Molly Fox's Birthday (9 page)

I was staying with her at the time. We'd been out, to dinner or to the cinema, I can't recall which, but when we came back it wasn't very late, probably no more than ten-thirty. There was an open bottle of red wine on the kitchen table. She offered me a glass and for the next hour or so we sat there talking and drinking. We were contented and relaxed and were still sitting there when the grandfather clock began to strike midnight. A silence fell over us. Inwardly I counted the chimes and after the last one I said, ‘Today's the summer solstice. The longest day of the year,' to which Molly replied, ‘It's my birthday today.'

‘Happy birthday,' I said, and she gave a dry ironic laugh. ‘Thanks.'

‘Any plans for the day?'

‘No.'

When you're in a hole, keep digging. ‘Why don't you celebrate?' I mustn't have known her as well as I thought; now I would never be so foolish as to do such a thing. Now I know that Molly will never talk about anything significant at a time and a place where there is leisure and peace. Her most intimate and significant confidences will always be communicated in an off-the-cuff way, thrown over her shoulder as she goes out the door, as she jumps into a taxi. She didn't bridle or become annoyed at my question, but she didn't answer me either. I didn't break the silence that followed, and it became a long silence. I left it to her to take control of the conversation and change the subject, as I was sure she would.

She drank from her glass and then she said, ‘I remember when I was about twelve. We lived in Lucan then. It was a difficult time. Fergus was more trouble than a bag of monkeys; my poor father was at his wits' end with him. Fainting fits, sleepwalking; he'd be poleaxed by pains that never seemed to have any real cause. So gentle he was too, though, Fergus, so sweet-natured.' She moved the foot of her glass across the table. By now it was almost as if she was talking to herself. ‘I was always far more streetwise; I was a tough little madam. I looked after him; I fought his corner. And then when I hit puberty I fell apart too, but in a completely different way.

‘I felt destroyed. It was as if I'd lost my soul. Up until then I'd been pretty well behaved, but practically overnight I became a delinquent. I started going about with this bunch of wild kids that I didn't even like. I'd cut class and take the bus into Dublin, go shoplifting. I stole things to order for my new friends. The things I stole for myself, sweets, make-up, little bits of jewellery, most of the time I didn't even want them, I'd end up throwing them away. I started drinking, I stayed out half the night, and when I was at home it was war. And through all of this, there was a voice, screaming and screaming inside my head.
Who am I? Who am I?
I thought I was going mad. Perhaps I was; I'd certainly lost my reason. All the bad behaviour was a way to try to drown out this terrible scream,
Who am I?
But nothing worked.

‘And then the miracle happened. On one of the rare days that I did show up at school, they took us out to the theatre, to see
Hamlet
. I think it must have been a good production even though I had no point of comparison. They caught Hamlet's youth, that ironic anger he has, his
rage against his mother. Sneering when he wasn't in despair: that was me too. I'd never before seen anything so
real
. All of my life, and the past year in particular, was like a dream, and what I was watching on the stage, that was reality, that was the truth. In the interval I put my hand in my pocket and found a lipstick I'd stolen the day before. I remember staring at it, this little gilded cylinder. It was a thing from another life, the life that ended when I walked into the theatre. And as I watched the play through to the end I gradually came to realise something:
So that's who I am: I'm an actor
. This is a crucial distinction – it wasn't that I wanted to
be
an actor, I knew that I was one already. And it wasn't that I wanted to pretend to be other people either. All I ever wanted was to be myself.
Who am I? Who am I?
I never again heard that voice screaming in my head. I now knew exactly who I was. I was an actor. As soon as I was old enough I would go on stage and I would become other people. That was how I would spend the rest of my life.'

Perhaps unwittingly, she had just explained to me something important about her gift. Many actors spend years doing exactly what Molly had dismissed: they pretend to be other people. They select voices and movements that might plausibly suit a particular character, and they assume these voices and movements in the same way as they might put on a costume, a wig or a cardboard crown. It isn't convincing. Molly had understood this from the start. There was always something unmediated and supremely natural about her acting, it was the thing itself. Becoming, not pretending. It was a showing forth of her own soul, something about which she had always been fearless.

‘So that's my life,' she said, and she turned and gave me a look, just as she spoke, which it wasn't, of course, it wasn't her whole life. What she had said begged more questions than it answered. But such a look! In it was all the pain of which she had spoken but which her voice had withheld, for she had spoken to me in neutral tones. There was anger, there was fear, bewilderment, and a passionate desire, a rage for love that could never be fulfilled. It was all there, a whole magma of dark emotion that could have destroyed her but which she had controlled and made central to her art. But still I didn't know what had caused this suffering, where it all came from. It would be quite some time before I found out. Molly looked away and the moment was gone.

‘Let's finish this bottle out, and then I'll open another.' She topped up our glasses.

‘This is enough for me,' I said, ‘I'm fine.'

‘Well I'm not.' She selected a new bottle from a small rack on the worktop and deftly removed the cork. The kitchen was dim, low-lit, and now she was alert as a cat, silent and tense. She emptied her glass and poured more wine. We couldn't find our way back into the conversation after what had passed between us, and eventually she suggested that I go up to bed if I wished. I left her there, for I sensed that she wanted to be alone. I lay awake for hours, and the clock had struck three before I heard the sound of her bedroom door closing.

I took my lunch and the newspapers out to the back garden, where I was joined by a neighbour's cat, a neat, greedy, ill-mannered creature that stuck its face in the milk jug and tried to get at the ham, until I had to move the tray well out of its reach. I read the colour supplement
because it was easier to manage than the broadsheet; and in the list of contents I noticed a familiar name.

