Molly Fox's Birthday (6 page)

The whole room was crammed with books, both in open bookshelves built into the walls and in a free-standing antique bookcase with glass doors. This latter holds her most precious books, for Molly is a bibliophile as well as a reader. For many years now she has bought herself a book to celebrate and mark each role she has played. Inside each one is a small white card on which she has written the details of her part in the production which that book honours, the date and the name of the theatre. Some of them are editions of the plays concerned. The earliest ones, from when she was starting out and had very little money, are simply good hardback editions of favourite works; but the most recent ones are rare and valuable books, including signed copies and first editions, many with fine bindings. Some have stiff ridges on the spines, others are supple in soft leather, with the edges of the fine pages gilded. Many of the bindings are stamped in gold, with patterns of vines and little birds, flowers and acorns. She has a lot of Shakespeare on these shelves, the complete works several times over and many individual plays as well. There are
also quite a few contemporary works, including many of my own plays, with written dedications to her from me. Looking at the spines of these books now brought back times we had worked together.

Molly has been something of a muse to me over the years. The best roles I have written for women have been created with Molly in mind. Our gifts complement each other in a way that is, I believe, rare. Often when I am writing for her I can hear her voice. Sometimes it is so clear it is as if she is speaking aloud, as if she were there in the room with me. It becomes an uncanny thing, almost occult. It gives me confidence and courage to know that I have such an instrument at my disposal. I would not be the writer I am without Molly. She can find the depth charge in the most apparently simple language. Once, when we were talking about Shakespeare, she remarked to me that the most seemingly simple and straightforward lines were the most potent, and also the most difficult for an actor to deliver. The richest and most complex language was the easiest.

The poetry was already there, all one had to do was speak it. But:

To bring out the complex meaning, all the possibilities of words such as these, was the great challenge for an actor.

Just before she left for New York, she had opened the bookcase and showed me her latest acquisition, bought to mark her triumph at the start of that year in
The
Duchess of Malfi
. As long as I have known her she has hungered after the role of the Duchess. I had never understood this and had told her so. I found the play absurd, Grand Guignol, too over the top to be taken seriously, with its poisoned, violent atmosphere. I had had the misfortune to see a bad production of it early in my career, and that, understandably, had put me off. At Molly's insistence I read the text, which struck me as frankly daft. It's a classic Jacobean tragedy. The Duchess of the title is a widow. She has two brothers, the Cardinal, whose evil is icy, and the mad Duke Ferdinand, who harbours incestuous feelings towards her. Against their wishes, she remarries, in secret. The brothers get wind of what has happened and all kinds of horrors follow on as a result: stranglings, murder by poisoned Bible, a parade of madmen, a severed hand.

Molly insisted that were I to see it performed in a good production, I would change my mind. She said it was one of those plays that are, yes, silly on the page, but can be transformed by the alchemy of the stage into something deeply affecting. She pointed out to me, as if I needed reminding, the difference between the text and what it might become. While Shakespeare or Chekhov might afford some of the most sublime theatre one might ever experience, they were also likely, Molly argued, to be behind some of the deadliest, most numbingly tedious performances imaginable. Her arguments were so persuasive that I read the text again. Slowly I began to see what she was getting at. There were things about the play that
were curious and seemed contradictory. The overall effect was suffocating and overheated. It was complex and corrupt, shot through with the knowledge of pure evil. All the acts perpetrated in it were acts of darkness. And yet these effects were achieved, as Molly pointed out to me, through language of extraordinary clarity, simplicity and power.
Look you, the stars shine still
.

Over the years, this wish of hers to play the Duchess would be mentioned occasionally in interviews as the one particular thing that she still wanted to do, hoping, I suppose, that some director would read the interview and take the bait. As she moved into her mid-to-late thirties we both knew that time was running out. Like most female actors Molly is both cagey and touchy about her age, and with good reason. Knowing that she is unlikely to be cast below her real age, she takes care to not let it be known what age she is. When she was finally offered the role of the Duchess my happiness for her was tempered by the fear that as with so many things for which one longs for years, it would prove to be a disappointment.

The book she had shown me, and which I now lifted from the shelves to examine again more closely, had been commissioned from a bookbinder. It was the play itself bound in black velvet and red silk, with the title stamped in red metal foil on the spine. Molly herself had suggested the design, and had been thrilled with the final result, with this erotic, dangerous-looking little volume that I held in my hands. When she was showing me the books she had urged me not to be precious about them, had insisted that although they were rare and remarkable objects they were still books and were there to be read. Reading is one of the great pleasures, the great necessities
of her life.
Take them and read them, use them, enjoy
them. That's what they're there for.

Yes, Molly loves reading, more than anyone else I know, and she has plenty of time for it because her emotional life takes up no time at all.
I'm only really interested in casual
relationships. Cream off the best of someone and then
move on. Anything else is a waste of time
. I was shocked when she said this to me not long after we first met, when I was still young and relatively inexperienced myself. It made me feel uneasy about my new friend, but I consoled myself by thinking that it was all bravado, she didn't really mean it. Time taught me that she did. In all the years I've known her she has never been in a serious long-term relationship, nor with anyone about whom I felt she cared deeply. Given her charm, her status, her extraordinary gift, there is never any lack of men keen to be with Molly Fox. Although she helped me through the two major break-ups in my life, first with Ken and then with Louis, and did so with all the kindness and compassion one could wish for, I couldn't help wondering if, deep down, she thought me ridiculous for taking it all so much to heart.

