Molly Fox's Birthday (25 page)

As the woman spoke I myself remembered being in the theatre the night I saw the play. The brassy music, cold, all horns and cymbals; the fires blazing in cressets, the
black and red costumes, cloth of gold. I too had been struck by what the woman referred to: how something so artificial could also be so moving and true. On the evening I saw
The Duchess
I'd seen Molly briefly in her dressing room a short while before the curtain went up. She was already in costume and fully made-up. Seen close to and without stage lighting she looked peculiar, almost grotesque, with her eyes heavily painted and two hectic spots of rouge on her cheeks. She wore a heavy dress made from what looked like upholstery fabric for a pretentious hotel, with all the fake luxury of cheap red brocade and gold trims. Molly seemed diminished in the middle of all this, muted, as she always is just before she goes on stage. I had gone to her dressing room at her invitation, but our talk was inconsequential. She would ask me questions and then I would be aware that she was not listening to the answers. From time to time she would self-consciously reach up and touch the elaborate wig she was wearing. I left her with a little time to spare before she was due on stage. I understood why she had needed my company and, not for the first time, I wondered at the psychological toll acting was taking on her. She had confided in me once that if ever anything brought her career to a standstill it wouldn't be stage-fright, but the terrifying loneliness she would suffer sometimes just before she went on stage. This surprised me, given how solitary a person she is in her life, but she insisted that this was different, that it was a dark, malevolent thing that made her understand what Fergus went through in his depressions. She said that it was as if, in preparing to become someone else, she sometimes fell between two psychic states; or as if, to fully inhabit the personality of the character, she had
to become alienated from her self. I told her I couldn't imagine what that must feel like. ‘You don't want to know, believe me,' had been her short reply.

Later that evening, the alchemy of the theatre transformed the odd little creature I'd met in the dressing room into royalty. I agreed with the woman who had called to Molly's house tonight, never had I seen a finer performance. The seating of the auditorium was arranged in curved rows, and from where I was placed I was able to observe not only the stage but also the audience. I could see all the people by the light of the stage, their rapt faces, the quality of the attention they were giving to what they were watching. Each of them was making their own private connection with the work, each bringing their own experiences and emotions to bear upon the play, to interpret it and integrate it into their own imaginative life. That this was happening in the presence of so many other people was crucial. In the apprehension of art there can be a loneliness, as there so often is in its creation. This breaching of loneliness may be the secret of what an audience is, or at least one of its secrets. That night in the theatre when Molly appeared as the Duchess, I looked at the audience and I thought, nothing surpasses this.

The cry late in the play,
I am Duchess of Malfi still
, is another of those apparently simple but endlessly complex lines which are such a challenge for an actor. I wonder if there was anyone in the theatre who didn't have gooseflesh when they heard Molly say it. She gave it its full weight and significance, while still honouring its simplicity. There was defiance, an almost arrogant assertion of who she was, and astonishment too that after the loss of so much in her life, she had not lost her self. That woman up there,
pretending, to put it crudely, to be a medieval duchess, was my friend, and I believed in her; believed in her as a duchess, that is. Her plight moved me, and yet still I knew she was an actor, someone whose home I visited and who talked to me about her garden, who never forgot my birthday and never wanted me to remember hers.
Who is it can
tell me who I am?
Who was Molly Fox? That night she was communicating something of her deepest self in a way that is only possible for her when she is on stage. Is the self really such a fluid thing, something we invent as we go along, almost as a social reflex? Perhaps it is instead the truest thing about us, and it is the revelation of it that is the problem; that so much social interchange is inherently false, and real communication can only be achieved in ways that seem strange and artificial.

