Molly Fox's Birthday (4 page)

What was he like then? I've already mentioned the Belfast accent, which was one of the most striking things about him. It disappeared so completely after he went to live in England that I'm still not convinced that he didn't take elocution lessons. I can detect a faint trace of it only occasionally on certain words or more generally when he's tired or angry. I doubt if anyone else would notice it at all, and I rather like it because it reminds me of the past.

Even then he wore his learning lightly and it was quite some time before I realised how quietly brilliant he was. Although he was from a modest background, he had attended a prestigious grammar school for boys to which he had won a scholarship. When I asked him why he had chosen to come to Dublin to study he said, ‘To get away from Belfast, why d'you think?', but I subsequently discovered that he also had a scholarship to Trinity. While art history was his principal interest and was to remain a life-long passion, I discovered that he was also broadly interested in a great many other things, including history, music, philosophy, literature and drama. ‘You have to be,' he said. ‘Because they all fit together. There's no point in looking at them in isolation.' I think it's fair to say that I myself knew almost nothing in those days, and his well-
stocked mind became a thing of wonder to me, as did the clarity and logic with which he expressed his ideas. This brilliance was the first thing that I understood about him.

Later, I realised that he was interested only in artifice. Nature meant nothing to him. It was as if the world around him were there solely to be translated into art. One afternoon, walking across Front Square together, I remarked upon the extraordinary clouds above us. He barely glanced up at them and made no comment. Then, remembering, brightening, he said, ‘Constable did some amazing paintings of clouds; I must show you pictures of them.' A tree, a painting of a tree: he would always choose the painting.

One day he asked me, ‘What was the first beautiful thing you ever saw?' I knew by then that to say ‘A sunset' or ‘A flower' was not what he meant, and that a fruit bowl my mother had made of green carnival glass wouldn't pass muster either, so I told him I had no idea. ‘What about you?' I asked.

‘It was the floor of a church, of all things,' he said with a laugh, ‘which is ironic, given the way I feel about religion.' I knew by now that he had no time whatsoever for it. He told me that his parents had been infrequent churchgoers but that when he was about seven, he was taken out of school to visit the local church. ‘I liked everything about it, to be honest – the coloured glass in the windows, the big brass eagle with a book on its outstretched wings, this strange-looking musical instrument, like a piano with loads of metal pipes coming out of it – I'd never seen an organ before, I didn't know what it was. But the floor was just gorgeous. I mean, now when I think of it, it was probably quite modest, but the colours –
terracotta, cream, bottle green, all in patterns and shiny. I hardly dared walk on it and I didn't want to leave at the end. The service itself didn't interest me, I just liked the building. That night, I was at home. We were having our tea and I was looking at the floor. It was covered in lino, grey with wee dark red squares scattered across it. I'd been looking at it all my life, but I realised then that it was ugly. I hadn't known until that day that a floor could be a thing so marvellous you couldn't take your eyes off it. And it didn't have to be in church. Sitting there I had a sudden revelation: that things could be beautiful or ugly and that practically everything in our house was ugly. The lino was ugly and the crockery was ugly, the curtains and the rugs, the bedding, and I hated it all. I wanted to live in a house where everything was beautiful. That was a good day. I knew from then on what I wanted.'

I soon realised that he didn't much care for the inhabitants of the ugly house, any more than he cared for its fixtures and fittings, and that he'd meant his early remark to me about studying in Dublin to get away from Belfast.

‘My father works as a mechanic, my mother's a housewife. I've one brother, Billy. He's three years older than me and he's an electrician. I don't really get on with him. We're not a close family; we don't have much in common.' We were outside the library, drinking coffee as usual and smoking when he told me this, and I was at something of a loss as to know what to say. I was aware it was a stupid question but I asked it anyway. ‘What are your parents like?' Andrew narrowed his eyes and blew out a long stream of smoke. ‘My mother's a snob. My father's a bigot. He would hate you – hate you – on principle.
He'd call you a Papish. I must tell him some time that I'm good mates with someone whose brother's a Catholic priest. That'll be a laugh.'