Ken was an actor, and some years after
Summer with
Lucy
I met him in the same way as I met Molly, when he was in a play I'd written. This time there were roles for one woman, which had been written with Molly in mind, and two men. I was happy with the director's casting of Ken, whom I knew by reputation to be a serious actor, and who struck me as perfect for the part. Initially I was extremely resistant to the choice of the third actor, David McKenzie, but I let myself be persuaded by Ken and the director, both of whom had worked with him before.

If I don't remember the moment I met Molly, I certainly remember, with cinematic clarity, the moment I met David. He was sitting with his back to me and turned around as I came into the room. I thought I'd never in my life seen so handsome a man. He held out his hand and he smiled at me, he said my name, and I knew for certain that I'd never in my life seen so handsome a man. He was dark-haired, with perfectly regular features, but two things transformed these rather standard good looks into something exceptional. Firstly, he had green eyes, as close to the green of a cat's eye as I have ever seen on a human being, but warm, unlike a cat's, beguiling. The other thing was the sheer force of his personality.

One of the reasons I hadn't wanted to work with David was that I had read several interviews with him and they had put me off. They all insisted breathlessly how delightful and friendly, how kind and good-humoured, how
nice
he was; and of course I hadn't believed a word of it. He was an actor, for goodness' sake; he could become whatever he wanted to be so as to appear favourably in the eyes of those around him. I suspected that under all the charm there was probably a cold and manipulative person. On meeting him myself, however, all of this was immediately forgotten. His was an energising presence, happy and uncomplicated, decent and warm. He was funny – not witty, wit was beyond him – but funny in the engaging, slightly silly way a small child can be funny. Above all he operated like a strange kind of mirror, so that you saw his many strengths and virtues reflected in yourself. By being attractive he made you feel attractive, by being sincere, sincere. Taken all together, the looks, the charisma and those green eyes, it was quite a package. I'm
neither ashamed nor embarrassed to admit that I was completely dazzled by him. He was at that time twenty-five, a few years younger than Molly and me, and had recently married a woman named Mel with whom he'd gone to school. He was becoming much talked about as an actor; there was a sense that he was on the cusp of great things. It was an exceptionally good moment in his life.

He did have a name for not being the most intelligent man in the world, something he brought up himself on that first day and didn't deny. ‘I hope you're not going to ask me about my theory of acting or anything,' he said to me. ‘I don't know how to talk about it, I just sort of do it.' Why, that wasn't a problem at all, I told him; that made perfect sense: he just sort of did it. Once I was out of the force field of his allure, however, I did begin to worry, because intelligence is something I particularly appreciate in an actor. It comes through in performance, but it's important in rehearsal too. If David failed to see what was required of him, would it be possible to explain to him? Would he understand?

Working with him, then, was a revelation. David was a deeply instinctive actor, more so than anyone I had known up to that point in my career or indeed in the years since then. He was a gift to any writer because, not having the wherewithal to question a text, he trusted it implicitly. He took a play at face value and went straight to the heart of it. His innate understanding of any given role more than made up for any lack of conscious knowledge and the inability to explain what he was about. It simply didn't matter. ‘It's like footballing intelligence,' Ken remarked to me one day as we watched Molly and
David rehearsing a scene together. ‘All that counts is that you can put the ball in the back of the net. Whether or not you can explain afterwards how you did it is neither here nor there.'

Ah yes, Ken. I became very close to him very quickly, and we were a couple by the time the play went up. There was a kind of perfection about that period in our lives. We all brought out the best in each other, both professionally and personally. Molly and David hit it off particularly well in spite of their being so different. He had none of her emotional complexity, her depth; and she was happy to let his sunny good nature set the tone. It was an invigorating experience, that production, in spite of the play itself being so dark. Contrary to popular belief, the spirit abroad in the rehearsal room does not necessarily mirror the genre of the play in question. Working on a comedy can be a fractious, ill-tempered affair; and Molly claims she has never laughed so much as when she was rehearsing
Phèdre
. We got great reviews and the run was extended. I never worked with David again after that, more's the pity.

I did work again with Ken, and that's a pity too, because it ruined what there was between us personally. We were together for a few years and I almost married him, but the more intimate we became the more professional rancour came between us. It was I who, like a fool, insisted that we work together once more. Ken knew that it was a mistake but I forced him into it. I couldn't see until it was too late that even given the circumstances of our initial meeting and it having been a good experience, it could never be like that again. Other people now saw us as a couple. To disagree with one was to risk upsetting
both; and for Ken to disagree with me before other people was something I couldn't handle; I took it personally. All kinds of resentments and rivalries infested our life together and eventually brought our relationship to an end. And it was all my fault.

I stood there in the morning light with Molly's copy of
The Duchess of Malfi
in my hands. Why was I remembering all of this now? It was all so long ago, but it was still painful to think of it. As I replaced the book I noticed a volume of Chekhov short stories, and in spite of myself I lifted it out to look at it. Before I knew what had happened I was on a jetty in Yalta, then the clock on the stairs was sounding ten o'clock and the untouched coffee was cold beside me in the polka-dot mug. In my defence I must say that this was most unlike me. Usually I am a most disciplined writer. When I am at home writing I don't stop when I hear the clatter of the letter box and the soft tumble of the post on the mat. I hear the click of the answering machine in the next room and I give little thought to who it might be. I do not procrastinate, I do not waste time. These mornings in Molly's house were exceptional in this way, and if I was going to do anything at all today I would have to start now. I left the cold coffee where it was and went upstairs.

I spent what was left of the morning working, that is to say, given that it was the early stages of a new project, that I spent the morning wool-gathering, staring out of the window into the back garden, reading over my notebooks, writing things down and then crossing them out again moments later; and all the time thinking about the man with the hare.