‘I wanted to thank her,' the woman said, ‘but I didn't want to intrude. I felt very shy about approaching her too, so I kept putting it off and making excuses to myself. Then this morning I saw her birthday listed in the paper. I knew she was here – well, I thought she was here because I passed the house a couple of nights ago and I saw an upstairs light on. I wanted to bring her a present, but what could I give her? I couldn't think of anything that someone like me could offer to Molly Fox.' She lifted her hand in a gesture that took in all the books and rugs and pictures in the room. ‘I know she likes gardening, and so I thought then I'd bring her some herbs and plants. In the bottom of the box there's another thing too, a little token that I hope will please her. I got everything ready mid-morning, but I made the mistake of telling my husband. All day I kept putting it off. I said to myself that I'd go round to her house before the hour was out, and then
the time would pass and I'd set myself another deadline and I'd let that pass too. And then about half an hour ago my husband said to me, “I knew you wouldn't do it. I knew you wouldn't go. You're always saying you'll do things and then you put them off. You never follow through.” That annoyed me so much and I said to myself, “I'm going to prove him wrong. I
will
go, and I'll do it right this minute.” I put on my cardigan and I came straight round. The only thing was,' she said, suddenly crestfallen, ‘Molly Fox wasn't here.'

‘I'll tell her you called, and I know that she'll be delighted with the plants.'

‘It's probably just as well I missed her, because it might have been difficult. It's been better to talk to you.' I made no comment on this, for I couldn't think of a polite way to say that it was true. Molly is ill at ease with the public; and while she likes to receive letters and cards, and is punctilious about replying to them, her shyness undermines her when she meets people face to face.
Curiously
unimpressive in herself, isn't she?
I once overheard a woman remark at a reception. It angered me because it wasn't fair. Molly is remarkably impressive in herself, but she doesn't make that self available to all comers. Sometimes she questions her own popularity. ‘Why should people like me just because I can act? It makes no sense.'

‘They like you,' I told her, ‘because you give them something and they're grateful to have it. It's gratitude a lot of the time, rather than affection, and they may not even realise it themselves.'

‘I really must be going,' the woman said, and she stood up. I saw her out to the front door with promises that I
would look after the plants and communicate her good wishes to Molly. In the hall she noticed all the pictures and trophies, Molly's little museum to her own success. I believe she'd overlooked them when she arrived, possibly through nerves, but she stood for a moment now and briefly studied them, all the photographs and posters and pieces of bronze and cut glass. She was silent and clearly awed. When she left she more or less bolted from the house. I was still speaking to her, and it was only after she had gone that I realised I didn't even know her name.

I went back to the drawing room and collected the box of herbs, carried it down to the kitchen. As I lifted out each of the plants in turn and set them on the draining board, I remembered that the woman had said she had also brought along something else, and as I removed the last little pot, I saw with dismay what it was.

A feather. A peacock's feather, of all things. There it lay, with its air of evil glamour, its glossy black eye and jewel colours, as though precious stones, sapphires and emeralds, had been transformed by some dark art into this weightless veil of mobile light. Suddenly the visiting stranger appeared to me in a wholly different aspect, as malevolent, as the bearer of a bad omen. How could she have done such a thing? Didn't she know? Molly must never find out about this. She has a pathological fear around this particular superstition; it would upset her terribly. I had to get it out of the house, get rid of it immediately.

I picked it up. It was unimaginably light, like everything connected with birds, like birds themselves, and it waved and quivered in my hand as I carried it out into the back garden. To put it in the bin didn't seem definitive
enough. It would still be on the premises, and a part of me did scruple to put a thing of such dark beauty in with all the rubbish, with tin cans and tea leaves. I picked my way down the garden as my eyes grew accustomed to the low light, until I came to a bench about halfway down, beside the fruit bushes. The bench was hard up against the wall that separated Molly's garden from the property next door. Moving quietly so as not to be heard, I climbed up onto the bench, from where I could just about reach over. I stretched my arm as far as I could, trying to hold my hand clear of the climbing plants that were growing up against the other side of the wall, and when I knew I could stretch no more, I released the feather. I hope it fell to the ground. I hope it didn't become tangled in ivies and clematis, giving the game away about how it had come to be there. As I climbed down from the bench and stole back up the garden, it struck me that what I had just done was rather mean-spirited. My only consolation was to remember that this was a particularly theatrical superstition and was perhaps not commonly known amongst the general run of people. Molly's neighbours might well be both delighted and mystified to find a peacock's feather lying in their back garden on the morning after the longest day of the year. I hoped that that would be the case.

