it should have been years earlier, only that I'd been too obtuse and resistant up until then. All the pieces were vaguely in place, but it took the shock of that night to pull them all together. Apart from this,' and he indicated the ring, ‘what was there by which to remember Billy? A few faded photographs, and a headstone over the family grave, a place I never visited. I started to think about how people disappear, and then how they're forgotten or remembered; the things we make in their memory, the
way we try to honour them. By the way,' he said suddenly, ‘to this day Tony doesn't know about what happened in Paris, and I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention it to him.'

Unbeknownst to Andrew, I'd already made a similar promise to Tony to keep secret from his father a conversation we'd had about a year earlier. I've known Tony all his life, and he regards me as something of an honorary aunt. Molly knows him well too, but she would strongly resist such a concept in relation to herself. When they're together she flirts shamelessly with him, something he clearly finds embarrassing and thrilling in equal measure. Andrew and I were going out to lunch together on that day and had arranged to meet at his house. Tony opened the door to me when I arrived, and explained that his father had rung a short while before to say that he was running late. ‘He'll be here as soon as he can.' Tony led me into the drawing room, formal with its gilded mirrors and dark furniture, a room that for me he had unconsciously humanised with his attendant clutter. There was an open bag on the floor with textbooks spilling out of its maw on to the rug. On a little table sat a mug of tea and a massive, half-eaten, crudely made sandwich, with bits of lettuce and ham hanging out of it. Tony politely ignored this until I urged him to continue with his lunch, and then he set to it with extreme and casual appetite. We chatted about his studies – he had exams coming up – and he told me that he was more interested in science than in arts and that it was something of a running joke between himself and Andrew. ‘I don't know how much he means it, though. That is, I don't know if he'll be really disappointed if I don't follow him into the arts.' I said I felt sure Andrew would be
happy with whatever choice he made, that he would rather Tony had his own interests and followed through on them rather than trying to please his father.

He swallowed the last of the sandwich, and then he said without any warning or preamble whatsoever, ‘Did you ever meet my uncle?' This was so unexpected that for a moment I had no idea as to which uncle he might be referring: I thought that he might mean a brother of Nicole's. ‘Which uncle would that be?'

‘Uncle Billy.'

‘Why no, Tony, I didn't. I never met your uncle.'