‘And Billy?'

Andrew's face closed. ‘Don't even ask.' He dropped the butt of his cigarette into the dregs of his coffee. ‘I'd best get back to the books.'

I was still very young then and I think I found it hard to imagine a family so unlike my own. My own background amazed Andrew, as it was to amaze Lucy and, in due course, a great many other people; and to begin with, this amazed me. At that time I thought my own family one of the most unremarkable there could be. I was the youngest of seven. The eldest was the priest, Fr Tom, and most of the siblings in between were already married with children of their own by the time I went to university. It all added up to a great warm web of people, sisters and brothers and husbands and wives, nieces and nephews, like some vast, complex soap opera but without the rows and the tension, without the violence and drama. They all still lived in the remote part of Northern Ireland where we had grown up and where my father worked a small farm. My family lived in scattered bungalows, or in semi-detached houses in estates at the edges of small market towns. They worked as teachers and as bank clerks, as nurses and minor civil servants. Two of my sisters stayed at home to look after their babies, and they helped mind the children of the other women in the family who went out to work. They all lived in each other's pockets, helping each other out, going to the pub together and to football matches, babysitting for each other, giving each other lifts here and there. At the time all this seemed perfectly
normal to me. I was unaware that elsewhere in Western Europe, even in Ireland, the nuclear family was shrinking in on itself, as its emotional temperature plummeted.

Of all my brothers and sisters, I've always been closest to Tom, even though he's sixteen years older than me. Sometimes when we're all together again, at Christmas lunch or a family birthday, we'll look down the table at each other and suddenly connect. Over the shouting and roaring, the clash of cutlery and babies bawling, I see Tom and I as contained together in a private silence. Although we may not have what the others have, we know something that they don't. When I think of Tom, most often that's how I imagine him, smiling at me, complicit.

It was Tom who introduced me to the theatre. When I was twelve, he insisted, in the face of my mother's opposition, on taking me to Belfast to see
A Midsummer Night's
Dream
. ‘It'll be money down the drain. How could a child like that understand Shakespeare?' my mother said.

‘She might, she might not,' was Tom's mild reply. ‘At the very least it'll be an outing for her and company for me.'

In the car on the way to the city, he broadly outlined the story of the play, and this helped me to follow the action on stage. But my mother was right, there was much I didn't understand, and it was precisely this that drew me in. Certainly I was dazzled by the costumes and the lights, as any child might be, by the idea of actors and the whole strange world of the theatre. But it was the language that enchanted me most. I loved its blunt truth:
I am as ugly as a bear
, its richly visual quality, that called forth images even more vivid and real to me than the softly glittering scene before my eyes.

I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,

Where
oxlips and the nodding violet grows

Afterwards, Tom loaned me his
Complete Works of
Shakespeare
, with its Bible-fine pages. I looked up the text, these
words, words, words
that I had seen translated into the extraordinary experience of a few days earlier. Because even then I understood that theatre, if it was any good at all, wasn't something you saw, it was something that happened to you.

I knew that by this time I should go upstairs and get to work, but couldn't bring myself to do so. Instead, I made another cup of coffee and took it out to the back garden. The fake cow stared at me blankly. Molly had told me that there was a hedgehog living somewhere in the flower borders, much to her delight. ‘Why are we always so pleased when we see a hedgehog?' she said. She had always thought of them as slow creatures, she told me, but that this one could move remarkably swiftly when it had a mind to do so.

One of the strange things about really old friendships is that the past is both important and not important. Taking the quality of the thing as a given – the affection, the trust – the fact that I had known both Molly and Andrew for over twenty years gave my relationships with them more weight and significance than friendships of, say, three or four years' standing. And yet we rarely spoke to each other of the past, of our lives and experiences during that long period of time. To do so would have been in many instances mortifying. Andrew once said to me, ‘You have the most extraordinary memory,' to which I replied, ‘I'm very good at forgetting things too,' and he responded, without missing a beat, ‘I'm glad to hear it.'