When I went back into the house, I remembered that this was the night I was supposed to wind the long-case clock. I went up to the return of the stairs and took the key from the hook on the door jamb where Molly kept it. I opened both the glass disc over the dial and the long narrow door in the body of the clock, behind which the weights were concealed. Before I started to wind it, I
studied the clock for a moment. Molly had once said that it was the one thing she would want to save if the house was on fire, which greatly amused Fergus. ‘I have an image of you, Molly, going down the road in your nightdress, carrying a grandfather clock in your arms.' The face of the clock was the colour of parchment, and the metal hands were delicately wrought. Above the dial was a semicircular recess with a painted moon and a shooting star. The moon had a long, straight nose and rosy cheeks; it stared at me innocently. The two weights were fully extended on their cords. As I started to wind the clock first one ascended slowly and then the other. I thought of the day that was ending and how, as I rose, as I tried to work, as I walked the hot streets of the city and talked to Fergus, to Andrew, to the late-night caller, all that time these weights had been slowly descending. I thought of them being raised up and slowly falling all the days of our lives in other houses, other rooms: on the night Billy was shot, on the night I spent with Andrew, on the day Molly's mother left home, until it seemed to me that this dark, narrow wooden compartment held time itself.

Now I could hear the phone ringing, down in the hall. Could it perhaps be Andrew?

‘I'm not disturbing you, am I? You weren't asleep?' said a familiar, extraordinary voice. ‘I'm not exactly sure what time it is in Ireland now but I wasn't able to ring earlier.' I reassured Molly; I told her that a visitor had left only a short time earlier. ‘Who was that?' she asked. I explained, and Molly seemed more interested than I would have expected; she was particularly touched by the gifts. She told me to eat the strawberries, which made me feel slightly – only slightly – less guilty about having drunk
her champagne, and suggested a spot in the garden where I might think to plant the surfinia.

‘What colour is it?'

‘Dark red.' She was delighted at this; she had looked everywhere earlier in the year for just such a flower.

She told me that she had spoken to Fergus shortly before she rang me and that he'd told her he had seen me. ‘He always finds this a particularly difficult day. I'm sorry I wasn't able to be there for him. I had told him you would be staying in the house; he must have forgotten.' I told her that Andrew had also called. ‘What did he want?'

‘He brought you a copy of his new book, the book of the series. Oh, and he brought you a bottle of champagne as well.'

‘I hope you drank it,' she said. I laughed to hide my embarrassment, and Molly laughed too. ‘Poor Andrew,' she said, and she said it in such a way that I knew she knew how much he idolised her; and I knew too that he hadn't a hope. ‘He sends his love. He said Happy Birthday.'

‘Did he, indeed?' Her tone was wary now. ‘How did he know that today was my birthday? Did you tell him?'

‘It was in the paper.'

‘What! How old did they say I was?'

‘Forty.'

She swore when I said this, a sudden, crude outburst. It was all the more shocking because Molly almost never swears. There was the incongruity of hearing such a thing uttered in that particular voice, and I realised that she was as capable of drawing forth all the ugly power an oath might contain as she could the beauty and tenderness of other words. ‘I never heard such nonsense in my life. I'm
only thirty-eight.' I wondered if this were true. I was gradually coming to realise that there was much I didn't know about Molly Fox, far more than I had imagined.

‘How's New York?' I asked. ‘Oh it's all right, I don't really know what I'm doing here, to be honest. I'm looking forward to getting to London and
Adam Bede
. I'm only ever really happy when I'm working. How about you, how's the writing?' I told her that I was struggling with it, that I had thought earlier in the evening that I had finally worked out a new idea for the play but that now I wasn't so sure. ‘Maybe I'll do something completely different, something I've never done before. Maybe I'll write a novel.'