Reasons to be Cheerful
is one of those features in which people with a new book, film, play or suchlike to promote do so by discussing the contents of their fridge or their handbag, showing off the finest room in their house or, as here, sharing with the public a list of things that make them happy. Most of the double spread on pages eight and nine was taken up with a striking photograph of Andrew, the text occupying a rather narrow column on the left-hand side. Several of his choices I could have second-guessed. Correggio, for example, at number two:
Quite simply my favourite painter
; or Chartres Cathedral at number seven. Several were as bland and anodyne as the concept of the piece implicitly required:
Dark chocolate, at least 70 per cent cocoa and
Valhrona
 
for choice
; but some were surprisingly robust:
Atheism. I
detest religion. It has done untold harm and nothing
would give me greater cause for celebration than if it were
to die out completely
. There was no mention of his son, Anthony, which told me he was taking the whole thing in the spirit I would have expected – some things are too deep, too private to be referred to in so light a context. But listed there at number nine, between Venice and Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, was
The incomparable Molly
Fox, our finest actress, bar none
. I wondered how she
might react to this, whether the faux pas of the noun would cancel out the splendour of the adjective. At the bottom of the page was printed in italics:
Andrew
Forde's
new book, ‘Remember Me: The Art of the Memorial' is
published by
Phaidon, price
£
30.00
. The four-part documentary
of the same name continues on Channel Four this
evening at 8 p.m.

The photograph had been taken in a room with the air of a gentleman's club. Andrew sat in a deep leather armchair, and on the wall behind him hung a gilt-framed painting of a winter landscape. He was wearing a pale blue shirt, open at the neck, and a dark blue jacket. Although he was sitting in a slightly unnatural pose, with all his fingers balanced delicately against each other at the tips, he looked relaxed and at ease, as he always does in any context connected with his work.

I think that Molly very much regrets that she didn't know Andrew before his great transformation. They didn't meet until about eight years ago, which was already about ten years after Andrew and I had left college. There were many logical and valid reasons as to why this should have been. During those first ten years when we were all in our twenties and busy consolidating our careers and our lives in general, there were long stretches when I saw little of either of them myself. Work commitments and other relationships, friends and family, kept us occupied and apart. When Andrew got married I didn't much care for his wife, Nicole, nor she for me, and we perhaps saw less of each other because of that.

But I would be lying if I didn't admit that the main reason they never met was that I deliberately kept them apart for years on end, and for the best possible reason – I
thought they wouldn't like each other. Andrew knew and admired Molly as an actor and had even begun to pester me a bit about her.
When are you going to introduce me
to that amazing friend of yours?
I knew that this was exactly the wrong approach to take with her. One of the strange anomalies of Molly is that she has never, I think, successfully developed a public persona in which to conceal and protect herself in society; another harder, somewhat untrue personality that can be passed off as the real thing. She always was, and remains, painfully shy. Quite frankly, I feared that Andrew would find her a disappointment, mousy and introverted, dull even, so unlike the magisterial presence he knew from the stage. I had seen this happen before, and Molly did nothing to prevent it. In social situations she might well be deliberately taciturn and sullen. And if I thought Andrew might not get along with Molly, I was completely certain that she would dislike him. She is a merciless student of human nature, and while she finds her greatest truth in life through the artifice that is her gift, I thought that in the artifice that was Andrew she would find nothing but pure surface, and despise him.

My own birthday is around the end of the year, and eight years ago I decided to throw a combined Christmas and birthday party at my home in London. By this time Molly, like half the country, had become familiar with Andrew through his career as a television art critic, and she had begun to ask to meet him, as he asked to meet her. It seemed the best idea to invite them both to the party. If they got on together, well and good; if not, there would be enough people there for them to simply withdraw and talk to someone else. I had little time to speak to either of
them that evening. As the giver of the party, I was too busy making sure that everyone had something to eat and drink, that no one was excluded or ill at ease. I did notice that Molly and Andrew were talking, but not monopolising each other. When I spoke to them in the following days I was slightly surprised by their reactions. I got the impression that Andrew had found her slightly intimidating, a reaction she rarely elicits, and while she had clearly enjoyed his company, what interested her most about him was precisely that change in him that I had spoken about and which she had not witnessed for herself.

‘He's a study. That accent! Where did that come from, those vowel combinations? I've never heard the like of it. And did you notice his cufflinks? Little bars of lapiz lazuli.' Yes, I had noticed the cufflinks. Molly is not the only one whose profession has sharpened her eye for detail, but I was surprised at how much she picked up on the speech, because Andrew's accent is most convincing. ‘What on earth was he like when you knew him first?' She was very curious about this, and quizzed me about exactly how he had changed. At the time I put this down to the actor's interest in the transformation of the self. Now I'm not so sure. I think she found my answers unsatisfactory, and I grew to resent having to try to explain it. In some ways he had changed completely, in others not at all. The way he looked, the way he dressed and spoke, yes, all that had changed comprehensively. In another man these changes might have made him seem effete and affected, but in Andrew they simply seemed right. There was a robust quality to both his mind and his personality that remained constant, that complemented his new manners and suited them perfectly. His
essential self, in as far as I could understand it, hadn't changed at all.

But Molly couldn't get it. ‘So it's purely a surface thing then?'

‘No. He was angry when I knew him first and that's gone. He's much less sardonic. He's become the person he needed to be, and he's been able to relax into that.'

‘Have you slept with him?'

‘Molly! What a question!'

‘I take it that's a
Yes
?' she said coolly.

‘It's a
No
. It's an
Absolutely not
.'