During my first year at college, for example, I frequently went home at the weekends, because I still had a boyfriend in the north, someone with whom I had been going out since I was sixteen. Henry, his name was. He was studying in Belfast at the time; he was going to be a maths teacher. My family was extremely fond of him, and a significant part of those weekends home consisted of him sitting on our sofa with my nephews and nieces crawling all over him; or drinking cups of tea and talking to my brothers about hurling. ‘Sounds like he's practically one of the family already,' Andrew said after I'd been talking to him about a recent visit. ‘Your Ma probably thinks you're going to marry him.' Marry! Marry Henry, of all people! I actually laughed in Andrew's face when he said this, but, ‘Think about it,' he replied. I did, later, and realised with horror (the word is not too strong here) that Andrew was correct. The pattern of my relationship with Henry was exactly that of my sisters when they had been going out with the men who were now their husbands, and there most probably was an unspoken understanding all round that we too would eventually get married and live locally. How could I not have seen it before now?

I dumped Henry suddenly, brutally, the following weekend. To be sure of a complete break I told him I'd been two-timing him for almost a whole term with someone in Dublin, and he was suitably, understandably, hurt. ‘What's this man's name then?' he asked me coldly, and I almost spoiled it, almost blurted out, ‘I don't know.' Henry's pain was nothing compared to my mother's anger. ‘I don't know what kind of airs and graces you're getting about yourself at that university, madam, that the likes of Henry isn't good enough for you now. Leading him on like
that, what must he think of us?' By Sunday night, my mother and I were barely speaking to each other.

Back in Dublin the following day, a look of alarm crossed Andrew's face when I told him what I'd done. ‘It's nothing you said,' I hastily told him, which wasn't true, and ‘It's a huge relief to me,' which was. And then, to my surprise, I began to cry, the first tears I'd shed over the whole affair. Andrew reacted with blokish unease in the first instance – lit me a cigarette, hadn't a clue what to say – but in the following days he consoled me. At his suggestion we went to a pub together one evening, something we hadn't done before. I told him I felt guilty about what had happened because I should have seen it coming. I had always known that I was something of a misfit in the family, but the visceral warmth, the fondness we all had for each other had prevented me from thinking through the nature of this difference, its implications. I knew instinctively the kind of life I needed to live, and since leaving home I had started to lead that life; I felt its rightness. But I hadn't realised until now that it would, inevitably, exclude me to some degree from my family, affection and love, even, notwithstanding.

‘It's true,' Andrew said, ‘you can't have it both ways.' He talked then about his own family, and was uncharacteristically forthcoming on the subject. ‘It's indifference rather than hostility,' he said, ‘although there's a fair bit of that too, particularly with my father. He's not a bit proud of me. When I do well in my studies, my exams, he takes it as some implied criticism of himself; he always has to get his dig in. Looking at pictures? Nice work if you can get it, although what's the bloody point? As for my mother, it's Billy who matters, not me.'

‘What's he like?'

Now that I come to think of it, I have never heard any
man mention his brother. The subject seems distasteful to
most men
.

‘Billy? Billy's a hood. A wee smart-Alec and a hood, but my Ma thinks he's the be-all and the end-all. I had a big bust up with him about a month ago, the last time I was at home. I found a box under the stairs with a gun in it, a gun and ammunition.' He let me absorb this information for a moment, aware of how shocked I would be. This conversation was taking place in the early 1980s. Andrew and I were from opposite sides of a deeply divided society. Although we both abhorred the bitter sectarianism of that society we also knew that were we to talk about politics we were bound to disagree, to argue even. That's how deep the divisions went. Sometimes when I was back at home and I saw a tricolour flapping above the fields from a telegraph pole, or when one of my family members made a casual, bigoted remark for which they were rebuked by no one (including me, it has to be said), I did think of how ill at ease, how threatened, even, Andrew would feel on my turf, and with reason. Apart from the most oblique and passing references, we had until now dealt with the subject by the simple means of avoiding it. But one of those bullets Andrew had found could have had my father's name on it, my brother's, mine. To know that my friend had a brother who was a Loyalist paramilitary chilled me, and he knew this. It chilled him too, in a different way.